Presents from Finnish Santa!

Lo and behold, loyal Nokia customer! Ovi Suite 3 is out!

New and improved are in v3.0.0.284:

- Direct download of songs from Ovi Music
- Greater ease in managing and downloading street maps
- Improved syncing of contacts
- Fresh Home view offering new and updated content from your device
- Splendid full-screen view of photos and videos
- Export of messages for storing and easy viewing on the computer

At the very same time, download of Nokia Photos app is blocked.
New customers have to use Ovi Suite only.
Download of the new version cannot be blocked, it is mandatory for existing Ovi Suite users.
Pre-existing Nokia Photos 1.6.434 is not removed neither blocked. It would still work.

Unfortunately, Photos part of the Suite is not improved with the famous "Timeline" view that was there in Lifeblog and Nokia Photos apps.

One prominent change in v3 of Ovi Suite is the "product placement" of the Ovi services and shops - the music and apps are recommended now at the home page of the app, taking up most space (that was previously used by your stuff). That's quite understandable, and can be useful.

One can separately browse and manage data on the phone and in the Suite. While this gives more flexibility, this can confuse a novice user.

Quite interesting is the new "competition for the customer" between Microsoft's Winows 7 and the Nokia PC Suite. Once you connect a phone in PC Suite mode, a Windows dialog pops up, inviting you to use the built-in features like media sync, files browser or the image transfer.

Nokia Maps can detect if the phone application is running - and it intructs you to close the Maps on the phone, but it cannot detect if you closed the app, and there's no F5/Refresh button; one should switch to another part of Ovi Suite and back to Maps in order to resolve this little stalemate.

Share feature is not improved much, in fact, the most noticeable is the action to download your Share library - this only confirms speculations that Nokia might outsource that Share part of Ovi to someone (yahoo! we're looking for talents!)

Another bug I noticed is that Software Update shows number 3 on the icon, but there is only one app on my phone wanting to be updated (Python, which I don't want).
The number itself might not be correct, it works just as and indicator for you to look there. UPDATE - the number reflected two not-installed apps, they are not visible in updates, but are offered for installation at the home page. A little misleading, that number is...

The Music view is improved, now more resembling Apple's iTunes with the album art inline along the song list. This shows efficient use of the horizontal display dimensions. Generally Nokia Ovi Suite is good at that, better than Microsoft Office.
If only they could fit the Timeline view for media...

All in all, it's a decent update and a timely release for the New Year's holidays.
I only hope that nokians did not have to spend all the Christmas time at work preparing and polishing it!..

Now that have all eggs in one basket, let's see more speedy and astonishing improvements! Thank you Finnish Santa!

Happy New Year to all!!!

Cheers
SZ

Goodbye to Nokia Photos?

For some reason, there's no Photo Service advertised or visible anymore at Ovi.com.

Access via Nokia Photos PC app and Ovi Share and Ovi Suite still works.

What happened?

UPDATE: The photos may go to Y! Flickr.

Patriot Act for all

There's no Outlook Express in Windows 7 anymore.
Say goodbye to your encrypted emails to Assange, people.

Will iOS 4.2 fix slow iPhones 3G ?

In his latest keynote, 20-Oct-2010, Steve Jobs mentioned new upcoming firmware update of iOS to v4.2 which is expected to fix slow operation and occasional delays in UI of iPhone 3G with current iOS 4.x.

If that happens, that would be a major difference to an average vendor behavior -
everyone is so interested in selling the latest models and there's little impetus to help and improve speed of models two generations old.

Could this say that Apple simply cannot keep up with demand for iPhone 4 and decided to try and keep existing iPhone users happy, in the meanwhile?

In fact, here a good tip for the struggling iOS 4.x/iPhone 3G users out there:
1. Sync up with iTunes. Make sure a backup it taken.
2. From the Settings menu, do a hard reset, destroying all data.
3. Connect to iTunes and restore the backup. (Read help in iTunes on how to do that)

I did it last summer and boy it helped!
And then they stole my iPhone...

NB: iOS 4 seems to be picky about fragmented filesystem on iPhone 3G.
It could also be that verion 3 of "OS X" did much better around some flash system quirks. Anyway, a reformat helps tremendously. Especially if you don't load the whole lot of Apps back into your phone...
I think most of iApps out there are just fart.
After year of playing, I don't need more than 6-8 of them.

By the way, why is Cisco so quiet about IOS trademark infringement? Has Apple given each Cisco employee an iPhone? :)

Windows Phone 7 in, Symbian ^ out?

Tectonic changes are happening, friends. Very big, long-awaited stuff. Dinosaur mating.

Not long after ousting Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the Nokia CEO, Nokia hires ex-Microsoftie for that role.

On November 8, Windows Phone 7 is out.
The very same day, Symbian Foundation is "suddenly" shrinks.

It's a very tough time for Nokia.
This year certainly wasn't their strongest.

And the next year will be even worse.
Unless they switch the tired horse.

And looking at the jockey, I guess I know where to bet.

Apple iPhone 4 "antennagate"

It's just brouhaha, fed by opponents.

It does not matter how many decibels we receive, what affects the call quality is SNR (signal-to-noise ratio).

Despite being at one bar, one could very well be able to make quality calls from a sensitive and well-designed radio module like iPhone 4's.

And - yes - they fixed the bar display with firmware 4.0.1.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)

It's been some time I wanted to tell you how great Ubuntu is.
I have been following this distro since 7.04 and the new advancements just rock!

It's the most user-friendly OS for PC, in my opinion.

It has the speed, it runs quite smooth, it contains an app store client (although you still need to enable 'unpure' third-party sources) and my overall impression is "Wow!".
You plug a USB drive - and it mounts on your desktop - very mac-like and better than Windows.
You plug a printer - and it just works.
You plug a camera - and F-Spot takes care if the import and albums - like a free iPhoto replacement.
Check out the F3 button in the filesystem explorer.

Finally, I thought, we have something to replace MS Windows with. I even stopped worrying about MacOS X not being released on PC.

By all means, if you haven't yet, you should try Ubuntu.

But, unexpectedly for me, the show was over when I hit a problem: Ubuntu sometimes disables all network after standby or sleep or hibernation.

With the amount of people who acknowledged themselves there as being affected by the problem, it will be probably solved in the next century.

If you experience the same issue, I pledge you to go ahead, register if needed, and acknowledge that this issue also affects you.

I am not a fan of tweaking system files to re-enable my network anymore.
Come on guys, it's XXI century!

cubeover.blogspot.com moved!

Hello! I decided to move my blog to a more memorable name.
It's best done when not popular. I have that luxury now.
cubeover.blogspot.com is now hasomi.blogspot.com

Apple quietly "screws" Bonjour for Windows

Apple Inc, having provided a nice service for Microsoft Windows users, which allowed them to discover, connect, configure and print to mDNS-enabled network printers, have hideously removed that nice functionality from Bonjour release 2.





As I understand, the Bonjour software v1.0.6 (can still be downloaded here), is replaced by version 2.0 which removes all shortcuts and the functionality, as part of ongoing updates via Apple Software Update utility. Was it the new iTunes that "screwed" Bonjour?
Most likely.

Anyway, it was nice but now it's gone.
Evil Apple makes life of Windows' LAN printer users miserable again.

UPDATE:
Those of you who are travelling, or have "flexible" printer environment, get the new and full version here, and be happy again.

FAQ on Apple Bonjour

Terrified by VISA

On many occasions already, I have been "burnt" by one new feature that VISA system is rolling out now: 3DS (3D-Secure). It is also known by name "Verified by VISA".
This feature involves a third-factor authentication - an additional password one should know in order to perform online transactions - but ONLY AT 3DS-ENABLED sites.
Sounds funny, isn't it? Does VISA think that I would 'prefer' to shop at the very sites that give me this nuissance? Here's my recap.
Of the three different sites that had this feature enabled, none of them really worked for me. I opened trouble tickets in all of respective companies' systems.

It took me few rounds to make sure the issue is not pushed into my issuer bank. Obviously, it's easier for a merchant to ask you try contacting your bank - then they don't have to debug the process and interact with different parties themselves.
OK I took that advice - not happy with results though.

The first thing that strikes you as a consumer, that once you enter you card details in a secured merchant's site, once the 3DS-enabled site determines that your card is a subject to that weird security experiment, they redirect you to a third-party site!
Without letting you know what's gonna happen. So, in my case, when I filled the card details and clicked "submit" i was struck by a pop-up window at obscure address (www5.arcot.com) which required me to re-enter my card details PLUS the 3DS password (which I did not have then).

Now, didn't this look exactly like phishing, to my unsuspecting eye?

OK I did some research and found out what that was about. Now, I needed the 3DS password. I called up my bank, and they were able to supply me one.
But still, the system just did not work!

Secondly, why would I need a separate password, when I have my PIN already?!?
Why not use that? Or my online banking password, which would be checked by sending request to my bank, not to a third-party, cloud-based, untrusted-by-me, server.

After some rounds of talking to the parties involved, I decided to
"opt-out" of this 3DS joke and called up my bank to do that.
They were unable to do that, quoting VISA as my contact point.
VISA did not do that favour to me either!

All I could do is switch to my other card. My credit MasterCard.

I am not getting a VISA for me next time.

iPhone 4G found

I like what I see and I wish they will not re-hash the design just to be original at the intro. I hope Steve jobs will not lose much hair due to the incident.

The new iPhone looks less curved, more metallic, is thinner, has front camera (better be using the new videocall codec I've aspired for!) and ... the style reminds me of a great NOKIA phone, E72.

I am skipping 3GS, going straight for 4G. You?

PS. Cheers to the German beer!

Opera strikes a false note

I was an active Opera browser user for about 10 years.
But the time has come for me to stop that practice, and here's why.

To start with, I really like Opera. Or, liked - I should say.
It has pioneered way too many useful features to ignore -

built-in e-mail client with tagging and quick reply (M2)
built-in bookmark sync (Opera Link)
built-in BitTorrent client (although quite limited and slow)
Opera DialPad - replacement for your TV channels
page mini-thumb previews
tabs (yes, way way back before Firefox)
side panes for everything
notes
widgets
Magic Wand - you unobtrusive password helper, even for those site which do not allow to save it
and, lastly, Opera Unite and Opera Turbo (which I don't use)

Opera is a real all-in-one convenience, especially for multiple installations and platforms. It seriously helps achieve unified user experience across separate devices.
I had used it on two PCs, one Mac and two cell phones (S40 and UIQ2.1)
Bookmark sync was a bliss!

But, recent 10.x branch of desktop browser has been less than encouraging.
First off, there's been UI rehash in 10.0 to which one would have to accustom for quite a while. Then, there were some issues with my proxy detection PAC script - while easily processed by IE, it was not always taken well by Opera.
These issues were finally resolved, only to reappear in the latest 10.51.

But Oh, this 10.51 release is something.

The hideous thing is that it installed itself on top of my two 10.10 PC installations! No questions asked, no indication of a process given.
Sneakily and silently it installed itself, so when I reopened a closed Opera browser, the Windows Installer proceeded to set up my user environment and - voila - I had a new shiny un-asked-for release installed.
And guess what - I don't like it.

On one of my PCs, with User Switching enabled, it takes so much time to load. It also makes a simple wake-up operation take up almost 10 minutes with blank screen.
It clearly behaves in a CPU hog manner.
On another PC, it loses connectivity way too often, and I suspect "new and improved" PAC script logic. For instance, taking notebook off the docking station, I am losing Ethernet connection, then I dock it back - and have to restart Opera, because it obviously loses proxy connection, and goes direct.

I hate the new Microsoft-like "O" menu button in the top left.
This is the new Start button for you the netbook generation! :)
Takes one or two clicks more to do same stuff.

Mac version takes too long to start. Although I like the way it scrolls pages.
Smoooth!

So I have taken a look at three more browsers for PC - Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. And here's what I say.

Apple's Safari was my next turn, obviously, for having it on my Mac.
Once again, I was looking for a unified user experience, a browser I can rely on for both Mac and PC. (I am not using those cell phones anymore)

Safari pros:
- works great on a Mac
- works fast on a PC, too
Safari contras:
- has ugly unnatural looks on PC, trying to achieve mac's look with pc's means
- takes too much space in vertical dimension (three lines for my setup, IE8 takes two)
- bookmark sync is a paid option (mobileme.com costs $100/y)
FAIL (as compared to Opera I'm replacing, and the winner)

Google Chrome is very fashionable now, I see it more and more often, especially at web expos, where most of devs are Google-junkies/wannabes. So I took a spin on it and was not impressed...yet? "Yet" is too, the word which comes to mind when I think of Android. But I digress.

Chrome pros:
- fast
- Google-integrated, HTML5 support
Chrome contras:
- system colors are not respected nor used! I am on XP (Silver theme), do not show me bloody blue Vista-like buttons! WTF? Respect my environment, look and color prefs - do not supplant them!
- WTF with fullscreen (F11) mode? I raise the mouse to top bar - and see no menu, no address line only some useless nag?
FAIL ("yet"?)
By the way, "Chrome" is "lame" in Russian.
Not that I hate it, it's just "not there yet".

And the winner is: Mozilla Firefox

Why?

Firefox pros:
- nice look, respects colors and style
- fast
- has free bookmark sync plug-ins
- does not cause "hanging" when waking up
- does not hog CPU on user-switched setups
- most sites are tested on it (although Opera was also OK in that regard for me)
Firefox contras:
- not the same look on mac - but I guess I don't want it to look like Safari on a PC
- there were problems updating it on a mac, "locked" dynlib files in Trash, even after restart
- popular - could be exploited successfully - will need often updates
Well, I guess it still much better on PC than the rest.

It's not the fist time Opera screwes up. But it's time to change.
Thanks for 9.x-10.10 though, it's been a great ride.

Cracking RSA SecurID

Yes, I cracked it! Read on for details.

There are surprisingly few hits on Google, if you search the topic.

So I, having the token, decided to take the matter into my own hands.

First of all, you'll need clean well-lit place and a strong knife.
Click over to Picasa and see the slideshow:

Crack RSA with only hands and a knife

For those who are lazy to go there, the most intriguing part is how easily can some circuitry contacts be exposed, and that means one can temporarily gain possession of your token, run some attacks on it, replace the glued-on stub and you will not notice a shit!

Could this be the reason they've obsoleted those?

In search for ... a better keyboard

Have you noticed how keyboards get smaller and worse, over the years?

My Apple Pro keyboard (1999-2001) from the PowerMac G4 Cube died on me, and suddenly I was in the market for a decent keyboard.

And I did not like what I saw.

Apple have shifted production to a simple piece of aluminum, which fits my kitchen more than my desk (not to say my fingers). Later on, they cut down on this piece of aluminum, getting rid of the numeric pad. These keyboards, being shipped with Mac Pro, it's a pitiful sight now...

Then I found old bookmark to Matias Pro keyboard, but online research told me that they're loud, and have their own quirks.

Knowing Logitech and Microsoft usually make good peripherals, I am looking at their offerings.

What do you use and prefer, guys?

E-mail encryption with FREE certificate

Hi, I've just discovered this interesting offering from DOCOMO:

The only caveat, compared to Thawte's WoT which came way of Dodo:

It does not verify persona.

So, what it's good for, and what - not?
It's still attractive for those who want to play without pay. I believe this case covers 90% or more, however sad that may sound.
It's also good for personal authentication as long as you know that:
(1) e-mail address belongs to an identified person (say, your friend whose e-mail you can positively identify from your previous transactions)
AND
(2) that it's really your friend who's gotten that free DOCOMO offer first.

Because even though your friend still may have access to his e-mail box, so may the bad guy have. And it's not hard for that bad guy to jump first and get that certificate, and peruse it for his deceptive purposes.
There is no persona verification, nobody goes to WoT notary with his passport and another photo Id, so whoever gets that certificate, and has access to the e-mail box (with no SSL used and abundance of free open WiFi it's not hard to do) - can positively forge his identity and make you believe that you are communicating over encrypted channel to your trusted partner.

In other words, "better than nothing", but "nothing for some".
Try it, use it, message me...

Note: did not work in Opera 10.10 (PC), had to use IE

Apple IS going towards video calling, after all!

Exactly as I envisioned 8 months ago, Apple seems to be moving towards a new and worthy accomplishment - getting bloody unfortunate heretofore Video Calling to the masses.

There are news spread around, and for me - that's rigid proof enough.

It would be nice if they expand some 3GPP standards, in part of video codecs - and open those for everybody else.
Such move would give more installed base of "new" video callers, and more chances to "connect people", bringing benefits to CSP.

Knowing Apple's business tactics, though, I find it highly unlikely that they release such feature to non-Apple users.
Most likely only iPad/iPhone users will be able to visually connect with those new features.
Selling more Apple devices is of course more important than "unduly taxing" CSP network.
Apple's got to know by now - they don't like it!

We're about to watch enrollment of a "new" killer app for 3G, folks!
I told you there were only two major ones, and this one was woefully amiss from the great platform.

AOL fixes Sent Items

There's hope to AOL.

They have finally fixed the long-standing, pesky issue with sent e-mails, which they "managed" even for IMAP accounts, by placing them into "Sent" folder.
While that was quite OK for web clients, this functionality posed a problem for signed/encrypted mail, as well as duplication of saved sent e-mails.

I wrote to AOL earlier last year and later in October and 3 months later (today) they do the fix. Hurray!

Hello,
there are some issues in your e-mail service.
More specifically, digitally-signed e-mails become "tampered with" in status, as they are automatically moved BY YOUR SYSTEM (not my e-mail client) into Sent Folder.
I am including one of many such e-mails in attachments.

It is also of note that I previously contacted you about this "auto copy" functionality - this feature is completely unneded on IMAP interface, as most IMAP e-mail client programs are able to perform this on their own.
It is exactly this feature that causes also troubles with signed and encrypted e-mails as I described in first paragraph.

In case you need more info/descriptions, please connect me to developers/admins.
I am a system engineering architect myself, in telecom.

Thank you.

And the response team strikes back:

Dear cubeover,

If you access your email using third party software, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, please read this important message.

We want to inform you of a change to our email infrastructure that will result in copies of sent emails no longer being automatically placed in your Sent folder when sent via third party email software, as of Tuesday, February 2, 2010.

In order for you to continue having your sent emails automatically placed in your Sent folder on February 2, 2010 or later, you will need to make a change in your email software settings no later than February 1, 2010. Please note that you will not be required to enter your AOL login and password as part of this process.

Below are links to help articles on how to update the settings for the most common email software

Outlook 2007

Outlook 2002/2003

Outlook Express

Thunderbird for Windows and Mac

Mail on Mac OS X

Please make the necessary updates as soon as possible.

The infrastructure change we are making will only affect email sent through third party email software. Email sent using AOL software (AOL 9.0, 9.1, 9.5, Desktop), AOL webmail, or a mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone will continue to have copies of sent email placed in the Sent folder.

Thank you for using AOL Mail.

Regards,
The AOL Mail Team

I can only add that of all times I tried to ask Yahoo! Mail team for similar fixes (mostly related to handling of international char encodings), none succeeded.
I got usual third-world support banter instead, and promptly decided to close my Y! account, few years ago.