Category / Technology

by dmacias

Sprint’s HTC Touch Pro is Out!

In case you didn’t know earlier this week (Monday) Best Buy got Sprint’s new PDA phone, the HTC Touch Pro. Then around Friday, all Sprint stores got them. I’ve played with it a little and love how responsive it is compared to the Mogul. However, I will still need to play some more with it, before making the decision to upgrade or not. Since I’m no longer under a contract, I’m hoping to get a good deal on it.

david

by dmacias

If you don’t play with it you’ll lose it.

So, recently I ran into a very nice WordPress theme which I’m currently using called Freicurv v2.0. However, there seems to be a very special combination of themes and MySQL versions which cause all your stories to show in ascending order instead of the default descending order. This is all great information, however it took me a few hours of searching around before I put the pieces together. So, here is it. If the order of your stories or posts is reverse and you’ve gone to WordPress support and read this article and you’re still trying to use this theme, here is my work around:

In the index.php change
php query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-111")
to
php query_posts($query_string)

I’m still playing around with the theme to see if I broke anything, but more than likely the big issue will be the whole Asides category this theme uses. Since, I will not be changing that section very often, I’m happy with just modifying the intro.php file when ever I want to make a change to that section.

david

by dmacias

Moving away from PHP 4 to PHP 5

So, by default the good folks at 1and1 give you support for php 3-5, however 4 is the default. So, recently one of the plugins I use in my site upgraded to php 5 which forced me to continue using an older version. However, since I’m always a big sponsor of upgrade to the latest and greatest especially when it comes to software, I decided it was time to make the move. Doing a little bit of google work, I ran into 1and1’s official FAQ on how to do this, which is found here. However, that was not the first link which showed up in google. This guy had a pretty good write up and discussion about this change and 1and1 in general. Thanks to that .htaccess change I’m now humming along with php 5.

cheers,

david

08/11/2008 edit: Funny, a day after I posted this PHP 4 support ended with the last release of the 4.4 branch. Perfect timing!

by dmacias

HTC Mogul Update 3.56.651.0

So, the fine folk over at HTC released a new ROM for Sprint’s Mogul. You can get it from here. I just went through the installation and as before it was pretty painless. From the notes:

1. Upgrades the operating system from Windows Mobile® 6.0 Professional to Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional
2. Adds Sprint TV
3. Includes all enhancements incorporated in previous software upgrades including:
EV-DO Rev. A functionality for faster download and upload speeds when utilizing data services wherever EV-DO Rev. A coverage is available
Advanced GPS functionality including the Sprint Navigation application
Adds a Task Manager to the Today screen for easier access and management of running programs

What I’m most excited about is the number 1, I’ve read a lot of great things about 6.1 and been wanting to try it out. Will update with any problems after a few days of usage. Remember after a clean install you want to install Opera Mini and Google Maps.

david

by dmacias

Twitter fix your IM gateway!

So, one thing that really grinds my gears is when a website offers a service which they know doesn’t work, but will not make any reference to that on their website. For example, according to the Twitter website you can send twitts over SMS or IM. So, you sign in and set up your SMS account with no problem, but then comes the option for IM using Jabber. Why would Twitter still have this option available if they know it doesn’t work?

We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.

We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
Thanks for your patience!

Update: We’re turning off IM services for the evening (Friday) to allow for the system to recover. We hope to turn things back on Saturday.

This was back in May 23rd, 2008… get with the program guys.

~dmacias