Techbook

Sprint and the new Palm Pre

Just received a PR email from Sprint about a groom who almost abandoned the altar in order to buy a Palm Pre phone.

On Saturday at 7 a.m., Theodore was 14th in line at an Atlanta-area Sprint store, fidgeting for his new Pre. His wedding was scheduled for 8 a.m. As much as Theodore wanted Pre, he wanted his bride, Anita, to see him at the altar at the appointed time. At 7:45, he abandoned his wait and left his line-number and credit card information with a Sprint store employee, asking that he “hold the 14th phone for me.” The Sprint store employee obliged. Minutes after the recessional, the newlyweds returned to pick up their phone, spending the first minutes of married life with a Ready Now consultant who walked the happy couple through Pre’s setup and features. The new Mrs. Travis later revealed that her reaction was “You did what?” to her husband spending the hour before their wedding waiting for a phone, but later admitted, “I guess I kind of understand now.”

Wow. And they ask me why I hate marketeers.

Understanding MySQL Control Flow Functions

Sure, the documentation for control flow functions is available right here. But it’s not the easiest thing in the world to understand. The documentation, I mean – since the examples given there are very simple cases.

Here’s a portion of it, explaining the CASE statement:

CASE value WHEN [compare_value] THEN result [WHEN [compare_value] THEN result ...] [ELSE result] END

CASE WHEN [condition] THEN result [WHEN [condition] THEN result ...] [ELSE result] END

The first version returns the result where value=compare_value. The second version returns the result for the first condition that is true. If there was no matching result value, the result after ELSE is returned, or NULL if there is no ELSE  part.

mysql> SELECT CASE 1 WHEN 1 THEN 'one'
    ->     WHEN 2 THEN 'two' ELSE 'more' END;
        -> 'one'
mysql> SELECT CASE WHEN 1>0 THEN 'true' ELSE 'false' END;
        -> 'true'
mysql> SELECT CASE BINARY 'B'
    ->     WHEN 'a' THEN 1 WHEN 'b' THEN 2 END;
        -> NULL

Great, but how do you use it in an actual scenario where you want to, let’s say, update a column based on its current contents?

Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile Number Portability in India. Finally.

While mobile number portability (MNP) has been in use for the last several years in many parts of the world, India was still lagging. The Department of Telecommunications (or DoT) finally mandated the provisioning of the MNP service. Officially, the department defines the MNP service as follows:

Mobile Number Portability Service means a service which allows subscribers to retain their existing telephone number when they switch from one access provider to another irrespective of mobile technology or from one technology to another of the same or any other access service provider (sic).

This is good news!

A Wordle analysis of Techbook

Wordle just won the 2009 Webby for Best Use of Typography. So I just had to run it on Techbook.

Click for larger image

Gmail Language Selection Feature FAIL

Why? Because it doesn’t exist, apparently.

The last few days I’ve been visiting maps.google.cz. Today when I opened Gmail, Google decided, for whatever reason, to present me with the Czech version of the site. I don’t speak Czech, and naturally I looked around for a “Gmail in English” or “Change Language” link – but couldn’t find it anywhere.

Click for a larger image

Nokia E71x Cell Phone Appears on AT&T

Just came across this bit of news that AT&T will carry the Nokia E71x (no doubt a North American version of the E71). I decided to look it up on the AT&T website. Here’s what I saw.

Nokia E71x on AT&T

Looks like somebody wanted to play with the HTML title tag.

Anyway, at 0.39″ thickness, this is a sleek, full QWERTY phone that I wouldn’t mind owning. The phone’s got a 2.4″ display which is a bummer, but hey, I can connect to the Internet directly using either the data cable or Bluetooth – assuming AT&T hasn’t disabled it. Oh wait, there’s no mention of it on AT&T’s website about this feature, which leads me to believe that they have, in fact, disabled it.

A new look for Techbook

After several months of running the very nice Almost Spring theme on my blog, I switched to the Gear theme today. Let me know if you like the new look.

Of course, the fact that JD upgraded the WordPress version to 2.7 was a major factor in getting me to make the switch.

SMS and Twitter

The first SMS is sent out way back in 1992. Fast forward to 17 years later, and Twitter is one of the fastest growing phenomena of the first decade of this century.

Nokia Easy Meet

(Read the service details from Nokia Betalabs)

Nokia Betalabs unveiled its latest baby, the Nokia Easy Meet. A collaboration tool, the service lets you share content on your phone or PC. Once you create an account and login to the service (yes, this one does not integrate with your Nokia account – a complaint that the other commenters share on the Betalabs blog), you are provided with the option to view existing meetings and create a new meeting. When you are in the process of creating the meeting, you also add invitations which can be sent as email notifications or SMS messages.

Once participants receive the SMS/email, they open the link in the message to join the meeting, where they can access content shared by the meeting organizer; they can also share content of their own with other participants. Types of content that can be shared include PPTs and images (JPG/PNG). You can also chat with other participants.

Since this is a web based service, you can access it with any phone with a decent browser. So I proceeded to sign up with my iPhone, as that’s the only working phone I have at the moment.

The UI essentially sucked ass on the iPhone’s safari browser. While the site looked okay in Firefox, I am pretty sure it would look better on the Nokia phones. We’ll see. (At least one of the commenters there was unhappy that the site was not optimized for the Nokia 5800 touch screen phone).

I am still not very convinced about the value of the service. Remember that it’s still in beta and may be scrapped at any time. I will continue testing it for a couple of days and see if this is something that’ll take off.

Gmail Mobile Enhancements with New Engine for iPhone/Android

According to this post on the Google Mobile blog, there have been improvements made to Gmail for mobile, but only if you are an iPhone/Android phone user. Now, I have both phones. When I opened Gmail on the Android (T-Mobile HTC G-1), it prompted me with a “Faster Gmail available! Update Now” message. Clicking on the link produced the above popup. So basically, I had to install Gears on my “computer” (nevermind that this is actually a phone). Before I could check the “I trust this site…” box (while in reality I don’t ;-)), the popup disappeared.

And now when I click on the Update Now link, nothing happens. No popup, no gears, nothing. When I opened Gmail on the iPhone, the Update Now link was not even shown. Welcome to the improved version.