David Carrington

This is getting a bit silly now!

1. September 2008: I won a Sagem MY721X “So Ice” for emailing Ben Smith “Ben Smith is the best presenter on Mobile Industry Review”.
2. December 2008: I won a Dell Mini 9 netbook from Mobile Industry Review’s Christmas Presents competition.
3. June 2009: I won a Nokia N97 from The Really Mobile Project’s WeekOfWin competition.
4. November 2009: I won a Sonim XP3 Land Rover phone from Mobile Industry Review.
5. June 2010: I won an HTC HD2 as part of a team entering Microsoft’s MyKindOfPhone competition.
6. Yesterday (July 2010): I won a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro from SE’s “insiders” competition.

So please, forward me any phone competitions you hear about because I really like entering them!

Funnily enough. Even though I win so many phones, it doesn’t stop me buying another every time my contract runs out:

• 2005: HTC BlueAngel
• 2007: HTC Touch
• 2008: HTC Diamond
• 2009: HTC Dream
• 2010: HTC Desire

I really ought to sell one or two of these!

I was skim reading  ”PHP – The Good Parts” yesterday to see if there was anything new in it. The following lines caught my eye – never knew this!

The position of needle/haystack parameters in string functions is the reverse of the parameters in array functions.

strstr($haystack, $needle)
array_search($needle, $haystack)

I just assumed the developers were completely insane and chose parameter orders at random.

A nice perk from working in the web development department at e2save.com: we’re allowed to buy books on the company credit card as long as we share the knowledge with the team afterwards.

I decided to try this out by ordering the “Rocket Surgery Made Easy“ by Steve Krug, the sequel to “Don’t Make Me Think“. I haven’t finished the sequel yet, but I thought it would benefit the team to do a 15 minute presentation on the original:

I’m quite pleased with my first ever presentation (not including primary school). I assure you, it makes more sense if I’m standing there talking you through it!

Oh, and I’d highly recommend “Don’t Make Me Think” if you’re thinking of purchasing a web usability book. It really is quite good, although a little out of date.

1. Emailing the Vodafone CEO with your customer support query gets it resolved very quickly.
2. I’m incapable of installing Aptana with Eclipse Helios with Flash Builder 4 all together on Windows without getting Java native errors.
3. I like Google Docs Presentations.
4. I’m vaguely capable of presenting.
5. I can talk about web usability in a clear way so that even a 12 year old understands (thanks Beth for putting up with my boring talk).
6. How to cook a cheesy pasta bake – yum!
7. LOVEFiLM are rewarding customers for adding lots of films to their queues by sending them out extra disks. Unfortunately this is the last week for that.
8. There’s an official HD trailer out for the new Harry Potter, although I’ve not seen it yet.
9. When you chop up spring onions you throw away most of what you bought.

I wish I could learn more every day. That’s going onto my non-existant daily checklist. I best get that started.

Daily checklist:

• Do a good deed
• Learn something new

I’ll have to expand that! :¬)

A couple of people have asked me about how I went about rooting my HTC Desire and what ROM I’ve put on it. Here’s how I did it:

1. I installed “HTC Sync” from HTC’s official website
2. I followed the rooting  instructions over at http://desire.modaco.com
3. I downloaded ROM Manager from the Android Market
4. I used that to install the DeFrost ROM (currently v1.4)

That’s all. No risk. No worry about breaking things, it all just works.

What I’ve lost:

1. All the slow, ugly, bloated, HTC software
2. The ability to record video (for now, until the community find a fix)

What I’ve gained:

1. Lovely pure Android OS with no HTC intrusions
2. 3G -> wifi tethering and other similar little things from Android 2.2

That might not sound a lot, but the benefits for me are huge as it has a big impact on the most used applications:

1. The browser is nicer
2. The phone dialer is nicer
3. The SMS app is nicer
4. The home screen/launcher is nicer
5. The locked screen is nicer
6. OK, the whole phone is just nicer!

If you do like HTC Sense and Rosie and all that Facebook nonsense, then stick with the existing ROMs and wait for an official update hopefully some time in the next 6 months. If you want to have a phone with all the latest and greatest Android capabilities then I highly recommend doing an update.

UPDATE: The latest DeFrost versions already have a working video camera. Android community rocks!