Blackberry Bold from Rogers finally!

After a long and delayed waiting, I finally got my hands on this so called “Monster Blackberry”. Yes, it’s the new Blackberry Bold 9000 from Rogers. Unfortunately this one is not mine, it’s my friend’s.

I’ve read so much about its new features. I know what to look into within limited couple hours review time.

Speed:

Yes, it’s lighteng fast. It’s fast everywhere. Open a browser, web page viewing, go back to the home screen, go back to playlist while playing a video in media player and etc.

Screen:

Very impressive hand held device LCD. It’s smaller compare to iphone, PSP but with resolution of 480×320, super bright LCD, I can watch some movies on a Blackberry!
Compare to my Blackberry Curve, Bold supports H264 at resolution 480×272 (only one I tested so far)! My Curve only supports H264@ 16x sth from the official spec. I did try H264 320×240 on Curve, only sound with no image.
Some WinMenc settings:
mencoder.exe “D:\Download\Video\169_diablo3_di_062908_hr.mp4″ -af volnorm -srate 48000 -vf-add scale=480:272,harddup -ofps 30000/1001 -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2 -ovc x264 -ffourcc H264 -x264encopts bitrate=500:level_idc=13:nocabac -o “D:\Download\169_diablo3_di_062908_hr.x264.avi” 2> 2.txt
call “batch\mp4-avc.bat” “D:\Download\169_diablo3_di_062908_hr.x264.avi”

3G wireless:

Fast again! It takes seconds to download google map application. I don’t see the progress bar stops at all.

Things I don’t like:

The earbud comes with the package. I like earbud, however I found it doesn’t work well with the Bold. Even it’s fully plugged into the bold, if I turn the plugged-in earphone, it effects the sound. Sometimes it becomes one channel of sound. It may be caused by bad contact or a defective earbud.

Conclusion:

Before I can get my Bold (in one month or two, financial reasons), I will stick to my trusty Curve.

Hey, I just changed the theme on my Curve to Bold precision theme clone.

some images taken by using an iphone 3G. easy on the image quality

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Windows live messenger on Blackberry on Rogers

Finally it is working!

It’s an unlocked t-mobile Blackberry 8320 Curve on Rogers network. And it is my second personal Blackberry (owned 8100 before).

Windows live messenger was pre-loaded on this t-mobile’s curve. But it never worked. It failed to connect to the server. The guess was Rogers didn’t have the service books for it yet.

Here’s what I did this time:

Connect your BB with your computer.
Use Internet Explorer, goto wlm.
Follow the steps to load Windows Live Messenger 2.0 onto your blackberry. (You may be prompted to install some activeX control for the loading)

And that’s it!

If it is still not working for you after the above steps, I suggest you take a look at your service book options. It should have something like WLM 2.1 [BBIM], Windows Live [BBIMConfig]. You can try to re-send service books from Rogers BIS.

My Curve is running OS 4.5.0.52.

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Free memory on Blackberry 8320

Ever lose emails on your Blackberry?

The first place I would check is free memory or File Free size of your Blackberry. It happened to me after I updated OS my 8320. It showed less than 3MB after a battery pull.

After some google searches, here is an article of how to maximize free memory on your Blackberry. I removed unwanted .cod, extra theme, voice activated dialing, 83xx media and etc.

To show Blackberry Help Me screen, go to advanced options, then applictions, and press Alt, Cap and H key all together. This is the Help Me screen after wipe and flash the OS:

After enterprise activation, and load the applications I use daily: Google Gmail, Goolge GTalk, Viigo, Mobipocket Reader. And load 2 company testing product. The File Free shows:

I fee much better seeing it’s over 20MB now :) This amount of free memory will make 8320 work better with the upcoming highly expected 4.5 OS.

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Troubleshooting High Memory Usage

First of all, this post is nowhere near a complete reference for linux memory usage and troubleshooting high memory usage. It only has the steps I’d taken to troubleshoot my own server when it gets overloaded by increased traffic. It happens once a while, and usually I can fix it by tuning some Apache, MySQL and other config setting.

1. using top command

After executing top command, press “Shift” + “>” and look at “RES” column. The RES column is the most reliable indicator of the real memory usage of that process.

top result

2. ps axu –sort:rss

show memory usage sorted by lowest memory usages first.

A general Apache which serves static html page should consume less than 10MB per process.
For heavily serving PHP pages, in my case it uses 18MB-39MB each httpd process.

mysqld has a memory usage of 120MB in my case. I can tell that the query cache settings worked as planned.

ps aux –sort -vsz | head -25
Top memory hogs

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Check Linux Versions – common commands part1

  • Check Linux Kernel version:

uname -a

  • Check Linux version

cat /proc/version

  • Check Redhat based Linux version

cat /etc/redhat-release

  • Check PHP version on Linux server

php -v

  • Check mysql version on linux server

mysql -V

  • Check apache version on linux server

httpd -v

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Google updated on January 13-14

Well, another update!

I’ve got BL updates on all my websites as well as PR. Traffic of some websites shows a jump today. It’s still too early to see how much the traffic has improved. Let’s wait and see.

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Install VMware Tools for Fedora 8 in VMware 6.0.2

  1. Click VM-> install VMware tools
  2. In Fedora 8 terminal window, copy WMwareTools-6.0.2-59284.tar.gz into your home folder
  3. unzip it. gzip -d WMwareTools-6.0.2-59284.tar.gz | tar -xvf WMwareTools-6.0.2-59284.tar
  4. run vmware-install.pl
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Google back links updated

All my websites have their back links updated (increased) in Google Webmaster Tools today. I also expect that PR will be updated soon. However the link command on Google shows no changes yet.

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Facebook Valued at $15 Billion — Microsoft Takes $240 Million Equity Stake

Facebook and Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership. Under the expanded strategic alliance, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and will begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the United States. …

read more | digg story

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Install MySQL Community Server 5.0.45 Without Installer on Windows Vista

  1. Download the zip file from here.
  2. Unzip it to your d: drive. Here’s what you should get after unzipping: d:\mysql-noinstall-5.0.45-win32. Rename this folder to mysql5045. (d:\mysql5045)
  3. Open folder d:\mysql5045. Copy my-small.ini and rename the copied file to my.ini. Open my.ini using notepad. Under line “[mysqld]“, enter the following lines:basedir=D:/mysql5045
    datadir=D:/mysql5045/data
  4. Run your command prompt as administrator. And enter folder d:\mysql5045\bin
  5. Type mysqld-nt.exe –install mysql5045 –defaults-file=d:\mysql5045\my.ini
  6. Type net start mysql5045 in command line. If you see the following, mysql 5045 is installed and running!The mysql5045 service is starting.
    The mysql5045 service was started successfully.
  7. IMPORTANT! type mysqladmin -u root password “your-new-password”, to set a password for your root account. The default install will leave no password required for your root account.
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