Island Linux Bits and Bytes of Technology

I received a text message from Rogers at 2:11pm PST today regarding disabling internet access.

This is the ONLY message I have received regarding the "URGENT Reminder":

In my previous post (http://islandlinux.org/story/rogers-turned-internet-access-my-htc-dream) I explained how I came to find out how my HTC Dream lost the ability to connect to the Internet.

The long story short is that Roger discovered an issue where having the GPS enabled caused 911 calls to fail. Rogers release a patch last week and send a text message to it's users to upgrade. Then suddenly and without warning, at least in my case, Rogers turned off it's data network connection sometime between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.

It turns out that the bug has been know about AND FIXED over 4 months ago. On September 17th 2009 at 14:29:17 GMT Mike Lockwood committed a bug fix for Android 1.5 titled:

THE GPS BUG THAT "FORCED" ROGERS TO SHUT DOWN THE NETWORK CONNECTION HAS BEEN FIXED FOR OVER FOUR MONTHS.

My HTC Dream suddenly, and without warning, lost it's network connection sometime between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. The loss of Internet access caused some significant problems for me.

This happened when I was 300+ kilometers north of Nanaimo in a small community called Port McNeill. The network connection was working fine on Friday afternoon as I used it with Google Maps to find some directions in Parksville.

On Sunday morning around 9:00am I went to access some information online and I could not get a network connection. I had planned on my HTC Dream to provide me with weather notifications and travel directions. It is about a four hour drive from Port McNeill and on Sunday morning the winds were gusting 40 to 50 kilometers per hour.

It was not until I got home and used my home internet connection that I started to piece together what had happened.

It turns out Rogers turned off the network connection deliberately and without notification.

First you will need to install the following packages that Boxee needs to run, launch a terminal and run the following command:

To install Boxee on Ubuntu 9.10 first download Boxee from here (32-bit) or here (64-bit).

UTF-8 is hell. I have run into problems with UTF-8 before (see Migrating MySQL to UTF-8 encoding).

I moved a site that was displaying fine from an old Apache server to a new Apache2 server and quickly identified that the Apache2 server was displaying odd characters.

The site is running a PHP application with a MySQL backend. The MySQL database is using latin1_swedish_ci character encoding. The old site was displaying correctly. Both the new and old site are using the same database.

So what was going on?

Configuring Exim to use Gmail as the outgoing SMTP server is simple. This HOWTO will walk you through installing, configuring and routing email thru Gmail for exim.

The first step is to install exim4. Launch terminal and:

Run the following command to configure exim4:

Set the following:

General type of mail configuration: mail sent by smarthost; no local mail 
System mail name: (default)

The Sierra Wireless USB 598 currently offered through Telus *almost* works on Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box. A Windows or Mac box is needed to install the "Watcher" program that allows for the automatic online configuration of the Sierra Wireless USB 598. Aside from the requirement of Windows/Mac the card was immediately picked up and ready to go.

I was running into an issue with a vserver where the disk space usage was at 23% but I was getting a 'No space left on device' error message. I run vserver with 12 virtual servers and none of the other servers exhibited the same behavior.

Rogers is bringing the HTC Dream to Canada next month. As I mentioned in HTC Magic Reviewed I can not wait to get my hands on the Google Android operating system.

The HTC Dream is exactly the same as the T-Mobile G1. According to an article by Rob Jackson (HTC Dream vs. T-Mobile G1)T-Mobile rebranded the HTC Dream as the T-Mobile G1 to "cash in on the idea of the '1rst Google Phone' - or G1". Check out the HTC Dream specifications versus the T-Mobile G1.

The reviews of the HTC Dream include quotes such as:

• "The G1(HTC Dream) isn’t going to blow anyone’s mind right out of the gate." - Engadet
• "Unfortunately the Dream can't decide whether it's a touchscreen device or not." - The Sydney Morning Herald
• "Better Wait for HTC Magic, Forget HTC Dream" - wassup

Enough said. The HTC Magic is a better choice.

The HTC Magic is coming to Canada next month. I am excited by this new "smart phone" (aka mini-computer) and can't wait to get my hands on the Google Android operating system. All reviews are positive and position the HTC Magic as an open-source competitor to Apple's iPhone.

This phone is running Google Android 1.5 (nicknamed Cupcake) and boasts many improvements. For a detailed and informative review check out this HTC Magic review. For the technically inclined here are the HTC Magic Specifications.

Personally I would rather wait for some more phone choices before committing to a smart-phone and a plan. If I had to choose now I would take the HTC Magic over the HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1, see HTC Dream Reviewed).