Real World Computing

If you've got a gmail account, then you really ought to have the Google Chat facility loaded on your blackberry. Here's how; Go to the Browser and enter; http://www.blackberry.com/googletalk Scroll down the page until you find a button marked Download and click it. Choose your language and then click Next Scroll to the end of the terms and conditions and click the option button marked (o) I Accept and then click Next . The application will then start to download. It should take about one minute. At the successful install dialog, click Ok For some reason, the install drops you back in the browser. Click the blackberry button and choose close. You'll find the icon in the downloads folder, though you might want to move it to home.

Installing the Installer Go to the Browser and enter; http://www.google.com/mobile Scroll down the page until you find a link marked Download Google Mobile App Click on the link to Download and install it. At the end of the install, you can run it automatically. If you don't choose to run it immediately, you can find it later by pressing the blackberry button then scrolling to (and clicking on) the downloads button . The app is marked with a red G Installing and Accessing Components The google app is quite bare looking with greyed out icons for Gmail, maps and news. Go to each greyed out icon and click on it. It will install automatically (unless it's a web application, in which case it will just open). After install, you'll be asked if you want to grant these applications trusted status . If you don't, they won't work so I guess you need to. In terms of application permissions, allowing http to google.com is probably sufficient in most cases. Not general http. T...

Today, I got a new Blackberry Bold 9000, so there's probably going to be a flurry of Blackberry related posts as I try to install stuff on it. The Blackberry Bold seems to ship with a 1GB media card, which really isn't enough for serious use. This procedure allows you to replace the card would one that is of a decent size. Getting the Old Card out and the New One In On the left-hand side of the blackberry about in line with the Q key, there is a small door with a picture of a card on it. This door opens from the bottom (camera side) of the blackberry upwards. Once opened, you should be able to see the card in the slot. Do not attempt to use tweezers to pull the card out as this will damage the blackberry. Instead use a finger or pen push the card in further. The slot is spring-loaded and the card should pop out part way. From here you should be able to grab it, but if not, it's safe to use tweezers at this point. If you find yourself having difficulty at this stage, try ...

I've recently become aware of one of Australia's large Notes/Domino clients moving to the exchange platform and have been thinking about what that move, in these troubled times says about their corporate direction and their local Notes/Domino support. Such a move could have been forgiven about three years ago when IBM was still floundering in it's Domino roadmap. At the time, it may even have seemed to make good business sense but the computing landscape has changed drastically over the last few years and Google, Apple and IBM have all emerged as leaders, leaving Microsoft behind. Why do People Migrate? So what are the real reasons behind migrations. I suspect that many are due to the defective notion that "nobody ever gets sacked for buying Microsoft" and others are due to belief in Microsoft's FUD (fear, uncertainity and disaster) campaigns. How anyone could actually believe that marketing tripe is beyond me but since there are still people who think tha...

Disclaimer: I started writing a Domino-related post today but after a good opening paragraph, it tipped into Microsoft territory and got too long. As a result, I decided to cover the Microsoft stuff here and keep the Domino post for later. I've tried to keep this blog relatively non-political (computer politics) but sometimes it just doesn't work. Please forgive me if this comes over as a bit of a rant. If you're a big Microsoft supporter, it's possibly better if you don't read this one. For quite a while now, a lot of systems migrations have been driven by the adage " Nobody ever gets sacked for buying Microsoft ". I've always considered this to be a cowardly practice in the IT world driven by the fact that many mid to high level managers really aren't able to make technology decisions by themselves - and yet, they're often afraid to ask their own people for advice. Once, it may even have made business sense of a sort but the computing ...

Every vendor makes UI mistakes but usually the guys at Google are pretty spot on. Unfortunately their recent idea, to put tabs down the left hand side of the iGoogle interface backfired pretty badly and the forums at Google are still buzzing over the problem. Funnily enough, I asked nicely and after a little while (a couple of weeks), my iGoogle page reverted to normal. I thought that Google had stopped the "experiment" but apparently it's still continuing for some people. In fact, worse; there rumours that it's about to start up again. If you're one of the people affected, you might want to have a look at this; http://manfre.net/project/819/reverting-google-s-personalized-homepage Someone has gotten so frustrated with the whole thing that they've created a GreaseMonkey script to fix it. If anyone from Google is reading; The fact that people are starting to write their own scripts to fix a UI issue is as good an indication as any that the changes are unwan...

The Importance of Social Bookmarking It's taken me quite a while to get my head around how the whole Web 2.0 and Social Networking thing hangs together but I think I've got it now and at some point, I might even blog about it and try to explain it in lay-terms. Not this post though. What I will say though is that Social Bookmarking is one of the most important parts of the whole thing and that it's not enough to presume that every blog you read will have (hopefully) social bookmarking buttons below the post. Shareaholic You need to be able to social bookmark from anywhere on the web. That's where the Shareaholic Add-In for Firefox comes in. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457 This add-in sits on your browser, near the stop, refresh and home buttons and instantly gives you the ability to post pages, links and reviews to a variety of sources including; digg, delicious, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodl...

Ok, before everyone starts jumping on me for this, I'm talking about the need for our individual PCs to be processing this sort of stuff. Recent Issues - Scanning I've been finding myself increasingly turning McAfee's services off in order to do simple tasks without massive interference. It's a well known and demonstrated fact that applications which use a lot of small files, like the new version of the Notes client (the Eclipse version) do not run happily with Anti-Virus. Why? Because everytime they pick up a file to execute it, the Anti-Virus app "snatches it off them for a look". In the days of large applications, the anti-virus would simply scan a massive EXE file once and then move on. That's no longer the case. Last Friday, I was trying to download some things from the IBM site using their "Download Director" facility. McAfee seized the Java applet and took so long to scan it that it kept timing out. In the end, the only way I could dow...