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This post summarizes my first experiences with Google maps turn by turn navigation. Please note that turn by turn is not supported in UK, not even as beta!

I took for a ride a hacked version of US Google maps application running on Motorola Milestone. It runs very smooth, you can use all Google maps power when searching, including post code search, which can’t be done using Motonav. That’s a great plus!

I have played with different destinations and every time Google was able to give me very reasonable routes – another advantage over Motonav, which tends to force me into congested streets in town centres. Google navigation reacted very fast to all mistakes on the road with almost immediate route recalculations. So far, so good.

After about 20 minutes of cruising in neighbourhood I understood why Google decided to block Maps Mavigation in UK – it cannot navigate here. Literally. It’s impossible to drive using voice commands given by the navigation – it lost some turns and remaining ones were told when I was in the middle of cross roads when I had no chances of turning. To get the directions right, I had to look on the screen all the time and even though navigation wasn’t easy since there are no icons displayed to show what to do next. The map itself is easly readble though.
You may also forget about roundabout notifications – with Google you don’t take second exit, you just drive straight through cross roads. It’s far from we all got used to.

I wish I could finish my list of complains now, but there are still two thing I must mention – both small but annoying. According to Google Navigation most of the time you drive on unknown road, which is quite strange as road names are correctly displayed on map.
Last quirk I’ve noticed is the most terrible voice I ever heard in any navigation (and I have tested quite a lot of them). Google decided to use Text-to-speech synthesis, which isn’t very good. The voice is absolutely artificial, it reminded me early TTSs I used to play with ten years ago. And I think most of them knew how to read “road” – definitely it should not be read as “hawl”.

I will be waiting for new updates to Google Navigation. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Google will turn its Navigation in really usable product. But I think I will stay with Garmin for next year or two.

It’s been almost a week since I got Motorola Milestone. It’s an Android based phone and I absolutly love it. Actually I’m using it to write this post. And since it’s running on an open source platform, it will provide many hours of fixing and twicking.

First quirk you’ll notice soon after booting your new toy is that you can’t import your contacts from old mobile. Android do not accept contacts sent by bluetooth nor can read them from sim card. So to copy your contacts you need a pc (or mac if you are gay or female).
I was able to make my old sony-ericsson k750 send all contacts directly to my outlook. This wasn’t what I really wanted – I hoped for a file, but still it was a step in good direction.
Gmail can import contacts from various formats, including csv and this was a format I’ve chosen when exporting from outlook (file -> export -> follow the wizard).
If you think it was too simple, you’re right. Somewhere during the process all phone numbers lost + sign from the country code. Still… 140 +s to edit is better than 140 contacts to add

Couple year’s ago I received a pretty funny joke – Albanian Manual Virus, which went something like:

For some time now Google is running Google Forms service which allows anyone to create web forms using extremely simple creator. Just log in to your google account, go to documents to try yourself:

Then follow on-screen instruction, there’s nothing that can cause any trouble to anyone. When you save the form, you will get email with two URLs – one to the form itself, second one to Google Spreadsheet which to which all data typed to your form will be saved. Clean and easy!

I’ve used Google Forms to gather  feedback from my recent presentations and I’m more than happy with results. I’ve created anonymous forms with no required fields not to put any pressure on responders. The turn-over was higher than expected, I got both positive and negative responses. Some people used “other comment” field to provide their email.

My tips for using Google forms for feedback gathering:

• use open questions
• ask for positive and negative sides separately “what did you like… / what didn’t you like…”
• if you had several separable parts of presentation, ask for each part separately to make the answers more straight forward
• do not make fields required – you will see that most people will fill all fields without you pushing them!
• make the survey anonymous
• add “other comments” field

Good luck!

On Thursday I gave presentation for Java Users Group in Lodz about implementation of Agile methodologies in real projects in enterprise world. The presentation has been interrupted frequently with questions and has been followed by interesting discussion. The PPT accompanyingthe presentation can be downloaded here (in Polish):  Agile w praktyce_public.

The most important observations and conclussions so far:

• There’s huge gap between wikipedia style theory and real world practice
• There are tons of obstacles in implementation of agile processes
• The benefits of Agile are enormous!

I need an excuse to investigate some more and prepare English version of the presenation – I hope some event like unconference will be comming soon!

VirtualBox on Ubuntu has an issue preventing host waking up from suspend. This issue is marked as resolved, but unfortunately it’s still present in 3.1.2 r56127 running under control of Ubuntu x64. The workaround for this issue is well documented: disable VT-x/AMD-v support. Fine, but… the option is greyed out in the settings:

To change it, you have to go directly to vm configuration file and change enabled attribute in HardwareVirtEx to false. After the change CPU node should look similar to:

      <CPU count="1">

        <HardwareVirtEx enabled="false" exclusive="true"/>

        <HardwareVirtExNestedPaging enabled="false"/>

        <HardwareVirtExVPID enabled="false"/>

        <PAE enabled="true"/>

      </CPU>

Having too much systems to work on has one small disadvantage – there’s a hell of a lot of Administrator and root passwords to remember. And yesterday happend what was meant to happen for some time  - I forgot an Administator password for one of my Windows 2003 Servers. For obvious security reasons (I had no pencil on my desk) I haven’t noted password to this machine anywhere.

The server is running on my company VMware ESX server and I decided to hack into it. VMware Infrastructure Client has great ability – it let’s you share your local CD (or .iso image) to the server. I don’t need to say more, do I? Yes, it is so simple.

So, here’s a step by step tutorial how to reset Administrator’s password on Windows 2003 server running on ESX. Prerequisites:

- VMware Infrastucture Client

- Permission from system’s administrator (don’t be naughty!)

- Live CD with your prefered password tools (I took http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ 3MB only!)

Disclaimer: The procedure below can destroy data on your server, use on your own risk! I don’t take any responsibility of the damages you may cause trying to runt the procedure (or any of its parts).

1. Stop the server. I had to shut down VM image, not good for file system, but I had no choice.

2. Edit preferences of your image to enable remote CD drive:

3. Change boot options to set boot delay

My image has been set to boot from Hard Drive first. I had to go into bios settings to set boot order. I’ve also set 10s delay on booting to give myself time to connect CD image – on power on it’s unconnected.

4. Power on machine and set up boot order

5. Connect iso image. Quickly, before system start booting

6. See system booting from CD, use your the tool to reset Administrator password.

7. Enjoy!

Hint:

It was impossible on my machine to set new Administrator password using ntpasswd. I had to use option to blank the password.

I can’t tell how many logins I need to remember nowadays. And it could be so much simpler - I already have very flexible and worldwide unique login – my email address. Let’s just all agree and use it as a login? If you will design a website, please, please, please use email as user name. Thank you.

I’ve been struggling for quite a time with setting up home audio system that can play my mp3 collection (about 8500 files) without need to turn my computer on. I failed to find reasonably priced audio system, so I bought LG 2.1 Home Theater system – HB354BS, which can play mp3 from usb drive. The sound it produces is really nice – solid base, clear trebles, powerful medium range – more than enough for me!

The HT system has one issue – it supports only 1999 files per drive. This is nowhere near my requirement, but I found out that it treats partitions as separate drives. I split my usb drive to four partitions, which gave me space for 8k files. 500 files had to go away (sorry Andrea Bocelli and some scene mp3 stuff), but now I can listen whatever I want (currenlty Tracy Chapman – Mountains O’Things)! With my TV off (and computer on, but I can close the lid and the music will be playing!)

Yesterday I spent a night listening to Avril Lavigne on youtube. How comes amazon.co.uk shows Avirl’s CD’s as “Customers with Similar Searches Purchased”? Is google selling my search history data??