AlanLok dot Com

Came across TekSavvy during my search for high speed internet, and ended up with getting their home phone service. I am a cheapskate, so I had to calculate the costs of switching from Bell to TekSavvy.

Cost of a basic Bell phone line: $29.32
$22.95, plus $2.80 for touchtone, $0.19 for 911, and $3.38 in taxes

Cost of a TekSavvy phone line: $25.18 (plus one-time $25 transfer charge)
$22.28, plus $2.90 in taxes

If Bell didn’t raise their prices next month, it would take me 7 months to break even. With their ever-greedy attitude on land line services, a basic line will cost $31.57 starting next month. The only difference with TekSavvy – no Bell!

Alan has no affiliation with TekSavvy or make any money on referral. Though he wish such scheme exists. The service practically sells itself!

I thought I share with the world my adventures in mobile broadband.

Ingredients:

• Linksys WRT54G3G router – you won’t find one in Canada, so start your search on eBay. Don’t worry about the which network it belongs to…
• 3G PC Card datacard – I decided to pick up an Option Wireless GT Ultra (GX0302) branded AT&T, but unlocked
• 3 months of useless investigation

Let me explain the 3 months of useless investigation and searching on Google, Yahoo and Bing. I originally have a Sierra Wireless AC860 card, which I thought would work with the WRT54G3G router (idiot me – I assume the AC875/AC881 should have the same interface as the AC860). It didn’t work, so I flashed the router with OpenWRT, a firmware that is more advanced than DD-WRT, but offers PC Card support. There are also various tutorials (see Simon Josefsson’s Summer House Wireless+3G Network, which was the most clear of them all) that made me waste my time trying to get my PC Cards to work, but to no avail. Here are some of the things ran into:

• How the heck do I flash my WRT54G3G-ST (Sprint EVDO version) to OpenWRT. Try http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/openwrt-3g
• Upgrade that version of OpenWRT to the ones found on downloads.openwrt.org? Remember these important hints:
  1. WRT54G3G is NOT compatible with the 2.6 kernel, so download the brcm-2.4 version of the image
  2. Once you have OpenWRT installed, you can flash between versions by downloading the TRX files to your router’s /tmp directory, then run mtd -e linux -r write linux
  3. To revert your firmware to the Linksys version, wipe the image to force the recovery mode. Run this:mtd -e linux -r (this will delete the partition and reboot), config your computer to an address in the 192.168.1.x range, and TFTP reflash the image you want. Read more here (DD-WRT site on recovering from a bad flash)
• The Sierra Wireless AC860 and Option Wireless GX0302 (in fact, most Option Wireless PC Cards) won’t work with OpenWRT, X-WRT or FreeWRT due to: 1. AC860 isn’t well supported in Linux at all; 2. Option requires the HSO kernel driver from Pharscape, which only compiles in the 2.6 kernel; 3. the latest versions of OpenWRT, X-WRT or FreeWRT with the 2.6 kernel has broken PC Card support
• Don’t bother with the Nozomi driver on OpenWRT – it only works with the old (ie. HSDPA) Option Wireless cards.

After spending 6 hours re-compiling a special version of FreeWRT on my Ubuntu machine, and many botched attempts to install OpenWRT on this router only to hit a brick wall. I decided to try the stock firmware just for kicks. Who knows if Linksys has built the HSO driver in their build? This is where I am going to tell you a secret… the different versions of WRT54G3G (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone) are all the same, except with different flash headers. What you need to know is that each firmware supports different modem cards, so the secret is to flash your router with the firmware that supports your data card. Most sites tell you to modify the header, but what header?

In my case, I have an Option Wireless card, which is supported with the WRT54G3G-AT V1 firmware. I have a WRT54G3G-ST V1 router. So follow these steps (everyone’s case is different, make your own decisions):

1. Download the WRT54G3G-ST HW v1’s 2.01.13 firmware
2. Download the WRT54G3G-AT HW v1’s 2.02.03 US firmware
3. Look at the ST firmware – the first 4 bytes read W3GS
4. Look at the AT firmware – the first 4 bytes read W3GA
5. Modify the AT firmware with a hex file editor, change the 4th byte from S to A
6. Flash your router with the newly modified firmware

Ok, if you are in my scenario, you can just follow step 2, 5 and 6 – but I wanted to illustrate the discovery for the public. Linksys reads the first 4 bytes as the firmware identifier. 10 minutes later I have a working mobile broadband router for Rogers or Fido.

Final note – you are better off buying a router with a USB port that is supported by OpenWRT. The USB port is typically for printer connections, but with OpenWRT you can turn the USB port to do anything – from sharing files from a portable USB drive to connecting to your 3G broadband with a 3G turbo/rocket/whatever stick.

Disclaimer: follow these instructions at your own risk

As a mobile gadget guy, I was interested in the iPhone alternative and trying to find a phone that defines me as “me”. It was cool when I was carrying the iPhone 2G in Toronto since no one had one, but now it’s just so common to see someone pull out an iPhone 3G or 3Gs from their pockets and haplessly try to tame the touchscreen beast.

So why did I decide to run out on day one to the Palm Pre rush? One, we were doing development with the Pre; and two it was cool that I was a part of the Pre rush! With all the signage saying “Pre-order your Pre”, I thought it will be another phenomenon like the Android and iPhone. It turned out to be a bit of a bust. I walked into my local Best Buy desperately trying to get someone’s attention to sell me a phone, there was only 1 salesperson at that point and she was helping this lady who was trying to buy something like the Pre, but not willing to pay full price for the phone (can you say cheap?). A second sales guy arrived and tried to sell me the phone but didn’t know how to go through the order system (ummm.. is this a PDA phone or 1X? What plan can you attach on a phone with no contract?), but 20 minutes later I got out with the Pre.

BTW: whatever Pre-sales training they had, they didn’t know how to activate the phone or even turn it on. It was frustrating to see the sales guy brutally destroying this beautiful package.

First impression:

• Packaging: small and sleek. I am not an environmental freak but this is what all phones should be shipped in! Not this cardboard crap and oversize packaging. Palm did a great job making a great first impression. I am sure Bell had nothing to do with this.
• Phone: smaller than I anticipated. It may be a bit thick (same as my N97) but definitely smaller. As many have already noticed, when you slide out the keyboard, the bottom of the keyboard has quite a sharp edge – enough to be a paint scraper (and create skinning accidents – perhaps they need to bundle band-aids). The build quality is good – no loose parts, and the slider is very firm.
• First power-on: can I say slow. My god, I thought the Nokia N97 boot-up was terrible, this is going down in the books as the slowest booting phone. It has an ARM Cortex A8 dual-core processor just like the iPhone 3GS, and it boots up like Windows Vista (yes, terrible jab at Microsoft, but at least Windows Mobile 6 boots up marginally faster).
• User interface: 10 for the font choice, 9.5 for the colour, 9.5 for the icon, and 0 for the rounded corner around the screen. It’s a rectangular screen, give us all the pixels we paid for, not this Mac-esque rounded corner of System 6/7/8. Rounded corners around the screen is so passe.
• Applications: there just isn’t a lot of applications on the phone or in their beta store, but at least it’s functional and easy to use. Though if you are listening music while doing other work, you will see the phone stuttering just a little bit.
• iTunes support: what can I say… it’s a good feature! I wish other manufacturers would challenge Apple in their own game
• Synchronization: I give this a 11 out of 10 for Palm. They really got this right, and glad they are not letting the mobile providers screw around with this important feature! The ability to do server sync right from the activation, download contacts from Facebook, IM with AIM and GTalk, and Exchange ActiveSync support, this is a true messaging phone.

Overall – it’s a cool phone, but it’s a bit PREmature and rough around the edges (no pun intended for both). It’s really the only real alternative to the BlackBerry for Bell users. It won’t save Bell (or Telus when the exclusivity is over) from losing customers to Rogers or Fido. CDMA/EVDO is dead.

Just came across from a post on N97Fanatics.com

I want one of these… well, maybe not.

I have been told that I have failed to post pictures in a timely manner… so in my sleep-deprived state, I deliver you two sets of wedding pictures.

Kim and Scott’s wedding
Rebecca and Richard’s wedding

I was just looking through a security audit of some sites, and half of the complaints include “the ability for people to know your underlying technology”. For those who are using Apache 1.3 or above (and using a distro that has configuration files in /etc/httpd/conf.d), you will find this solution helpful. Simply create a file called /etc/httpd/conf.d/0-security.conf with the below content:

ServerSignature Off

ServerTokens Prod

TraceEnable Off

<Directory />

 <LimitExcept POST GET HEAD>

  Order deny,allow

  Deny from all

 </LimitExcept>

</Directory>

Save it, restart httpd and you are “more” protected… a few notes:

1. This assumes that your application will only use GET, POST or HEAD. If your application is fancy (or you don’t know your app, then you might want to get rid of the LimitExcept directive)
2. If your application (or application container such as PHP, Python or Java) generates additional HTTP headers that identify their technology, then you might want to use mod_headers to them.
3. Anyone with an ounce of network knowledge would know that you can figure out the underlying technology by probing at the TCP layers (nmap with the OS fingerprinting option is very handy). So don’t let auditors fool you – you can’t hide unless you have a security device in front of your servers that remove traces of OS “uniqueness” in layer 3.

One of the great joys of being a gadget guy is to shamelessly spend money on shinny new gadgets… so out of a whim (and impulse), I search high and low to find my beloved Nokia N97 and sourced it from a store in Mississauga. Here are my first impressions:

• The box: simple, elegant, relatively compact, and “mostly” environmentally friendly (bonus points here – the box is black and without the plastic shine, and still looks sleek… remember, the person just paid over $700 for an expensive electronic toy)
• Phone: surprisingly light and solid. The keyboard slide movement is smooth and without any creaking noise – it feels like closing the car door of an expensive luxery automobile rather than a Chrysler K-Car! However, the battery door is purely plastic and prying it open to put in the battery is not a fun experience. If you use too much force, you’ll break every plastic tab from the cover, rendering your phone backless.
• The power-on: it’s Series60 – what more can I say. You have to embrace the fact that you are booting up a computer rather than a phone. If you expect the phone to power up and be able to dial a number in 10 seconds – give up on owning a smartphone right now! (On a side note: if you think you have power off your BlackBerry by clicking on the icon on your home screen – you are sorridly mistaken. That power off is merely a suspend to save power – it doesn’t shut down the phone. You are better off pulling the battery out)
• Guided setup and first impressions: Finally Nokia paid attention to the finer details of the whole-phone experience. I must say it rivals the G1 in terms of ease-of-use. I plugged in my SIM card into the phone, powered on, and within a minute I have a working phone. They even loaded all the useful software (such as Nokia Maps with all the maps, Facebook, Reuters, and a Guitar Hero imitation) into it so I don’t have to hunt it down on the Ovi Store – which I’ll get to my gripe in a second.
• Overall: if you are a Nokia fanboy like myself, then this is the ultimate phone! It’s the most speedy Nokia phone yet, and it does everything an iPhone, Palm Pre, and G1 will do – and then some.

My gripes about the N97

• Ovi – Who is running the Nokia marketing department? Good concept, terrible name, and badly executed. The Ovi Store is often down (or not accessible if you are not using your 3G connectivity), the prices are in Euro (I know, this is a European company with their user base in Europe), and the browsing app is not snappy at all. They should take a page from Apple iTunes App Store or BlackBerry App World and build a usable app. What got me more upset is that I have to download and install Ovi Store app initially – another 500KB of over the air download.
• Web browser – great, you now show me a full-screen experience, but some very important features take too many screen tapping to access. For example – to go to the previous web page, you have to click on the “show menu” icon at the bottom right, click the “back” button, and then click on “select” button. I just want to go back to the last page – is it so difficult to ask for? Also, you’ll notice that your browser will mysteriously quit (probably due to out of memory or browser crash) – it happens to the iPhone Safari browser too, but the frequency is a bit too high (about once every 40 pages or about 10-15 minutes of web browsing)
• E-mail – when will Nokia give a native HTML viewer for e-mails (it’s nice that you can click on the HTML attachment to see the message, but it’s not right)

I still love this phone – and it will take a lot for me to switch to the next good phone.  Though my HTC Dream is being shipped this week, as part of my renegotiation efforts with Rogers (and lowering my bill by $50/month). Anyone want a brand new HTC Dream?

If you don’t know me, I love my smart phones.  My first smart phone was the Nokia 3650, a Symbian-based smart phone in 2003.  When TV shows and magazine articles started to talk about taking pictures and videos, listening the MP3s on the phone in 2006 (and made it sound like magic), I often question them by saying – what is the big deal, I have been doing it since 2003.

In 2006, most of Eurasia already had 3G high speed access, video calling, and a lot of other cool ideas.  North Americans are sadly lagging in this area due to poor understanding of the technology – perhaps due to resistence to change, our obsession for free handsets, and the extreme high cost of paying an average cellular phone bill. I know because my monthly bill between my three cellular phone lines cost $400.

I think 2009 marks the year of smart phones – we have Apple and RIM to thank for the popularization of these devices (and the push of much needed cheap data plans).  Alan of course have been using smart phones for the past 5 year to see a progression of faster (processor speed/video) and smaller phones, with better cameras.

• 2003 – Nokia 3650
• 2005 – Nokia 6680, 7710 (Yes, I had a touch-screen smart phone in the day)
• 2006 – Nokia N80, E61
• 2007 – Nokia E61i, Blackberry 8830, iPhone 2G, HTC S720
• 2008 – Nokia N81, iPhone 3G, Android G1, Blackberry Storm

A few notable features of the new phones are:

• Applications: most applications in before 2007 were focused on productivity, and almost all of them are not tied to a function of any particular web sites.  Facebook and Google created the demand for applications that serve the purpose of a particular website, which also drived the need for Smart Phone platform standardization and a central application store.
• GPS: I was really hoping for the Assisted GPS (AGPS)/Advanced Forward Link Trilateration (AFLT) to take off on the CDMA networks. Unfortunately with the high cost of deployment and the mobile network’s need to realize profits for their AGPS deployment ultimately caused the mobile location space to muture two years late.  AGPS/AFLT have been deployed in North America since 2005 for the purpose of E911, but the providers felt that they need to protect this information for revenues rather than innovation.  I am so glad Nokia, BlackBerry and iPhones have GPS chips built-in so that we can use location-aware applications such as search and navigation
  • Side note: iDEN phones by Motorola were the first phones that incorporated the GPS chip long before AGPS/AFLT, but the network/phones were industry-specific
• Music capability: farewell MP3 players, hello all-in-one phone/MP3 players. I have been enjoying this integration much longer than most typical Canadian/American just because I have been using phones from Eurasia.  I am glad they have merged the two together – now I can identify songs from the radio using Shazam, stream audio from last.fm, listen to MP3 from my 8GB microSDHC card, and take a phone call all without taking out my headset during a bike ride.
• Camera: we still don’t have the crazy 7MP+ cameras with Xenon-flash on our phones like the ones found in Japan or Korea, but with 3MP you can finally do something useful like book cover/barcode recognition. QR codes are finally are reality in North America if the application is pre-installed on the phones.

My take on my latest smart phones?

• Android G1: by far the most pleasant experience that a smartphone can get for configuration/set-up.  Gone are those complex “please insert CD to computer and load a million software” steps. It has been replaced with a simple “please enter your G-mail account info to continue”.  Within 2 minutes of me entering the info, my phone was usable, with my calendar, mail, and contacts all synchronized to my Gmail.  You have to hand it to Google for owning the search, e-mail, profile, and now the phone – it may not be the prettiest, but it is smooth.
• Blackberry Storm: I was surprised at the crisp display and easy to use touch screen.  I love the fact that the screen is a giant button, and to that there is a difference between hovering / pressing on the touchscreen.  The application library is somewhat lacking, and the keyboard is as annoying as the iPhone one, but at least it works.  The rotate function is cute for the first 5 minutes, but it is no longer cute when a small bump can flip you between orientation.
• iPhone 2G/3G: no comment.  It has the coolest application store, and the iPod integration is by far the best media player from any phone platform.
• Nokia: still keeping my options open on the E71, but my E61i has been a reliable workhorse. The os is slow, but it is much more reliable than the rest of the phones out there.

This may sound like a rant, but there’s a silver lining to my tale:

A year ago I experienced a persistent cylinder misfire on my poor 1998 A6 2.8, and so I go to my trusted mechanic friend at a VW dealership and got the advice to buy new spark wires and ignition coils.  In I went, and all the stuff were putted in, the car ran just fine for 8 months.

October came, and car decided to misfire again (the dreaded P300-series error code from the OBD2 readout), but my mechanic friend is no were to be found.  As my luck ran out (ie. the dealership closed down), I resorted to the evil act of bringing my beast to the Audi dealership for an official diagnostic.  November came, and I dropped my car off at the Agincourt Autohaus dealership – the reset the error codes from the computer and declared the car worthy of driving.  This was in fact the biggest mistake I have ever made!

December came, and as I return from the company Christmas party, the car finally smoked and gave out at the intersection of 16th Avenue and Woodbine Avenue on a cold Friday evening, I desperately called everyone from my family to the Audi dealership to figure out what I needed to do.  First thing in my to-do list is to call a towing company to get this car OFF the busy intersection.  Audi is nice to include a hazard sign in the trunk so that the oncoming traffic can safely ignore the sign and honk at a car that is smoking…  6 towing companies later, and Cardinal Towing came to my rescue promptly and professionally.  At least my towing experience has been extremely pleasant.

Now, you must think by towing your car to an Audi dealership (this time, Uptown Audi) with a real problem, they would know what to do right?  Wrong!  Once again, they misdiagnose the car and said I had burnt spark plug wire, and that my problem with the misfiring cylinders were to replace the spark plug wires, plugs, and clean the injectors and throttle body.  $1300 later, I said to myself, they know what they are doing – I dropped the car when it was completely dead so they MUST be able to find the problem.  Sadly, within 12 hours of getting the car back (and with only 15 km added to the odometer), the misfire returned.  Brought the car back, and this time I got a quote for $4800 to replace two catalytic convertors, 4 oxygen sensors and 6 exhaust nuts.

Any reasonable person would rationalize – why would you want to throw in so much money to a used and old car?  On the other hand, if I don’t repair the car, I can’t extract the other 50% of the value of the car (no one would buy the car in the current condition).  Out of desperation, we found our old mechanic friend who suggested another person who may be able to save us – but only in January , which brings us to our interesting conclusion to this post.

January 3rd came, and car went into the shop for the catalytic converter replacement – we were told (and have seen) the old part would have burnt up the car if we didn’t repair it.  What we didn’t do was to tell the mechanic about the history of the car and why we are doing these repairs, and so another 200km later, the symtons returned.  I call the mechanic to ask him to conduct a thorough diagnostic on the car, and turns out the ignition coils were defective again.  What made me more mad was that if Agincourt Autohaus properly diagnosed the car intially, we would spend $550 on the repair ($327.30 for the ignition coils at VW/Audi dealer, 1 hour install and standard $95 diagnostic fee) rather than the $2800 catalytic convertor replacement.

The moral of the story:

1. Don’t trust Audi dealers, they are crooks.  In general, don’t trust the dealers unless you know the mechanic personally.
2. Don’t allow dealers to tell you want you need to repair until you see the damage.  Our desperation in getting a working car caused us a lot of money.  Dealers are evil.  (Unfortunately, most repair shops are evil too, so I you just better do a lot of research on the net)
3. Trust your instinct – if the car reports a cylinder misfire – triple-check all of the ignition electronics (ignition coils, spark plug and wires) and replace the part if suspect.  Our lack of trust (and assumption that 1-year old part cannot be defective) caused a much bigger repair bill than needed. Audi A6 2.8 / VW Passat 2.8 ignition coils tend to get destroyed quickly for some reason.
4. Genuine VW/Audi parts are actually better and more reliable.
5. Lastly, don’t trust the dealers.  They are evil, very evil.  I know, I said it before.

If you are a Rogers customer, you might have noticed in the past day that when you typed in a wrong website URL (or any domain name), it claims the site exists and gives you Rogers-Yahoo sponsored advertising.  See an example here:

http://this-domain-does-not-exist.ever

Brings you to:

http://www20.search.rogers.com/search?qo=this-domain-does-not-exist.ever&rn=X-AtJja2sy6ndMo

Shame on you Rogers! Breaking RFC and annoy your customers all at the same time.