I just (well, not just now, but a little while ago) picked up the Xbox 360 Elite I ordered online this morning at Circuit City on Broadway.  The item was in stock, and ready for me to pick up.  All in all, I spent less time in the store than if I had went in and bought it.  An overall excellent experience.  Best Buy should use Circuit City as an example, where if their site shows product in stock, it actually is, in stock.

Plus I get 4x points from MyPoints for buying online. ^_^

So at work I’m working on an application that has to run on Windows Mobile 5 smartphones. Long story short, it’s going to make cops’ jobs a little easier (and maybe, just maybe, a certain cop in Marana PD will actually do his job instead of sitting in their cars on yahoo all night waiting for strippers to arrest…seriously man, bust some red-light runners or some drunk drivers or something) and eliminate a paper to computer transfer job that has to be done back at the station. Simply put, more efficient cops. Anyway, for the project, Verizon sent me 2 kinds of phones, the Moto Q and the Xv6700, and Sprint sent me a Treo 700wx to test it on.

Xv6700
So far I like this phone the best. This is a UTStarcom PocketPC phone (also branded as the PPC-6700 on Sprint and Alltel). The sound quality is pristine, and it has a slide-out keyboard with nice big keys (because we all know that people don’t really have thumbs that are less than a square centimeter in shape) that I can type seriously fast on. The only problem with this phone is that the processor is a little bit slow, clocking in at 400 MHz (XScale) it’s a little less zippy than I’m used to, coming from a 624MHz Dell Axim x51v. The slow speed doesn’t bother me too much, it just strikes me as odd that my application loads much faster on the Axim. The EVDO interface is pretty fast too; I haven’t done any formal speed tests, as testing Verizon’s EVDO speeds is beyond the scope of this review, but needless to say it mets my needs. The other con about this phone is that Alltel doesn’t carry it anymore, which really bums me out.

Treo 700wx
This one is the second runner up. I’ve always liked the Treos, even back when they were Palm devices. It has all the nice qualities of the Xv700, but since the processor is a different type (Samsung 300MHz) I can’t really do a speed comparison. I will say it’s comparable in speed to the Xv6700. This phone would be tied for first place except two things. One, the keys on the thumbpad are just too small for most men to manage. I get “fatfinger” errors all the time with this thing (as my girlfriend will attest, seeing some of the atrociously spelled text messages I’ve sent her from Treos) and it can be annoying. It does have the advantage of one-handed text entry if your fingers are small enough for it. The other issue is the square screen. The screen is a 240×240 screen. I really don’t understand this…they could have easily made the phone just a little longer and put in a 320×240 standard PocketPC screen, or at least made it 320×320 like the Palm Treo models. It’s a little disappointing, but the sound quality is great, and this device is a solid performer.

Moto Q
This phone really blows. If Motorola was going to try to make a “budget smartphone” they should have told people this. The voice quality on this phone is terrible compared to the two above phones, and even terrible compared to my Motorola e815 (Alltel). My girlfriend’s T-Mobile sidekick sounds better for voice quality than this unit. This isn’t an issue with the phone, but with Motorola. I’d pay $10 more for the phone to have a quality speaker in it. Maybe they can release a Q “pro edition” for $50 more that has a better speaker and a faster graphics processor/cpu. Which brings me to my next point: the Q has serious problems with page tearing when doing transitions and renders UI elements slowly. If I have a page with 10 text boxes on it and hit the down key 5 times, the phone does not keep up with me. This is terribly annoying, and it happens in Internet Explorer too. I’d have tested Opera if I could have made it run on that toy. The only pro about this phone is that it has the thumbpad built into the front, and typing is a little easier than on the Treo for me because the buttons are more spread out. It does not make up for lacking a touchscreen though; navigating this phone is extremely difficult. Don’t buy this phone until Motorola fixes the bugs!

Verizon also sent me some PN-820 phones, but because they lack a QWERTY keyboard, they never left the box. I just told the client “no” with my laughter.

This game is utterly horrific. The control schema is utterly retarded…I have never played a game that made such an utterly obnoxious requirement of the touchscreen on the DS. I thought the tutorial was lame, but the game was even worse.

Don’t pirate this game. Don’t buy this game. It’s lame beyond words.

Score: 1/10.

At least it used to be called that…I think it’s google accounts for domains now or something like that…anyway…

I just set it up to handle ethergeek.com’s mail after having so much trouble with my host’s email (too much intermittent “-ERR Maildir invalid (no ‘cur’ directory)” errors) so I finally just said fuck them and set up Google mail for domains.

Anyway, setup was a little tricky, they asked me a few questions, then made me upload a file to my server to verify that I owned the domain, then made me wait 24 hours while they “verified my MX record” (I don’t know why that takes more than a few hours, the TTL on those records is not *that* long), but finally it works. To be honest, the logging into my account should be easier; I should be able to just go to www.gmail.com and enter my username at ethergeek.com and my password, and the system should just know to take me to my mailbox, but instead I have to log in via a different google site with a long annoying name or add a CNAME record (my cPanel host may have a problem doing this, as most hosts that use cPanel have nobody on staff that understands how to manually configure bind) that will point something like mail.ethergeek.com somewhere. I may abuse a redirect to get this to work ^_^.

As for the general experience, it’s just like using gmail, I can set up catch-all addresses for my domain, and they gave me up to 100 accounts with 2 GB of storage apiece. And of course I get the gmail spam filter (thank GOD, since those assholes over at freewareppc posted my email address *in the clear* for months so every spam harvester in the world has it now) to clean up my inbox.

It also comes with other services, like calendar, docs and spreadsheets, talk (which I’m gonna play with later), and google webs…fun toys I haven’t gotten to try out yet, OH…and a /ig for domain accounts.

Best of all, it’s free. Can’t beat that. All in all it kicks the shit out of the basic as fuck mail support you get with cPanel hosting.

Someone told me about COMODO Firewall the other day, and said it was free, lightweight, fast, and simple. Well, I tried it, and here’s what I found:

If you want application-based control, this program is great.

If you want component-based control, this program is even better.

The above 2 work well because this software has the option of using a “safe list” of components and applications from COMODO’s servers somewhere, which can seriously simplify things for new users, so you don’t get bombarded out of the gate with access requests from the program.

If you just want simple, rule-based, network filter level control, this program is FUCKING PERFECT. It’s basically like iptables for Windows. Here’s how I set mine up:

1. Turn off application and component control, and application behavior analysis
2. Delete all the rules in the network monitor component except the last one (the default drop) and the incoming ICMP ones if you actually care if hosts are dead (for most people, this will only speed up error notification, since the OS will timeout packets at some point anyway).
3. Add your own rules above the default drop for allows
4. Finally, add at the very top an allow all outgoing IP rule, so your outgoing traffic is allowed
5. If you use windows on a windows network, you’ll need to allow incoming 135/udp or network names won’t resolve when the machines tries to resolve by using broadcasts. You can ignore this if you’re a DNS/WINS only setup.

That’s all there is to it. The program is relatively gentle on system resources; it uses about 14 MB of RAM, and doesn’t slow down the system with bloat the way ZoneAlarm did. I also like how this program makes no assumptions; ZoneAlarm implicitly allows certain types of traffic (like the aforementioned 135/udp) without telling you, because it just *assumes* it’s needed for windows, and thereby necessary.

In any event, I’d recommend this firewall if you are a Linux user with an iptables addiction; otherwise, there’s nothing special about this aside from the fact that it’s free.

To get the program for free, you give COMODO your email address (hooray for spamgourmet) and they send you an activation code that’s good for life.