tenpastmidnight blog

I've had my Nokia N73 mobile for a little over a year. It's OK, but not the best phone I've had. It's slow to switch between functions (i.e. going to text messaging) and my top right button had stopped working and I had a lot of dust inside the screen.

Why not just get a new phone? I have a contract with Orange and don't care enough about mobiles to want to buy one separately and I don't want to get a new free phone from Orange because that'll mean extending my contract and I want to get to the end of it in case I decide to get an iPhone now the new ones are out.

However, I knew I could upgrade the 'firmware' - the software that runs on the phone - and sometimes there are useful updates in those. I'd done this a few months after getting the phone and it hadn't made any difference that I could notice, but maybe there was another one out. I hoped that my button had stopped working because of a software problem, rather than it being physically broken.

I found out what firmware I was running by typing *#0000# in to my phone, then found out there was a newer version out from Nokia.

A little Googling led me to download the Nokia Software Updater for N73, which works by connecting the PC (doesn't work on Mac) and phone together with a cable that came with the phone, then letting them talk for a while. Or it should, it turned out I needed to install the Noka PC Suite first, then run the software updater which then worked.

Before updating, I backed up my photos, texts and other bits on to the separate memory card I had in the phone - I did this by going in to Tools -> Memory -> Options -> Backup phone mem.

So, connected everything up, let it run, got worried when it took ages to finish, it finished OK, calmed down, turned phone on. And... woo, it's quicker! Not blindingly quick, but noticeably quicker than it was. Broken button still broken, bugger.

One fix I didn't notice immediately: my N73 has always shown the icon saying there's a voicemail message for me, even when there wasn't. This firmware update fixed that, which is very nice. Although I've lived with it for so long I now think there's something missing when I look at the phone.

Having decided I had a hardware problem, I went looking for instructions on taking the phone apart. I found links to pictures and videos that Nokia has had removed, which was not helpful, then a post with useful pictures (may take a while to load.) It looked like the screen dust could be under the plastic screen which is between the world and the actual LCD screen. Cool, that means I could take the phone apart and clean it.

Getting the phone apart was quite awkward and involves lots of prising and not losing your temper and breaking it. I found the worst part is the bottom corners as they have tabs much closer together than the top, so expect those parts to take a bit longer to get free.

I could clean the screen as soon as the top case was off, but decided to go further to try to get the top right key working again. This required a size 6 Torx screwdriver, which my friend Jamie was kind enough to lend me - he makes presentation equipment for exhibitions and has all the fiddly tools under the sun.

To get at the keyboard you have to take the main case completely off as there are small tabs that need releasing on the side of the keyboard which you can't do without getting the case off. Once I had access to the membrane under the buttons I gently prised the edge up under the broken button and scraped the shiny metal of the contact that gets pressed down by the phone key. When I put everything back together this was enough to get the key working.

Warning - putting the phone back together is rather fiddly and takes some time and patience. I found I had to take the little plastic tab which covers the SD memory card slot off to make it easier to fiddle everything back in to position - it's easy to slot back in later. I got my case back on then realised I'd forgotten to screw the keyboard back down and had to take the case apart again - it's much easier the second time!

All back together and the phone has a new lease of life. It's faster because of the firmware update, the button works again and the dusty screen has gone, now I just have the array of little scratches I always get because I tend to put the phone in the same pocket as my keys. I can now see out my Orange contract with my N73 and decide whether or not I want an iPhone in a couple of months, which will let the furore over the new iPhone die down a bit so I should be able to get one without any silly queuing up. I may be British, but I don't see queuing as a form of entertainment.

Labels: fix, hardware, n73, nokia, phone

If you're programming in PHP and want to do a 'to the power of', you might think you could just use the caret symbol (^) between two numbers, like this:

print 2^5;

But no, this will give you some gobbledegook like bWH�. You need to use the pow() function, like this:

print pow(2,5);

Which will give you 32, which is what you want.

I haven't got time to dig in to why PHP ignored this sort of mathematical notation, when it'll treat + * - and / properly, but it's rather annoying.

Labels: development, php, programming

I went to see science fiction author Iain M Banks talk last week.

This should have been a relaxing affair - Alex had sorted the tickets well ahead of time, and we'd discussed where the venue - The Old Market - was, near the City Books shop on the edge of Hove. I've walked past the Old Market lots of times and wondered what it was, which makes it more annoying that I couldn't find it on the night.

This was partly, well, totally because I have all the navigational ability of a dead haddock. I found City Books easily enough, having printed a map to it rather than a map to the venue of the talk, and dropped down from Seven Dials straight to it - this turned out to be my largest mistake because I thought "Ah, it's around here somewhere, but the poster says it's in Hove, so I'll walk that way."

Actually, I walked one road Brightonwards and could see that wasn't down to the place, so I went towards Hove. If I'd walked two roads Brightonwards, I'd have found the bloody place.

A good whack of tiredness and stupidity meant I walked further in to Hove than I should have. I then got stopped by a not-particularly-homeless-looking homeless bloke, who claimed to have broken down, be from Lancing, and need some money. On any other night I'd have spotted him a mile off (he even did the standard homeless-bloke weirdness of asking for a very odd amount of money - £47.17 or thereabouts.) This took up a bunch of time and in the end I was trying to give him money just to get rid of him.

By the end of the discussion I'd given the chap some money, he insisted on giving me his address and taking mine and saying he'd drop the money off later. I gave him my office address because I didn't want Katie being hassled by some random guy if he did turn up. Stupidly I didn't ask him any questions about Lancing, a village I know well, but I find myself more sympathetic to old codgers who appear lucid apart from a few facts since my dad had a memory problem a few years ago.

Anyway... I go further in to Hove, feeling daft for not pulling the bloke up about Lancing. Then I start looking for a map - the one I found was useless, then a taxi and can't find a free one - terrific. Having eventually turned around I find some roving Policemen who say it's a long way away on foot - great.

Eventually, looking for a taxi the whole time, I make it back to City Books, then after some swearing, two roads down I find the Old Market. Relieved, sweaty and kicking myself, I make it in for the last third-to-half of the talk.

When I got in to the hall I didn't realise it was in the Q&A session and all I could hear was a voice going and a chap on the stage who obviously wasn't talking. It went on so long I wondered if it was a taped excerpt and IB had lost his voice. It turned out to be an intermidably long question, which I would imagine is stock in trade for Q&As involving SF fans :-)

When he gets a chance, Iain Banks is a good speaker. Enthusiastic and funny, with strange asides and rants. I managed to catch a number of answers, and hear him read from The Steep Approach to Garbadale, which was well worth the £6 admission.

While listening, I could see the back of several friend's heads but managed to lose them all in the scrum to get out, which turned out to also be a queue for getting books signed. Happily, Ian scooped me up on the way to the pub, and we found Jay on the way. I finally got to meet Ben.

All in all, a mess of an evening, which ended well, apart from managing to completely miss Alex, who'd sorted out everything in the first place.

Labels: blither, brain dump

I've been interviewed by Andy White for Freelance Advisor, a new blog/podcast to help freelancers and contractors succeed in business helmed by Darren Fell.

We talked about the main points of marketing yourself as a freelancer. Andy is a good interviewer and put me very much at ease, which was great as in general I hate microphones.

Darren found me because of the Farm, and since the interview was recorded has asked me to write for the marketing section of Freelance Advisor. As soon as I have some time there should be some more freelancing advice coming from me there, in the meantime there are a lot of other contributions to catch up on.

Labels: brightonfarm, freelance, interview

In November (2007) Wired Sussex and it's partners expanded their usual Digital Festival to take in a whole month of events, rather than the few days of previous years. Many (most) of the events were carried out by local groups who aren't affiliated with Wired Sussex, and the Festival offered an umbrella of advertising for all of them.

I had quite a busy festival...

As one of the organisers, my friend Matt asked if The Farm would run an event. After chatting about it a while I agreed that we'd organise a Hack Day, which would appeal to developers, as I felt a lot of the events that had been planned were good for designers, but not so good for the more technical crowd. So I organised a day-long event.

Ian and Jon ran a Start Up Day, and invited David Rosam and myself to do a talk on SEO, which we were delighted to give.

The Brighton Web Awards was back and they once again asked The Farm to judge an award, and as organiser I got to present it.

And finally I went to a usability evening put on by Use8

There was plenty of other stuff happening, including a week of Skillswaps, a special Geek dinner, and some Flash events, all of which I missed due to illness and event-fatigue.

I think it was a good idea to do a lot of events in one month to show how much is going on in the community in and around Brighton. However, with so much happening, pretty much an event every day or evening, I found I got very tired and had to really pick and choose what I went to. Talking to some of the people who ran the events, turn out was lower than I'd expected for some of them, which I think reflects that other people were picking and choosing as well.

Hopefully the festival will stay quite large next year, but I'm unsure how to balance how much stuff is put on with the amount of people who actually go to events. It might be better for there to be slightly less stuff, but give people a chance to go to everything they want. Hmm... I'm open to ideas about how to 'fix' this, it could be that it'll just be a case of "tough, you can't get to everything", which is certainly a fine and understandable attitude to take if you're organising a festival!

Labels: brighton, brightondigitalfestival, digitalfestival, events

(Please excuse huge lateness, only two-and-a-half months after the event!)

Being one of the organisers, the run up to BarCamp Brighton was quite stressful - trying to make sure we'd covered all the potential problems before they came up, or had a plan for them. I'd dealt with a lot of the equipment needs and promotion, so most of my stuff was over by the time the weekend started. I got there, helped Glenn lump some chairs around, then went up to SCIP to pick up the projectors they were kind enough to lend us.

Glenn and the Madgex team did a fantastic job over the weekend. They'd cleared several of their offices for our use, and took care of the door, the badges and chunks of the food when it arrived. Matt, Andy and I could basically enjoy the weekend without having to do much more than help the sponsors out occasionally.

I was surprised how easily the day runs in some ways. Glenn lead the introductions and then sent everyone downstairs to fill out the schedule board, and they just did it, and then went to the first talks - easy! BarCamp makes for a very self-selected, self-organising group, so it should work, but it's great to see it actually happen.

As only a couple of people had agreed to do a first talk, I agreed to do mine - 'A Crashcourse in SEO' - in a first slot, and so did Richard Dallaway, which meant I missed his talk about Xserves.

I was still writing my slides as people were coming in to the room, but luckily only had a couple of points to add before I could get on with it. I rushed a bit as we were running late, but managed to get most of my points across. I needn't have rushed as everyone else was running a bit late as we'd started late.

Getting my talk out of the way meant I could relax some more. The talks I went to were:

Google Earth - the GEO browser by Brian Suda - showing what you can do with cheap GPS units and integrating them in to Google Earth.

OpenStreetMap Brighton by Mikel Maron - describing why OpenStreetMap exists and how they created a free map of Brighton using GPS, the community, and a good dollop of effort.

Web Biology 101 by Phil Blything - talking about how the behaviour of animals can be compared to the behaviour of groups of people as they use web applications and sites. I was completely zonked by the time I watched this talk so wasn't much help in the question and answer section at the end of the talk.

After a break it was in to Let's talk about SWX baby by Aral Balkan - SWX is a very easy way of Flash to get information from various popular APIs, such as Flickr and Twitter, in to Flash as a native object. He'd only just launched it and it looks very easy to use, and that's coming from a non-Flash developer.

Electronics from a Grease Monkey Perspective had (someone who's name I'll fill in shortly!) talking about hardware hacking - he'd built a set of timed glowing lights to help him focus at work. He took us through the various stages of development of the physical product, and talked about other options available for the interested but naive would-be hackers.

Next was Social Networking is Dead! by Ian Forrester - this started out as a talk about how Social Networks could be (much) better by using microformats and shared APML to profile your interests, but was mainly about Ian's 'adventures' with various dating sites. Ian runs the London BarCamp's and his experience with speaking was obvious, especially as he put up with large amounts of mickey taking from the audience.

Dinner arrived in the shape of 100 pizzas, provided by Pizza Express and sponsored by BT Osmosoft. Watching 100 pizzas being carried in is a great experience that I recommend to anyone - it's like a cartoon where more and more people come through a doorway holding armfuls of pizza and the stream never seems to end.

After dinner I went to Bootstrapping piertopier.net by Dave Phelan. Pier to Pier is a free wireless project in Brighton which is best known for providing wireless between the Palace and West Piers on Brighton beach. Dave covered the history of the project and some of the technical details of the kit that they use, and also a call for donations and sponsorship if anyone has some. This is a project I'd love to help out in some way so I really need to think about how I can help, especially if it's bringing some dosh in to help it keep going.

Proving how good Dave's technical ability is and how piertopier.net helps, he brought along some routers and added wireless to BarCamp Brighton for us. We'd sorted out a wired connection for everyone to use because wireless has been so unreliable at previous events this year. The piertopier nodes worked perfectly, which just goes to show: if you need wireless done properly, get someone who's passionate and knows his stuff, i.e. get yourself a Dave Phelan.

There was a couple of talks going on to finish the day, but I was knackered and went down to the kitchen to upload some photos, update the blog and generally try to get my brain straight. By the time I'd finished there was a table football tournament going on, and BarCamp perennial Werewolf was being played up in the main meeting room.

Forgoing the enticement of Werewolf, I stumbled home to a decent bed, and made my way back on Sunday morning, to a slowish start and...

Sales for Geeks, by Ian Oszvald, in which Ian talked us through how to cope with being a salesman if you're also a geek, and how he's used his successful freelance career to bootstrap his new tutorial website showmedo.com

Then it was in to Depression in the World of Geek by David Thompson. This was a very frank talk about living with depression and how it affects you, and how some aspects of being a programmer actually suit depressive personalities, and how other parts can help people with depression. I wasn't sure about going to this talk, but it was one of the best of the weekend, partly because it triggered a very interesting discussion in the group after the main talk.

Next, a double session - Ready, Steady, MVC! where Simon Willison, Jay Gooby, Mark Ng and Wayne Douglas showed off their favourite MVC framework by building a basic job board as quickly as possible. Shown off were Python with Django, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Symfony, and .Net respectively. There was a lot of programming talent in action, I think Jay and Ruby on Rails just got it as the quickest, but Simon and Django wasn't far behind.

After lunch was Liars need Apps too which was another Ian Forrester presentation (I think) and which actually became a more interesting talk and discussion about helping geek kids before they lose interest in being the next generation of programmers and hackers. Some good ideas came from this and I hope it actually turns in to something.

Finally I managed to blunder in to What's a wireframe - and how to avoid it! by Tom Coady, which was partly about wireframes, and partly a demonstration of Rapidweaver (co-incidentally developed by one of our food sponsors, Real Mac Software.) Unfortunately I had to leave party way through the talk (having disturbed it at the start) to sort out the projectors so they could be picked up.

And suddenly, that was it! The talks were over and Glenn was making the closing speech. After clean up, which was greatly helped by the attendees, and Mat appearing from SCIP to pick up their equipment and some of the hubs one of the sponsors was donating to them (I swear Mat was a pack horse in a previous life, there's no way one man can carry so much stuff), it was off to the 'Madgex Arms' - the Victory Inn, for a post-BarCamp pint.

I can't believe how well it all went, and it inspired me to get on with sorting out Hack Day for the digital festival. Getting active members of the new media community together and great things happen, pretty much naturally.

A quick final thank you to Alex for helping me back up the hill with some of the equipment!

Labels: barcampbrighton, brighton, events