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dennySo far, the new phone (Sony Ericsson K600i) has been working for about 16 hours, 8 of which I was asleep for, and I've already found two bugs. One of which is completely duplicatable and causes the phone to power cycle without completing the requested operation (which is: accept and save a batch of contacts via bluetooth). This means that I'm having to send all my contacts across one at a time, which is fucking tedious. The other bug is that I set a load of shortcut options for the joystick thing last night, and they were working this morning, but then at some point while I was on lunch they got reset to the defaults. This may be related to the frequent crashes caused by me poking at the first bug while I waited for my food to turn up in the restaurant.
More worryingly, I've also run into what appears to me to be a huge hole in the feature-set... there doesn't seem to be any way to save text messages in any useful or organised fashion. I can save 20 (woo!) into a pre-supplied 'saved messages' folder, which is on the SIM, and uh, that's about it. I have to leave all my messages all mixed up in my inbox? I'm really hoping I'm missing something here, because that would be quite astoundingly shit. My phone from 4 years ago (Nokia 6310i) had better SMS features than that.
This aside, the interface is great. It does everything right that the Nokia did wrong (except for having the space key in a weird place :p ), and I can see how it would be a much easier phone to use once I've got used to the way it does things, which shouldn't take too long. However... if I can't create custom folders for my text messages (and save hundreds of them, not 20!), then I don't think I'll be using it for very long at all.
Edit: rang Orange, who said "Doesn't it? Isn't that strange?!". They suggested I ring Sony Ericsson to confirm. Sony Ericsson confirmed. So, I guess I'll send it back to Orange and get another Nokia instead. Told Sony Ericsson this, they didn't seem to care much. I'm still amazed that any modern phone is lacking such a basic feature!
While I'm discussing bugs, I've been installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES4 on a machine at work for the last two days. The reason it's taken two days instead of four hours is because of some quite shockingly shoddy functionality in the Red Hat installer and the RHN registration process. Firstly, when one of the CDs was dirty, the installer died fatally rather than present me with an opportunity to retry that disc. This sucked, especially as it was (of course) well into the last CD in a set of 4 before this problem manifested.
My second installation (cleaning each disc in a rather paranoid fashion before inserting) worked fine, but then ran into a different problem. I'd set the wrong gateway during network configuration earlier in the install, and so when the time came to connect to RH's registration/update servers, the connection failed. I knew what I'd done wrong straight away, so I clicked on the 'network configuration' box to correct it... and found only one option that I could change, my proxy settings. I don't have a proxy. Where was the rest of the network configuration? Well, not accessible from the installer.
At some point during the attempts to fix this, I ended up logging onto the RHN website and activating the subscription there, which was something I'd had to do with subscriptions purchased online in the past. This at least seemed to work okay, and I got an email telling me my subscription was up and running and ready for me to use. Yay.
A phone call to Red Hat this morning revealed that the way to fix the networking problem was to hit back a few times, select the option "Tell me why I need a RHN login" which was the only route to an exit from the installer without connecting to the registration server. Because that was obvious. So I did that, corrected the gateway setting, still couldn't connect to the 'net, kicked things a lot, found the cable that I'd plugged into the wrong socket, swore a lot, reconnected the machine and got through to RH's servers.
At which point I got an error dialog during registration, "Invalid subscription number". So I back up, select the 'no subscription number' option, and keep going.
I run into another problem when I try to submit my machine's package list and hardware specs using the registration tool, it throws an error uploading the hardware details. I bounce off this twice and then untick the 'send hardware details' box and carry on to the end... at which point I rather predictably get told that I've got no valid subscription and therefore can't use the service I've just registered for.
More swearing. Another phone call to RH gets me the same helpful guy as before, who points out that my system is half-registered three times, but none of them correctly registered. I fail to make the connection with the bounces for the hardware problem (because hey, a 'failed to send details' dialog should always make you think your system has been registered anyway), so we just delete them all and I go off to try again. And fail again.
A third call to RH gets me a sarky bastard who argues with me a lot, but who finally goes to look up wtf has happened to my subscription. It turns out, the RHN site had automagically allocated it to another system that's linked to my login there, a test box for a totally different project, the 30 day trial for which had run out a few weeks ago. Never mind that I never got asked if I wanted it assigned to that machine, nor has that machine been so much as booted up lately, that's where it had gone anyway. I ask what the solution to this is, and he tells me to go register for a fourth time on the new box. Less than gentle questioning finally extracts from him the reason he's expecting this to work this time, which is that he's deleted both systems from my RHN account now. Well thanks, but I wanted that test box for the next phase of the fucking project it's meant for! I guess I'll have to register it again when we buy the subscription for it.
The fourth attempt to sign up does indeed work, now that my subscription isn't being nicked by some random box, and the system is updating in the background while I vent at LJ.
Meh.
More worryingly, I've also run into what appears to me to be a huge hole in the feature-set... there doesn't seem to be any way to save text messages in any useful or organised fashion. I can save 20 (woo!) into a pre-supplied 'saved messages' folder, which is on the SIM, and uh, that's about it. I have to leave all my messages all mixed up in my inbox? I'm really hoping I'm missing something here, because that would be quite astoundingly shit. My phone from 4 years ago (Nokia 6310i) had better SMS features than that.
This aside, the interface is great. It does everything right that the Nokia did wrong (except for having the space key in a weird place :p ), and I can see how it would be a much easier phone to use once I've got used to the way it does things, which shouldn't take too long. However... if I can't create custom folders for my text messages (and save hundreds of them, not 20!), then I don't think I'll be using it for very long at all.
Edit: rang Orange, who said "Doesn't it? Isn't that strange?!". They suggested I ring Sony Ericsson to confirm. Sony Ericsson confirmed. So, I guess I'll send it back to Orange and get another Nokia instead. Told Sony Ericsson this, they didn't seem to care much. I'm still amazed that any modern phone is lacking such a basic feature!
While I'm discussing bugs, I've been installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES4 on a machine at work for the last two days. The reason it's taken two days instead of four hours is because of some quite shockingly shoddy functionality in the Red Hat installer and the RHN registration process. Firstly, when one of the CDs was dirty, the installer died fatally rather than present me with an opportunity to retry that disc. This sucked, especially as it was (of course) well into the last CD in a set of 4 before this problem manifested.
My second installation (cleaning each disc in a rather paranoid fashion before inserting) worked fine, but then ran into a different problem. I'd set the wrong gateway during network configuration earlier in the install, and so when the time came to connect to RH's registration/update servers, the connection failed. I knew what I'd done wrong straight away, so I clicked on the 'network configuration' box to correct it... and found only one option that I could change, my proxy settings. I don't have a proxy. Where was the rest of the network configuration? Well, not accessible from the installer.
At some point during the attempts to fix this, I ended up logging onto the RHN website and activating the subscription there, which was something I'd had to do with subscriptions purchased online in the past. This at least seemed to work okay, and I got an email telling me my subscription was up and running and ready for me to use. Yay.
A phone call to Red Hat this morning revealed that the way to fix the networking problem was to hit back a few times, select the option "Tell me why I need a RHN login" which was the only route to an exit from the installer without connecting to the registration server. Because that was obvious. So I did that, corrected the gateway setting, still couldn't connect to the 'net, kicked things a lot, found the cable that I'd plugged into the wrong socket, swore a lot, reconnected the machine and got through to RH's servers.
At which point I got an error dialog during registration, "Invalid subscription number". So I back up, select the 'no subscription number' option, and keep going.
I run into another problem when I try to submit my machine's package list and hardware specs using the registration tool, it throws an error uploading the hardware details. I bounce off this twice and then untick the 'send hardware details' box and carry on to the end... at which point I rather predictably get told that I've got no valid subscription and therefore can't use the service I've just registered for.
More swearing. Another phone call to RH gets me the same helpful guy as before, who points out that my system is half-registered three times, but none of them correctly registered. I fail to make the connection with the bounces for the hardware problem (because hey, a 'failed to send details' dialog should always make you think your system has been registered anyway), so we just delete them all and I go off to try again. And fail again.
A third call to RH gets me a sarky bastard who argues with me a lot, but who finally goes to look up wtf has happened to my subscription. It turns out, the RHN site had automagically allocated it to another system that's linked to my login there, a test box for a totally different project, the 30 day trial for which had run out a few weeks ago. Never mind that I never got asked if I wanted it assigned to that machine, nor has that machine been so much as booted up lately, that's where it had gone anyway. I ask what the solution to this is, and he tells me to go register for a fourth time on the new box. Less than gentle questioning finally extracts from him the reason he's expecting this to work this time, which is that he's deleted both systems from my RHN account now. Well thanks, but I wanted that test box for the next phase of the fucking project it's meant for! I guess I'll have to register it again when we buy the subscription for it.
The fourth attempt to sign up does indeed work, now that my subscription isn't being nicked by some random box, and the system is updating in the background while I vent at LJ.
Meh.
