When I got to work, the first thing I tried was plugging the phone in over USB into my Windows XP workstation. Windows was very good about finding drivers, and this thing needed about 4 different drivers. I’m not what all the functions of the device are, but I am able to put the phone into “file Transfer” mode and the phone and the memory card show up like removable drives in My Computer. The coolest thing, is that the phone charges over USB. That’s so cool!

Now that I have the phone plugged into my Windows PC charging, I turned on the Bluetooth to get my contacts from my Mac onto the Phone. The Mac Bluetooth Set up Assistant got it up and running in no time. iSync swooped in and zapped all my contacts over to the phone.

That was fast! while I’m working, I like to monitor my phone with BluePhoneElite. Since the new phone was already paired to my Mac, it took all of 2 seconds to change BluePhoneElite’s preferences.

THe first thing I’ve noticed from using the new phone, is how fast it is. It is really responsive to commands and getting around the menu is fast.

On the way out to lunch, my coworker Jonah[you know, from Jonah's secret blog] asked if it mounts as a drive over USB on my Mac. It does, and iPhoto detects it as a camera and prepares for import. That will save some time.

I encoded some aac audio files, loaded them over USB and bam! Walkman!

To get data access to the phone, all I had to do was go to this link, and make a few selections. They sent em the configuration via SMS, and BAM! Internet access. This is going great.

Now that I have internet access, I thought I’d try the built-in software update. 2 seconds to find out I have the most up to date. With internet access I thought I should get a decent Web browser. Used the crappy built-in browser to get Opera Mini. Just go to mini.opera.com using the phone and download and install. DOUBLE BAM! We all love google maps right? How about using it on on you phone. On your phone, go to www.google.com/gmm

Setting email is slow and kind of sucks since I have to use the stupid number pad to enter in server names and email addresses. Now I have to install certificates for the SSL encryption to use Gmail. I had to do this for the old phone. WHAT A BITCH!!! There is little documentation and help on setting up google mail on the built in mail client. Here are the settings:
Email address: USERNAME@gmail.com
Connection type: POP3
Incoming server: pop.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Encryption / Incoming Server: SSL
Encryption / Outgoing Server: SSL
Incoming port: 995
Outgoing port: 465

Now here’s the magic ingredient… The W810 doesn’t ship with the proper certificate to verify the SSL encryption. You need to install it yourself. You could probably find the right certificate online somewhere online, but I couldn’t. Here’s an easy way I found. On Mac OS X 10.4, open the Keycahin Access application. Select the X509Anchors from the Keychains list on the left. Find the “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority” certificate. Select just that certificate. From the File menu, select Export. Export the certificate as a .cer file. Know send the new .cer file to the phone via bluetooth, and your done. It is simple, yet hard to figure out.

I grabbed a bunch of free themes from Esato.com.
I downloaded a bunch of free games from SonyEriccson’s WAP site.

Well that’s enough for now, But I’ll share my new ringtone with you.
Ring Away: Macarena.m4a.

Still to do:
Get my Mac to use the phone as a modem over bluetooth
Get the phone to use Cingular’s high speed Edge network
Explore Media management software
Get some sort of Instant Messaging software for the phone
probably more…

It took no time at all to find the code around the question marks was, but it wasn’t immediately apparent where the mysterious question marks were. Right where I expected to find question marks, I found nothing! It turns out that the question marks were in the whitespace. I guess when I was copying and pasting from my web browser to my text editor there as some funky character encoding mismatch. All I had to do was delete the tabs and return and replace them to my liking.

AN EPIHPNAY
I’m really disappointed with myself for not seeing this sooner. I have a category of blog post called Ask Rick for all the random questions I get. I’m working on a question/answer database project called Askeet! Perhaps I should port all my Ask Rick blog posts to the the Askeet app. I’m sure you were able to draw this conclusion far sooner than stupid old me.

Hey Rick, I want to get rid of an old fridge, who should I call? Can’t I just dump it in the nearest dumpster?

Um sure you could, but that’s probably illegal. Besides, for the sake of Pete, try to be a little more friendly towards the environment. Try calling you local power company. Often times they have recycling or buy-back programs on older less energy efficient appliances. Try a recycling center. If all else fails, you can call you local city’s bulky item pick-up and they’ll haul it away. It the city of Los Angeles, you can call the Bureau of Sanitation Bulky Item Pick-Up hotline at (800) 773-2489.

P.S. Thanks for the submission Mike! I love you.

This one’s not just for Acrobat, but for any program. Filetypes get associated with certain programs. When you double click a file it will open that file in the associated program. By default double clicking .txt files opens them in TextEdit. But let’s say you always want to open .txt files with BBEdit, TextWrangler, Microsoft Word, or whatever. Just do this:

In the finder, located a .txt, or the or .pdf as in the original question.
Click the file once to select it, and choose get info from the file menu.
In the resulting properties window, locate the area labeled “Open with:”. It may be hidden and you may need to click the little triangle to expose the area.
From the drop down menu, select the program you want to associate to that type of file.
Click “Change All…”

Now all your .pdf, .txt, or whatever type of file you got the info for will open with the program of your choice when you double click them.

It’s worth remembering that when you install new programs, sometimes they will change these settings, but you can always change them back.

1. I haven’t really tried anything new in a long time. I haven’t learned anything through experimentation or discovery in so long. I feel like my skills are becoming obsolete as the technology around me evolves.

2. There are some amazing trends in programming architecture happening that if I choose to ignore them, I’ll be left in the dust.

Specifically, I keep running into this MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm that I know nothing about. I’ve seen it in Cocoa for the Mac, Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other places that seem to be cutting edge and the future of programming. Ruby on Rails struck me as interesting since a big part of the Web development that I do is mundane, repetitive and menial. I really do a lot of copy and paste, and duplicating of code. Ruby on Rails has been getting a lot of attention lately too. So much attention, that there is a bunch of clones for different web languages.
Theres:
Ruby on Rails
PHP on TRAX
ColdFusion on Wheels
and another PHP framework called
Symfony,
and a bunch of others.
I don’t know of something for ASP, but I’m sure it’s out there or on its way.

Symfony and PHP on TRAX caught my attention since they run on top of the rather ubiquitous and free PHP language. At first glance and from what I understand, Symfony seems more mature and extensible.

So I should learn Symfony right?
HELL NO! I’m too damn lazy to struggle with this shit myself without good documentation, and besides with work, who has time. I’ve also never felt that learning something for the sake of learning was practical. If only I was getting to paid to work on a project using Symfony and there was a great book to reference I would do it.

OK, enough dramatic effect.
My coworker Jon Bauer turned me on to this 24 day tutorial called askeet!. Jon says he starting doing the tutorial, and he’s blown away by it. He hasn’t finished, but what he’s learned from the first 2 weeks worth of lessons has been enough for him to start developing an application using Symfony. I think I’ll helping him on this project in the near future as part of my job.

No reason for me not to try it out now. I get a great tutorial. It’s part of my job. I have a partner to learn with and bounce ideas off of.

This diary will be of my experiences in building the askeet! application, but because I’m stubborn, I’m going to do it a bit differently. I’m going to do it all on Mac.

I’m running Mac OS X 10.4.3, and I haven’t installed anything other the the base system. Here’s my story.

Absolutely! You’re using iChat right? sure, let me show you how to do that.

Open the Messages tab of your iChat preferences, and maker sure you have the “Automatically save chat transcripts” option selected. This will save transcripts in a folder called “iChats” located inside you Documents folder.

Now, iChat does this stupid thing of making a bunch of files in that folder, and it’s not very intuitive to find who said what when, but it’s better than nothing. Searching for a specific chat transcript is made easier with spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4, but browsing is lacking a bit.

You can improve browsing your chat transcripts by using a small third part application. Just search for iChat log on MacUpdate.com, or VersionTracker.com and check it out for yourself and see what’s out there.

OK, fine! Since you asked. I use a program called “Logorrhea” because it’s simple, free, and has a funny name like that sounds like diarrhea.

WOW! Logorrhea is a real word. Who knew?

Hey Rick, how do I update my credit card and billing info for the iTunes music store?

That’s not a difficult operation, but an important one. Launch iTunes, and click on the green Music Store playlist from list or Sources on the left. This should load up the iTunes Music Store home page. [You don't necessarily need to be on the home page. You can do this from any page inside the iTunes music store.]

Click on the Account button in the top right hand corner. Shown here. It should have your email address instead of mine.

At the login prompt, enter you iTunes Music Store Password.

You’ll be taken to your account page. Click on the Edit Credit Card button.

Enter your updated credit card info on the next page, and submit.

That’s it, your done.

Hey Rick, in Mac OS X, How do I take a screen grab of only the window I’m on?

You should know by now that Command+Shift+3 takes a screen grab of the entire display.
Command+Shift+4 lets you select a portion of the screen to grab. You just draw a rectangle with the selector.
If you do a Command+Shift+4, but hit the spacebar before you make a selection, the mouse pointer will turn into a camera icon that you can select a window and take a screen grab of just that window. It’s really useful since the resulting picture is only of the window you select, even if there are other windows covering portions of the window you want.

Here are some samples.
Command+Shift+3
Command+Shift+4 (a selection)
Command+Shift+4 (a window)