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Social Network Status Mapping

Published
by
Dilantha
on December 30, 2009
in Ideas, Technology and Web Applications
. 1 Comment

I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them.

You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t use that because I want to keep things separate. I’d rather have a block that shows my latest tweets somewhere.

There are so many ways you can cross post from your blog to twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. For me personally this is too much cross posting of not too related content. Let me explain.

On twitter I have mostly techies, locals, bloggers and new age marketers. On Facebook I have friends and family who for the most part are not techies at all. On LinkedIn I have co-workers and professionals.

So for me at least these networks mean different things. I saw a tweet yesterday on LinkedIn it was a personal quote about love. Also when you see auto posted blog posts with tweets and link bits it seems less personal and mechanical. You know the blogger hasn’t taken the time to write something.

I prefer to post separately to each network depending on what I have to say. This is except for getting link backs for my blog posts which I mentioned first.

I’m sure there are people with a consistent profiles across networks that pull this off well, but I’ve yet to see one.

My 2 cents is keep things simple and think of the audience for your post before you setup automatic cross site posting.

So Much for 2009

Published
by
Dilantha
on December 29, 2009
in Consumer, Driving, Food, Personal, Sri Lanka and Work
. 2 Comments

Hope you enjoyed my moving to Australia posts, cause just after posting those I moved back to Sri Lanka. I won’t get into “moving back to Sri Lanka” cause its pretty painful and I’m sure no one will want to read it.

Why move back? Well although its a bit crappy here most of the time its home, and with the end of the war one can hope again. Here are a few first impressions of Sri Lanka for someone returning after a few years.

Driving has got worse and kind of easier. Before there were only a few idiots who drive bad, now everyone does, so you go with the flow and try not to hit anything.

Everything is more expensive. The quality of products are lower. A bar of soap has been carved in so many creative ways now its about half the weight at the old price.

There seems to be a few new local products trying to fill in the gaps of more expensive imports so that’s kicked off a bit of business.

Everyone seems to be doing more business than going to a 9 to 5 job.

2009 has been a decent year. I’m still working so I survived the recession. I thought coming down in time for the holidays would be a great idea, but this season was a bit damp and low-key. Not my kind of Christmas.

Most of the time I feel very few reads this. Since I got down I’ve spoken to a few people and it seems a few more do. So I’ll try to post a bit more often even if its not too technical.

By the way if anyone is hiring Java people drop me a line I know a decent J2ME developer looking for work.

Nokia E71 Firmware update

Published
by
Dilantha
on November 27, 2009
in Mobile
. 1 Comment
Nokia E71 Grey

Nokia E71 Grey Steel

There was a firmware update for my Nokia E71. Remember to backup using PC Suite before doing an update, and restore your settings after. This has been my primary phone for just over an year and I must say its been great. Its fast and gets the job done. This was my first QWERTY phone and I can’t see myself not having a full keyboard anymore.

The most immediate change seems to be the addition of OVI contacts in the phone book.

Here are the changes from All About Symbian.

E71 firmware 400.21.013 v6 Euro
Not officially released, but here’s the changelog:

NEW FUNCTIONALITIES:
* Gimlet v9.5 (v9.5.3.72)
* Quick Office 5.3
* Ovi Store 1.5 (v1.5.2)
* Ovi Contacts – Preinstalled
* Mail for Exchange 2.9.176

CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS:
* Email Setup Wizard update
* WLAN Corrections
* Internet Radio v1.16 – Increased functionality
* Camera functionality improvement
* Incoming call hang issue fixed
* Turkish SMS character input improvement
* Many functionality and Stability improvements in MfE
* Support for Russian and Ukranian keymats
* Phone activation Baseline updated
* Yahoo account hack fixed

GENERAL
* Stability and functionality improvements
* Email and WLAN functionality improvements
* Increased robustness in handling SMS and incoming calls
* Memory leak fixes and crashes
* Email and WLAN functionality improvements

CALL HANDLING
* Fix for Incoming call hang issue and fast call crash
* Fix for making emergency call when the phone is locked

CALENDAR/CLOCK
*Minor Functionality improvements
*Time display correction when the phone is locked

CONNECTIVITY
*WLAN functionality Improvements and fixes for crashes
*Improvement in WLAN authentication
*mVPN authentication improvements and general functionality improvement

CONTACTS/PHONEBOOK
*Functionality improvements for search functionality

EMAIL
*Email setup wizard updated
*Fix for Yahoo account hack while setting up Gmail account through Nokia Email
*Fix for mails getting duplicated after restoring backup
*Mail for Exchange upgraded from 2.9.158 to 2.9.176
*Many functionality and stability improvements in MfE
*Robustness and functionality improvements in email items.

INTERNET RADIO
*Improved functionality
*Increased application stability

QWERTY KEYBOARD
*Usability improvements
*Keyboard mapping corrections for Russian and Ukranian keymat

MESSAGING
*Improvement in Turkish SMS characters input
*Fix for delivery report for SMS with more than 22 characters
*Increased robustness in handling SMS
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Back to Ubuntu

Published
by
Dilantha
on November 8, 2009
in How To, Linux, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.

It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.

Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.

I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.

So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.

So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.

KeePass – password manager

sudo aptitude install keepassx

FileZilla – FTP client

sudo aptitude install filezilla

F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.

Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.

Moving to Australia – Part 2

Published
by
Dilantha
on October 30, 2009
in How To, Life and Sri Lanka
. 0 Comments

Catch up and read part 1 of this guide where I’m documenting my experience of moving to Gold Coast Australia from Sri Lanka.

Now that you are settling in you need stuff for your place. eBay and IKEA are your friends. Also keep an eye out for weekend garage sales.

The Gold Coast City Council website has a ton of information about parks, markets, events etc.

When you get tired of popping burgers those markets come in handy to find curry leaves etc ;) Also its much cheaper than supermarkets for fruits and veggies.

Daily needs is a great online shop for buying Sri Lankan food.

One critical thing I should have mentioned in the first post was getting a mobile phone. I recommend Virgin Mobile pre-paid. If you bought a GSM mobile from Sri Lanka just buy a SIM from almost any phone or news stand and top-up on the site.

Virgin Mobile is the only operator that will let you use all your bonus minutes to talk to Sri Lanka. Everyone else has a limit before the full cap amount.

If you are looking to buy a phone try All Phones. There are cheap pre-paid phones you can unlock later or just buy one outright.