406 Not Acceptable

It seems there are a number of issues with Aircrack on the N900. Whilst you can sniff packets and sometimes injection may be successful; many other features do not work.

This looked to be an early success for the the N900. Sadly, aircrack is not that useful at the moment. As it sees every network as being on channel 6. Airodump-ng does not work on the latest SVN version; unless you are actually connected to the network (which renders it pointless.)

Before I go testing other utilities on the N900 I really need to flash my device. For no apparent reason I did not get the PR1.01 update pushed to my device; so I have had to make do with a manual update using apt. This has left my N900 in a weird state. All my applications are working with PR1.1 features (e.g. rotation, Ovi store) but my device reports as using PR1.0

Merry Christmas!

After waiting for what seemed like an eternaty, I recieved by Nokia N900 in the post on tuesday. I was using a G1 beforehand, and the N900 does a good job of killing my interest in Android!

First, let me start with something that has been worrying many people eyeing the N900: the size. From previews, the size and weight were frowned apon. To be honest, neither is an issue. The N900 is pretty much the same size as the G1. In fact I use my G1’s carry case for my N900! Whilst a collegue noticed the weight of the device when looking at it, I don’t really notice any difference in comarison to my G1.

Next up is the touchscreen, it’s resistive, but a very good one. I would say the N900 sets the benchmark for all other resistive screens to be measured against. Coming from a G1 I did notice you either have to push a little more or tilt your finger to use the tip or the edge — rather than the pad. Once you have the technique down it becomes second nature and is just as good as a capactive screen. To be honest, i used the same technique when trying to select small links on my G1. The resistive screen demonstrates superior prescision and is far better at dealing with small links/menus. Another, although rarely used in my case, benefit is the stylus; which helps when using debian applications.

I don’t think the keyboard is an improvement on the G1’s. The keys feel too close and the lack of rows does slow me down; although, the predictive text implementation is outstanding.

Maemo itself, feels much more like a real linux distro than android ever did. That’s probably because it is one! Already real linux applications are being ported, many of which will never see light on Android unless there are substantial changes to the platform.

This post is already getting wordy! I’ll post some more impressions later.

Today I realised how strong a hold caffeine has on me. I have gone cold turkey on the drug before, but I’ve never felt as bad as I have today.

After 10 am this morning the dreaded caffeine headache hit me, the aspirin could not hold it back! I felt horrible all day, I just needed a quick coffee… but I knew that would be giving up early.

By 2 pm I started to feel like I needed to go to sleep. That just shows how much caffeine has been propping me up these last few weeks!

The plight continues aided by a ton of caffeine free diet coke, hehe.

I mentioned previously that the site would be moving to a new host, Linode. Well I can now confirm that everything has worked out fine and for all the hard work I’ve treated this place to a new lick of paint. I hope you like the new look! The site loads faster for me, so I hope that’s the case for everyone (my 3 avid readers.)

I have copied across all the articles from Tech-Rant, as I plan on deleting the site. I know Google penalizes duplicate content, but the old site should disappear in a few months. I have FINALLY found a download manger for Wordpress, so the old downloads database can be moved here too. I guess the downloads will work a lot better now they are supported by 25Mbit of bandwidth, instead of whatever could be salvaged from the line at Dreamhost. I’ve kept all my domain names with Dreamhost, they never caused me any problems so I felt like keeping some business with them.

The SpeedForever Trackmania server is also being hosted here; although, that ran fine on my home connection.

Hopefully I will try to post more often, even if I can just schedule some dull posts here and there.

Work really has been taking up my time recently. At first I was commuting for 3 and a bit hours a day, which got VERY tiring. So I’ve moved into a new place, but I still find myself driving home at the weekends (can’t find a launderette… so sue me! On top of all this, I’ve had to do a number of trips to Ikea for furnishing and I’ve found Ikea shopping/DIYing to be rather time consuming

Thus, I’ve had very little free time for here…

After shockingly noticing that I haven’t posted in december, I thought it would be best to quickly do one!

I don’t have much to do until I start my job in December and once that starts I’ll be wasting around 2 and a half hours commuting everyday. For some reason, when I have nothing to do I don’t post here… not sure what that’s about!

Have a happy new year!

A few days later and I seem to have converted two job interviews into two job offers. So my current interview to offer rate is around 71% Not bad! I’ve practically handed in my notice (basically I just mentioned that I have offers and will be accepting one.)

Not 100% on which offer I’ll take. One is programming, which is what I want to do; however, it doesn’t pay that much (for a programming job) and would require me to relocate (and pay rent!) I was told on the phone that I had a very well on the interview and had exceptional assessment marks and that they really wanted me; so perhaps there is potential for a quick ascent within the company. To be fair, after a year with them I could be applying and getting jobs that pay £5-10k more; and they probably know this too!

The other is local so I can continue to sponge a free room for a while and get rich. The downside being it’s not an IT job, so I don’t get the magic of ‘experience’.

I am still at my current borefest for a few more days, so I can continue to post somewhat frequently. I then will have some days off, which probably means I won’t post here… I am still working on my ArrayList implementation, so I can get that finished soon (or not!) At the moment it is just a dynamic array, but I feel like using index list; which should give it some more speed… Or I could even make it use a tree architecture…

Tomorrow morning I have to drive my father to Manchester airport by 7am and then drive back to Alfreton by 9am… ouch. I know it takes an hour and a half to drive to Stockport from where I am, but it should be atleast 20 minutes more to the airport. So that means a 5am start and leaves a short period for me to drive to work… Then I have to deal with an 8 hour day of crummy work. I snuck portable Firefox, Notepad++, and Minesweeper onto the work machines via my now ‘permanently attached’ USB stick. Really needed something to do! It’s rather shocking how bad Firefox 3 ran on a P3 machine with 128mb of ram, my eee used to run it better! I am stuck with only one tab…

I’ve again looked at the blog stats after posting some technical pieces and found they do bring the visitors along. So I’ll be mixing ‘normal’ posts like these alongside some techy stuff.

Maybe I should get some sleep

Had an interview in Stockport today, which I found went rather well. So hopefully I now have my foot in the door… The job doesn’t really pay that well, but hopefully it will later down the line!

I had another interview on Thursday, which didn’t go as well as my preparation wasn’t as thorough. I made myself a 2 page ‘interview cheat sheet’ based on the most popular interview questions. I felt this really helped and will probably come in handy another day. I’ll be really happy to get out of the POS boring job I currently have. I can’t believe how crummy it is working in a call centre! It does help with the ‘give an example where you used your customer service/communication skills’ style of question though!

Got to drop off my dad at the airport at 6/7 am on Monday, not really happy about that. I don’t know my schedule until tomorrow, so for all I know I might be expected at 8am!!!