After too many pattern attempts you're greeted with a form prompting for your Gmail email address and password in order to unlock the phone.
No problems! I enter said credentials, hit enter, and... Bzzzt. Incorrect email/password. I try it again, but still no cigar.
So I jump on my Mac and hit Gmail with what I thought was my email and password and voila it let's me in. Great, I now have a phone that I can't unlock. Long story short, I'm not the only one with this problem, and there's a fair few suggestions (including doing a factory reset) to overcome this bug.
As a last ditch effort, before I go down the factory reset path, I found one solution which was to use the word "null" as the password along with your Gmail address as the username, pretty sceptical of it myself but no harm in trying.
It actually worked.
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I like keeping things clean, simple, and organised. So much so, I have only a few things on my work desk at home. Occasionally, there'll be a notepad/magazine/letters that find it's way there, but they're usually moved to the bookshelf behind me pretty quickly.
Click through the photo for the breakdown of components on my desk. The wall as you can see is quite bare, I'm planning on putting up a few prints I purchased from Paris years ago to spruce it up a little.
Firstly, I purchase a fair amount of technical books, and a fair amount of them from the Pragmatic Programmers. Typically I would purchase the paper book and eBook bundle together, which is significantly more expensive combined with shipping to Australia. With having a Kindle however I'll only be making paper book purchases if only an eBook version isn't available.
So onto the device itself.
I love the size and weight of the device, it's very portable and also has amazing battery life. I take it to work everyday, and bring it out every so often if I'm at a cafe and want to do some occasional reading. The auto-bookmarking feature is great as it remembers where you are up to for each book automatically. The e-ink screen is just great for reading, I've had no problems reading from the device outside in sunlight and it's very easy on the eyes.
The device also supports PDF documents but I've found that some of the books that I have in PDF format I'm unable to resize the text, the software control on the device is greyed out so I'm assuming it's only available for the mobi format of documents.
My main purpose for the Kindle is to, obviously, read books. There's an upcoming firmware upgrade that adds Twitter and Facebook integration, to which if I had the option to not install I would do so. I don't need the distraction and I'm not sure how well executed it may be given the e-ink screen and slow refresh of the screen.
There is an mp3 player but there's no on screen controls, to play, pause, and skip a track is done by combining certain keystrokes. Again, I don't think this is a necessary inclusion for the device.The built in experimental browser is good enough to read a text based website, and if you can.
All in all, I think it truly is a great device to do what's it intended for, reading. I do think that I'll also be purchasing and iPad when it's released but for reading books I'm fairly confident that's an exercise with the Kindle.
]]>Feature wise it's very thin, it really is just a quick way to throw up a blog post without much other information such as tagging and categories.
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TextPad has a feature called Clip Libraries, which basically is a library of code snippets. Each snippet is identified by a short name and the full code (of the actual snippet). Once the short name is double-clicked, the expanded code snippet is placed at the location of the cursor.
Out of the box TextPad provide a handful of these libraries, such as SMS Texting, HTML Characters, and Control Characters to name but a few.
As I previously wrote, I end up writing most of my code in a plain text editor (rather than a WYSIWYG editor). The other side of the story is that you need to remember all of the available elements of the language, which really isn't terribly difficult for HTML, but when it comes to doctype's I always seem to draw a blank!
When I was to start a new HTML document, and in need of a doctype, I would end up going to a site in one of my bookmarks, viewing source, and copying the doctype. Works most of the time if I got the site correct for which doctype I wanted to use! So, rather than relying upon guess work I ended up writing a Clip Library for HTML doctype's.
The process is fairly straightforward, and it really only involved a few minutes of tinkering with one of the existing libraries and searching for the doctype's.
Once you download the HTML Doctype Clip Library below simply save the file into the user folder for your clip libraries. You can find this by going to Configure | Preferences menu, then click through to Folders | Clip Library and note the folder path. On my Windows 7 system it's located in C:\Users\serdar\App Data\Roaming\Helios\Textpad\5.0\ and place the file in there. You may have to show hidden files in Windows Explorer to see the App Data folder.
Do not save the file where the default Clip Libraries are, which would be in the Program Files\TextPad\Sample folder, as the next time you restart your machine you'll see that you're custom libraries would have disappeared!
To remind myself of writing more throughout the year I signed up to Project 52, I won't rehash the purpose of the program but do expect a blog post at least every week of this year.
]]>So it's time to dust off the cobwebs and give this weblog a bit of a tune up!
First up, two quick changes, one being to the about page to reflect some new items and remove what is now inaccurate. Yes, a new profile picture is on the cards as well!
Secondly, the homepage now lists the last 5 published items in contrast to the last item that use to be published. This should liven things up a little as I plan on writing a little more than I did last year.
However, for the last several weeks, maybe even months, the apple.com homepage has been featuring the new iMac with a desktop photo of a scene from the new Star Trek movie. Every time I see this, I want to go out and watch the movie. Of course, on a Mac as well.
Yesterday I finally succumbed to the marketing and hired the blu-ray version from my local Blockbuster. I have to say I did have my doubts about whether or not I'll actually watch it till the end, however, I ended up finding it to be quite engaging and thought the performance of "Sylar" as Spock was what really made the movie.
I haven't read any reviews so not sure on what the general consensus or what the "trekkies" thought of the movie but it's definitely one that I'll look forward to owning.
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]]>Armed with only the basics of Cloud architecture the main takeaway for me, as a developer, was that basically the tools and other material that I use in my day-to-day job will have to suffice, as there is basically a lack of Cloud-aware tools available. The nature of the beast also makes building such tools non-trivial. However, I'm sure that as it becomes more and more mainstream we'll start to see some more tools becoming available.
Photos of the event can be found here on my Flickr stream.
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