Issues I had with HTC Android that are solved for me now:

• com.android.phone process no longer crashes every now and then. When it crashes you have to enter your pin-code to be able to receive phone calls again.
• I don’t use HTC Sync so having the pc synchronization process always running was wasted memory.
• I don’t use the facebook integration in contacts since I’ve already synced contact photos with my gmail account and I think the facebook app works better for looking at the facebook news feed. Since the facebook/flickr/twitter sync process is always running in HTC Android regardless if you use it or not it was wasted memory and cpu usage for me.
• The HTC Calendar does not have a week view, the Android calendar does.
• The HTC Browser is always in full screen hiding the notification bar, I prefer the original Android browser that does not run in full screen so the notification bar is visible.
• The Android browser seem to crash less than the HTC browser.
• com.htc.android.htcime leaks assets and asset managers everytime a keyboard is shown.
• The phone seem a lot faster running vanilla Android compared to HTC Android.
• com.htc.android.mail is always running even if it is not used, wastes memory and cpu.
• 3G connectivity seem a lot better now, with HTC Android the phone would drop the 3G connection and never reestablish it until I manually did so.
• Integration between the different apps is much better in vanilla Android. For example, in the messages app you can see if a contact is online on gtalk and a lot more neat little contact shortcuts.
• I prefer the look and feel of vanilla Android compared to SenseUI.
• And there are a lot of nice new features in Android 2.1 compared to Android 1.5.

For how I use my phone there are a few issues with the Android 2.1 ROM on my HTC Hero:

• Camera does not work very well.
• Battery drains a bit faster, it lasts a day (~13-16h) for me now.
• Gallery app UI is corrupted when changing orientation.

And of course since vanilla Android does not contain SenseUI there are no HTC widgets, HTC keyboard or HTC quick dialer. But so far I haven’t missed them.

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.617 2009 (GMT+1): CLR:(

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.617 2009 (GMT+1): C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations\3.5.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.618 2009 (GMT+1): )

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.618 2009 (GMT+1): Rejecting native image because dependency C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Core\3.5.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Core.dll is not native

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.619 2009 (GMT+1):

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.619 2009 (GMT+1): ModLoad: 00000000`5aee0000 00000000`5aef2000   System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll

I have no idea what has caused this, but closing all Visual Studio instances and then starting it once with the /safemode switch and then closing it seems to have fixed the crash.

Will be intersting to see what they’ll do with the avatars in games. 

It’s not perfect though. When logging in you have to enter the password twice unless you sign in via the guide and just after boot it’s a bit sluggish.

I’ve for some time now wanted to always exclude certain domains from my search results since they are of no use to me. For example, I will never pay for experts-exchange.com so results from that domain are just a nuisanse to me. So now I’ve created my own search that always exclude unwanted domains. It only excludes experts-exchange.com right now, but I’ll probably add more as I find them.

Maybe the proposed Vista Protected mode feature needs to be more prioritized after all. I don’t know if it would have lessened the impact of this issue though.

The initial impression is good. Feels a lot faster than previous versions, and memory usage isn’t steadily increasing. And the improved address bar is really nice, I only have to write a few characters of the name of a page I want to visit and it usually appears among the top three or four suggestions.

Also, the two add-ons I use are compatible which is great.

• Firebug
• Del.icio.us

The address is not valid

Searching for this on google turned up a KB article that says this is because of a security measure introduced in security update 896358.

To view a downloaded .chm file do the following.

1. Right-click the CHM file, and then click Properties.
2. Click Unblock.
3. Double-click the .chm file to open the file.

Got my Xbox 360 back from repair today, took 10 days. I tried playing a few XBLA games using different accounts and had no problem so it seems they fixed instead of replacing it.

Haven’t noticed any reduction in noise level which is a little disappointing, but I guess I should be happy since it works and the noise isn’t worse.

var result = (from v in db.Table select v.IntColumn).Max();

This fails with an exception if Table is empty.

The null value cannot be assigned to a member with type
System.Int32 which is a non-nullable value type.

So after some reading on MSDN I found the extension method Queryable.DefaultIfEmpty, it returns a collection with one element that has the default value of the type of the IQueryable<T> if the IQueryable<T> is empty, that looked like it could solve my problem. But I quickly found out that it is not supported by Linq to SQL.

Could not format node 'OptionalValue' for execution as SQL.

So then after reading a blog post about this I ended up with the following query that does what I want.

var result = (from v in db.Table select (int?)v.IntColumn).Max()
    ?? 0;

It has the side effect that the generated SQL query contains an extra nested select but I think that is acceptable.

SELECT MAX([t1].[VALUE]) AS [VALUE]
FROM (
    SELECT [t0].[IntValue] AS [VALUE]
    FROM [TABLE] AS [t0]
) AS [t1]

Now I’m trying GooSync that currently only syncs with Google Calendar, but they recently announced that they were adding Google Contacts sync the next month or so. A big advantage of GooSync compared to Plaxo is that they handle events that you were invited to and support syncing multiple calendars, although to sync more calendars that the default you have to pay. But I don’t really mind that as long as the price is right, and GooSync is pretty cheap.

So now all I need is for Plaxo to add support for Google Contacts sync. Then I can sync my contacts and calendar wirelessly wherever I am to my phone and get contact updates from Plaxo. Maybe it’ll happen, but I wont hold my breath.