* Remove any power source (cable, battery)
* press camera, key-symbol and the square in the circle (right-top corner of dpad) at the same time
* put battery back in, turn pc back on.

The X10 mini is a nice phone. It is in fact the best phone I have ever had. Not because it is a good phone or because it’s well supported by Sony (no, it clearly isn’t, if it were, we had Android 2.2 on it and frequent security upgrades). No. But I like the camera. I like the fact that it is small and runs Android smoothly all the same. I like a lot about it. But what I don’t like is the memory size (and – if you happen to have read over my commentary above without taking notice of this  - I feel it needs an update to recent versions of Android!)

So. Why do I think we need Android 2.2 on this phone? Well, because Android 2.2 has App2SD functionality. And because my X10 mini is not even a year old, so it is far too new to be abandoned by its manufacturer. Back to App2SD, though. App2SD means installing Apps directly to the SD card and not the internal memory. And since the memory is so damn small, we need that. Badly.

For the time being, I had to hack myself to get a solution for the problem on my own to increase memory for installing more applications. Here I will explain how I did it.

You will need a PC with Windows XP (neither Wine on Linux nor Win7 worked for me) with .Net Framework 2.0 (no higher version, no lower one) installed.

1. Update to the latest Firmware (the one with ANT+ was the newest as I am writing this)

2. Download and unpack SuperOneClick.rar from this forum http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=906742 (you need to register for free)

3. Open “SuperOneClick” and select “Root”.

4. Connect X10 mini with the cable to the PC.

5. Wait! Look at what it says on the screen and click through the dialogues that pop up.

6. When everything is done, reboot.

7. Install “busybox installer” and “Titanium Backup” from the market. Download busybox 1.19 with the help of the installer and then start titanium backup. Go into Chuck Norris mode there and uninstall shit like Facebook or other garbage apps you could not uninstall before.

8. Install Link2SD from Market and move your biggest and least used apps to SD. More info here: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/move-selected-apps-to-sd-with-link2sd-app/

9. Finally you are done and have gained free memory to install new applications. Or you could use the freed memory to simply breathe in a bit more deeply when using your X10 mini now.

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

After I read here that it was possible to run the Mannasim framework for ns2 on version 2.32, I thought that this might be as well possible for 2.34. Instead of philosophying about this (the source claims that it would take months and 1.5 years of C++ knowledge), I simply did it.

Here is a patch that installs mannasim into ns 2.34. http://www.box.net/shared/th6qi9b5v0

It is missing the tcl maker, but should otherwise work fine.

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

A good example is that you cannot seem to change the GDM scheme in Ubuntu 9.10. The options provided are just plain ridiculous. And no one likes brown. NO ONE LIKES BROWN!

Login screen

Here is what you have to do:

1. log out

2. go to the shell by holding ctrl-alt and pressing F1

3. set your X display to be the gdm login screen (type export DISPLAY=:0.0)

4. start sudo -u gdm gnome-control-center

5. Got to the Appearances Dialog and change Background image & everything. It can only get more beautiful!

Kudos go to ubuntumini.com

You might as well switch your xsplash and usplash theme.

Boot screen (Usplash)

Changing usplash is looking for themes with

apt-cache search usplash

installing themand then changing them with the command

sudo update-usplash-theme [theme]

Intermediate Screens (Xsplash)

Changing your xsplash theme is done by going to /usr/share/images/xsplash and using gimp.

Have fun!

r 3.052590420 _75_ RTR — 14 SPAN 40 [0 ffffffff 5e 0] [energy 999.989886 ei 0.000 es 0.000 et 0.001 er 0.009] ——- [94:-1 -1:-1 32 0],

So… here it is, all beautifully laid out and explained for you:

Note: This applies to CMU trace files that were created using the span protocol. Your ns2 output could be a bit different, but still: you will find this very helpful.

P.S.: Oh… I’m out of luck publishing this on wordpress. It’s all cut off on the right. Please, do simply copy this article to the clipboard and paste it somewhere to read, ok?

Read on! Knowledge is lazy today.

What that site doesn’t tell you is how to install it. There is a nice howto by tk424 here, but that wasn’t written for a recent version of ns2. All the same I recommend it, as it’s very useful. However I have contributed here a patch for the configure file of tcl-debug2 in order to make it compatible with recent versions of ns2. This was tested in ns2.34.

Ah, yes another thing. I am not going to go into as much detail as the howto above. Refer to it if you have questions. It’s totally fool proof.

The quick way is this.

1. Download http://expect.nist.gov/tcl-debug/tcl-debug.tar.gz (apparently thats the most up-to-date version out there since dinosaurs populated the earth.) If that link does not work, try my mirror: http://www.box.net/shared/0fah87994s
2. Untar it and move it to your ns-allinone-x.xx folder
3. go into the ns-allinone-x.xx/tcl-debug-2.0 folder and try calling ./configure
4. if that fails apply my patch from http://www.box.net/shared/20z8klbpjy and call ./configure again (applying the patch is as simple as calling “patch -p1 < tcl-debug-2.0-configure.patch”)
5. call make
6. you will get a file called “tcl-debug-2.0/libtcldbg.a” if everythings fine
7. copy that to “ns-allinone-x.xx/ns-x.xx/lib”
8. go to “ns-allinone-x.xx/ns-x.xx”
9. do “./configure –with-tcldebug”
10. call make (perhaps you have to make clean; make)
11. insert the line “debug 1″ at the line of your script that you wish to debug
12. follow this PostScript document for instructions how to use the debugger

So… that’s about it. And with that tool installed, you will finally know what your _o?? reference that is in the backtrace of ns2 really stands for. Plus know the type of the object simply by using its OTcl handle _o??. Cool, isn’t it. Happy debugging!

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

But don’t you try installing openssh. The dropbear ssh server comes preinstalled & offers everything you want. If you try openssh, beware: some bug causes the $DISPLAY parameters not to be set up correctly. Like that, you cannot forward X sessions!

My workaround: Use dropbear it works out of the box.

I also got some issue with the vmware soundcard. Apparently the soundcard modules are not all precompiled…

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

1. go to ns-?.?? directory
2. run ./configure –enable-debug
3. make clean
4. make

BUT here comes the big BUT:

for the –enable-debug option the compiler flag -WError is passed to gcc and will make it throw errors instead of warnings in many cases – for the (sometimes not too well written) Mannasim code, this is deadly: It won’t compile due to formalities.

If you get errors when compiling ns with Mannasim in order to debug: Edit the configure script and change the part where -WError is passed. It will compile like a charm (if you don’t run into compiler bugs).

You might want to pass arguments to the executable that you want to debug.

you can do this without problems:

gdb [gdbarguments] -args yourexecutable yourarguments

By calling a gdb-script, you can run the executable automatically and also quit gdb if everything went fine.

Create such a batch file by running

echo "run" > run.script

and execute it like this:

gdb [gdbarguments] -x run.script -args yourexecutable yourarguments

And all of a sudden you have the possibility to call gdb inside of scripts without having to type run all over again. Practical, huh?

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

I updated it to run with gcc 4.x and made it into a patch file in order to apply it in an easy way. It is available at http://www.box.net/shared/esc71ny5ns .

How to apply:

Download the ns-2.28-allinone distribution,  http://www.box.net/shared/ottfdyaz60 (patch for configure scripts in ns-2.28) and http://www.box.net/shared/esc71ny5ns (patch that inserts SPAN into a fresh ns-2.28-allinone), then unzip all files.

cd ns-allinone-2.28
patch -p1 < ns2.28-gcc4-configure-scripts.patch
patch -p1 < ns2.28-span-gcc4.patch
./install

Have fun with the SPAN protocol on NS-2, THE Network Simulator.

Read on! Knowledge hurts.

I had turned it on – it didn’t post. No beeps, but no BIOS screen. Nothing.

Of course I looked the problem up. There are MILLIONS of people out there complaining about defunct DV2000 and DV6000 laptops – all this due to a manufacturing problem at Nvidia.

I complained to HP. They called me and said that they were sorry to hear that the service fee of over 400 € for replacing the motherboard didn’t suit me and suggested going to an independent repair service. I was stunned. A problem that lay clearly on their side – just canceled off like that? WTF?

The problem: The BGA soldering of the graphic chip is bad. And the chip keeps heating up and extending and then cooling down and shrinking again all the time. Until some connections break.This is further helped by some bad heat conducting (or so we hope) foam pad of 2mm that is between graphic chip and cooler and lets the chip move almost freely.

I mean, really: I have disliked HP for a long time because of their printing supply business model and I didn’t think much of the quality of their products. But this shocked me. A HP product that goes defunct 5 months after guarantee ends? And HP only providing a BIOS update to make the fan turn faster??? Not using the 200 Million US$ provided by nVidia to help their customers? Where did all that money go??

I still haven’t finished reassembling the laptop. Let’s see what happens. But I am highly disappointed.

Read on! Knowledge hurts.