Point Element

So once I have called it quits on the R&D, I started work on the integration thing. The problem has grown tenfold by now. The powers that be want to do a lot of messaging stuff and its become a list of at least half a dozen changes where messages are to be introduced. Now, there's another angle. I am serving notice period, the recruitment people are having hard time finding a replacement and its my last three weeks here. I should be doing the handover. Shouldn't be working on these new features - especially things as complex and less understood as this STOMP stuff. But what can you do when the powers that be want to push in code without worrying about the future of that code. So I sat silently on this wet and cold Monday morning, trying to figure out the integration strategy. Yeah, the code is all C code, so better to keep it all together. Means a single function which connects to server, sends the message and disconnects. What can I pass? We need to fetch in settings f...

So far... I'm sending data to a RabbitMQ broker as messages. These messages get queued up in a user configurable queue. Supposedly a consumer is going to process these. But the consumer is out of my view. Doesn't matter. Now there came a feature of receiving notifications from the consumer or some other system. So after some discussion, the powers to be decided that we are going to have a notification queue which the client has to read. And from it we get the notifications to be read. Now the shady part of business was I had no idea what the hell is going on the inside of libStomp. So I ask politely that I don't have any read code. And I get handed over a single stomp_read code snippet. (In whiny voice) They said it works!!! But it doesn't!!! I tried so hard!!! Damn!!! So I looked into the protocol to understand why the hell I am no getting anything. After reading the protocol, I came to know that the implementation is fucked up in ways more than a few. First ...

I need to give some background for this situation. Its like this: we have a client server product. The server is written in .net and performs analysis on raw data collected from a number of clients and prepares various reports. The client software is written in c++/Qt and it interacts with various hardware controllers/ sensors to get the raw data. There is a sync program written in .net that runs on the server and it pulls data from all the clients. The data is saved in servers PostgreSQL database for later processing. Now, the powers to be decided that we need to remove this syncing program ( because it sunk the data into oblivion sometimes! :D ). So what's the replacement? Well, they decided on RabbitMQ as the queuing solution and decided that the clients would sync their own data to the queue and from there it will be fetched by the server. So we as clients needed to have this functionality in our application. But after looking at the complexity of our own client, we...

www.needrom.com has a collection of ROMs for this phone. The things to remember are: 1. Always backup the existing stuff! 2. Ensure that phone battery is more than 70% and the computer laptop you are trying out the procedure from has sufficient backup power. 3. Ensure that whatever ROM files you get from the net are from reputed sources and are tested previously by multiple person. Flashing incompatible ROM will brick your phone. So big word of caution here. 4. Also don't forget to check MD5SUM/SHASUM of the file to ensure that your downloaded file is fine and not corrupted. Flashing a custom ROM is dangerous if you are not careful!

Zte Blade c (v807/v889) can be rooted by using vroot application. This is a windows program, so you need a windows PC for this. You can follow this process: Enable USB debugging mode on phone and connect to PC. You need to install USB drivers. You can get these from the phone itself. When you connect the phone to PC, you get an option in notifications about connection type. Here if you select CD-Rom, then a mounted CD-Rom appears in your computer which contains the drivers. Otherwise you have to search on the internet to get the debug drivers. Once the drivers are installed, you will see a MT6513 device in system tray. Now start vroot, and wait for it to detect the phone. Once phone is detected, clicking on 'root' button will start the rooting procedure. After files are copied to the phone, it will restart the phone and rooting will continue. Afterwards phone will restart again and load android. You will see a Superuser app in app drawer. If you open root checke...

This tablet belonged to one of my relatives and I took it with me for updating the apps on my home WiFi. Once it was connected, I started updating the apps one by one. Then in between the updates, a notification popped. This was about a system update availability. I was frankly intrigued. Seeing an android update. So i stopped app updating and instead went for the update. It was ~92MB and took some time to download. Then another dialog popped up asking me if i wanted to update now or after some time like 30mins, 90mins. I selected to update now. The tablet rebooted and updated. After it was done, it rebooted. Once we were connected to WiFi, another update popped up. This one saying it was memory related and it will wipe out all user data. So I went through and checked the partitioning. So it had a 512 MB system partition and 2GB internal partition. Ok. So I went through that update. Now after some time in getting the user account set up, I'm running through so many apps install, bu...

So I am using the ZTE Blade C as my daily driver now. It's almost a fortnight since I started using it. The main point for me to go for this one instead the latest crop of cheap chinese kitkat phones from Micromax/Karbonn/Xolo etc or Moto E was the price it was offered. The price was INR4000 i.e. ~$68. Thats dirt cheap. And whatever features it provided are more than enough for me. When compared to my previous android phone - Karbonn S1 Titanium - INR7600 /~$127, the blade c actually shines. The Karbonn handset had following shortcomings: 1. It's touch response was sub par. The capacitive keys were terrible. Plus it's touchscreen used to go crazy when it was charging. Also there was a bad touch spot which made typing slightly painful. 2. The 5MP/720p camera was average, even though it was touted as a main feature. 3. It's chipset is Qualcomm S4 play - not the best when it comes to power consumption. And it's couple generations old by the time I got the phone. ...

Here are some more benchmark scores

These are scores in nenamark 2 and geekbench

I have been a WP user for last two and half years. The samsung omnia was my first smartphone and it has been wonderful hardware so far. Even after so many years of rough use the phone still feels solid in hands. And the software has been great too. But all software ages. And so has the old WP7. Mind you, its still has the performance. The UI smoothness is there, the OS is responsive as ever. The hardware is solid, the phone has not rebooted of its own accord. And whatever features it provides it excels at them. For me though the first blow was losing gmail support after upgrading to WP7.8. And recently Whatsapp outage was something else I could say was most significant for me to start considering something else. But the problem was I had sunk almost INR16,000 in this one back then. Thats about $320 back then. And right now I am weary of sinking so much hard earned dough into a smartphone. But thankfully the smartphone prices have also come down dramatically. I was looking for a kil...