Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

So I got a new phone before leaving Denmark for vacation in the States. MarkJ posted a comment to that post detailing some problems he has experienced with the phone, namely that it misses phone calls and voice mail notifications. I haven’t had that problem with my phone, but I have experienced that same problem with other phones. Both my Qtek 9090 and my Imate JasJar has had similar problems. Sometimes you wouldn’t get calls of SMS (Text Messages) before you yourself made a call or send an SMS, after which all of sudden it would pour in with messages and sometimes missed calls notifications. Weird! The commonality between the phones is of course that they run Windows Mobile. But apparently these phones aren’t the only ones with these problems. During the time I used the JasJar it got a problem with the headphone jack getting stuck. Therefore I borrowed a phone from my friend Tais – a Nokia — and lo and behold I sometimes had the same problems with missed calls. Another friend of mine (Lars) has had the same problems with both Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones and on a completely differnent Tele ISP than me.

So what seems to be the problem? I don’t know but I have a theory. I think that sometimes the phone gets disconnected from the network, but the phone doesn’t realize this; it still thinks its connected. Because the network thinks the phone is disconnected it doesn’t forward calls and SMS’es to it. Then when you send an SMS or makes a call, the phone connects directly and the network finds that the phone is online again, therefore pushing the SMS’es and calls to the phone. I don’t know what makes this disconnection of the phone from the network, maybe heavy load. But nevertheless it sucks!

Anyway, after returning to Denmark I found out that a lot of people had send me SMS’es while I was away, but I hadn’t received most of them. MarkJ is in the States, and reports these problems, I too was in the States and experiencing SMS receival problems. Maybe there’s a problem with the phone in the US?
Scouting the net I found this post on MoDaCo’s forums:

Thats what HTC sent me today via mail … 

“We are indeed aware of the issue, and it is mainly to do with compatibility with the 850/1900 MHz bands in North America, but you should not experience this issue anywhere else.

There may be an update available at some point in the future which addresses this, but first will be a dedicated North American version of the 8500, which will solve the problem for our North American customers.

Any update would take the form of a ROM update which would completely wipe the device.”

This totally sucks! Especially because I’m going back to the States in 2 weeks. This’ll totally render my phone useless until they manage to get an update out, which could take months. I think my best bet will be to take my Imate JasJar with me, at least that one works for sure.

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Just a couple of random musings. I checked out Sapphire in Steel’s website, and they’ve released a new beta which includes RoR support. There’s even a video up there, that re-records the infamous blog creating video tutorial done by David H. It looks very cool!

And my brother pointed me at Cubicle Wars 2006. Funny video!

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Late monday evening I returned from vacation in the States. It’s been a great 3 weeks! During which a lot has happened. We started off by visiting friends in Delaware on the East Coast. While staying here we also visited New York, and drove to West Virginia to see my new university: WVU. With 2 weeks left we catched a plane from JFK to San Francisco, where a rental car waited. It was a Pontiac Montana SV6. In this we drove to Las Vegas, saw Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon, Santa Barbara, Solvang. Drove up the coast via Highway 1, ending in Vallejo, where we visited Sonoma Valley and Napa Valley. Lastly we had some days in San Francisco before flying home via Munich and Copenhagen.

Of course a lot more has happened than what I’ve fitted into the above single paragraph. I guess I’ll leave it to later installments to write about it. Suffice to say we have 1340 pictures totalling at 1,5 gigabytes.

Returning from the US you cannot help but feel a bit bummed. Stores are not open 24/7. There’s not a Starbucks on every corner, and fast food isn’t readily available when you want it. The Coca Cola price is higher, no re-fills. As I drove to the baker this morning I found myself wanting to drive by a Starbucks to pick up a tall caffe americano. I guess it’s a good thing I’ll be returning to the States soon…
As a sidenote to that, Mads – a fellow software engineering student of mine at AAU, is taking his 9th semester in Australia. He blogs about that, and from what I’ve read he seems to have settled in rather nicely downunder (check out his references to beer). Anwyay, looking forward to my stay at WVU, after having visited the campus it all seems so much closer now. And for the date minded: I’ll be leaving for the US on August 11th.

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Tomorrow morning at 0740 me and my family will depart from Aalborg Lufthavn beginning a 3 week long vacation in the States. First we’ll visit friends on the East Coast for little over a week, then we’ll fly to San Francisco, where a rental car waits for us. We’ll drive to Yosemite, Las Vegas, and back to the coast above Los Angeles. We’ll drive up the coast, and see Solvang – the Danish Village – possibly Hearst Castle, visit Monterey, Carmel, and drive the 17 mile drive around Pebble Beach. Finally we’ll end in San Francisco where we’ll spend some days, before the big flight home.
It’s going to be a blast!
While on the East Coast we’re also planning on visiting West Virginia University, to check it out.

So don’t expect much from here, and until I get back: have a great summer!

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I’d like some ability to track the comments I make on posts on blogs, and get notified when others reply. So I can continue to be a part of the conversation. Currently when I make a comment, I need to remember I did and on what post I commented and then continually return to the site to make sure I get the replies. It would be nice if I could track it from my news aggregator (RSS Bandit).
I haven’t been able to find a solution that solves my problem. I looked a bit into CoComments but in order for that to work everybody has to use it, which is a kinda lame solution.
However, I’ve been thinking about another solution. Some blogs utilize the CommentAPI, which adds XML tags to your feed for each post. The interesting tag is the wfw:commentRss which points to a url containing a feed for all the comments to that post. So how about making a plugin using the IBlogExtension (which RSS Bandit supports) that enables you to subscribe to these comment feeds? You could right click a post, select “Track comments” and the aggregator would subscribe to the feed placing it in a “Tracked Conversations” folder. This shouldn’t be hard to do, so I’ll probably do it some time, and blog the results.
Other users of RSS Bandit discussed comment tracking on Dare Obasanjo’s blog regarding the Jubilee release. A couple of sites (TechMeme, Megite, and TailRank) are also mentioned, I should probably look into them…

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