03 Aug 10 Docking the Open Office Styles Panel
One of the weirdest artifacts about Open Office has to be the Styles and Formatting panel. It’s a panel right? Like the one for tables that appear when your cursor is placed inside a table cell. So, it should like behave like them when you drag it to the edge of the window and dock to that edge right? Strangely enough it doesn’t. And don’t bother adjusting your mouse because you thought “I must have not dragged the panel correctly.”
The right way to dock this panel to your document window is to hold down the Control button on your keyboard and double-click on an area of the panel. Take note to do so on an area of the panel – I don’t think it will work if you double-clicked on a button.
After the panel is docked, you can then drag to dock at a different side of the window. To undock the panel, simply drag it away from the side towards the centre.
15 Jun 10 My Nexus One Can Finally Send MMS!
After much tribulation, I finally got my phone to send MMS. It’s running on the M1 network.
I had called the helpdesk and searched the forum to no avail until a user named “trinityb4″ in the Google forum suggested a novel approach – resetting to default. After a reboot, voila!
So basically, the settings for M1 MMS are:
Name: M1 MMS
APN: miworld
Proxy: 172.016.14.10
Port: 8081
Username: 65 and your phone number
Password:user123
Server: http://mmsgw:8002
MMSC: http://mmsgw:8002
MMS proxy: 172.16.14.10
MMS port: 8080
MCC: 525
MNC: 03
Authentication type: PAP
APN type: mms
On that note, here is a link to the three telcos’ Internet APN settings on Lester Chan’s blog. For posterity’s sake, here are the settings (copied from the link):
Starhub
name: Starhub Internet
APN: shwapint
username: (blank)
password: (blank)
M1
name: M1 Internet
APN: sunsurf
username: 65
password: user123
SingTel
name: SingTel Internet
APN: internet
username: 65IDEAS (or blank)
password: IDEAS (or blank)
22 Mar 10 jQuery Plugin for Tabs (Tabber Plugin)
I developed a custom plug-in for jQuery that creates a tab widget which can contain practically anything it. It’s a small, lightweight plugin weighing in at 1.3kB uncompressed. You can download the Javascript here and the CSS here.
11 Mar 10 Starhub Tweeting & M1 Messing
It’s nice to have Starhub respond to a Twit when you post an issue related to its broadband connectivity. Although the problem is likely to have been resolved by the time I got the direct message (DM), it’s nice to know that they are listening.
Compare this experience with what I had with M1. Just a couple of days ago, I received my phone bill from M1 with over a hundred dollars charge to mostly my data charges. This is the second time I’ve got such an amount from M1 when previously my bills were around $30. You see, just two months ago, I activated a 1GB BlackBerry plan with M1.
The first month I got the bill, I figured, “Hey, it could be that the first month I choke up extraordinary charges becase I had more to transfer.” But when the second bill came, I guessed something was wrong. So I called the helpline. The first person I got through told me that I was using the wrong APN so that’s why the data charges were not counted as part of the BlackBerry data package. Fine, so I was then transferred to the technical helpdesk who then told me that third party applications cannot and will not count towards the BlackBerry data. I was flabbergasted! When I got the plan, no M1 personnel told me that third party applications on a bloody BlackBerry cannot use the BlackBerry data plan. Furthermore, information given by the customer service officer and the helpdesk person were completely different!
Right. So I switched from the BlackBerry plan to a normal data plan. I figured that since I don’t have much use for push mail and BlackBerry Maps (I use Google Maps), might as well change. To their credit, M1 did not charge me for the early termination of my BlackBerry plan which was meant to run for at least three months.
After the plan has been switched, my BlackBerry became bricked. Why? According to their helpdesk, it seems that the service books that were installed in the BlackBerry causes it not to be able to communicate with the normal APN to transfer data. Now, I know this is no fault of M1, but shouldn’t the customer support officer advise me on this? The only reason I can think of is that the person didn’t even know this. I only got to know this when I got through to their technical helpdesk.
The only recourse that I had, aside from throwing down another few hundred bucks for another smartphone, is to restore the BlackBerry to the factory settings. I was hoping this will clear the service books and let my phone use the normal data plan again.
Fortunately, it worked. For now. I’ll wait until the next bill comes and see what happens. This has been a bad experience for me with M1 and BlackBerry phones. I don’t think I’ll ever get another BlackBerry again. EVER.
11 Mar 10 CSS Best Practices
As mentioned before in earlier posts, I’m involved in a Web application development project. Recently I had to do some testing on the Web application (although it’s barely beta ready, but that’s a different story). During the testing process, I’ve got to see for myself the implications of not incorporating scalability designs early on into the code.
This post will take a simplistic approach to look at why load times can be improved by consolidating CSS files. At the same time, I will also take a look at naming CSS selectors as the approach to consolidating CSS. By taking a consistent approach to naming CSS selectors and organising the selectors in a structured manner in CSS files, we can minimise the number of CSS files.
Tags: css
28 Feb 10 Alpha, Beta, … What’s Next?
This question has always been on my mind. The best answer I’ve found so far and is reasonably credible can be found at http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080912142314AAZdlh9
Basically it follows the Greek alphabet:
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
Zeta
Eta
Theta
Iota
Kappa
Lambda
Mu
Nu
Xi
Omicron
Pi
Rho
Sigma
Tau
Upsilon
Phi
Chi
Psi
Omega
16 Dec 09 Why I don’t join Facebook
Reading this post (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/121409-bank-antifraud-measures.html) confirms my decision not to join Facebook a correct one. Hell, if some corporate entity knows about your daughter-in-law, you should be scared!
01 Dec 09 Ever Heard of the Crunchpad?
It was supposed to be a headline-worthy cooperation between the world’s arguably most popular tech blog and a Singapore startup. Now it’s all going downhill. Why and how it came to this stage nobody will know for sure, as Arrington puts it, “Ultimately there are two sides to every story…”
But, if it were the case as Arrington described, the “shareholders” deserve this ending. Why squander away a chance to launch a product in a larger market by leveraging on a famed tech blog’s name and instead choose to have the whole of a much smaller pie? If greed was really the cause, I hope Arrington wins the suits against Fusion Garage.
But Fusion Garage deserves a chance to voice their side of the story. Maybe we’ll get to see something on Straits Times to hear from them what exactly transpired. I hope it’s not because they are unable to produce the software – I really look forward to a successful Singapore tech startup make good internationally.
30 Nov 09 Animal Swapping Pain
The Facebook game Animal Swapping has caused me much anguish in my bid to best everyone. Now, I’m only third place. It took me a long time to get there and recently I’m reminded why I don’t want to play it anymore.
Image Overlay Error
Some time into the game, I always encounter this error where two animals will overlap and that makes it difficult to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it’s due to me using Linux, but it’s a good excuse to say why I can’t be first =P
Tags: facebook
28 Nov 09 Weird Problem with WordPress
When I was writing my post “Setting a Static IP Address in Ubuntu“, I encountered a strange problem.
In the post I was describing the location of of a directory and it contained the following:
/ etc/network
Notice that there is a space between the word “etc” and the preceding forward slash? If I were remove the space between these two characters, I will get the following error message when I preview or publish the post:
Method Not Implemented
POST to /wordpress/wp-admin/post.php not supported.
I don’t know if this is an isolated incident or a Wordpress vulnerability. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this problem.
