Headworx

After moving my wireless contract to Orange (.PL) the only thing that stopped working were SMSes. Really... Murphy's Law... I can receive SMS messages just fine. I can even send them out. But any message longer than just a few words (3-5) displays as a set of little squares on the recipient's handset. And if a recipients are lucky enough to have an iPhone, they get the message in Chinese... I submitted this problem to Orange customer support and after roughly two weeks got this reply: W odpowiedzi na złoszenie techniczne dział ten informuje co należy zrobić, aby problem został rozwiązany. Przy problemach związanych z odbiorem wiadomości SMS prosimy, by odbiorca wiadomości wykonał w kolejności: 1. przełożenie karty SIM do innego telefonu na czas ok 3 godz.; 2. wykasowanie 2-3 wiadomości SMS; 3. wysłanie do siebie samego wiadomości: text. Część telefonów / kart SIM niepoprawnie odbiera wiadomości typu LONG/graficzne/z polskimi znakami. Pozdrawiamy. Orange. In English this means: ...

Earlier this week I had a brief discussion with Houston Neal who posted an article on potential role of the iTablet in EMR applications . There are areas where I would fully agree with Houston. User interface (or its clean, streamlined design) has been the primary strength of Apple's OS for years. User interface has been the winning aspect of the iPhone. It has been both intuitive and cute. It is funny thing with the Apple Tablet (or iTablet or whatever it will be called once delivered...)... Apple has a long track record with pen / touch interfaces. Starting with early Newtons and now with the iPhone and iPod Touch. People love it. It seems pen / touch interface to the OS X should not be that far away. But may be Apple does not want to follow Microsoft's path of just adding a couple of tablet functions to the plain old operating system? To be honest Microsoft has not been very successful with its Windows Tablets... They were stars of one or two seasons... back in 2004... And t...

Memory leaks are plaguing our gadget - heavy life. Most of the electronic devices we use, from game consoles to mobile phones to digital cameras to personal navigation devices to netbooks and beyond. All of them are computers in fact. A microprocessor, memory, storage and software running on top of the classic Von Neumann architecture . Processors are faster and faster and software becomes more and more complex, very often running away from initial frames it was designed to stay within. Software running away usually means weird behavior of an application or execution slowdown or loss of functionality. Software running away usually means memory allocation problems hidden deep inside. Software programs spend most of their time allocating and releasing blocks of memory. When there is continuously less memory freed than allocated, we have a condition called memory leak, ending up in a situation when all available physical memory is eaten by an application and no more can be allocated caus...

As promised. And as anticipated. It looks like this is the last episode of The Switch saga . I am now a happy customer of Orange, using the BlackBerry Curve 8900, including it's UMA feature . The entire story started back in December 2008, when I decided to jump onto the BlackBerry platform and started learning all the pros and cons and curiosities of this setup. As you may remember I selected the BlackBerry Bold 9000 smartphone and a two - year contract with Era (T-Mobile) network. In a matter of days I figured out two things. First, whatever application runs on BlackBerry, it heavily depends on what data connections are configured and running. And the connections and settings are a maze on the BlackBerry platform. I started downloading various applications just to see them failing to work. It never happened before on a Windows Mobile platform. Nor on the iPhone. WiFi was enough to run everything. And outside of WiFi coverage, the usual cellular data over standard APN was sufficie...

My new BlackBerry Curve 8900 arrived surprisingly last Tuesday. I had been told by the Orange sales representative before, it could have taken a week, but in this case the week was only two days. First impressions - the best phone ever, surely the Bold 9000 beater. Yes it does not have 3G, but who cares :) ???. At the time I write this (Wednesday morning, as Sunday is planned for joyful snowboarding in Austrian Alps) the BlackBerry services are not yet fully functional, so I cannot comment if The Switch from T-Mobile to Orange has been successful, but one thing I tried was UMA. I posted on UMA before , as I has been one of technologies / services I consider very smart. In short: it allows to talk via Wi-Fi. Elaborating a little more on the subject, UMA is a solution implemented by a MNO (Mobile Network Operator), that allows certain (UMA compliant) mobile phones to log on to the MNO's network over Wi-Fi. So instead of connecting to the MNO's base station, the phone uses Wi-Fi ...