Saturday, April 20, 2013

Specifications: Correct when writing, Gentle when reading

I got a BlackBerry Z10 a few days ago.

I had not tried to use it as my main phone until yesterday since it needed a MicroSIM and i had a regular one.

Yesterday I got myself a MicroSIM and put it on the device to find out I could not access the 3G data network.

No problem, my operator has a website where you put the make and model of the phone and they send a SMS to the phone that autoconfigures it.
I went there and was surprised to see there was no BlackBerry listed at all.

OK, time to write the APN settings by hand, so I went to the Settings and started to look where to write the APN details, found them and realized they were disabled(greyed out) so I could not write the correct values.

After lots of searching I have come to understand that the phone obeys a indicator of the SIM that can say "I know how to connect to 3G data, no need to letting the user edit it" and when that happens, the BlackBerry Z10 happily complies and locks you out from editing them.

Problem is, my operator SIMs are wrong, they say "I know how to connect to 3G data, no need to letting the user edit it" and then provide wrong data.

And BOOM! I have a nice paperweight worth 600€

BlackBerry fan forums are full of people that say "BlackBerry is just doing what the spec says, blame your operator".

I say to them "I've used that SIM in Apple devices, Samsung devices and Nokia devices and had never any problem connecting to the Internet". Because the manufacturers were smart enough to let me edit the APN settings and write there the correct values if I wanted.

And this brings us to one of the mantras of engineering, be Correct when writing stuff but be Gentle when reading. It's good the BlackBerry browser is following that mantra, otherwise you'd hardly be able to render any webpage.

So people at BlackBerry, please come of your senses and let people edit stuff. This way maybe I'll get to use your device and people around me will see it and will want to buy one.

Otherwise I'll just wait until the Ubuntu Phone is a bit more usable and start using it. It may not be as polished (at the moment) but at least it's open source and I can fix crazy stuff like this.

Update: With BB 10.1.0.1627 I've been able to edit the field and now my 3G data works again

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release - 15 April 2013

We are 59 days away from Beta 1:
* kate has 1 tests that fails
* kde-runtime has 1 test that fail
* kdelibs has 1 test that fails
* kdepim has 8 tests that fail
* kdepim-runtime has 21 tests that fails
* kdepimlibs has 14 tests that fails
* nepomuk-widgets has 1 test that fails
* okteta has 1 test that fails

Everything else that belongs into the 4.11 release is green

You can find the up-to-date info at jenkins http://build.kde.org/view/KDE%20SC%20master/

Saturday, April 06, 2013

Okular welcomes undo/redo for annotations

Thanks to the amazing work of Jon Mease Okular now has undo/redo for annotation editing in master. Give it a go, it's quite cool :)

Now let's see if we can get Jon to do the same for Form editing, everyone give him some love!

Monday, April 01, 2013

builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release - 1 April 2013

We are 73 days away from Beta 1:
* kate has 2 tests that fail (down 2-3 from 2 weeks ago)
* kde-runtime has 1-2 tests that fail (no change)
* kdelibs has 1 test that fails (up 1 from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepim has 7-8 tests that fail (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepim-runtime has 19-22 tests that fail (up 0-3 from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepimlibs has 12-16 tests that fail (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* nepomuk-core has 1 test that fails (down 2 from 2 weeks ago)
* nepomuk-widgets has 1 test that fails (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* okteta has 1 test that fails (stable from 2 weeks ago)

Everything else that belongs into the 4.11 release is green