Motorola Rokr E6, made a mistake buying it?

I bought this mobile after a very brief survey on the net. First I bought it for my fiancee and then when I saw it, without thinking much went and bought one for myself. The facts that made me like this phone are,

1. being a Linux based phone (E6 is powered by Motorola's custom kernel) I had a hope that we a lot of modified firmware as well as custom kernels which will enhance the phone features etcetera.
2. The cheapest touch screen phone AFAIK.
3. Had trust with Motorola as I have seen my friend using a moto for over 2 years and we literally played football with that phone. I heard that phone is still working after 5+ years.

Well its been 1 month+ that I am using this phone. I have not done much with this phone except, flashing it once and put a modified firmware which enable a few features in the phone. The firmware which I used is AhMan's Hybrid. You can see the release info and features added in his forum thread. One feature that made me smile wide was that I was able to edit the shortcuts in the home screen. I always wanted to change the FM shortcut to Alarm shortcut.

But...

Should I have bought this phone for the reason that it was running Linux and hence its open source ? Well Motorola is not a sweet and user friendly company as they seems to be (more). Motorola has set up a nice web page which has a FQDN http://opensource.motorola.com. It looks like only the web site has the name open source, not that they have released the source for E6 which, seems from the forum conversation, is licensed under GPL. A Motorola spokesman repeatedly assures that its their obligation to release the code as per the GPL terms blah blah, but seems to be "working on it for eternity". The commitment Motorola has shown in releasing the source for E6 puts me off from thinking that Motorola is a customer/community friendly company. They seems to be more committed to working on newer versions after releasing the E6 and hence there is no update firmware from Motorola for E6. Guess I made a mistake in buying this model without a proper research.

Still...

My phone works as a phone. I can make calls, I can use the camera, I can listen to songs and FM, I can browse the web. So I am not at a great loss, after all, features are a fantasy come true for a day and then you just go back to 'using it as a phone'.

Benazir Bhutto, featured in history from today.

I feel sorry but that does not stop me from saying, our neighbours have done it again. I am in no way, politically or religiously biased person, but thinking within the shell of an normal person, I do not understand why the people in Pakistan is so against democracy. I wonder the suicide bomber who killed their opposition leader, earns what ? No place in the glorious history, not a martyr praised in the coming era. Then why are they doing this ? Why they kill innocent people, why they kill Indian's at Kashmir, why they kill their own people, why they kill their politicians?. I have started to believe that this is because the people in Pakistan is so against Democracy, so against improving their life and the society and with that, their country. They does not seem to understand how good it feels to live in a peaceful atmosphere where there is no bombs and shells, no guns and rockets, no killing and beheading, no Taliban, no Jihads, no cruelty, no bloodshed, no hatred, no nothing. Well, that is too much of an ask.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father was former Prime Minister of Pakistan who was executed in 1979 by more or less a politically motivated action directed by the General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Now Pakistan was on the verge of election that this mishap, the demise of the probable Prime Minister of Pakistan occurred. Bad luck for our neighbours ? I say bad luck for the world, as now there seems to be nothing to control the whole country, Pakistan is going to be a feeding ground for terrorism. If a country has only one aim, that is to buy more and more weapons, not to defend itself, but to boast to the neighbours that we are a super power



I do not hope for any improvement in Pakistan's political scene, nor do I hope that the relationship with India would improve in any ways. This is me not being an optimistic, typical Indian, but since I learned the term "terrorism" the same time I learned about Pakistan and for all these years nothing has changed favourable in Pakistan, I am just saying what I feel inside.

(Added on 31st Dec 2007)

It looks like Musharaf and Pakistan government officials should at least learn to lie smartly. Claiming that the Lady was not dead by the shot but due to her head banged on the car roof's lever, ah, they are in an impression that rest of the world are people with their head filled with clay and not grey cells. Government accusing the terrorist and the terrorists denying the accusation, this is a kindergarten play ? WIth a literacy rate of approximately 50%, its understood why this happens in Pakistan. I do not have any interest in the proceedings regarding this, as, if there was anything up to this point, I have lost it. God bless Pakistan.

Jai Hind

Online PC Scanning resource.

Here are a few sites which offer free Online PC scan for spy wares and other malicious content. I find it useful at times when you suspect that you are infected. In the end its the best practice to buy a anti virus package for your windows machine, this will come handy before something screw your machine.

Microsoft One care PC Scan
Symantec PC Scan (virus and online threats)
McAfee Online PC Scan
Trend Micro Online PC Scan
BitDefender Online PC Scan
Kaspersky Online PC Virus Scan
Panda Security Online PC Scan
F-Secure Online PC Scan

Online File Scanner by Kaspersky
Kaspersky Online File Scan

Free PC scan/security resources
TheFreeCountry.com

Convert -File System- ext2 to ext3

Lets get started.

If you can un-mount the partition which needs the change, perfect. Else you can remount it in
read-only mode

mount -o remount,ro /dev/xxx

If you want to un-mount the partition and it complains that the device/resource is busy, you can use a little brute force to get things done if you are sure nobody else is using it.

lsof | grep "<mount point>" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

The above command may disturb other users logged in and  if they are using the machine. You should be sure that the machine is not shared with anyone else, hence make sure before you do. If the above trick does not work, you know what it does I hope, hence you can try do it yourself some other way. Once done, you can un-mount the partition. Next step is

tune2fs -j /dev/xxx

This will create ext3 file system in the partition specified. Once this is over "without any errors" you should change the "file system type" in /etc/fstab and make it ext3. Then do a

mount -a

To check whether its mounted properly and the file system type, do

mount

Offline weblog editors

After stumbling up on the "deepest sender", a few days later I thought I would search for more of these software which are stand-alone applications rather than a plug-in. I found that I have one blog editor in the windows vista that I use called, "Windows Live writer". Initially when I installed it, I had a feeling that this works only for the windows blog, called spaces in their live.com portal. But later today I had this urge to see more of what windows live writer can do. It was easy setup for my WordPress blog. with a few text entries and a few clicks I was ready to blog with Windows Live Writer.

This is how to start it. Select the tools> Accounts to see the image on the right side. Select "Another weblog service" from the radio selection and click on next.
You will get the the screen on the left after the click on next. Here you have to enter the weblog homepage URL - This is the blog home home page which You want to use. In my case it was http://kryptoz.wordpress.com. Username - Your WordPress username Password - Your password for the WP username. Additionally if you have the option for proxy setup.

After finishing the mentioned, when you click next, windows live writer will do its part and collect info from the WordPress for your account (styles, posts, keywords, etcetera) and you are ready to blog. There are a few plug-ins for the MS Writer, which are available at gallery@live.com. I did not find any of them interesting for me but, You are not me, so go have a look!

I am planning to use this as my primary weblog editor now. Not that I am a regular blogger, but it makes things easy whenever I want to scribble anything on the blog. Windows Live Writer saves me from, typing in the URL on my Firefox browser Address bar. Though, since I save my username and password in Windows Live Writer, I expected direct access to my dashboard (logged in) when I clicked on my link called "Dashboard" on Windows Live Writer. Currently it opens up WordPress login page. For me that should be okay for now, unless I get more lazy and want the auto login to the dashboard from Windows Live Writer.

Apart from this a few that are in my 'Apps to try' list are...

BlogDesk, Ecto, w.bloggar and QTM

These AFAIK are free tools which runs in either Windows (majority) and Linux (QTM) or both (QTM).

This is all aboutus.org!

Ever heard about aboutus.org ? Well time to hear it from me, if you have not yet. This is what the creators of aboutus.org says about themselves

"We are building a wiki resource on the internet that we hope will complement other great web resources such as Google and Wikipedia. We work to merge commercial with informational by helping people organize the information that is important to them."

Exciting enough, I have created a intranet wiki (mediawiki) for our internal use at office. I never contributed much to the local wiki at office. But lately I started scribbling the common (technical) problems which I see at office on day to day basis and the solutions also in there. More like a FAQ style, this was helpful to a few in the office as a do-it-yourself guide, as well as for me since when I do something rarely I have a documentation in hand to refer back. This made me less shy from the wiki on the www, and thus created the below page for my company.

Aboutus.org is a great way to put across to the world what we are doing (for a company, this is a nifty feature), and talk about what we do, what we offer to the community/people etcetera. Below is a image link ( a badge, as aboutus.org calls it) which links to the page I created for my company in aboutus.org community. Try yours, try create one at aboutus.org, its great fun to talk about yourself ~smile~

Firefox addon called "Deepest Sender"

This add-on called "Deepest Sender" claims that I can post to my wordpress.com account without going to the site all the time. I have just added this and am going to try this out. The installation was as simple as installing any other add-on to the Firefox. Next when I selected "Deepest Sender" from the "Tools" menu of the Firefox, it asked me for some one time information about the blog I use, the account user name and password. It went on and logged in without any errors (so it shows up as of now) and a nice small interface poped up for me to type. This is going to be interesting if this works it claims. This is going to be my first post from the firefox add-on called "Deepest Sender" to my wordpress blog. Let see if this works! ~exec post~

Oh well this did worked (All excited). This did posted my scribble to word press. This is a wonderful add on. I was looking for to have some option like this where I can post to my blog without having to login to wordpress and then click here and there before I end up with the pad they provide for scribbling.

On a quick look at this add-on, they have a "post history" which list all the posts on my wordpress account. Once from the retrieved history, I can edit any post just by selecting the post and click on "edit". (I am editing this post using the mentioned way). They also have a save option so that I can type and save those, for a rethink/recheck and a postponed post. Another feature they have is a offline mode, which I am yet to try. This sounds like saving my effort on saving the posts as XML if I am offline and then open to post it when I come online again. This offline mode should make the posting while offline transparent. I can add the post to one or multiple categories. So far I found one thing that will make me go to the website, wordpress.com is to add/edit the tags for the post. It doesnt seem "Deepest Sender" lets you add tags for a post. But thats the only feature missing that I felt straight away. Good so far. I really am going to try the offline mode today evening once I leave office.

I think those who are lazy like me to login each time to post a blog should atleast try this software. Well, Happy Bloggin...!

Funniest Reality TV show I have ever seen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br1WUSEwGwc

No kidding, watch this and you will find that I meant what I said!

Find out the IP Location

There are a few ways to get this done for free. First place where I stumbled up on was http://www.hostip.info. This is a community-based project which does locate the geographical location of IP address. They have a firefox plugin which comes handy for the curious souls.

 Other one which I found interesting was http://www.maxmind.com/app/city. This is a commercial one, though they have free country lookup. They have a python api which you can use in your code to locate the country from the visitor's IP address. 

You can find  a few hundred+ of such useful sites which a google search.