Windows Vista & HTC TyTN II

Well, I just installed Windows Vista Business x32 and tried to set up a sync partnership with my TyTn II (which is running WM 6.1 – official ROM from HTC).

Although the device is seen by Vista (i.e. Explorer), I couldn’t convince it set it to configure with Outlook 2007. After browsing few sites I have found that Microsoft released a new software for syncing required for desktop. You can download it from here (requires genuine validation). Then after installation was successfully detected by Windows and syncing worked as the software suggested.

Here’s a screenshot:

I will mention that before this update, I went to Start > Settings > Connections tab, opened USB-to-PC and unchecked ‘Enable advanced network functionality’ as seen suggested on some forums, device was rediscovered by Windows still didn’t synced with Outlook though.

Good luck!

Banc stupid

Un tip se trezeşte dimineaţa, ia ziarul de la uşă , se uită pe numerele de la loto şi vede că i-au ieşit toate cele şase. Cum avea un serviciu pe care nu îl suporta, pleacă tacticos la serviciu, intră în audienţă la şef şi îl anunţă cu satisfacţie că demisionează. [/] Şeful spune că e alegerea lui, îi mulţumeşte pentru cei peste 20 de ani lucraţi în firmă şi îi dă un bonus de despărţire de 200.000 de euro. Omul, fericit nevoie mare, în drum spre loterie intră la reprezentanţa BMW şi cumpără cel mai scump model, în valoare de 200.000 de euro. Când să dea banii, este anunţat că, deoarece este clientul cu nr. 1,000,000 primeşte maşina gratis. Când e să ai noroc, ai noroc, zice omul bucuros că a rămas şi cu cei 200.000 de euro şi are şi BMW nou nouţ. Trece pe la loto, ridică milioanele şi pleacă acasă. Stă pe terasă, la o bere şi o vede pe soţia sa venind acasă, cu bicicleta. Moment în care trece pe stradă o betonieră şi o calcă. Asta e, zice omul, când e să ai noroc, ai noroc până la capăt!”

How about Zope 3 performance …

Well, I have just finished a three-day introduction course into the Zope 3 environment. Me and my colleagues from the company got very curious about Zope 3 and hired someone to give us a crash course.

First of all, I must write some assumptions because things will go a little bit tendentious while I want to amuse myself while writing this as well as find some answers, proving myself I am deadly wrong.
1) I want to note that I have about some few years of Java experience, MySQL etc. Since this spring I have started to work in Python, more precisely Zope 2 and Django. I could affirm that still I am a beginner in this language, I am not that “pythonic” in thinking and practices. But still I like Python and I wish use it, even that I miss sometimes those explicit data types declarations while passing or returning things in Java.
2) I haven’t got the opportunity to find (positive)/do benchmarks, my affirmations are purely drawn while asking this guy and while google it and my ~6 months experience with Zope 2.
3) I admit that Java still sucks for website development, but more than Zope 3? 🙂

Now, let’s get back to business…and please excuse my sarcasm

I had asked my self a question:
“- How the hell am I going to store 6 millions of records inside ZODB?” And shared with the teacher.
He pointed that I could use an alternative such as PosgreSQL and MySQL.
First observation is that if I would do this then I wouldn’t need Zope 3 anymore, wouldn’t I? Then I would choose Django. To me, storing half of information in ZODB and half in MySQL seems like “duct tape” and that before even starting.
I have also learned that you could still use the 100s caches and more from Zope 2 on Zope 3 too. There’s memcache, varnish cache, squ…Then I said to myself “I haven’t even started yet and I would wrap it up in duct tape? Why the hell these all kind of caches and not simply serve static pages?”. Shared my tought and learned again that in rough moments, like spikes, you I could do that too, you could generate static pages for squid to serve and invalidate them every 5 minutes or you could load partial page and complete it with Ajax…Then I should have screamed “WTF, dude? This is freaking duuuuck tapeeeeee!”

This brings me to the real question … do I really need Zope for that? Short answer, NO. I don’t need it for my fictional yellow pages with 6 millions of objects. Django would fit fine. The presentation layer would need few templates, that’s all.

The irony is that while I work on the Java, people from PHP or Python keep asking persistently why I need that shit thing called EJB. Yuck! Python is so simple and fun, geez! Why write loads of XML, write interfaces, W*H*A*T the hell is that soup? Tried to explain what an real application server is, what is a transaction, isolation, Portlet API, moving to what server you want. Bla bla bla! Java sucks and that’s that!

Well, now while looked over Zope 3’s ZCA there’s a small smile to the corner of my mouth.
Interfaces, Adapters, viewlets, adnotations, Events, Templates, Skins, more Interfaces etc. are making EJB 2 look like a small little naughty kid licking his popsicle. Everything is decoupled, fully dacoupled … from reality. You can do anything there, at what cost? Is there anything “pythonic” in there? I certainly don’t think so. Seem to me Java style (or OO style) all day long, without the statically-typed feature of Java language, they implement interfaces and ‘implements’ notion, btw.

There are two things I am thinking about.
1) Zope 2 was the right answer at the right time to the weak link from Java world JSP. I liked Zope 2 concept since then and I will use it. For small-medium sites (homesites, blogs, university sites etc. is ideal) it’s even more feasible than Django. ZMI is so flexible that lets you fix things while you’re sunbathing. No SSH, phone to root@localhost etc. I love ZMI and clients are satisfied and like you when you carry your toolcase with you on vacation.

2)With Zope 3 I started to love old ZMI even more. Zope 3 is the wanna-be enterprise-grade application server having that old grandpa called ZODB which you have to CPR each morning, pack it and ressurect it. I read somewhere that Zope 2 was abused to do enterprise-like application, I agree. But the problem in Zope 2 is not the framework (fully) but also the really slow transactional ZODB. The most funny one is that you delete something from it and actually the file grows in size having the transaction saved. So it only knows to grow (at a rate of about 160 KB/transaction). How would you feel when the garbage man picks up the garbage from your door but leaves few bags behind the house?

Where does Zope 3 fits? For a blog site would look like investigating a wooden spoon with a tricorder while for enterprise would look like a old Dodge on a German highway. Where !?

Thinking in money, paying the rare breed of Zope 3 consultants or having to learn a framework that makes Alfresco, Django a breeze, sounds frightening. What for? To be able to transmute my sexual fantasies into code via zope.Interface?

I asked about community and according to teacher and Google search (yields for ‘alfresco’ vs ‘zope 3’ vs ‘django’ a rate of 3:1:9), it seem to be somewhere underground working with Zope 3 like assembly line of the T-model of Ford preparing to conquer the world.

Last I had one question, I wanted to see an enterprise-grade portal powered by Zope 3.
I  know how Plone is performing, I pray for my colleagues every morning. They try to squeeze every drop of Plone’s blood to make the site work at a reasonable annoyance level.

Of course I haven’t had one presented so I have started my own little investigation right from the devil’s den (http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZopePowered/index_html?b_start:int=0)
Any site bigger than university site or local news? Some are down, some moved to PHP (WTF??)
Anything magic? I let you judge that.

Until then, I’ll pass on this one. Thank you.

While I was writing this I remembered Sean Kelly and his presentation http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov .I would like to hear his expert oppinion on Zope 3 and faster web application development.

Cheers.

Reference:

• http://www.unessa.net/en/europython/sessions/51/
  
• [PDF] http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/ep2004slides/Lucchesi-paper.pdf
  
• http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZopePowered/

Windows Mobile WM6 Hide SIM Contacts

In order to prevent contacts from SIM being displayed in ‘Contacts’ list open your registry editor (I use PHM RegEdit) and edit the following key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Phone]
“ShowSIM”=dword:00000001 ->0 to disable, 1 to enable.

Found it on the web, here.

JavaScript handling of IE DOM childrens for TABLE, UL and SELECT

One of the challenges of my current project was the dynamic creation of a HTML table using Internet Explorer.
Suppose you have something like this:

…
<table>
<thead>
<tr><th>Column 1</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody id=”table_body”>
</tbody>
</table>
…
<script>
var tb = document.getElementById(“table_body”);
tb.innerHTML = “<tr><td>Sample row</td></tr>”;
</script>

The code above will fail with the Javascript “Unknow runtime error occurred” error.

In order to avoid this problem, there are two solutions:

1. Solution one is to generate all the table element in one string and append to a “parent” element such as a DIV.

The code will look like this:

…
<div id=”table_container”></div>
<script>
var cd = document.getElementById(“table_container”);
cd.innerHTML = “<table><thead><tr><th>Column 1</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Sample row</td></tr></tbody></table>“;
</script>

2. Second solution would involve creating a correct set of DOM tree objects using document.createElement and document.createTextElement then appending each to each other appropriately in a parent-child manner.

The code would look like this:
…
<table>
<thead>
<tr><th>Column 1</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody id=”table_body”>
</tbody>
</table>
…
<script>
var tb = document.getElementById(“table_body”);  var tr = document.createElement(“tr”);  var td = document.createElement(“td”);  var td_txt = document.createTextElement(“Sample row”);  td.appendChild(td_txt);  tr.appendChild(td);  tb.appendChild(tr);
</script>

Note: Even if the second solution is the best from the DOM point of view, using it would lead to a performance penalty esspecially when there are a lod of DOM manipulation required (ex. adding 2000 rows).

This behaviour applies to IE (6, 7) and both for TABLE, UL and SELECT tags. In fact I’ve read that there’s a bug coming from IE 5 (I cannot find the URL now)

Day #15

09:00

                           Calories|Fat|Carbohydrates|Protein
250 ml    milk 1.5% fat    83      |0.2|12.2         |8.3
200 ml    orange juice     80      |0.4|18           |1.2
2   tblsp Weider Whey 100  111     |0.3|1.2          |25.8

Total:

• Calories      : 274
• Fats          : 0.9
• Carbohydrates : 31.4
• Proteins      : 35.3

How much fat body needs daily

14 days later…

Day #14

Weight   : 130.3   kg [-0.9 kg]
Neck     : 45      cm [ -1 cm]
Shoulder : 138     cm [ -8 cm]
Chest    : 135     cm [ -3 cm]
Biceps   : 41/42.5 cm [-1/-0.5cm]
Waist    : 120     cm [ -5 cm]
Hips     : 126.5   cm [-5.5 cm]
Thigh    : 70      cm [-2 cm]
Calf     : 46      cm [-2 cm]

Day #6

09:30

• 100g yoghurt 3.5% fat

12:30

• 450ml chicken soup w/ vegetables
• 2 apples
• 3 cups of tea w/ 9 teaspoons of sugar

16:30

• 2 cups of tea w/ 6 teaspoons of sugar

20:30

• 300g caltabos (black pudding) w/ 3 bread slices

Day #5

10:30

• 100ml coffee with 2 lumps of sugar

12:30

• 450ml chicken soup w/ vegetables
• 150g Rice with 100g boiled pork meat

16:30

• 100ml coffee with 2 lumps of sugar

Day #4

09:50

• 100ml cofee 2 lumps of sugar

11:45

• 450ml tripe soup w/ 30ml cream 3 bread slices
• 2 small sausages, 2 pork steaks, 100g fries 3 bread slices

22:30

• 1 coke 330ml normal

23:30

• 400g stoven cabbage
• 150ml milk 1.5%
• 150g napolitane

Total:

• Calories      : 2650
• Proteins      : 127
• Fats          : 115