Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

As my old Sony Ericsson P1i is almost dead and going that direction very fast, I had to do something about it. Since I am not in a position to buy an expensive smartphone now, but still wanted an Andoid phone, order myself a Samsung Galaxy 3 (i5800) for EURO 140 only – nice price for a phone that can serve me for a while until I get something better.

Going around the web and checking what’s there for Android, I found a huge amount of apps, and for sure, when I will have a phone with me (expected to ship within 10 days), I will be installing and checking a lot of stuff, but since a lot of you already have an Android phone, it would be nice to hear your recommendations on different applications. What do you run and like? Put it this way: which apps you will install immediately if you change your phone to another Android?

Actually, any recommendations would be better than nothing, so while I have few days before I have a phone, I can go and check, as well as safe some time on trying apps, since I know a lot of them duplicate each others functionality.

Comments from you are highly appreciated :-)

Today we had a car accident near the office and one of the cars hit and destroyed a communication box of the ISP, which we use in the office. No internet or phones were working, but by luck, my flat is just cross the road and I am using other ISP, so bridged WiFi connection recovered the office workflow for a time being. Hopefully the guys from Cyta will fix their stuff soon :)

I saw a pretty interesting case today. My lovely girlfriend is studying for computer science and while doing VisualBasic class, she created a software in Vistual Studio for her father. Later on we put Fedora on her laptop and now she needed to do some improvements in the application. We got MonoDevelop with mono-basic compiler and opened the project of VisualStudio on MonoDevelop. All seemed fine, but the code would not compile.

Next to the line of code “Me.MainForm = Global.OurAppName.Form1” it was giving an error: “OurAppName.Form1′ is a type and cannot be used as an expression. (VBNC30691)“. Note that this line of code was produced by VisualStudio. The issue has to do with object creation. While normal syntax would be “objectVar = New ClassName“, the actual code was of “objectVar = ClassName” format and obviously was giving compile error. Converting a code to “Me.MainForm = New Global.OurAppName.Form1” solved the issue perfectly well, but a question is: how an IDE would do such a mistake and why it would compile under windows?

Some time ago saw a real inception concept in technology. This had to do with activation process of pre-paid cards for a distributor of such cards within cards provider. Whenever a distributor needed to activate a batch of pre-paid cards (prior for those cards to be sold out), he needed to perform the following steps:

1. Open a web page and login to distributors area on the site
2. Click a button to launch a java applet which would open an RDP client and connect to a window server
3. In the given RDP session click on shortcut, which would open IE with a web page of some intranet, accessible only from that RDP session
4. In the given intranet, enter a part of LIKE SQL statement with parts of the serial number of cards to be activated and click the query button
5. Select all/some checkboxes next to result rows of a query and press activation button

That looks pretty much like a scenario of a recent movie :)

I won’t give out any names of companies or whatsoever, just wanted to show how a simple task can be over-complicated…

After working for a while on Xfce, I found out about Gnome 3 fallback mode. That is almost exactly what I needed – old style Gnome. Obviously not completely like Gnome 2.x, but very very close to it.

Will work in Gnome 3 under this mode for a while to see. At least I have all my menus, applets, proper system tray and whatever else I am so used to in their correct places :)