Monday, June 20, 2011

CM's update and their s****** instructions! AMP!

Last week Cherry Mobile just release their update for the MagnumHD. Thanks to Aryan Limjap for the shoutout telling me about it. Its a nb0 file about 160MB which uncompressed to about 402MB. Sweet, right? Screw that, they goof the instructions.

They said to download the file, and copy it into your SD card. No problem unless your one of those asses who didn't buy a SD card or believed he didn't need one. And if you couldn't afford one, then you might be simple be screwed. Fine lets move on.

Next, they said to enter bootloader mode - done by pressing and holding the volume up + down + power buttons. Now, they didn't explicitly say to hold all three buttons down at the same time. Unless, you're like me, you'd be forgiven if you thought that you should press and hold the volume up then down and then power in sequence. But then again...You're such a newb.


Now, you should Press ‘Home’key to show the update utility. Use the volume buttons to select the option “Download nb0 from SD card”. I think this is where it gets scary for you tadpoles. You should see a bunch of text popping up. Now if it says something to the effect that is was successful then no worries. But if not, then you'll have to do an extra step.

You have to rename that stupid file: FB0-318B-0-5019-A01.nb0 to say firmware.nb0. After you have rename it just re-enter the bootloader mode. And redo the whole "Download nb0 from SD card" procedure.

BTW, make sure that you have atleast 70% battery when doing this. We don't want any bricked CM Magnums, do we?

One more thing, by doing this, you will need to root your phone again. Yeah, I know, what at bitch.

Friday, June 17, 2011

How I see things: A Drupal devel to a Drupal Designer

Its hard dealing with clients that are so...."technologically challenged". You would think that with a designer, things would go a bit easier - well not exactly. As a Drupal developer, I had done my fair share of hand-holding first time designers working on their first Drupal site - also true for clients.

From experience, first time clients and designers need to understand that we simply won't always see eye-to-eye on all things when it comes to Drupal.  All this reasons have been confirmed by a recent research done by the University of Minnesota on Drupal Usability.
  1. Drupal terminology confuses clients and designers alike. Words like "node", "block", "views" or "module" have different meanings to clients and designers compared to what I understand what they mean in the Drupal context.
  2. Clients and Designers see different things when looking at a Drupal webpage.
  3. How they see and what I see
  4. Drupal doesn't really make distinctions between frontend and backend - Yes, I am taking about clients familiar with Joomla.
  5. As a developer, I don't do design that well. As Forrest Lyman (of Pro Zend Framework Techniques) said:
    A great deal of this boils down to one of the most striking differences between programming and design:
    • The foundation of programming is binary logic; there is a right and wrong way to implement a given algorithm.
    • The foundation of design is how your brain interprets what it sees; since everyone interprets things differently, it is impossible to say whether something is right or wrong.
    True That.
Go with the flow, I guess. What else exactly am I gonna do other than educating them?

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Make up your mind! - How an error made me "ang amp @#$@#!"

I admit that I don't really use Microsoft software but that doesn't say they don't put out some fantastic stuff. So I decided to check out Microsoft's Expression Web 4. EW4 is for web design, also lucky for me the university that I am working for had an academic alliance license for it. Woohoo!

It should have been a straight-forward procedure installing EW4. But it had me to jump a couple of hoops.

First, I had to download the .NET 4 framework. Fine. OK. No problem. So, I got the web installer and ran it. Being a web installer, I had to wait for it to download the whole thing.

I also got Silverlight. What fun would I have with I couldn't run all those cool demos from EW4 without Silverlight. BTW, getting Silverlight should be pie if you are running Windows 7.

With everything set, ran the app and I then ran into this error:

I don't know about you but the error confused me. Take a closer look: "is either not designed to run on Windows..." Not designed to run on Windows? Are you sure?

Anyway, I did fix this error...eventually.