Deep Aurelia

HTC Sensation

Well, the HTC Sensation is finally here. I upgraded to the new $79 Freedom Connect Plan with Telstra on Friday and here’s the review.

Good

Cool!
The UI is really nice with HTC Sense 3.0.
Loves how it’s “smart”, like when the phone rings and you pick it up it drops the ring volume, or if you turn the phone over it goes silent.
The phone is very fast with 1.2GHz duo-core processor.
Loves how you can customise the profile (Scene) for different environments (eg. work, play, travel).
Intuitive lock screen. I love how you can drag an icon into the ring to quickly launch an app.
Out of the box international language support. Didn’t have to install anything to read/write Chinese.
Simple setup. At first start-up it asks you to add your Facebook/Twitter/Email accounts. Once this is done just watch the HTC magic. Your Friend Stream will automatically start to flow with Facebook/Twitter updates.
This is not a phone feature but I used Double Twist to sync my iTunes music library. It worked flawlessly.

Bad

Laggy touch screen: sometimes it takes more than one tap to get a button to work. Scrolling is not as smooth as iPhone 4.
Annoying capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen makes it accident prone.
Touch screen built quality is poor. On the second day after acquiring the phone, I started to see air bubbles underneath the screen. I haven’t got a screen protector on but it’s quite visible under bright lighting. You won’t notice much of it when the screen is turned on but you can see pockets of air underneath the screen especially under bright sunlight. When you apply a pressure on the screen you can actually see the air bubbles moving. Initially I thought this was a defective screen and I took it into the Telstra store but the phone on display also has the same issue. It does not effect how the phone works but it’s really annoying.
Camera makes a lot of noise. If you are holding it up and trying to fill objects in the frame, the auto-focus mechanism kicks in like Wall-E.
Speaker volume is low. Playing music at max volume sounds like half of the volume on the iPhone. I haven’t received many calls but I missed all of the message notifications. Didn’t realise them until I checked the phone.

Bring Exposé to Windows

Switcher is a nifty utility that brings exposé to Windows.

I have sold my iPhone 4 and I’m now a step closer to the long anticipated Android dream. The runner-ups are HTC Sensation and HTC Incredible S due to be released on the Telstra Next-G network sometime this month.

Paper-based Password Management

I have been frustrated with password management for quite sometime. I have tried various digital ways to safe-keep passwords but never really felt completely secure as a computer can be stolen, broken or hacked. And the problem gets complicated when you are dealing with multiple computers on a daily basis (eg. computers at home and work). It’s difficult to memorise passwords specially if you have lots of accounts.

I think paper-based password management is the way to go, at least for my needs. I came across this article which I found really useful. I have adapted it to suit my own needs. For example, instead of using multiple characters, I’ve just used one so that I have control over the length of my passwords.

I found it difficult to generate the passwords I need using a spreadsheet application so I wrote a C++ program that does the job. Basically I declared an array of strings which contains letters (both lower and upper case), numbers and common symbols. A random integer is generated at runtime and it matches an element in the array which outputs a table of 13 (columns) x 5 (rows).

#include <iostream> #include <string> #include <time.h> using namespace std;


int main (void) {

	int randInt = 0;

	const int MAX = 65;

	const string strArray[] = {"0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z", "!", "@", "#", "$", "%", "^", "&", "*", "+", "="};
	/* Initialise random seed */

	srand (time(NULL));
	/* Generate table of random characters based on strArray */

	for (int i = 0; i < MAX; i++) {

		/* Breakline every 13 characters */

		if ((i != 0) && (i % 13 == 0)) {

			cout << endl;

		}

		/* Generate random number based on number of elements in strArray */

		randInt = rand() % (sizeof(strArray)/sizeof(string));

		/* Output table */

		cout << strArray[randInt] << " ";

	}

return 0; }

Truth of Touch

Get your copy of Yanni’s new album Truth of Touch on iTunes now!

Hongkong Post is hopeless at item tracking

What does “The item ([item number]) was posted on [date] and is being processed for delivery to the addressee” mean?

So does it mean the item has left Hong Kong? Or is it still been processed in Hong Kong or even better, processed by who?

It seems to me that it’s just a generic message saying “your item is being delivered but we have no freaking idea where it is and when it will reach you”.

Damn HTML5 specification

Some have noticed that many HTML5 sites are failing to validate recently.

As suggested here, HTML5 spec has changed recently which restricts the values in the rel attribute. So essentially any WordPress theme that uses HTML5 no longer validates because it places non-standard values in the rel attribute (noticeably rel=”category tag” appearing in the_category() function).

Custom resize options for Web Developer extension for Chrome

I’ve been using Chrome and the Web Developer extension for a while now. One thing that really bugged me was the lack of custom resize options. If you are in my shoes then be sure to follow MAXWEBDEV’s comment to add custom resize options. If you read further down it also has instructions for various platforms.

Weather HD for Mac

I purchased Weather HD for Mac. It’s a great app with room for improvements. Adding location isn’t a walk in the park but you get used to it once you know what to do. I’ve read some reviews that suggest it doesn’t work for Australia as the data it is pulling is incorrect. This isn’t true. You need to go to Preferences and add a new location then delete the default location that was already in there. The interface isn’t that intuitive as people get confused by the fact that you can’t change a location once you have added it (except changing the location display name). The animation is beautiful except it isn’t HD.

Upgrading WordPress

Wow! I just finished wiping the sweat off my forehead after running into problems with upgrading to WordPress 3.1.3. The automatic upgrade failed and on the live site displays an unpleasant “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” error message.

According to this article, the simple fix is to remove the hidden .maintenance file in the root directory of the WordPress installation.

DeepAurelia