appelgren

I’ve had my HTC Hero a couple of months now and up until recently I used it with the original ROM. After getting no response about crash issues and other annoyances from HTC support I decided to try a different ROM. I’m now using CyanogenMod for HTC Hero (GSM) v1.0 by jnwhiteh which is a ROM based on Android 2.1.

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.

Ran into a strange issue with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 where it crashed, vanished with no errors, if I selected the Choose items menu item in the context menu of the Windows Forms designer Toolbox window. Attaching a debugger and reproducing the crash gave me the following error.

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.

The last few days I’ve been using the new Xbox 360 UI, and I like it. The live arcade games list loads instantly and you don’t have to endure the noise from the dvd-drive anymore, for games you’ve installed to the hd that is. Unfortunately I only have the 20Gb hd so I can only have one game installed, and upgrading to the 120Gb just feels too expensive. While reading Major Nelson’s blog I found out about a small improvement that’s neat, you can now delete all games from your profile with zero gamerscore. Nice!

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.

Found a new Google tool today called Custom Search Engine that might be useful.

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.

Secunia recently published an advisory about a bug in Firefox 3.0 and earlier versions that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code if a user visits a malicious webpage. Not a good start. Should everyone use IE now until this is fixed?

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

Some time ago I gave up on scheduleworld. I tried using Plaxo that synced to Microsoft Outlook and from there to my phone for a while but it was just to cumbersome. I had hoped that Plaxo would launch a SyncML solution, but that doesn’t seem likely for the foreseeable future.

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.

Some time ago Google started to detect my p1i on the download page for the mobile gmail app. Unfortunately the p1i version does not work correctly on a p1i phone. No fullscreen and the back button does not work.

Fortunately it looks like the version for SE k750i works correctly on SE p1i. I got it using the following URL:

http://gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Sony%20Ericsson&model=K750&ver=v1.5.0.1187&hl=en

Update 20080409: The above URL is now broken, and Google has fixed the fullscreen issue with the P1i version of Gmail j2me but not the back button.

Energialternativ, originally uploaded by appel.

When setting up my new Vista computer I ran into a minor localization issue. In the power options in my swedish Vista there are two things called “viloläge”, sleep in the english version.

The first one is most likely sleep, and the second one hibernate.

When I changed the clock from winter to summertime on my SE k750i the calendar did not behave as expected. All events were moved one hour. I contacted Sony Ericsson Call Center about the problem and yesterday I got a response, this behavior is in the specification for the SE k750i. How stupid is that? I don’t care if they designed a bug on purpose or not. It causes problems for me, and I’d guess anyone else that uses the calendar on a k750i.

Update: After a few mails back and forth they’ve at least provided me with a workaround. Always sync the calendar with a computer and do a sync that overwrites the phone after each change between summer- and wintertime. Brilliant!