Final words on IONE NAS

Pulled the HDD out of the cage, plugged it in into Linux box, ran "fdisk". For your pleasure:

Disk /dev/hdd: 40.0 GB, 40027029504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4866 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdd1               1        4866    39086113+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Hope that helps. Please note that this drive is greater than 32 GB.

Moto v400 unlocked for J2ME development

Now, since I moved to non-GSM carrier, I wonder whether I should put my prior phone up for sale... It's in a good condition, I can throw in a USB cable and I could collect a document describing which software should be used to access the filesystem on that phone. But why bother? Even the fact that I unlocked my phone to allow uploading Java (J2ME) Midlets via same cable woluld not, IMO, be a feature to attract somebody. Those who need their phones unlocked for the same purpose are better served by a local shop. These shops rarely advertise anything beyond "GSM phone unlocking" or "address book transfer", but in fact they can also change the firmware on your phone (turn v400 into v500, for instance, albeit w/o Bluetooth), and as well they can enable features that are otherwise disabled. As an aside, I always wondered what would happen if one were to unlock Java VM on a BREW phone.

Yeah, I'll just keep this phone. Maybe one day (hopefully soon enough) I would use this phone for what I intended initially, J2ME development. Never gotten farther that making two prototype Midlets one of which would load an imge from the network for a spash screen, and the other would move a smaller image on a background made up of bigger image. I really need to justify why I purchased it in the first place :)

Changed wireless carrier

And so my contract with Cingular has ended. I had high hopes how I will get new cool free phones, just the way one would find on Amazon, LetsTalk or Wirefly... Silly me! Calling customer support and pointing them to those resources and stating clearly that I intend to go to thgeir competitor did not make a difference. What does it mean?

Look, the math is quite straightforward. I wanted them to match the deal offered by Amazon, which would be a difference of $400 as compared to the best deal they wanted to offer me as upgrade (they had Moto Rokr and Sony Ericsson W600i at $149). They would not, even though I would have paid them over $2000 during next 24 months. What gives? Did they become so big and arrogant with aquisition of AT&T that they're no longer making deals? Screw that.

I went with Sprint. Got an awesome deal at a store nearby (had to go to the store to have my old cell ##s transferred). I did not mind at all paying $150 for 3 Sanyo MM-8300 cell phones. These ones are rather good looking :)

I was put off a fair bit by the fact that these phones can not use MP3 files for ringtones, but a couple days of research on the Internet, and I had all our cells stuffed with ringtones that I not only made myself, but also written a servlet and 2 JSPs to serve those off of a Tomcat server running on my old Athlon 700 machine. (Friend asked why did I have to go though all the trouble with WAV->AAC plus doing the server setup when there's sprintusers.com/focus. My reasons were two: 1) because it sounded easy to do, and 2) because every time I give somebody my phone # to send an SMS to, I feel rather suspicious... This always reminds me how Jamster scammed all of the Europe.)