When I bought the external battery slab people laughed at me, wondering why the hell did I buy such a monsterous piece of equipment. Well.. the battery more than proved it's worth yesterday when I was on the field doing some remote deployment testing, without having to use any power plugs or wireless hotspots. My notebook just kept on ticking for 4 hours and the slab was only down to 50% of battery capacity, for internet access I relied on the Dopod C730 to provide data connection through HSDPA... luckily Maxis did NOT let me down this time! :P

Ok.. here we go.. we're upgraded and ready for full Live Writer support.

Oh joy!!!!

I don't care how much time you save with the code, I don't care that you're not familiar with the way I want you to do things, but bloody hell why did you go and write a data layer WITHOUT USING PARAMETERIZED QUERIES?

I told you that it wasn't safe, why did you still do it??? Why??!?!??! WHY?!?!?! WWWHHYYYY??????

Now I have to rewrite the whole bloody data layer!

Forgot to mention one thing about the C730, the other party comes over loud and clear and the phone transmits your voice VERY loud and clearly, my friends have already complained that it's deafening.. or maybe it's just the way I talk. :P

Cool, they've released a official stable version of DasBlog (Yes I know I could have just downloaded the incremental ones but I procrastinated so..) So I guess it's time for an upgrade!!!!

Better backup my contents first I guess.

So.. it's been a week since I gotten my new Dopod C730, time for a round up of how well the phone is doing for me.

The Good
The phone is slim and light, but it's wider than normal phones thanks to the errr.. I think people call it the BlackBerry design style. The 320x240 screen is bright and sharp, no worries of not being able to see stuff properly under the sun. The keyboard works well once you're use to pecking away at the small keys. HSDPA support is extremely welcomed when needed.

The Bad
In order to keep with the slim form factor the battery holds relatively little charge compared to what it needs to work well in a stressful enviroment. ie. Whenever the phone is fighting over wheter to use GSM or 3G. If I let the phone decide which network to use, the battery doesn't last half a day! (due primarily to the fact that in my office it keeps cycling between 3G and GSM, CONSTANTLY!) Switching the phone to be using ONLY GSM gives me about a day of battery life. I also hate the fact that the primary LED on the phone doesn't indicate missed calls, received SMSs, etc etc. by blinking a different color.

The 'I Still Don't Know If I Hate It'
The Joggr strip... at times it's good to know that when I use the Joggr strip to scroll through webpages and such it means that I am not putting too much stress on the DPad of the phone, since I pretty much worn out every dpad on all my previous phones. But I hate the fact that I accidentally scroll through something, or call up the Inbox, etc. etc. whenever I hold the phone.

The Damn! That's Ironic Bits!
The size and shape of the phone makes it a bit hard to hold when you're not used to it. Therefore I applied the anti slip eGrips in strategic places so that I can have a better hold on it. Even more ironic is that while I was applying the grips I dropped the phone! The screen is BLINDINGLY bright!!! And while you are not used to the thumbboard the most common mistake is to accidentally hit multiple keys at a time. :P

overall I'm still pleased with the phone, more on WM6 in a future post.

Cold chinese tea is a VERY potent laxative.

Look at this.. you let them sleep with you in your bed, and they forget who's the boss.

There's a new type of rechargable batteries available around town.. Ok.. they've been around for a few months but I haven't gotten around to talking about them since well I only recently gotten a pair myself and they needed some time to prove their worth to me. I guess the best way to call them are.. 2nd generation Ni-Mh rechargable batteries?

You must have seen these on the shelf before, marketed as the Uniross Hybrio, or the Sanyo Enerloop. The easiest way to identify these new generation rechargable batteries is that they always market themselves as ready to use after purchase and there's no need to perform an initial charge.

The main appeal about these batteries is that, they are able to hold their charge for a long time. And thus make them very good candidates for digital cameras since you don't use them all the time, but you wouldn't want to be in a situation where it's time to take a picture but your batteries had already discharged themselves.

One disadvantage is that the capacity of the battery is lower than current, seems to be 2000mAh compared to the 2800mAh that you get with normal batteries.

Definetly recommended if your camera uses AA batteries and you don't use it that often.

 So you're walking towards your office, and then you see a box near the entrance to you office, filled with a gazzilion glass fragments, like some unlucky schmuck must have smashed through a glass door nearby.

You give the box a feel kicks, and you like hearing the sound of tiny glass fragments jiggly around and ringing like a chorus of bells. Cool! you think as you turn to enter your office building...

Not so cool anymore...

The first digital camera I ever gotten had this nifty trick which aided in to taking multiple images to form a wide panoramic image, though after taking said images I'd had to use another program to stitch it together since technology then didn't allow the camera to have enough memory to perform the stitching onboard.

It was a neat trick which I liked having around... and lo and behold... the new HTC camera program in my Dopod C730 also has such panoramic functionality!

 

Yes.. my place is a dump.. and, note the ghost images near the connection parts. To take good panoromic images it is essential that when you pivot to take the next picture, you pivot using the camera lens's center and not on your feet.

Why the fark am I interested in such old tech? Probably because I haven't seen it in use for a while and I'm getting nostalgic over what I used before and what is possible now.

That's how you feel like when a cop pulls you over in the middle of the road and tells you that you've been driving the wrong way for 12 years!

Other than catching the PLAY! symphony my other objective while I was in Singapore was to get a new phone. The Dopod C730. And after hunting around a few clueless shops in Funan IT mall for a while where the best response I got from a shop was.. C730? Oh we don't have no C730? Then I pointed at the dummy unit in their display case then the guy goes.. OOOOOhhh.. THAT C730... Then he starts asking everyone in the shop about it and no one seemed to know the answer, while they were still questioning among themselves about the mythcial Dopod C730 I thanked them for their help and walked away to a shop IN FRONT of theirs.. and what do you know? They DO HAVE A C730!!!

OK, let me post the XML that was given to me so people have a better idea of the problem with the XML file which I was talking about in the previous post and why it is wrong. I posted the original post 5 mins after getting the file from them so I was in the middle of work and couldn't post the chunk.. so.. here is what he sent me.

XML can be used to represent a structured, hierarchical, relational data. Please do NOT use it as if it's something like a CSV file. If you're using XML to represent a product availability for the various branches your shopping chain has I should be able to discern which branch has what products based on the position of the item nodes.

But instead what did I get from you? A file where all the XML nodes are pretty much on the SAME DAMN LEVEL! And you're expecting me to parse it like some flat file to get the information I need?

If you wanted me to parse it in the first place why the heck did you bother generating an XML compliant structure? You like angle brackets is it?

As mentioned I watched at the PLAY! symphony on the weekend in Singapore. It was held at the Esplanade Concert Hall.. or what most Singaporeans refer to as... the Durian due the it's exterior shape design.

I really enjoyed the experience of listening to some of my favorite tunes being played by a live orchestra, but.. since I regularly seek out game music, most of the themes were very familiar to me already but still it was fun to hear a live orchestra play it.

Some notable highlights during the show

It was very exciting that while I was using Pictochat on my DS in the event hall... SOMEONE JOINED THE CHAT ROOM!!! And then another... then another.. it was just like how the bloggers would use the DS's bulilt in Pictochat to communicate with each other during a news conference. And it was also the first time I actually got some use out of the Pictochat app! of course.. once more people starting joining in the chats started drifting to DS r0x and all those PSP users behind me suck territory!

When you have a performance of music that's not dedicated to one particular game, the audience might not be able to relate to it. So while I was blown away by the Super Mario Bros suite, the music from Chrono Trigger while familiar to me just didn't invoke any particular feelings for me.

When they played the music from Lost Odyssey it felt that most of the audience was a bit errr.. unresponsive since.. the game hasn't come out yet at all. And the most funny thing about the performance was, they choose to play clips from the M rated trailer during the performance, I could see the 8 year old in front of me tense up and his guardian adopting an Oh my god, why they heck are they showing this? look. Somehow I think the symphony directed should make the video clips as PG as possible since people of all ages would come to their performances.

The most interesting performance of the night came when they introduced Takenobu Mitsuyoshi to the stage, I wasn't familiar with the name but I was very familiar with his works which included Shenmue and Daytona. And he was there to play on the piano the theme to Daytona. I was wondering if he was going to SING the theme as well but the MOMMENT he opened his mouth and english words came out from him I knew it.. HE SANG ALL THE SONGS IN DAYTONA!! And the momment he started off with Du Du Du Du Du Duuuuuu... DAYTONAAAAAAA!!!!! It's Gonna Be.. DAYTONAAAAAAAAA!!! Oh.. all the memories of power sliding with my friends started rushing back to me!

Ahh.. it was an very enjoyable night indeed.

 So I'm holding down to Singapore for the Play Symphony tomorrow. According to the venue's webpage there doesn't seem to be any strict dress codes that I need to follow ie. jackets, tie, etc. etc. So that's good.. since less clothing restrictions means more people can be exposed to such cultural performances. It also means I get to wear whatever I want.

Yup.. this looks good.. makes a nice statement too. :P

An interesting item on the venue's webpage states that.

Due to artists' sensitivity and copyright issues, cameras, image capturing and recording devices are prohibited within the venues. Patrons approaching the venue with any such recording devices are required to deposit them at the Deposit Facility at the entrance of the venues or at the Mezzanine level Cloakroom.

Err.. there's a seating capacity for 1,811 people in the venue, do they have sufficient logistics to store and retrieve 1,811 mobile phones?

When the system you're responsible for is just one of the many gears in the system, the first thing that you must do when the system fails is ask.. Is it our fault? Never think of blaming the other bits of the system first before confirming that your role in the system is performing as expected. Because somewhere out there people responsible for the other parts of the system will be saying it's YOUR FAULT the system failed and you want to be ready to answer them back with why it ISN'T the case.

I've pretty much set my sights on a new phone already. And it's going to be a Dopod C730, which is already available widely in Singapore already. It's release sibling the C500 is already available here but the C730 is still no where to be seen.

Calls to the local distributor SiS were answered with a simple "We are not bringing the Dopod C730 in due to poor demand of the previous model." to which I wanted to ask.. you bring in the largest, most expensive pocket pc in the world, the U1000 and you decided not to bring in something that more people would actually buy?

Feeling bummed about the whole thing I made up my mind to get the C730 in Singapore while I'm down there this weekend for the Play Symphony concert. But first I needed to get my equipment ready, I had to go to a Maxis centre and upgrade my SIM card to a 3G compatible one.

Then.. cause I am using a 3G card I needed to use a different set of GPRS settings when connecting to the traditional GPRS/EDGE data networks, so I went to the Maxis site to look for them and I stumbled into their phone configuration SMS sender. Then I saw this in their supported phones...

The Dopod Cavalier... now where have I heard that before? Oh yeah... the original HTC code name for the Dopod C730 is... the CAVALIER that would mean that Maxis knows something about the C730 and isn't telling.

Hmmm.. considering the fact that SiS is outright denying that they're carrying the phone other than the usual product coming soon excuse which they give on unarrived products I'd have to think that Maxis might have some sort of exclusivity deal on the phone and thus everyone else is just denying it's existence here.

So if you're looking for the Dopod C730... you *could* wait a while and see what Maxis does.

Me? I'm still buying it this Saturday... god I hope it's not sold out yet....

That's what WZ has been doing recently, constantly sucking on his thumb. He seems to be drooling due to his teething again. And the amount of drool he leaks is...

Let me put it this way.. he's a very bad sleeper and he moves all over the bed he sleeps in. And we can see exactly where he has been thanks to the trail of drool!

See... I play with WZ too! And I get hurt carrying the big lug around..

Just realized that I need to talk about something important after an incident with a client recently, so.. you decide that you want to have your own web address and URL, so you engage one of the various webhost providers out there, they tell you for the low low price of.... oh.... chicken feed? You can have your own personal URL up and running in no time at all. So you pay them the money, tell them the domain name you want and within a matter of minutes you get an email with all the login information for your website to upload files, manage permissions, etc. etc.

So.. that's it right? You can now happily run your website right? WRONG!! If you got the webhost to register your domain name for you, they are holding one more VERY IMPORTANT piece of information, your domain name registrant login! What is this? The name registrant is basically a database that converts www.yourock.com to the ipaddress 10.23.23.59 so that people can connect to it, if you DON'T get the login from your webhost provider it's going to get very complicated should you decide to change hosts cause if you don't get that login you can't point the domain name to the new server.

So do remember to get that piece of information from your webhost if you have your own domains.

Hmm. if I keep posting one video per post I think it's gonna get very crowded on the page so.. here's 2 videos in one post!

My mother takes care of WZ during the day, and everytime she feeds him she always makes sure that he puts his hands on the bottle and thus.. WZ pretty much will put his hands on the bottle when feeding.. he doesn't know why he's doing it though and thus he doesn't know he has to tilt the bottle to get more milk when it's empty.

This is how WZ moves FORWARDS right now, he doesn't do it very often.. and I don't think he understands the notion of movement yet though cause you can be in front of him calling and he just stares at you blindly.. But it's a start!

There I was trying to record how strong WZ that he keeps trying to pull himself up when he's in the bouncing net.. imagine my surprise when as I hit the record button WZ nearly climbed OUT of the net... HEADFIRST!

MSN Soapbox (soapbox.msn.com) is reopened to public again after being closed for a while, now the UI is faster and slicker (thanks to the fact that they don't use Flash for the whole UI anymore) The main reason I prefer to use MSN Soapbox than YouTube is because I can set it so that my videos are hidden from public search results and yet are still accessible by anyone who knows the link to the video, therefore my friends and family don't need to login.. or be in my friends list or what not to see the video BUT.. the video doesn't show up when someone is just searching for videos of babies. :P

Some of you might have already spotted it in the previous picture, but this colorful little cloth ball that makes crinkly noises (me thinks there's a plastic bag inside) is WZ's first real toy, I wanted to buy something else but mommy said the other louder toys seemed like a waste of money since WZ might only play with them for a month or so. And my mother tells me that even though I had a few toys when I was a baby I found an empty milk can much more attractive than any toy! :P

Posting from Live Writer V2.. hmmm... I should probably upgrade my DasBlog to support the new features...