Patrick’s Blog(2)

In case you are bored you can find a wealth of flash based games here. If you are looking for some inspiration have a look here. Quite an impressive painting performance.

For some reason Nokia continues to be the subject of this week’s posts. This time it is not about the lack of IrMC support on the Nokia 6230 or that someone from Nokia actually read the article. It is about this article on The Register that Nokia may be migrating 55,000 desktops from Internet Explorer to the Firefox browser. Nokia off course denies any such thing. With monday’s partnership between Nokia and Microsoft still fresh on the table, I’m sure Gates and friends would not be amused.

However, if I look at the data from the one person from Nokia that visited my blog, it is quite obvious that there definitely are people at Nokia who use the excellent Firefox browser. So the question is if Nokia denied the Firefox migration rumour merely to keep Microsoft at peace or that there really is no story. Time will tell.

Looking at the security nightmare called IE it absolutely makes business sense to migrate from IE to Firefox. Last night I used IE at a friend’s house. If you are used to the Firefox experience then using IE makes a grown man cry. IE’s age is really slapping you in the face and it is embarassingly obvious that Microsft hasn’t spent a minute on IE since they killed Netscape. Microsoft may have announced IE7 but the articles on this subject on the Net suggest it is only windowdressing to keep more IE users from switching to Firefox. IE is an amazingly insecure browser and if IE7 is only a dressed up IE6 then the security problems will continue to hit a desktop near you. The only sane thing to do is kill IE and migrate to Firefox, Mozilla, Opera or any of the other alternatives out there.

Nokia may not be migrating 55,000 desktops from IE to Firefox this time. But it is only a matter of time before Nokia and the Corporate world do the math and figure out that IE is too much of a security (and thus financial) liability. Enough is enough. Time to take back the web.

Today I checked the logs for my blog site and lo and behold someone from Nokia had visited my site in relation to my previous blog entry which described the lack of IrMC on the 6230. Here are the details of his/her visit:

• Date: 18 Feb, 10:18:15
• From: Finland
• IP: 192.100.124.219
• Host: esprx02x.nokia.com
• OS: Windows 2000
• Browser: Firefox 1.0
• Referrer: www.technorati.com

The Nokia person found the article through Technorati, this link specifically. Now let’s hope they do something with this information. With the upcoming Sony Ericsson “Clara” (probably K750i) and the K800i that was announced on the 3GSM World Congress 2005, I have plenty of cool phones to replace the 6230 with if Nokia does not fix this flaw. Nevertheless it is good to see that at least one person at Nokia is using Firefox.

Recently I got the Nokia 6230 and boy did I make the wrong choice. I had my shortlist down to two GSM phones: the Nokia 6230 and the Sony Ericsson K700i. The reason I chose the Nokia was that I appreciated the MMC (MultiMedia Card) capability that came with it. Or better, the 1GB card that I will be sticking in it soon so I can listen to some MP3’s on the tropical beach I will be visiting in a month or two. I have an “old” Siemens SL45 which came with a 32MB MMC card and I used it a lot.

For my business purposes the MMC capability of the Nokia definitely scored over the SE K700i. But when you talk about a business phone there is another thing that is very important: Connectivity. And here the trouble starts….

If you compare the “Connectivity” specifications of both phones on their respective websites then you will see that they are basically on par.

The Nokia 6230 Connectivity:

• Pop-Portâ„¢ interface
• Connect wirelessly to a compatible phone or to a compatible PC
• Connect to a compatible PC with Nokia Connectivity Cable DKU-2
  Infrared
• Bluetooth wireless technology
• Send and receive images, video clips, audio files, and graphics
• Install applications with Nokia PC Suite for the Nokia 6230 phone
• Browsing XHTML (WAP 2.0) over TCP/IP stack
• JPEG/PNG support in browser
• Full OMA DRM for content protection
• SyncML

The Sony Ericsson K700i Connectivity:

• Sync ML
• Infrared port
• GPRS
• High Speed Data
• USB support
• RS232 cable support
• Synchronization Apple®
• Synchronization PC
• Bluetoothâ„¢ wireless technology

But what is not obvious about the Nokia specs is that the 6230 does not support IrMC. IrMC stands for Infrared Mobile Communications (check out the Infrared Data Association website for more info). What it does is allow you to sync your phone with other phones, applications on various Operating Systems, PDA’s etc. using the IrDA MC protocol even though you might be using a Bluetooth link to the other device.

You may ask yourself what the big deal is since Nokia makes their Nokia Suite available at no charge and you can use that to sync your Outlook with your phone. And you have a perfectly valid point unless you are not using Microsoft Windows and Outlook. And the Nokia Suite only runs on Microsoft Windows.

I am one of those few people who have not been hacked, infected with virii and spammed to death simply because I have not used any Microsoft product on my PC since 1995. My PC has been humming fine with Slackware and Red Hat Linux in the early days and Fedora Core later on. So I do not have Windows but use Fedora Core with X. I do not have Outlook but use Evolution and I do not have Office but use OpenOffice.org.

How did I find out the Nokia 6230 lacked IrMC? If you use Linux and want to sync your phone details with an application like the popular Evolution Groupware client you use MultiSync. And MultiSync reported that it could not sync my Nokia 6230 with Evolution because my phone does not support IrMC.

When I asked a Red Hat guy if he could sync his SE K700i with Evolution using MultiSync his answer was unequivocally yes. Off course the next thing he did was perform the “told you so” song because he had suggested I get the SE K700i. I wish I had listened to him.

So now I am stuck with this Nokia 6230 that is a perfectly fine business phone except for this major fact. I even emailed Nokia via the Club Nokia contact form asking them about it and off course never heard anything back from them. Guess they already made their money on me…

If anyone from Nokia is reading this: your 6230 business phone lacks IrMC, a serious piece of functionality that will prevent users on non-Microsoft platforms from syncing your 6230 to Groupware clients such as Evolution. How about fixing this? I’ll be happy to test new firmware with IrMC support.

Yesterday the updated corporate website at www.laimbock.com was launched. Being a good Netizen I made sure the new site was HTML (4.01) and CSS compliant. Which I thought it was. That is, until I figured out that the W3 Validator service only grabs a single page and not an entire site. Meaning I had missed a few (ok, a lot of) things that made the site totally non-compliant. So I spent the majority of last night and tonight with fixing the site. I’m happy to say www.laimbock.com is now fully HTML 4.01 and CSS compliant.

Earlier today I read about Microsoft’s announcement that they will come up with Internet Explorer version 7 (IE7). The announcement itself is the typical Microsoft marketing speak we have come to expect from them. I guess it will be a cold day in Hell before Microsoft will acknowledge that they were forced to update their crappy Internet Explorer due to the landgrab of the much better Firefox browser. What is significant is the amount of comments (really tons of them) of web design, creative and other folks who all hoped that Microsoft would finally start to support proper W3 standards in their browser. And they do not mean the typical “embrace and extend” thing Microsoft usually does.

Frankly I hope Microsoft will see the light and will conform to industry (W3) standards in every aspect including their browser. It will make life so much easier for everybody involved in creating websites. And it will also create a more level playingfield for other browsers in the marketplace.

Obviously Microsoft knows their IE product can’t compete with Firefox or the fine Opera browser because Microsoft has neglected IE for years and will be playing catchup for a long time. If I understand the news coverage on this subject correctly IE7 will not be a new browser from the ground up. It will be IE6 with more bandaids, a bit of glossy sauce to hide that IE7 is basically IE6 plus security fixes and a few de facto, obiquitous features that IE had been lacking for years.

And if IE7 really is only an updated version of IE6 then I think chances are slim that Microsoft will have a browser that is W3 standards compliant any time soon. If only to protect their sliding marketshare. Care to bet?