Month: August 2008

Huawei E220 3G and Acer One

[UPDATE] VERY IMPORTANT: The solution I posted below is a bit hackerish and has been refuted by Rui Carmo who makes available a great resource for Acer One owners that want to hack their system a bit without breaking down functionality. For your own sanity, please take a look at his notes.

Today someone asked me if I could try to get the Huawei E220 to run over an Acer One. I agreed. Boy was it hard..

First of all, some background info. Do not skip it 🙂

  1. Acer One brings its own Linux flavor, some distro based on Fedora 8 (Werewolf);
  2. This distro bundles XFCE window manager;
  3. There’s one OSS tool from Vodafone R&D Labs available here (actually this is the tool I use for my connection, even that I’ve a contract with other operator, Kanguru);
  4. Download vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta2-fedora-installer.run as that was the one I tried successfully;
  5. Be sure to be running the latest version of software on your install;

Got it? OK, let’s go to the terminal. If you don’t know where you can find it, you should quit reading this post. Now:

  1. sudo -s
  2. yum remove linpus-lsb
  3. yum install redhat-lsb python-twisted pyserial pytz gnome-python2-libegg
  4. ./vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta2-fedora-installer.run
  5. If everything goes right, a dialog will appear asking for you to insert a space-separated list of users who will be able to use this software. Simply put user

This should do the trick. Now just run sudo vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux and it should ask you to edit info regarding your connection. To the Vodafone Portugal clients it should appear a dialog which asks you if you want to load Vodafone Portugal configuration.

Neat!

Any doubts, just comment!

The unwritten rule

While on my quest for more information on .NET oriented ORM solutions, I asked a friend with some years of .NET experience which ORM he uses and if he could provide me some code I could look at. He pointed me to one OSS project he’s involved with, Midgard.

Midgard’s main goal is to become a solid RAD framework for .NET developers. Yet, as you’ve probably noticed, it’s dead since the end of 2006. Why?! – I asked Pedro. He told me that the project failed because there were no contributors. I immediately refuted this fact as being strong enough to stop the development of such project, or even to give up to “open source” it.

Anyway, he’s right! At least from my perspective, .NET developers are generally unaware of the benefits of OSS. I know it’s somewhat dangerous to generalize this kind of behavior, but as a Java developer for some years now, and having knowledge on the .NET area too this is a conclusion I come to. Curiously, I was reading an article about NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET where the author, clearly an advanced .NET developer, states the following:

The most common dissenters of ORM technologies, in general, are developers using Microsoft technologies. (As I’ve placed myself squarely into this realm for the past decade or so, I feel quite comfortable bringing us up first!) There seems to be an unwritten rule that “if it wasn’t invented by Microsoft, then wait until Microsoft puts out the right way to do it”.

Well, simply substitute ORM for the technology you see fit and you’ll probably find this to be profoundly true!

Share your experiences, please. Thanks in advance!

Databases and Persistence

One of the things I miss the most is my dear Lazyweb. Even though, I know that many of you, my ocasional or fanatic readers (hi mom!), have more than the necessary skills to help me on my doubts.

So, this time I want to learn from you a couple book titles I should read in order to become a master in what concerns database design. From indexes to partitioning, from transactions to locks and clustering, I’m deeply interested in it all. I have some basic knowledge on some of these issues, but as I said, I want to be a master.

Also, I’d like to know from the .NET developers which persistence mechanism they use and why. I’m looking for something as open and mature as Hibernate for Java! I know there’s NHibernate, still I think it lacks a lot of functionality.. Am I wrong here?!

Cheers and thanks for all the fish!

This is a local shop for local people!

Are you local?

Eheh, jokes aside, I’m getting rid of:

  • Hynix 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Laptop – 2x1GB (2 hours of use on my Macbook)
  • Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Desktop – 2x1GB (half a year of use on my home desktop)
  • Samsung 160Gb SATA 7200RPM 8MB cache 3Gb/s (half a year of use on my home desktop)
  • Samsung 250Gb SATA 7200RPM 8MB cache 3Gb/s (three months of use on my home desktop)
  • [FOR FREE] IBM 300GL Workstation – this has been with me for some years now and was used as home-gateway, running OpenBSD. Has of now it has something like Pentium 166MHz, 64Mb RAM, or so I believe, Seagate 20GB IDE, Samsung CD-RW 48x16x48 and an external NIC, 100Mbit Realtek. It’s silent, slim and sits nicely in any position. I’ve had it once under my couch and it didn’t complain.

So if you, or someone you know is willing to get one of this just comment this post telling your interest. Don’t forget to specify your e-mail in the comment form.

Tuga.. Diz que é uma espécie de treinador de bancada!

Pouco tenho ligado aos Olímpicos, mas não mais consigo ignorar aquilo que pra mim é mais um sinal da estupidez do povo português: a novela sobre os “cromos” nacionais dos Olímpicos!

Treinadores de bancada, sempre fomos! Sempre nos sentimos melhor a criticar do que a fazer, e oh.. como somos exímios na arte de criticar.. e uns mestres no que toca a não fazer nada, digamos que, melhor! Como somos pequeninos e mesquinhos, tentamos sempre pegar em algo que aqueles que se destacam, no desporto ou noutra coisa qualquer, dizem ou fazem. E isto aconteceu com um pobre atleta de 25 anos, um tal de Marco Fortes, lançador do peso pelos vistos.

Bem, não sei quanto a vocês, outros portugueses, mas eu nunca vi este senhor na TV, e muito menos o desporto que ele pratica. Mas ele lá foi aos JO, e pra nossa “desgraça” não conseguiu medalha nenhuma. No entanto passou de “nada” a “super-besta” só porque, para os treinadores de bancada, surgiu a proferir umas tais sábias palavras, que concerteza todos vocês já proferiram num daqueles dias em que o galo vos despertou mais cedo. Ehpah, poupem-me!

Algum de vós consegue manter o mesmo nível de rendimento em qualquer hora do dia, no vosso trabalho? Bom, tirando aqueles que não fazem nada, desafio qualquer um de vós, super-homens e mulheres a argumentar o contrário! Ritmo circadiano – sabem o que é?! Então aprendam, BURROS!

Neste país onde só ha dois desportos, o futebol e o “levantamento do copo”, ainda quero ver um Porto – Benfica, ás 9 da manhã! Já agora, na China se faz favor! Ia ser giro, ai ia ia..

Which access router to buy and what open firmware to run on it?

Hi fellow geeks,

I need your opinion on what is the best wireless access router to buy around here, and which open firmware you can’t live without. Things I do need:

  1. 802.11 n
  2. WPA2
  3. SSH
  4. QoS – Layer7 abilities are a must!
  5. IPv6
  6. Of course all other basic stuff like port-forwarding is included in this list 🙂

I like what I’ve read about DD-WRT, but haven’t found a good compatible device. Help for this important decision is highly appreciated!!

Thanks in advance,

PP

Thoughts on creating a real tech hub – my two cents

cpinto posted a nice blurb about how he’s somewhat disturbed by the lack of infrastructures outside major Portuguese cities, which causes high stress in a variety of ways to companies and mainly, to the people who are eagerly trying to find a suitable way of escaping to the drawbacks of living in dense-populated areas. Obviously, he also gives a hint or two on what could be done to achieve that, specially in what concerns to IT companies.

All in all it’s a good idea, but not a new one, as someone pointed out. I’ll just add my two cents, as a comment to that post was becoming larger and larger and I want to spare cpinto‘s database size, eheh.

IMHO, what we really need is companies and employees able to work online rather than on-site!

I mean, come on, in a Web2.0+ era, why are we still looking for bricks to rely our company on, when its most important organ, communication can be supported in a variety of more agile and cheap ways like the Internet?

Why must we, for instance, developers, live obligated to the 8h/day-5d/week work schedule and all of this in the company’s offices? Sure, being with people is important, yet most of the time it is not needed, given the technology online we have accessible to the average joe nowadays.

From where I stand:

  1. Home is the best place to work. I have all the comfort I need right here (food, ergonomic chair, etc.)
  2. Being at home means almost no extra bills like transportation, parking, lunch, and even better I get more time to me and family..so, more happiness!
  3. Sharing workspace with other people may be rather complicated, specially on big open spaces like the ones you find in big corporates as my freedom ends where others start! And that’s why people just love start-ups.. cause it’s nice dealing with few people. But if things run the way the company wants, and the way you should be working for, soon that feeling will be gone. Been there. Did that. Got the t-shirt! Trust me.

Now, don’t take me wrong, I love to communicate with others. I love to learn from others. Hell yeah, it’s fun to be part of a community, but when you are surrounded by people who you work with, on a regular basis, most probably you will learn to ignore the real value of being with them. This affects your productivity too! Hard! And it will affect your company’s on the long-term. Hard!

Who of you, haven’t nearly fall asleep during some work meetings? I did.. not because it was boring, but sometimes because those weren’t needed. It’s easy to someone to simply point a meeting, sometimes no matter what, just because it’s costless.

Who of you, haven’t ignored most of those meetings content ? I did.. not because it was boring, but because that same content was not directed at me! Why should I be at a one-hour meeting where all I need to know is given to me in 10 minutes?

Who of you, do give true value to that time where you grab a cup of coffee or have lunch with your “inmates“?

So, we’re not facing just structural deficiencies, Celso. Those mean large investment, both money and time. Money and time that most of us don’t have. We’re facing communication issues, the largest problem of all in all companies around the world. So let’s get a hand on it 😉

DISCLAIMER: The author of this post is aware that this solution is specifically targeted at Web-oriented companies, in the truth meaning of Web.