C drive? E drive? or... D drive!

On Nokia Series 60 phones, there are two memory types for user to choose from, namely as "Phone Memory" (C drive) and "Memory Card" (E drive). Mostly, users should install applications and copy data to memory card, so that they can reserve as much phone memory as possible for other purposes, such as receiving messages. On the other hand, developers will install applications on phone memory, due to lack of expensive memory cards in stock. Thus, users might experiencing something very different, which the developers have ever thought of.

I discovered this tonight, when I tried to develop a program with my E50. Being a developer and a user, I knew that installing application on memory card is far more safe than on phone memory. Not to mention that I want to reserve more phone memory too. At least, if anything goes wrong, I can format the memory card easily with a card reader, while phone memory is hard to clean up. Using the card helps me discover a problem of using memory card: it's 20 times slower than the phone memory.

My application will import some data on first start up. The database it generated is only 67KB. It took less than 3 seconds to generate on emulator, around 27 seconds on phone memory, and nearly 8 minutes on memory card! However, it's quite sure that users will install their applications on memory card 90% of time. What to do? I've try to optimize the importing process, which eventually I'd introduced some memory leak within (I knew they are unclosed database view, but haven't locate and fix all). For nearly 5 hours I was struggling with this damn, slow memory card (both Eagle Tech 256MB and SanDisk 64MB are slow). Well, yes, I also struggled with sleepiness. Finally, I've a solution come up in mind, a lightning solution which might do thing in a flash!

1. copy the orginal database to the D drive, the RAM disk on phone (Yeah, S60 phone has a ram disk, can you believe it?)
2. do the importing on the RAM disk.
3. copy the final file back to the place it came from.

But this mean quite a lot of re-do work now. No sleep...

My Mac goes Wireless

I spent two full days to get my iMac online using AirPort but without success. Finally I gave up and use cable. However, ocasionally the Mac will unable to connect to Internet. I will have to unplug and replug the cable several times before it can hookup again.

Tonight, I used miniStat2 widgets to connect via AirPort, accidentally. It is a monitoring program, in Dashboard. Actually, I seldom use them, except when I try to set up an alarm clock at the ProdMe 0.7b. But I ain't sure why it can make connection possible. A mircale, anyway.

While using Mac

I am going to list some problems I'm current facing when using my Mac, as well as great software I found.

Problems:

1. Must install OpenVanilla for my one-and-only-one Chinese input method, Dayi.
2. OpenVanilla's Dayi works in NeoOffice Writer (Word) but not Calc (Excel)
3. home and end keys do not act same as in Windows.
   

Great software:

1. VirtueDesktop
2. You Control: Tunes
3. Adium
4. Microsoft Messenger 6.0.1 for Mac (the latest update is quite okay, at least it can display others' emotion icons)

Hints:

1. To install Open Office 2.0, must install X11 first. To install X11, insert the Installer Disc 1 that come with Mac, select Optional Installs and select customize. (details)
   

List shall go on.

Naming My Devices

In computer world, every device can have a name for identification. Naming them one by one has been a headache to me. Most of the time I just use their model number. Sometime will added my name with it. But sometime I would give them a better name.

falcon - the second desktop built by me. This name was first used in a file server from the first company I worked for. Furthermore, I was using falconer somewhere for something before, which I had now forgot. A funny thing about this computer is that, I picked the slowest P4 CPU available in the market, rather than a fastest one.

dolphin - Buffalo LinkStation is a 250GB LAN disk I bought for backup purpose. I tried to pick names of animal species, to match with falcon. "D" for data and "D" for dolphin.

swallow - I borrowed Sunny's CPU-onboard computer for some time (now returned). This computer won't start up if installed memory is over 64 MB RAM.

Penguin - for my white and black Nokia E50.

Hawk - during reinstalling the Bluetooth software on my second laptop, IBM ThinkPad T42, I gave it a new name. This comes from black hawk (in Chinese) as T42 has black body.


I want to rename my white iMac and black Nokia N70 if possible, but don't have any good names to represent them. iMac is white...... may be... polarbear? And Owl for the black N70?

iBackup for Mac (2)

Pure Mac: Backup - Software for Macintosh is the original website where I found the link to iBackup. You might also find other interesting software for Macintosh there.


I've been using the iBackup for half a month. However, I run the backup a few times only. Sigh, my work is killing me. Anyway.

As someone has reported problem with non-Mac partitions, I tried to run a small set of backup before. It seems that if the backup destination is FAT partition (my Buffalo DiskStation 250 GB USB harddisk come as FAT16 by default), iBackup cannot be smart enough to not overwrite already exist files. Luckily that it shows a complete log on screen and save as log file for users to analysis. Because of this, I've reformatted my DiskStation to Mac OS format (which took me some time to do so).

So far, iBackup works as I expected, although the duration is quite long. Existed and unchanged backup-ed files are no longer being copied. This would save some writing time. However, it takes a long time to do comparison, which unlike Windows which use a flag in file to identify whether the files was backup/updated. Well, may be this is because the backup in Windows is built into the OS, while the one for Mac isn't.

Due to this, the iBackup sometimes appears hang when compare folders with large files (such as the Movies folder). If you have enough trust on the software and if you have over 100GB of data to backup, please run it while you will be away for hours. Last time it took me 3 hours to update my 120GB backup set with less than 2GB of new data.