So I’ve been using HTC phones for several years now and so far I’ve liked every single phone I’ve had. But the Desire was my switch from Windows Mobile to the Android platform, and I was very worried about the switch to say the least.

First impression of the Desire

After switching on the phone for the first time I went through the setup procedure, which is as simple as 1, 2, 3. So thank god for that, it’s a huge step up from Windows Mobile 5.

I have to give HTC one thing, the phone response very well to any time you touch the screen. It’s probably the capacitive screen, but its a whole lot better then what I was used to.  Just after first boot you will probably play around a little with the widgets that are included.

As the Sense interface gives you 7 different tabs that you can put widgets on it will take you some time to configure it to your likings. Which is as much a blessing as a curse, especially in when you are just using the phone for the first time. Luckily the phone comes with several presets for the Sense interface.

My biggest concern was migrating all my data from Windows Mobile to the Android platform. And unfortunately my worries where right. So Google step up to the plate and make migrating from different phone platforms easier. It’s impossible to migrate text messages or call history without doing a lot of manual work.

The good the bad and the ugly

So what’s up with this phone. Is it a good thing to buy or good gift to get . Well it sorta depends on what you are expecting. If you want a phone that gives you a lot of access to your social networks, then yeah it might be something for you. If you want something that just enables you to call and send text message, then please don’t waste your money on the Desire.  It’ll do the job but at a high price.

Having said that here are some of the pro’s and con’s of the phone:

Screenshot of Captcha

Now I know I’m not an expert on the usability side of things, but why do you need to enter a captcha code after correctly entering both your username and the password. This sersiously makes me wonder if it would not be better to erase my LinkedIn account. Unfortunately that would require me to login, now if I were only able to read the damn image.

After downloading and burning the image I got from Microsoft I quickly tried to install it on my HP TouchSmart PC. Why did I choose this computer rather then my laptop or mediacenter. Well I was honestly expecting a lot of trouble and my TouchSmart has a recovery disk to quickly revert to Windows Vista .

First look at the Windows 7

The installation of windows was damn easy, I guess when you compare the installation it is very similar to Windows Vista. A graphical interface is loaded that will help you trough the various steps needed  to install Windows 7. So far so good, though it does take quite long to install. But then again who is expecting anything else from a bloated OS, which I still believe Windows is. After the installation most things on my computer are recognized and work fine. Why I say most things, well unfortunately none of the special buttons of my computer are working. So I can’t control the sound, media or the brightness of the screen. Which sucks, but then again I don’t think I can blame Microsoft for that. As HP does not have any support what so ever for Windows 7.

One cool thing I really liked is that after installing a multi touch driver my HP was able to recognize 2 pressure points on the screen at the same time. Which makes for some cool features that work. I really liked it, but keep in mind it is just some eye candy and won’t help you in the every day things you do on the computer .

Some new neat features

Some might have already heard about some of the new features included in Windows 7. Well I will try and summarize a few that I find useful and some of which I have serious doubts that they are any added value what so ever.

More decent window grouping
Anyone who has used Windows XP or Vista knows about the feature that windows starts grouping similar windows when there are a lot of them open. Well in windows 7 this feature got extended. Now it groups the windows no matter how many are open. This on its own is not that bad. Because like in Windows Vista you get a small preview of the window when you hover over it. A new feature in this is that when you stay over a window for a longer period of time the window will be displayed on the screen and all other windows ‘disappear’ to the background.

Though this is a pretty stable and nice feature I strongly dislike Windows for doing this same thing for every single tab in Internet Explorer. Which is pretty annoying to people like me who have several tabs open, as well as several instances of Internet Explorer. This causes it to become a bit crowded down in that small preview window.

Better quicklaunch features
One of the older features in windows is the quicklaunch bar in the taskbar. This allows you to quickly start up any program you pinned to it. Well Windows 7 is no stranger to this. It features this prominently and slightly changed. The icons are a lot bigger then before, and like before you can pin any application to the taskbar. One new thing is that if you click on an icon and drag up a quicklaunch window appears with the most used actions, or in case of the explorer the most opened folders.

Speed compared to Vista

A lot of people are comparing Windows 7 with Vista, which I guess is not that strange since they look very similar. One huge improvement is that Windows 7 appears to be a bit quicker and slimmer then Vista. I have not done extensive tests speed wise, but it looks like it boots up a bit quicker and closes quicker. As well as loading of applications this also appears to be slightly faster.

The eye-candy included in Windows 7 is a bit sluggish tough. It’s just that bit lagging behind on commands giving. Like dragging of applications seems to bit just a bit slow. It might have todo with my HP TouchSmart, but Vista runs on it beautifully so I would expect Windows 7 to do the same.

Some related video’s

Like all of you I like vid’s, so I added some nice reviews and feature video’s below. Enjoy them and until next time…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jsx-gf-z2U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt9rnSWM25U

Before this update of PowerDVD the weird behaviour was the disapearing of PowerDVD when playing discs. No message no error nothing, just gone! After the update the DVD player informed me that HDCP was not available and it could not play protected Blu-Ray discs.

This sounded weirdt to me since I have played them in the past, and I know the onboard graphics chip (the Ati Radeon X1250) supports it.

As it turns out, after a lot of digging, I had recently installed an updated version of the Catalyst Control Center. Which should not be anything strange, its recommended practice by a lot of software developers. However the graphics chipset on the motherboard appears to have some custom stuff, since after installing the latest version from the Ati site HDCP was no longer supported.

When I reinstalled the version of the Catalyst Control Center that came with the PC all my troubles went away. No more warnings / crashes or unable to play disc reports.

You are not alone. I wasn’t even sure if such a thing exists either. Well the first part of the quest was very easy, find a computer that does not have a seperate casing for the actual computer. So an all in one system. Well these things actually exists, I mean look at the iMac. So I know they are out there, I just don’t want an iMac because non of the software I use is available for it. And I’m not a big fan of the Apple company, but that’s a completely different story all together.

It was only a couple of days later that by accident I came accross a small poor quality video of the HP TouchSmart series. Which appearantly has been out ever since early 2007. These computers have everything build into the monitor, not just that but they are touch enabled. And I say touch enabled because they don’t have a touch screen in the traditional sense. The HP TouchSmart series has a shit load of LED’s build into the screen that detect where you press on the screen (and no you don’t even have to touch the screen for the LED’s to detect the touch).

Initially I was considering either a late model of the IQ500 series, which was brought out in 2008 or the IQ800 series which was brought out in 2009. The trouble with my little quest was that the 800 series is currently very hard to get. When I called several shops they could not get any computers in that series at all! So I ended up going for the IQ532, which was the best out of the IQ500 series currently available. And I can honestly say I like it, no more wires. And best of all you can choose to not use the mouse or keyboard. The touch part works pretty damn good, even with the onscreen keyboard that HP made for us as you can see in the screenshot below.

So I really like it, I mean the HP Touch application that is provided is pretty useless to me. But the idea of not needing anything and only having a single cable for your entire computer. Having bluetooth, WiFi and even a TV Tuner integrated is perfect for me. So just for you I have included some YouTube movies on the HP TouchSmart Series.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1PYc0pIzw

 httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CStZZrkc7Ck

I will attempt to start posting somewhat more regularly from now on again, as I’ve sorta managed to get some stuff out of the way. One of them is my work on a complete overhaul of a part of the platform that the Zylom site is running on. Well enough of that!

Ok so what have I been up to that caused little posts. One of my new projects was a complete change of the corporate website I have been maintaining. It’s not live yet, but great things are comming for this website. Which also gets me into the next phase of my career, as I am now looking into starting my own company, and it is really a scary thought 8-O.

I will soon start writing some more posts on developing website platforms in both PHP and Java, as I’ve been learning a lot recently for each one of these two languages.

So now to repair my mistake I am adding the following features to my already existing mail server. To find out how to setup the  mail server itself read my earlier article.

• Use spamassassin to mark spam in the header
• Change the mail delivery to dovecot LDA, this is needed for step 3
• Automatically move marked e-mails to the spam folder of the user

Sounds easy right. Well it should be .

Install spamassassin and set it up in postfix

The first step we will take is installing and setting up the spamassassin tool. First lets install it with the default options from Debian by running:


apt-get install spamassassin
useradd -g spamd -s /bin/false -m -d /home/spamassassin spamd

Next we setup the basics of spamassassin configuration, the file called /etc/spamassassin/local.cf

report_safe        0
required_score     2.0
use_bayes          1
bayes_auto_learn   1
use_bayes_rules    1

# Some basic configuration
score DCC_CHECK 4.000
score SPF_FAIL 10.000
score SPF_HELO_FAIL 10.000
score RAZOR2_CHECK 2.500
score BAYES_99 4.300
score BAYES_95 3.500
score BAYES_80 3.000

# Headers to be added for all scanned messages
add_header all Status _YESNO_, score=_SCORE_ required=_REQD_ tests=_TESTS_ autolearn=_AUTOLEARN_ version=_VERSION_
add_header all Level _STARS(*)_
add_header all Checker-Version SpamAssassin _VERSION_ (_SUBVERSION_) on _HOSTNAME_

So what we’ve done so far is set spamassassin up to automatically learn from mail it receives and to mark anything with a bayes score over 2 as spam. But we still need to integrate it into postfix to get it to work. Add the following to the postfix configuration (/etc/postfix/master.cf):

spamassassin unix -     n       n       -       -       pipe
 user=spamd argv=/usr/bin/spamc -f -e
 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -f ${sender} ${recipient}

You will also need to change the smtp line in the same file to the following, this will set up spamassassin as a pre delivery filter:

smtp      inet  n     -     -     -     -     smtpd -o content_filter=spamassassin

This will add the spamassassin service as a unix service through a pipe connection. Sounds complicated but it’s really easy it basically uses a binary file to comunicate between postfix and spamassassin. Make sure the user spamd exists and create the folder /usr/bin/spamc with full access to the spamd user. Also edit the file spamassassin to the following:

# /etc/default/spamassassin
# Change to one to enable spamd
ENABLED=1

# SpamAssassin uses a preforking model, so be careful! You need to
# make sure --max-children is not set to anything higher than 5,
# unless you know what you're doing.
SAHOME="/var/lib/spamassassin/"
OPTIONS="--create-prefs --max-children 5 --username spamd --helper-home-dir ${SAHOME} -s ${SAHOME}spamd.log"
PIDFILE="${SAHOME}spamd.pid"
CRON=0

Make sure to create the directory /var/lib/spamassassin and give spamd full access right to it, otherwise the service might not run properly. Spamassassin is now setup and will start scanning your e-mail. So if all you are interested in is the header being changed to indicate if a message is spam then you are done. If you also wish yo move it to a different folder then continue reading.

Settup Dovecot as LDA (Local Delivery Agent)

Next step is setting up dovecot as the default LDA for postfix. This is needed to let dovecot filter messages into the proper locations. First setup the connection to the between postfix and dovecot by adding the following to the /etc/postfix/master.cf:

dovecot   unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
 flags=DRhu user=dovecot:dovecot
 argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -f ${sender} -d ${recipient}

Please note that we now need to keep track of the fact that dovecot will be the user that is running this part of the mail server. So every file needed, log or configuration and mailboxes related, need to be owned by dovecot:dovecot. I have had issues with files having the wrong owner so it is important! Before activating the postfix connection lets configure dovecot for LDA by editing the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file. Add the following piece of code in the group auth default >> socket listen:

        master {
          path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master
          user = dovecot
          group= ssl-cert
          mode = 0600
        }


This will setup the authentication service that dovecot will use for delivering the e-mail to the correct user and authenticating users. Also add the following at the bottom of the file to configure the LDA of dovecot:

protocol lda {
  mail_plugins = cmusieve
  sieve_global_path = /etc/dovecot/globalsieverc/global.sieve
  log_path = /var/log/dovecot-delivery_log
  postmaster_address = noreply@domain.com
}

plugin {
 sieve = /etc/dovecot/globalsieverc/global.sieve
}

Again make sure that the user dovecot has full access to both the logfile and the global sieve directory (which you will need to make) . The plugin group is just for safety. I don’t know if it is needed but it doesn’t break anything. Also check the dovecot-mysql.conf that you made earlier to make sure that the uid and gid are those of the dovecot user. You can find this out by running:

:> id dovecot

If this is all setup in dovecot restart it by running:

:>/etc/init.d/dovecot force-reload

Now it is time to wrap things up and activate dovecot as the LDA for postfix, edit the file /etc/postfix/main.cf and change the virtual_transport from virtual to dovecot. Last but not least is creating the globe.sieve file.

:> vi /etc/dovecot/globalsieverc/global.sieve

require ["fileinto"];
if anyof (
    header :contains ["X-Spam-Flag"] "Yes"
) {
    fileinto "Spam"; stop;
}

Now restart postfix and send yourself a test mail. If everything is setup correctly it should be delivered to your mailbox. If not then first check ‘/var/log/mail.info’ to gather some information as to what is going on. If this indicates a delivery was attempted but it failed then check ‘/var/log/dovecot-delivery_log’ to find out more.

I hope you have fun using your spam free mail server. If you have any issues let me know, but please include snippets from the log as this will help me help you

Setting up certificate authentication is really simple. Just login to the machine as you would normally. Change to the user you are setting-up a certificate for and enter:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

You will be prompted for a password twice. After this is completed two files will be generated. One being the public file and one being the prive file. You need to download the private file from the server and store it somewhere safe. The public key needs to be copied to:

 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

After this you will be able to login to the server using your username and the private certificate. Please note that for Putty you will need to import the generated private key into puttygen and export it into a new private key. This is because Putty does not support the SSH generated private key.

Update: fixed the name of the keyfile to actually make it work, thanks for that neosam.

This time round I’ve been playing around with two seperate versions of custom ROMs for the HTC P3300. The first one I’ve looked at is the ‘Black&Blue 5.0′ ROM, written by Tom. The second one is the ‘Oops Black 1.0′ also written by Tom. If you need information on how to install these ROMs then look at my earlier article and follow those steps, except you don’t install the Windows Mobile 6.0 ROM but one of the two below.

Black&Blue 5.0

Image of ROM Black&Blue 5.0

The main reason for me to use this ROM was that it was build on top of Windows Mobile 6.1. Why was this so important you may think. Well let me list a couple of nice new features in:

• Better usability with out using the styles
• A lot faster

Though it’s not a big list the first one was reason enough for me. Finally a Windows Mobile version that I don’t need a styles to operate. Some of the parts I really liked about this ROM was that it was really fast. And even better really stable. I’ve had no problems what so ever using this ROM.

You can download the ROM Black&Blue 5.0 here.

Oops Black 1.0

Image of the Oops Black 1.0 ROM

Like I stated before the second ROM I tested was a relatively new one written by Tom. The base of this ROM is identical to the Black&Blue one. It’s also running on Windows Mobile 6.1 and has more or less the same applications installed. One huge difference is that this ROM is attempting to emulate the Touch Diamond style.

For those of you interested in this please let me give you a warning in advance. The ROM looks a lot like the Touch Diamond, but it’s behaviour is nothing like it. So if you are interested in the eye-candy this ROM is for you. If you want the functionality behind it then buy the new phone.

You can download the Oops Black 1.0 here.

Warning notice: Please note that both of these ROMs have been written by a 3rd party, which means you’r phone operator will not support you if your phone breaks. As to support from HTC they might, but you did modify the phone without approval.

Update 1: I’ve been getting some questions from people that had problems updating the P3300, all of them noted that the file might be corrupt and the update failed. If this happens you don’t need to worry, as long as you installed the USPL first. You should be able to reflash any ROM to the P3300 even if an update fails. If you encounter update failures you could check http://forum.xda-developers.com where you can find a lot of information on the HTC P3300.

One of the first problems reported back to me was that the tool crashed whenever ran with some strange error message. Well appearantly this was caused by the .Net framework, a problem which I solved.

For a quick list of bug fixes:

• Program no longer requires .Net framework to run, which was a big bug in the early alpha release
• Logging is a lot more robust and stable, this actually caused some crashes in the past
• Memory usage is way down, solved a lot of memory leaks
• Solved a problem that for some systems directories were not created at the destination folder
• Solved a problem causing synching to mounted network folders to fail

Of course some things have not yet been solved, but are in the works:

• Multithreaded causes some logging problems and crashes (please be carefull with multithreading at this time)
• If debug information is enabled the memory usage is huge on large directories, on the Windows directory it rose to 89 MB.

If you find any trouble running it or it crashes on you then let me know, and if at all possible send me the log file created by the tool using the -dd option. That will help me track down the problem.

You can download it by clicking this text.