(it’s the back of an ocarina.)
Tag: blackberry
pretty neat, i guess
Google Mobile Maps’ “My Location” from cell signal triangulation is fairly neat. It’s a few hundred meters off my true location downtown, but good enough if you were completely lost.
how can you have less than one unread?
My blackberry is confused. It really thinks it has -1 unread messages. This creates all sorts of philosophical questions, most of which I’m not equipped to handle.
pocket mail
Gmail works flawlessly on the BlackBerry. Wish I could find a general POP3 client for my other mail…
the commitments
When I was testing BlackBerry typed-alike words (dactonyms?) I found that sqlite was averaging about 1 insert per second. This is by no means good.
It turns out that, under Perl, sqlite auto-commits after every write. This slows things down terribly. Here’s how to fix this:
When opening the database handle, turn AutoCommit off:
my $dbh =
DBI->connect( “dbi:SQLite:bberry2.sqlite”, “”, “”, { AutoCommit => 0 } )
or die “$!”;
Then, only commit occasionally — say every thousand writes:
while ( … ) {
…$id++;
$dbh->commit unless ( $id % 1000 );
…}
$dbh->commit;
It works out about 1000 times quicker this way.
best beat neat nest
Beware, nerdiness follows: I generally like my BlackBerry 7130e, but its multiple letters per key can sometimes give the wrong result. Using word frequency lists from the British National Corpus, sqlite, and way too much programming time, I determined that the key sequence with the most possible word results (81?2) produces best, beat, neat or nest. The device itself suggests also brat and bray, so I should try a longer word list — in my copious free time, of course.
The longest (common words in the corpus) that have the same key sequence are employers and employees, which might briefly cause hilarity in an HR or legal context.
blackberry lost and found
GPS is good. I was walking this huge field, and somewhere in the middle dropped my BlackBerry. I can’t follow tracks for toffee, but with the GPS track map set to high resolution, I found it.
the cry of blackberryschmertz
My Blackberry mail server setup hasn’t been completed yet (it’s quite a shock to be on a computer with nothing above user privileges, I tell you). So I’m getting lots of blackberry.net messages which look a bit like this:
BEGINETP 10
AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!
ENDETP ...
Sums up pretty much how I feel about it: AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!! AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!
first day new job
I had a good day. There was a lot of administrivia, setting up e-mail accounts, form filling, and learning about the network, but that’s all once off. The afternoon was mostly spent fighting with my new BlackBerry (a 7130e, you nerds), which works as a very nice phone, but the e-mail isn’t set up.
My cube has a view, and the transit is great. I’m happy.