28 May 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Bought a refurbished Blackberry 8820 from Att.com and started having problem from day 1. Following were the issues encountered.

- The phone would reset itself in middle of a phone conversation.

- The phone would lose mobile service and will not get it back until I resetted the phone by taking the batteries out.

- On an average it would reset itself once a day.

Needless to say I returned the phone back and declined to extend the contract.

Additional tips for those considering to buy 8820

- Opera, Yahoo Messenger, Google Apps do not work until you have a data plan. It has nothing to do with ATT but all these apps do not have the capability to recognize a wi-fi connection to the internet. Stupid but it is true.

- Tiggit Mail is the way the go if you want to check your personal emails but do not want to have a data plan. LogicMail is not there yet.

- Setting up Wi-FI was a piece of cake on this device.

- It is a very good device, had I not had the issues I reported earlier, I would have kept it. Maybe the technician who refurbished my handset did not know what s/he was doing.

- Web Surfing was SUPER! Blackberry browser does its job pretty good.

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18 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I got hooked to Thunderbird because it is an awesome email client. Nothing like it and we have a portable version too so that you can carry the client on the usb flash drive whereever you go. Needless to say the next step was to install Lightning and make it one step closer to Outlook. My goal is to have a completely portable Email, calender, contacts and tasks (which thunderbird enables me to achieve it)

The ideal situation will be to have Blackberry’s desktop manager directly talk to thunderbird ( I am not smoking anything ) but I know it is not possible yet and may be a while before we reach that level of maturity.

After searching I bumped into www.ScheduleWorld.com (for the real hardcore go getters, you can start with www.funambol.com, install that server and so on so forth). An excellant product and kudos to the guys who maintain this thing. This product is what I would consider as the holy grail of synchronization ( I did not steal this word from one other blog which also coins it the same but it was an immediate mind response the moment I browsed the site). It certainly is the holy grail of synchronization.

Installed Outlook Plugin, Thunderbird plugin and blackberry plugin as mentioned on that site.

Before going full production live (i.e : full synchronization between outlook, thunderbird and blackberry) I wanted to test whether outlook, schedule world and thunderbird can collarborate accurately. Started running in problems one after another, recurring events like an event which occurs every tuesday and thursday in outlook do not get updated properly in Scheduleworld. Just lots of problems in general that I ended up putting atleast 20 hours over a period of a week when finally I decided that even if I get this working, I will not be sure that I can rely on the sync software. Point to note, I did not add blackberry to this mix yet, blackberry being a very “closed” device I am sure will not be easy to tackle too.

There are lot of things to take care of before you can get this machinary well oiled and working for you.

- Make sure that the date and time zone settings on Schedule World are same as your outlook and thunderbird.
- Make sure that you have the correct plugin version.
- Even synch has lots of different options by which you sync your data. This can easily confuse any user.
- Sunbird is also not 1.0 i.e : it might have bugs of its own which might create issues with regards to synch.

I do not want to undermine the developer’s tremendous efforts in creating funambol, scheduleworld and all other plugins but I think this whole technology is not ready for prime time yet. Certainly not at production level when a normal computer user can embrace it and trust it to work like a champ.

Bottomline :

1. I will wait another year (see for my test results in April 2009) as it is too time consuming and cumbersome.
2. Thunderbird as an email client is powerful and production level.
3. Do not venture to research whether Thunderbird (Lighting extension), Outlook, ScheduleWorld and Blackberry will work harmoniously together yet unless you just have loads of time at hand. And if you do find out, uninstall and all reinstall plugins, create a new schedule world account and test it again. If you can get it to working properly post the steps you took on your blog so that others can leverage it.

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16 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

If you are getting the following error at the bottom of the thunderbird window then go to \App\thunderbird\chrome and delete (or rename it to something else) offline.manifest file. Once that is done, restart thunderbird and the error will be gone. Don’t ask me why. It just works
menu id=”offlineMenuItem” insertafter=”trashMenuSeperator” label=”&offlineMenu.label;” accesskey =”&offlineMenu.accesskey;”

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9 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

With email becoming a communication tool of choice and security breaches/holes a part of digital life, it is imperative that we take appropriate security measures that will protect our emails both from content integrity and privacy perspective.

By Content integrity, I mean that the email which you write is the email which is received by the recipient. Sounds like a no-brainer? It is not. Email message once composed and sent goes through a maze of servers (machines) before it finally reaches its destination. Anywhere in this chain of servers can your email be altered, thus compromising your contents. The recipient might not get exact message you sent to her. A simple example is, using a wi-fi connection in the library. The connection between your computer to library’s wi-fi access point can easily be intercepted and the contents be altered before delivering your email message to the first machine (which is the library’s access point). And this is just a starting point of the message’s journey.

By Content privacy, I mean that the email can be read by anyone who either snoops or intercepts your email en route. Thus there is no content privacy. The requirement here is that the message sent by you should *only* be readable by the recipient/s and nobody else.

Both of the above issues can be resolved by using secure email certificates. Having a personal email certificate ensures that the recipient will be notified if the message is altered and if both you and the recipient have certificates then by encrypting your email, nobody else will be able to read it. There is one requirement however, certificates only work with Smime compatible email clients like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc. Most of the web mail clients are *not* s/mime email compliant, except Gmail (there is a plug in available for Firefox - gmail users which allows you to sign and encrypt your email sent from Gmail). However if you can access your yahoo mail(let’s say) from outlook then you can use this facility as outlook is smime compliant.

By attaching a certificate to the email, you are digitally signing that email so that nobody else can alter the email content. It is like when you sign your will, nobody else can alter your will because the malicious party cannot recreate your signature. With hand signatures it maybe possible to fake it but be rest assured that with digital thumb prints, there is no technology which can fake your signature.

Comodo issues certificates and I have used them without any problems at all and they are free. They are very easy to acquire and it will take less than 2 minutes for your to install it on your computer.

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27 Mar 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Most of the organizations (small/mid sized/large) have data store which cater to the whole enterprise, the so called data warehouse or data marts. More often than not it has been observed that the applications which feed from the warehouse or feed to the warehouse need some sort of Metadata management tool which acts as inventory of the data fields which are in involved in the data transfer.

Following are some of the reasons why there is a need of Metadata tool

- To determine the impact of a change in field definition. A classic case here is Y2K problem where before the year 2000 only 2 digits were allocated to the year and post Y2K it was required a change it to 4 digits. In this scenario the only option would have been to manually go thru each and every source code file to check which all files use 2 digit year if the organization did not use some kind of Metadata Management tool to identify the potential impact to all the up/down stream applications.

- Identify Golden Elements amongst suite of applications. Each enterprise has some “golden” elements which are widely used amongst different applications in an enterprise. Having a Metadata Management tool will enable us to identify it efficiently.

- Promotes reuse of data. Rather than creating 20 different fields for account number the enterprise can leverage and enforce a single field for account number. Needless to say reuse of data elements is always an efficient and effective way of enforcing data consistency in the enterprise.

- Enable developers/data analyst/maintenance staff to understand the data semantics. Metadata management tools by default forces all those who work closely with the application to keep metadata information current.

I am currently in process of determining best practices, industry standard and tools available in market for Metadata Management. I will be updating my blog on a regular basis on this topic. If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to post here, I will highly appreciate it.

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4 Mar 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Google provides a great SMS texting service by which you can send a SMS message to them to get directions, weather, movie times etc. It is a great utility when an individual is on the road and does not have access to an internet connection. All we need is a text plan by the mobile carrier. As SMS texting is becoming a norm this should not be a concern. Pretty much everyone who owns a cell phone also has some kind of text messaging plan.

To learn more please visit Google’s Text Message Overview website.

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