I am a happy owner of Nexus One, though I have written about some quirks in the past. Now it is time to discuss one problem deeper: common software availability outside USA and couple other lucky countries. And the worst of it is that it affects software, that comes preinstalled in our phones.

For example, it affects Google Maps in Android phones. If you have tried updating this application from outside USA (and several lucky countries), you could not find it in the market. You get Google Maps with your phone, you get it updated during system updates. But you can not get an update through Android Market here – the application is unavailable.

And I do not know any good reason why Google does this. It is not payment collection issue: Google maps is free application. The navigation is one of the few services whose availability is problematic worldwide, so it could be disabled outside USA/UK, that would make more sense. Even then, some workarounds are posted.   The issue is not the driver’s original country, but the maps and understanding the routing in the countries.

There are plenty of other services where country-based availability does not makes sense whatever sort. For example, Google Places, Google Buzz, which is available through web interface anyway. Any user could use it through web at limited functionality.

Sigh. I do not expect an explanation from Google about this. I guess we will have to wait and see if something changes, or other applications will take its place locally.

I have written about Ndrive in the past. It is one of the best available navigations for your Android phone outside USA and “lucky 11″ (countries, from which google accepts payments in their Android Marketplace). Most of other map software processes payments through google market thus they are not available in most of the countries. This is a shame.

This week there is an exciting opportunity to win a free map of your choice from Ndrive. You need to do following:

1. Download Ndrive on your phone, use it (7 days – all maps free).

2. Register at AndroidForums.com

3. Write a comment at android marketplace and rate Ndrive. Mention your AndroidForums username as well. It is required that comment would be made from your phone (to identify your phone I assume).

4. Write in the thread dedicated to the contest in Android forum: http://androidforums.com/android-applications/116315-ndrive-contest.html . You will have to register there.

Simple, eh ? The best part is there will be more than one winner, in fact it is promised that there will be more than 20! You will be contacted in AndroidForums by administration staff if you win.

I would participate myself, however, I have purchased all the maps I will need in the close future myself (Western Europe + Eastern Europe) .  They are worth the money. And even better if you get them for free

Recently I had to buy a new router for my apartment. My old router Speedtouch was rebooting constantly when third wireless device connected to it. After some testing, my theory is that it cannot handle lot of concurrent connections at the same time.

For router, I have picked Asus RT-N16 router. The key features that won me was support for 802.11n Draft, which allows communication at speeds up to 300 MB/s instead 54 MB/s. Also, gigabyte Ethernet support is nice too. Additionally, it claimed good support for concurrent connections e.g. during torrent download. RT-N16 has 4 LAN and 1 Wan sockets, which is enough for home environment, though one would need a hub or two in bigger office.

Asus RT-N16 came packed with 3 antennas, power supply, network cable, instruction manual and useless installation CD. The CD is useless as router can be configured through network interface. Default IP is 192.168.1.1 (like usual) and login/password is admin:admin. This should be changed, even if the router cannot be accessed from WAN side by default. I would strongly recommend going through network setup wizard to set passkey for wireless network. Also, I changed network type to WPA2-PSK with AES encryption for better security.

Not everything went seamlessly for me. I had several problems connecting to administration interface and connecting to WAN (dynamic IP). Apparently, router lags when it tries to connect to WAN interface and will not respond to LAN during that time. After some changes, I got an error message like this:

You have set the wrong dynamic or static IP address for your RT-N16. Refer to the diagnosis.

Sure enough, the IP was dynamic and received correctly. The problem was in faulty Cat5 cable in my apartment, so I had to move router into another place which is not as convenient as old one. After that the problem disappeared and router worked as expected.

Another issue is that you got single field to enter DNS addresses that are passed through DHCP server to client PCs. Personally, I do not want router to cache DNS requests, so this caused me some headache. I will see if I can enter 2 IP’s into single field there.

Overall, I can recommend ASUS RT-N16 for people that like having fast wireless and ethernet network at home for reasonable price (~95 USD at amazon at the moment). You might get some quirks, but I think they will get fixed with firmware upgrade.

NDrive is a Portuguese GPS navigation software with Android version available in Android Market. It can be downloaded for free, also there is 7 day free trial for all of the maps.

Ndrive Installation is quite straightforward. One downloads application from Android Market, and then selects maps one needs. I would recommend downloading maps using Wireless network rather than 3g as it would be (probably faster). Ndrive East Europe maps – 300Mb, West Europe – 2Gb, so it takes a while. Afterwards you are ready to use it. I assume that all software versions (Iphone, windows Mobile and Android) uses more or less same maps as long as you got latest software version.

Most of the settings can be controlled in Ndrive settings menu as well, including voice used, what is shown in maps and so on.

Here is my experience with Ndrive on my Nexus One phone:

The good:

1. Ndrive is the most easy to install and use Android navigation application outside USA and couple other selected countries (11) due to fact that it is free (only maps are paid). One does not has to deal with Google Checkout.

2. Works quite fast on Nexus one – no crashes, no problems for now.

3. Speed camera location integration is very nice feature.

3. Strangely enough, Ndrive price for East Europe (30 E) is smaller than any of the single maps of East European countries (45-ish ). I guess there is mistake in its Android purchase interface, as in website the price is bigger.

4. Seven day trial is a very nice thing.

The bad:

1. Poorly updated maps (at least for East Europe) and speed camera locations. Camera map is 1-2 years old, other maps are about the same age as well. This might be an issue for people that rely on GPS navigation only.

2. No good enough way to temporally silence the navigation without silencing anything else on the phone. There should be an icon to stop all sound from navigation.

3. Had problems on finding a way to fast-forward simulation mode. It is not very well done.

4. (UPDATED) There is a lack of routing modes. 2 times I were routed through roads that are not asphalted. This means that the travel was slower than anticipated (Non-asphalted road speed limit is 70, however it is highly non-recommended to drive at 7o km/h on most of them). These routing modes Ndrive should address.

I still need to test if Ndrive works well with trapster running, as Trapster speed trap database is much better. As it is single commercial navigation available for download here, I can not compare it to other Android applications except hacked Google Navigation which would not be fair. I would like to try Copilot as well, but if they do not want me to buy their software – oh well. I am perfectly happy with Ndrive for now.

You should give Ndrive a try if you are looking for Navigation on your Android phone.

I am using my Google Nexus one for one month already, so I got quite used to it. I would not change it to Iphone (at least not to any existing model), nor I would change it to Symbian/Windows mobile or other smartphone. At the moment I am Android convert, and there are reasons for that.

However, there are aspects of my phone where I see large possibilities towards improvement

1. Data exchange over USB. I needed whole month to make it work with drivers I had to download and using USB debug mode. This is not something end-user should do. I have read that Nexus one is quite sensitive in respect of USB socket, however that is not something that should concern end users. This should be not a beta – product.

2. Touch screen sensitivity. It is too poor for high end smartphone. Droid gets much better touch sensitivity than Nexus one. Also, nexus one scree is almost unusable in sunlight, although I can survive with that.

3. Sound quality. Sound quality is lacking in HTC phones. That is one of the worst drawbacks of HTC overall, after owning Sony Ericsson especially.

4. Please, Google, open paid apps worldwide. I am happy to pay dollars for apps. May developers would be happy to develop paid local apps.

5. Internet tethering. Should work without any paid apps, as I get that on my 3-year old phone without any paid apps as well.

6. I can live without flash as long as you provide html5 video play work on android. Not only in full-screen, but in window mode as well… or at least clickable. One has to use workaround for now – javascript or serving specific code for android users.

7. I would like to choose which contacts I want to see in my nexus one contact list. This is especially important for Buzz users. Also, skype integration would be kinda nice, but I guess it is asking too much.

Thats all I am asking for now… Is it too much ? I do not know.

Recently I got new dell XPS 16 with I7 processor. I am really happy with it ( I guess a post comming soon), however I want address a problem I had to solve.

You see, each time I scroll or type something, my PC froze for couple secs each 10-20 sec apart. The drivers were ok, windows 7 install is fresh as well. So I could not pinpoint the problem. I ruled out hardware malfunction as there is no custom hardware (except blueray and more ram) in this Dell XPS model. Speaking about the Blueray/dvd writer, the freezes might have affected writing process as the single dvd I wrote was unreadable.

Lastly, I found the problem. My laptop came with Mcafee preinstalled. Even if I had no plans on buying it, I havent removed 14 day trial at once. Well, that was the mistake. Apparently, Mcafee was behind PC freezes all along.

I am not planing to leave my dell unprotected though. I will go with ESET smart security probably, as I have good experience with it. Its detection rate is better, and I expect my PC to be more responsive than with Mcafee. There are other good software around too, like Kaspersky, Avira, Avast.

I had received my brand new Google nexus one finally! As it is not available here, I had to buy it through ebay and send it by post. I had additional week to wait because of slow postal service here – they had to send information to customs and so on. I haven’t replaced my last phone for 2 years or so, thus it was a quite big change.

Nexus one box included the phone itself, 110v charger, usb/htc connection cable (can be used for charging as well), headphones and case for carrying. The phone is shipped with 4G sdcard.

The first impression – it rocks. I am not a big fan of Iphone and nexus one is just my kind of phone: good design, I can easily operate it in one hand (most of the time), very fast and lots of applications. The camera is very good as well. Additionally, the Android os will get multi-touch support as well soon, which will be quite nice add-on for galleries and browser.

Additionally, I like the contact management in my google account. This saved a lot of time – I exported my contacts to vcf in my old phone, uploaded to PC and imported to my google contacts. As an additional bonus, Android offers nice integration of contacts from various sources : google addressbook, facebook, etc.

There are still some glitches that should be fixed:

a) Sometimes touchscreen is not sensitive/wont work, especially on edges. After couple of tries it starts working again. Annoying, though.

b) There are major issues with bluetooth connections – it pairs, but fails to connect with some equipment, including handsfree in my car. I’ll have to read about it more and maybe I’ll get it to work. Maybe there will be an update by android team.

c) There is not a big choice for some niche applications, like GPS ones. But Copilot looks promising (if they got good Lithuanian maps for Android).

d) Sound quality is slightly worse than my old K800i.

Now I just need to wait for OS update to get multi-touch and I will be really happy .

Slow PC Fighter is a registry cleaner from same family as Spam Fighter or Virus Fighter. Registry cleaners allow fixing errors and inconsistencies in PC’s registry making PC boot and operate a bit faster. Many of them are made by security companies.

Slow PC Fighter website claims that running Slow PCFighter will increase PC speed up to 40%. That might be true on really badly supervised PC, but I would not expect such things on each PC.

Slow PCFighter free scanner installation was quite quick and easy. The download is around one megabyte. What impressed me, it recognized my Windows as 64 bit one and installed correct version of application itself.

The scan is was quite quick and found around 2000 errors, mostly missing files or empty registry keys. It had not shown any false positives, which is good.

The free version of SLOW PC Fighter removes 25 registry errors, which is quite little compared to errors it found.

Verdict: I would definitely give it a try to see if there are lots of errors in the PC. It might be useful and safe to have this product if you hate reinstalling windows like I do. The downside is that you would have to purchase full version as free scanner is not too useful except for trying the product out.

You can download Slow PCFighter here.

I have to distribute a mailing list of circa 150 000 email clients and wondered what alternatives I have to in-house system. This has lead to some research of various options for mailing customers.

First there are 3 types of software I might use: web-based services, server based newsletter/mass mailing applications and PC software.

web-based mass mailing services are quite expensive for bigger lists. For example, icontact.com offers plans costing $699.00 for 100 000 users per month. Aweber.com is about the same (at least for smaller plans). It would be a good choice for a smaller permanent list.

Also I can’t tell how well web-based services would perform under my constraints. I need Lithuanian encoding, handling weird email addresses of One.lt – popular Lithuanian social network with emails that uses its own email engine. And it has its own spams filter as well.

Another choice would be installable php scripts that would offer mass-mailing or newsletter handling. A clear choice would be phplists – a free php script for that. It looked very promising at first, however I met couple problems. First, it is not as user friendly as you would expect from distributed php software. I had to change lots of things in php scripts manually, even disabling test mode or changing encoding. That is not acceptable. Second, its import scripts suck. I have not managed to import mailing list properly even after I removed couple checks. Overall, its interface is lacking and I would not recommend this software for no-techie.

I have tested PC software as well, for example SendBlaster. It was quite promising except the way how it handles international encodings. I have received empty letter in my spam box.

So, the question remains open : should I try to make something working from phplists, search for its alternatives or use our in-house mailing system.

Hootsuite (Hootsuite.com) is a very good web-based twitter account manager. It is very feature rich:

1. Multi-user multi-account management. Very useful for corporate twitter accounts.
2. Multiple columns, tabs for columns, custom groups of users. This is quite important for bigger accounts. In fact its interface is quite similar to tweetdecks or Seesmics, thus I got used to it quite fast.
3. Tweet scheduling functionality, which might be important for some
4. Feed integration (similar to twitterfeed)
5. Ping.fm integration for upgrading fb and other accounts.
6. Own url shortening service which is quite reliable and provides statistics. Also adsense integration in it.

However, there are some issues in Hootsuite that I would like to be changed or fixed:

1. Separation of groups from tabs/columns. I might want to put same group of people in multiple tabs (as I need to see them more often).
2. Better FB integration. I use Seesmic for reading FB as well as I don’t have time to check website often. Full integration with stream API would be very very nice.
3. Some things bug in groups. For example, tweets of some people are excluded when I add them to groups even if they are in main view. This is because some users do not appear in twitter search. However, this information would be easily recoverable from home stream. Or I do not get a reason for separating groups from keyword search.
4. Custom color schemes. Yeah, I am picky.
5. Ability to clean up column once it is read, or a way to distinguish between tweets that are unread.

Will I use it? Yes, definitely. Hootsuite is a very nice software and I see lots of potential in it. However, I cannot abandon desktop client in hootsuites favor yet.

I had no fun in twitter till I saw first destop client.  It was tweetdeck – a powerful and really nice application that had won my heart at once. However, there is a couple problems with it at the moment, and the most noticeable is memory leak. I tend to leave my laptop always on, or use hibernation. After 5-6 hours tweetdeck crashed on my Vista64 Ultimate, which I found highly annoying. Also, some users complained that it does not perform too well for users with big follower list.  Thus I had switched to alert thingy, which offered Facebook support as well.

The downside of AlertThingy is lack of columns and limited Facebook support. Thus after a while I started looking for another client and found a remake of twirl – Seesmic Desktop. Since it supports both twitter and facebook (even multiple accounts) I am very happy with its performance. It is Adobe Air program, thus not OS based.

The best of Seesmic is that it is developed actively and does not crash that often. There are issues, as adobe Air is not too efficient with memory. But most of them will be fixed with time. I still like tweetdeck design more too, tho differences are not so significant.

On request on commenter, I have taken a look in Elgg platform. We are developing separate inhouse platform now, but it is always nice to look at different code and see whats made correctly and what can we question.

Let’s see how this Elgg does and compares to others.

The first impression is Elgg platform significantly resembles drupal with some facebookish look. The platform itself is hook based, though plugins use more user-friendly system than drupal (which I hate). The comparison to both Boonex and Drupal is quite obvious.

The page builder, which builds pages from widgets, is both good and bad thing. Good in terms of usability and reuse, bad in terms of performance on heavy sites. The Elgg shares with boonex profile fields builder as well. I would say plugins would be a better choice for extending profiles.

Negatives

1. Elgg uses myisam tables for storing information. These tables are faster, though you cannot create triggers/stored procedures or use foreign keys to ensure data integrity.

2. Setup process still needs some fine-tuning in Elgg platform – you have to enter information correctly at first time. It is written at once into files/database and if you mess up, you will have to fix it directly as site will not work. That is a big problem in Elgg, also some of the setup points should be simplified, including the data directory location. Note: system is broken if you put data directory inside of your web directory. 

3. Page/profile builder would need to be reconsidered.

4. Discussion system is quite weak compared to drupal. Though nothing can be worse than boonex.

5. No custom routing. Lots of links are hard-coded. The www root is hardcoded badly in fact, with little or no checking when setting it up.

6. Also, too much configuration stuff is loaded from mysql database. There should be a pre-generated config file somewhere for better performance.

7. Requirements for system is quite specific. Not everyone uses php 5.2.x and sometimes you have to leave older versions of php to maintain legacy code. 

Positives

1. I simply like the way plugin system is done. It is more elegant than drupal one, simpler, though powerful enough.

2. Templating is definitely better than Boonex. The whole coding of modules separates DB, control and display code nicely, which is a good thing.

3. Elgg has potential on avoiding drupals problem with amount of modules needed to construct working site. It’s maybe me, but I hate systems which consist of smallish modules that do only small parts of useful task separately. Like 3-5 modules to make audio upload and play work in drupal nicely (not exact numbers, remember from times we tried to do something useful from it a year ago).

4. Also, data model where you do not have to extend database schema and work on existing set is (possibly) a nice thing. As you have less things to worry about. 

Overall

Elgg has lots of potential to be better than many of the choices. It does not cut to be replacement for custom in-house developed social system, though. Some things have to be added natively, like custom routing, which would allow using elgg as replacement for allready existing systems. This is kind of a must to have for us.  Also, the performance of system is questionable. 

I still recommend to give it a try, especially if you considered boonex as choice.

Today I got notified about some Intelinet Smart Security software (intelinet-global.com). A friend of mine could not decide if its rogue or not at first. Well, some diging around and we found who owns it, and  it was not even hard : they used netcom3.com domain email while registering the new one. Remember Netcom3 guys ?  The “Software leaders” with fake antispyware and antivirus comparison pages?  I would doubt the company has 150 employees they claim on the webpage, as the domains itself are  only 4  and 2.5 months old. 

Ok, what did they wrong at presenting and distributing product? 

1) The name of the product is kinda stolen, or, more exactly, combined from Symantecs Smart security and Inteli scan term, used in spyware removers. The terms used are stolen from other removers. Not sure if they are covered by copyright law. There are companies called Intelinet in US, that are not related to these Netcom3 software makers.  

2) You dont start distributing software from version 3. You start at version one. Except if you wanna show that you are longer in market than in reality. 

3) You do not claim being best and winning awards which you havent won. Thats a scam and a sign of being a rogue. 

4) You do not make new removers under different company names if your product is legitimate. Except if you want to hide fact that your software is a piece of crap. You stick with your company name if everything is ok. 

5) Your previous security suite was crap anyways.  You should go to other business.

Domains related : intelinet-secure.com, intelinet-global.com

We recommend NOT using this software.

Ok, it wont be full chrome review as I expect a lot of these in the net for today. I am planing listing some things that I like or bugs I have faced.

Good things:

It is fast. Faster than Firefox with firebug atleast, and the resource management is much much better.

I like the clean interface too, and browsing history is made well. Of couse, you might hate it if you browse strange websites

Tabs on top – I need to get used to it. Somehow i tend to close whole browser instead one tab, but that will be ok when I get used to it. Confirmation screen for closing browser would be nice though.

Also, it does not need firebug – it has its own dom inspector which is quite powerfull. This will make some webdevelopers move from firebug to google chrome, as it requires FAR less resources.

Bad things:

There are few visual bugs in Google chrome, not too much and far less than in I.E. 6 on non-IE6-optimized website. As an examples, www.zynios.lt – some symbols in menu are pushed downwards due to strange handling of relative positioning. Also, font resizing is not as good as on IE 7, but quite comparable with firefox.

The biggest bug so far is how Chrome handles urls in forms with no url specified. As an example, lets take a semi-real url : http://blablablabla.com/admin/index.php/moderation/listing . The url is composed for MVC framework,  with index.php working as dispatcher and arguments separated by /

The form is declared with action=”" and mode is post. In most other browsers, you will be forwared to original URL after submition. So, whats different with google browser ? I get forwarded to http://blablablabla.com/admin instead. That is incorrect behavior in some cases, especially in MVC environment. The form submition has to be handled by specific controler, and generic dispacher knows nothing about handling it. Probably it is caused by cleaning “get” variables from url.  Which is not expected behavior. 

Notice:

Safari browser uses the same behavior, thus this is not necessary a big bug. Overall it forces me to make some forms usable to as much as couple percent of site users . 

Another, smaller bug is handling of HTTP Authorization. We have a site under Http auth which is distributed through 2 subdomains. Lets call one www, and other img. Second subdomain serveres images only and has same login/password for accessing it as first one. So while accessing the page I would need authorize twice, right? Well, not with google chrome – I will have authorize for each image on first page load. Apparently, it does no sinchronizing autorization data after first image is authorized. Annoying minor bug.

Overall Chrome is nice, And I expect it will have impact to browser market. We will see how much market share it might gain.

Update: 

There is another strange bug of Chrome. After a while of usage, you can not play flash clips for longer than couple secs. Then they stall, you need to stop/start to play another couple of seconds. It is same for youtube clips and all other flash movie players I meet. After restarting all chrome processes, everything works just fine. Apparently, it is bug in chrome itself and not in flash player, as other browsers work just fine.  

I used jedit as php editor of choice for quite a while. Although it is java-based, its features and plugins make it suitable for php as well. Additionally, its not very large, and it is quite suitable for php editing jobs

What I like most, many of the useful stuff is available as plugins. Without them jedit would be unusable in my environment where I have to access files through net, both SSH1/2 or FTP. This is a great bonus. Also, split screen feature, various modes for search really help in development. Even more so, it is completely free.

However, there is a small catch. If you use jedit with FTP/SSH module, it is good strategy to kill ssh processes occasionally, or you can use up your server memory. Havent seen this behavior with other editors.

Overall, if you want a completely free tool, Jedit is way to go. If you hate java or want standalone, faster applications, you should look elsewhere probably.

I have to admit that Komodo Edit 4.4 is the editor I use the most for editing and developing. What I like is code collapsing/expanding, quite nice syntax help, also SSH2 support, which is a must for any editor. Additionally, it is free (there is a paid Komodo IDE version too). Overall, quite nice tool.

However, there are couple of points where it could improve as well.

First, Komodo edit’s project management is far from satisfactory. It automatically adds files in the same directory as project file to project, which is not desirable behavior sometimes. Quite often project files are used for keeping shortcuts to important files in remote server only, so the “projects” are quite messed up. The more project you got, the more messy it looks

What’s even worse, the files in project are handled by their name, and not by name and location like it should be. So, you can not add 2 files with same name to same project, even if locations are completely different. One co-worker even lost content of one file due to this “nice” Komodo edit’s feature.

The remote access to files needs a fine-tune too. In previous versions, reloading a project would change active remote dir to the one of last file loaded. Nowadays it does not change it, and it feels like a downgrade in capabilities – I have to browse more till I can edit the files required.

Overall veto: Komodo Edit is more geared towards local project development with some ocasional edits on remote server. Quite good tool if you are cheap