David Carrington

There’s a few ways you can upload photos from a Pocket PC to Flickr:

• Browser upload. Pocket IE can’t do it¹, but Opera Mobile doesn’t have any trouble uploading to the Mobile Flickr website.
• Email. You can e-mail directly to Flickr, but I only use web-based e-mail so the benefit here is non-existent.
• Resco Photo Viewer 6.33. My favourite choice here, I’m happy to pay £10 for a decent Photo browsing application on my phone.

I’ve had Resco Photo Viewer for 2 weeks now on the trial, purchased today and very happy with what it can do.

¹ - Pocket IE could probably handle the browser upload if you changed the User Agent string (probably in registry?).

I tried a number of times to log in to Orange email with various usernames, until I found their FAQ which says that the username isn’t your normal username - it’s a gibberish alphanumeric code like AB1CD2EF. How wrong can their website be?

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I don’t pay the extra £1.50 for itemised billing, but I can still get a full itemised 18-page bill online in PDF format. Here’s a few key things that I noticed on my first phone bill from Orange:

• SMS delivery reports: 1p - Bad
• SMS to Jaiku: 20p (International) - Bad
• SMS to Twitter: Free - Excellent
• MMS to Flickr: 25p - Good
• 10% Love Your Number discount - Nice
• Unexpected 10% staff discount - Awesome!

So I’m only paying £28 for a £35 contract (Dolphin 35). What the guys at the store also forgot to mention was that the Love Your Number discount slowly increases by 5% each year up to 25%.

Orange seem to have endless ways to make me happy!

Update: Here’s a couple of quotes regarding the Orange employee discount which I noticed while scanning their terms & conditions:

• The “pay monthly offer” is 10% discount on line rental for the life of the contract.
• Offer is limited to a maximum of 5 phones per employee.

Since mobile phones and similar devices pay quite highly for bandwidth, I’ve created a Berkshire traffic summary page for mobile devices. Basically it’s for my own use, but someone else might find it useful.

Behind the scenes, it takes the BBC’s travel data and parses it with PHP into a minimal amount of HTML. I’ve also restricted it to only show information from the last 7 days to stop from showing all 25+ current traffic / roadworks incidents.

I’ve read a few articles about spoken languages across the globe fading to non-existance because no one speaks them any more and they get forgotten.

“More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base.” - New Scientist

On a much less epic scale, I’m concerned about my own knowledge of programming languages fading to nothing from lack of use. The best example for me is Perl.

Perl is the first server-side programming language I tried to learn to improve my websites. I made very basic guestbook scripts and that was about it, but I did (for a short time) know the syntax and some basic principles in the language. I’ve not used Perl for 5 years!

I started looking into PHP, and never looked back. So what do I remember of Perl now? Hardly anything at all.

With a few years of self-taught PHP under my belt, I’m now pushing slowly into ASP.NET. This time, I’m going to keep my PHP very much alive.