Phone contacts update

Here’s an update to the previous entry regarding losing my phone addressbook. In the Apple Address Book application (in OSX) if you select all the names in the Name column you can right click and export all the vCards in a single file. You can also use the bluetooth option “Send File” to send the .vcf file to the Nokia 6822 and the phone then sees it as a business card that has just arrived and offers to add it to the addressbook.
Unfortunately it only adds the first entry in the file to the addressbook and where the “is a company” option has been ticked in Apple Address Book, it imports the record with an empty name value.

Continue reading

5..4..3..2..1.. Phone contacts are go.. err, gone!

MY 6822 died yesterday, it powered on and then just as it establishes a connection with the Orange network locks up with a message “Contact service”. Yes, that’s right. My fairly new phone.. the Nokia 6822 I’d only had since June. With it went all my phone numbers, text messages and preferences.
I phoned Orange thinking perhaps it had been blocked or there was some kind of technical hiccup at their end and was told it would have to be returned to be fixed. I don’t have their phone insurance scheme as all my previous phones have worked for ages but the customer service guy I spoke to said that they’d replace it under some sales regulations or other, I guess because I’ve only had it a few months.

Continue reading

Graphics for OSX

Just recently I’ve been wanting to do some basic graphics stuff in OSX, copy & paste some bits of image, paint onto the canvas, average run of the mill actions that MS Paint would do easily enough. The problem I’ve found is that OSX seems to lack any kind of simple paint application, sure you can download The GIMP but that’s not the point (and not really very simple, see review below). Apple, if you’re listening, there really should be something along the same lines as MS Paint included with OSX 10.5. Please?

Continue reading

Server hiccups

It seems that every few days something goes wrong with the server. Just this morning it died for some unknown reason and I had to get it rebooted. It was still pinging and services such as pop3/ssh/http would connect but then no banners/prompts etc would appear and the service is unresponsive.
Having looked through a number of logfiles, I noticed that just before the crash, there were a lot of failed SSH login attempts from a few different IPs and having seen this before, figured it was about time I did something about them.

Continue reading

mod_perl & session ids

I’ve been trying out a few things in mod_perl just recently, getting together a small basic framework that handles sessions and generates an entire site (apart from images) from a bunch of Perl modules. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be but I’ve got the basic code working now.
Next step is security of session data.

Continue reading