Category: Communication

Quassel IRC, never miss anything on IRC!

I was one of those guys who had irssi running inside a screen on a remote Linux box somewhere. It works just fine, but I always forgot to open the SSH session so I missed a lot of IRC conversations. Private messages were a problem as well, most of the times it was a couple of days later before I noticed somebody had actually sent me a PM…

It was time to change my IRC client, with the preference to always be online.

A short search lead me to the website of Quassel IRC, a distributed IRC server/client. Exactly what I was looking for! You just install the “core” on a remote Linux box and use the Linux, Windows, Mac OSX or Android client to participate on IRC.

The core has been running on a Ubuntu 10.04 machine for about one week now and it works like a charm. My IRC conversations are secured by SSL and I never miss a PM or when somebody tags me!

Integration of the client goes well on Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity, it integrates seamlessly with Unity and notifies me whenever I’m tagged or I receive a PM.

Looking for me on IRC? Find me on OFTC @ wido where I hang out in #ceph. Or find me on Freenode @ widodh in #cloudstack

Nokia, shame on you..

Last november i bought a Noka N900, the reason for my purchase was because it ran Maemo which gave me the freedom to do with my phone whatever i wanted to (with some limitations ofcourse 😉 ).

I’ve been using my N900 intensive since then, using it the whole day to keep up to date with my work, manage some servers through SSH and keep in touch with Jabber Instant Messaging.

Really, the N900 is a great phone and even better when you like Linux as much as i do.

But there was a downside…. A few weeks ago (half April) my phone started to complain that my memory was full, so i couldn’t receive any more IM’s or SMS’s. When i opened a terminal and did a “df -h” it showed me that i was only using 23% of the internal memory. A reboot solved it, so i guessed it was a bug somewhere.

After a few days the phone started to reboot itself and kept complaining whenever i wanted to save something to the internal MMC memory, so i opened up a terminal and typed “dmesg”, well, then i knew what was wrong: The internal MMC memory was broken.

So i started to search the web and i found this thread: talk.maemo.org

It seemed i wasn’t the only one! I contacted Nokia (since i bought the phone from them directly) and they told me i could return it to “BelCompany” (A Dutch phone store) which would then return it for me to the Nokia Service Center.

And so they did.. After a week i got my phone back with the message: Software reprogrammed

Well, i didn’t think that would fix it and it didn’t. After 5 minutes of usage i opened a terminal again and i saw the kernel spitting out errors again about mmcblk0p2. So i went back to “BelCompany” and they returned it again to Nokia.

Guess what? I got my phone back again with the same message and it is still broken!

So i got a broken phone back from the repair center for the second time! I brought the phone back to “BelCompany” again and they urged Nokia to replace my phone with a new N900.

Nokia, shame on you! When i returned my phone to the Nokia service center i attached 3 A4’s with error message from the phone and ways you could reproduce the problem, but in stead you just reprogrammed the MMC and sent it back to me again. Really not the way to treat people when they pay EUR 599,00 for a phone!

To be continued..

ActiveSync (Z-Push) sync with Zarafa and Nokia N900

Recently i bought a Nokia N900 and started right away with configuring my Exchange (Zarafa) account, but i didn’t work.

Syncing a mobile phone works via Microsoft’s ActiveSync, in Zarafa’s case this is implemented via Z-Push.

After making a post on the Z-Push forum i got in contact with Andreas (a Z-Push) and he found out what the problem was. Z-Push implements Exchange 2003 and the Nokia N900 requires Exchange 2007.

Andreas started working on some fixes and after a few days of mailing he made an alpha version which also support the Nokia N900.

At the moment i am running the Alpha in conjunction with my Zarafa envirioment and it works fine, so for all the other N900 users, help is on its way!