R.A.W.

E-mail spam on the rise? · 12. August 2006

Recently I have noticed a very large increase in e-mail spam on all public e-mail address that I use regularly. In particular on my gmail address I do not ever delete spam, I simply mark it as read and leave it in the spam folder. Gmail will delete all messages older than 30 days in this folder. This means I can track a moving average of spam messages in my gmail account. The number of messages in this folder quickly plateau’ed at about 100 and remained there for about a year. In the last couple of months however, this number has rapidly increased to its current value of 261. I am starting to track this number in an excel workbook and hopefully I can find a simple means of plotting the number on robwall.com

As an aside, gmail has in my opinion a very good spam detection engine – I seldom get any false negatives although I have gotten a few false positives which is the only thing stopping me saying that it is an excellent engine or the best engine.

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Changes · 8. April 2006

In the words of my brother: “First to the North side, now to the other side”!

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Finding official airport web sites · 19. January 2006

One of the simplest ways of finding official airport web sites and carrier web sites online seems to be one of the least known: the .aero domain. For example to find Dublin, Ireland’s (DUB) airport online, simply go to: www.dub.aero or to find Los Angeles (LAX): www.lax.aero To find carriers, simply use their codes, e.g. British Airways (BA): www.ba.aero Many of the major airports and carriers are available in this way!

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Bluetooth on Windows XP SP2 · 23. December 2005

My recent entry on setting up the Nokia PC Suite on Windows XP SP2 has easily generated the most hits from other people searching for answers on this topic too. It’s good to know that I was not alone in my struggle in configuring Bluetooth. It is a real pity that some (many? – I don’t have that much other experience of Bluetooth technology on computers) is so difficult to configure. Computers have come along way in easing the pain of installing new hardware but they clearly have a long way still to go.

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Nokia PC Suite & Windows XP SP2 · 25. November 2005

After a long running off and on battle with Windows XP SP2, I finally have all of my applications back running on Windows. In particular, a few weeks ago I managed to get my Nokia 7650 connected via my MSI BToes Bluetooth dongle to the Nokia PC Suite software.

Before I upgraded Windows to SP2, I backed up my phone memory and synchronised my contacts and calendar regularly with Outlook. After the upgrade however, I could not get my phone talking to my Bluetooth dongle. I had previously downloaded the driver for SP2 from the MSI website and installed them without success. The solution to my problems turned out to be quite simple. Firstly, I downloaded the complete MSI Bluetooth software 1.4.3.4 (this may not be the appropriate package for you – check the drivers web page for more information on downloading the appropriate version). Install this software as usual. If you try to run it you will get a message about not using an authorised device. There are many references to this message on the web but little in the way of a solution. The solution is to get an authorised security key for your device from MSI. The MSI dongle is based on Widcomm hardware. Widcomm used to administer the delivery of these security keys, however, they have now been taken over and no longer do this. You can get a security key direct from MSI however by filling out their Security Key Form. Follow the instructions on that page to find your dongles BD Address. Finally if you haven’t already uninstalled your Nokia PC Suite, do it now and run the “Nokia Registry Cleaner”: to remove any stale references to the previous PC Suite installation. Reinstall the PC Suite and your data should back up without problems!

I may be the only person still using this phone, however if anyone else who stumbles upon this page is struggling to get this combination working again, I hope it has been some help!

As a side note to this tale, whenever I do finally upgrade my phone again, I will definitely be looking for another Nokia running the Symbian OS. I’ve always found Nokia phones to be more robust and easy to use but Symbian adds a whole new level of power and sophistication to the phone. Recently, however, Nokia made this an even more attractive platform by adding the power of the Python programming language to the operating system (Python for Nokia). The Nokia 7650 is alas too old to run the interpreter but all modern phones are very capable of running Python. Whenever I upgrade I will certainly clear some time for some hacking on my phone!

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