Telling. 29 (Commando) Light Regiment RA haul a 105mm gun by hand up a rock pinnacle in Afghanistan, to a feature called Roshan Tower. Yes, Roshan as in the mobile phone operator. We can offer you 900MHz GSM service, and some things that go with it, but far from all of them, or we can…
Read More onwards and upwardsHere are two news stories whose contrast should tell you a lot, via Charlie Stross. Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack: INTELLIGENCE chiefs have warned that China may have gained the capability to shut down Britain by crippling its telecoms and utilities. They have told ministers of their fears that equipment installed by Huawei, the…
Read More spybreak!I’ve put my mobile version of FixMyStreet for Symbian S60 devices up on SourceForge at fixmys60.sourceforge.net. You can check out the source code from SourceForge’s subversion repository by doing “svn co https://fixmys60.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fixmys60 fixmys60” or whatever your client likes. The current version requires GPS to work and sends the reports to Matthew Somerville’s test FMS server…
Read More FixMyS60I often miss chunks of the humour at the Stiftung because I would rather do almost anything than watch US business-spot TV news. If you wanted to hide something from me, you could do worse than put it next to a TV tuned to CNBC. But I think I experienced something of the culture the…
Read More talking without speaking; speaking without talkingIn which the Database nearly got me. So I went to 3GSM (sorry, sorry, Mobile World Congress). Now, these things are usually fairly good previews of the ID-card future – constant RFID-tag badging, lists everyone in the world is either on or they aren’t, security theatre aplenty. On this occasion, when I visited the registration…
Read More a terrible experience with extremely dangerous bugsI may not be blogging 3GSM for this blog, but you can look at the pictures on Flickr, here.
Read More photosA total disjuncture between cost and value; such was the problem facing Gorbachev. Consider this; Pajamas Media, that heroic attempt to refute the principle that putting 15 idiots around a table gives you the average of their intelligence, not the sum, is reorganising as a subscription video site. You will be able to pay $15…
Read More stupidity quantifiedI’m not sure what Jaap de Hoop Schepper was going on about here, but I’m slightly distressed that people are *still* being all impressed that there are mobile phones in Afghanistan/Iraq; someone even brought this up for John McCain last year. Roshan has been going for what, five years now? And, of course, the kind…
Read More probably better than a snarky blog postNeed to get contacts out of a Nokia phone and into something else? There are various standard things – the “switch mode” on the newer ones may help. But the PC Suite client (which still only seems to exist for Windows) doesn’t let you export data from the phone as anything but a .nbu (Nokia…
Read More getting contacts from an .nbu fileOK, so I was feeling sufficiently foolish to try and install the all-new version of Python for Symbian S60 phones. Not least because of rumours that things like the Location API (i.e. “all the interesting or useful stuff”) have been liberated from the finger-waggy signing process… Unfortunately, Nokia has shipped it without completing the same…
Read More Nokia Software Distribution FAIL