Guide

1. Upgrade to firmware 4.0.1.

2. Sync with iTunes.

3. Open Safari and go to either jailbreakme.com or jailbreakme.modmyi.com (I had to use the latter because the former was having server problems.)

4. Slide the…um…slider.

5. Wait.

6. There is no 6th step.

As you can see, jailbreaking a 4.0.1 iPhone is ridiculously easy – so easy, in fact, that there is essentially no reason not to jailbreak the iPhone. I remember jailbreaking my iPod touch once using the command line (about 15 commands) and now even a complete noob can do this.

Happy jailbreaking.

P.S. I have restarted my Tumblr.

P.P.S. I have also redesigned my personal home page.

Meeting

I met Chaya, Tushal, Rikesh, Avish and Yusha at the Victoria Station and we took the (overcrowded) free shuttle to the Expo at Swami Vivekananda Convention Centre.

There, we met Selven, Jason and 1132nd (nom de plume).

Left to right: Jason, Tushal, Me, Rikesh, 1132nd.

The Expo

We used our free tickets to enter the exposition (we weren’t going to pay for that) and we got some empty sac bazaars (shopping bags) as gifts.. There was virtually nothing of interest inside the expo; so, if you aren’t going there with friends, it ain’t worth it. Beds, toilets and kitchen appliances were on sale. In the kitchen section (why the hell does a tech fair have a kitchen section? I wonder.), there were mandarines.

Effing mandarines at orange expo. What is this world coming to? :P

At the “Wi-Fi cafe”, I tried to use the internet but it was slower than James May‘s driving. I used my Emtel 3G connection instead. I tried out a HTC Magic with Google’s Android OS and realised that I’m much better off with my iPhone 3GS. ;)

The Orange Postman

Best. Costume. Ever.

The Macs

We loaded this page on most of the Macs at the fair.

The Notice Board

Since Orange Mauritius is a fail and the expo was another fail in itself, I decided to write “#orangemauritiusfail” (the hashtag we use on Twitter when we complain about Orange) on the notice board.

Yep.

After the Expo

No one had found something worth buying and we went to the cafeteria. There, I had the opportunity to film Orange’s latest ad (featuring Tushal):

We went out of the centre and it was raining heavily; Rikesh finally found a use for the bags they had given us.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

We took the bus to Shoprite to get some KFC. I forgot to take a picture there mainly because I was busy doing some more important things – like eating. Then, we parted ways and returned to our homes.

I really enjoyed myself, but I’m afraid that doesn’t make the expo less horrible. ;)

Rikesh’s post about the Expo here.

Tushal’s post here.

What about you people, did you go there?

Last Tuesday, I got my new iPhone 3GS, and, to make a long story short, it’s awesome (Seriously, I could go on for hours about this. :P). It’s a gift from my parents because of my results (I got aggregate 8 at the Cambridge O-Level exams) and I got it factory-unlocked from Hong Kong.

Since using an iPhone only to make calls and send messages is like using a Ferrari only to drive to the supermarket, I decided to activate 3G internet connectivity.

From the Emtel Website

I went to Emtel to activate it. The following is a transcript of what happened:

[After waiting in line for about 15 minutes, I was called by the customer service representative]

Me: Hi
Emtel employee: Hi, how may I help you?
Me: I need to activate 3G for my SIM card.
Emtel  employee: Oh, what phone are you using?
Me: An iPhone 3GS
Employee: *Types something into computer*
Hmmm, sir, I’m sorry but the iPhone 3GS doesn’t support 3G.
Me: Yeah, right? And why would they call in the “3GS” if it didn’t support 3G?
Employee: I don’t know how to activate it for your phone.
Me: You know, there’s a big difference between you not knowing how to activate it and my mobile not supporting it.
Employee: *dumb face* But the iPhone doesn’t have a WAP browser!
Me: WAP?! WAP is 2002 technology, for God’s sake. As far as I know, we are in 2010 and a modern phone doesn’t even need that.
Employee: You want me to activate Video Call and MMS?
Me: Hmmm…yeah.
*hands iPhone to employee*
Employee: *rotates iPhone in all directions*
Sir, where’s the front camera?
Me: There’s NO front camera.
Employee: Let me activate MMS then.
*types into computer*
Sorry, MMS is not supported on this phone.
Me: It does support MMS. Maybe you don’t know how to activate *that* too…
Employee: Yes, I don’t know.
Me: Are the settings for Internet connectivity the same as my previous phone (A Nokia 6300)?
Employee: I don’t know…maybe…
Me: *Takes iPhone from employee*
*Types settings into phone*
*Opens google.com…it loads*
*Shows iPhone to Employee*
Employee: Hey, it works!!!
Me: Normally, I should be the one telling you this.
*sarcastic tone* Well, I have to go now, thanks for your invaluable help; I would never have been able to do this without you.
Employee: No problem Sir.

[I walked away, unable to decide whether I should laugh or cry]

In retrospect, I realised that I had done nothing but waste 30 minutes of my life going to Emtel. However, my previous experience with their customer support was excellent, so this one could be an isolated case. I’m also fairly satisfied with their service.

Here are the web settings for the iPhone/iPhone 3G/iPhone 3GS; ridiculously simple:

(In Settings>General>Network>Cellular Data Network)

How about you readers, have you ever a had bad experience from Emtel or any other company’s customer support?

According to Wikipedia:

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).

In my case, it’s not only a ‘web hosting service’ because it introduced me to several things without the knowledge of which I wouldn’t be what I am today. Basically, it introduced me to the Internet. Yes, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway (:P), however-you-want-to-call-it…

However, I won’t take the fact that it’s closing as a shot through the heart or anything like that; it’s completely useless in the Web 2.0 period and should have been improved or closed a long time ago. There are several services which are a million times better that it. For example Weebly or Moonfruit.

[Please not that I'm talking about the Mauritian situation in this article, the rest of the world might have been very different. I wasn't really into technology at that time and can't make conclusions about that. Please not that the internet has come to Mauritius relatively later than most countries, the 90's situation of the rest of the world is like the early 00's here.]

It started in 2005, when 64k dial-up was considered ‘damn cool’, people looked at you quizzically when you talked about something called ‘Google’, I actually used Yahoo! Mail for something other that receiving spam and everybody’s home page was Yahoo! (a.k.a. the Times Square of the Internet).

Bottom line: Yahoo! was in some ways what Google is today.

Back then, I was Saajid Vawda, a 12-year-old to whom ‘Social Networks’, ‘blogs’ and other geeky internet terms were unknown, not ‘sjdvda’, 16-year-old geek blogger addicted to the internet.  I didn’t even have a Hotmail address and hadn’t joined hi5.

I wanted to create a web page, and as I was some kind of Yahoo! fanboy, I chose GeoCities even though there were some better free web page publishing services (notably freewebs, now known as webs). It offered 15 mb web space, a little bandwidth, a free page builder and some other goodies. Not much for today’s standards, but at that time, when people here still used floppy disks, it wasn’t bad.

The following are among the many things I got from this once-great web service:

The origin of sjdvda

Most people use a nickname instead of their real name on the internet; here’s mine’s story:

I wanted to sign up for Yahoo! to create a web page and the aliases ‘saajid’, ‘vawda’, ‘svawda’ ‘saajidv’ and ‘saajidvawda’ were not available. I could have added a number after my name, but I hate numbers. I could also have used my full name ‘muhammadsaajidvawda’ but that was just ridiculous. Seriously, what kind of URL is ‘geocities.com/muhammadsaajidvawda‘? lol.

I was in a real fix and couldn’t think about something else, so I checked out the suggestions and among them was ‘sjdvda’. I chose it because it was short and really unique, albeit rather hard to remember.

That’s the origin of sjdvda. :)

HTML

Although GeoCities used a WYSIWYG editor called PageBuilder™, you could edit the HTML source of the page, and that’s how I knew about HTML. Before that, I dismissed it as one of those ‘complicated computer languages’ but after reading some tutorials, I found it rather easy to understand. I didn’t really start to write HTML until 2007, but GeoCities introduced me to this fantastic language who’s almost  as cool as English and way cooler than French. :P

Blogging and RSS Feeds

When I built my page, there was an option to add a Yahoo! 360 blog, so I added it. I didn’t even know what a blog was, some Googling Yahooing was needed and after reading some blog posts about blogging (:D), I grasped the concept. I sent an email to some relatives asking them to visit my site and tell me what they thought about it. Imagine the smile on my face when I received some positive and encouraging comments in the ‘guestbook’. Unfortunately, no one was visiting the blog and I gave up after 3 posts. :D I also learned about RSS Feeds in the process.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can’ insert some screenshots of the website because I deleted all the pages last year when I created my first blog.

I say “Goodbye GeoCities, I’ll remember you like people remember their first car or their first love. I’ll remember you, but I don’t need you anymore. I won’t miss you…” ;-) (I’m good at dramatic conclusions. :P)

So, what are the services that have influenced you people?

P.S. I wrote this article some months ago and was waiting for today to publish it. Right now, this would’ve been pretty much impossible as I’m in the middle of exams. :(

It has a very ‘Google Chrome’-y look that I love. I also love the full Windows aero glass transparency.

You have to take into consideration that these are only mockups, the finished product could be exactly like this, but  could also be a far-cry from this. Personally, I’d love to see FF 4.0 to be like the mockups.

Tabs

There are two possibilities: Tabs-on-top or Tabs-on-bottom:

Tabs-on-bottom

Tabs-on-top

Which looks better? Of course the one with tabs on top.

I prefer the tabs on top because they save a considerable amount of screen real estate. My point is that we are in 2009, when the attention is on the content, not the browser. We are not in 2002 when everybody added a gazillion toolbars to Internet Explorer 6 and pretended to use them. :P

Actually, I am currently using Firefox with tabs on top thanks to the Chromifox Extreme theme.

From the Mozilla Wiki:

Positives

• Save Vertical Space
• Efficiency/Remove Visual Complexity – Right now the tabs have to be connected to something. So we are adding an extra visual element for them to connect to.
• Shorter Mouse Distance to Page Controls

Negatives

• Breaks Consistency/Familiarity – Moving things confuses existing users.
• Title is MIA – With the space removed from the titlebar you only get the truncated version in the tab.
• Longer Mouse Distance to Tabs – Takes longer to mouse to a tab.
• Lost Space – Sandwiched in between the application icon and the window widgets you lose some space.

This about sums it up, what more can I add? :)

Address Bar Tweaks

I’m not sure I would like a combined Stop/Go/Refresh button. Stop and Refresh combined is good but I’ve grown used to the Go button being separate. However, the “Progress ‘Line’” is totally awesome. Similar (well, kind of similar) functionality can be obtained by installing the Fission add on.

That’s it for today. So, what do you people think about it?

Seriously.

I’ve decided to make some changes to my blog to reflect my decision to put some kind of effort in this thing.

1. The Theme

I’ve read that the best way to change a blog is to change its theme, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that because my theme (THiCK) is totally awesome. I chose to change the colors instead. My theme already has 4 or 5 different colors but I don’t like most of them, so, I opened Fireworks and made some changes, applied some filters to the default images until I found them to my taste. I changed them from grey to black because, well, blue is my favorite color. :)

Next, I fired up Notepad++ and made some changes to the CSS so that some headings are now blue. Instead of choosing a more traditional blue, I selected something(#4370B4) close to the “Facebook blue”.

The Result:

Before:

Old Theme

Now:

"New" Theme

It’s neither a subtle change nor a complete redesign, but I like it. It may not look as ‘professional’ as before, but my blog never was, is not and never will be professional. Tell me what you think of it.

2. The Commenting System

Previously, I had been using the IntenseDebate commenting system but I’ve switched to Disqus now. The main reason for the switch is that Disqus has introduced several features over some months but IntenseDebate has not improved considerably.

While I agree that IntenseDebate has better WordPress integration (obviously because it’s owned by Automattic, the company which is also behind WordPress), Disqus is better as a package. It offers Social Media Reactions, Twitter, OpenID, Facebook connect and looks better with the WPTouch iPod/iPhone theme.

3. The Widgets

I’ve moved some widgets and removed some. The MyBlogLog widget now only appears on the front page, it has been replaced by the Google Friend Connect widget.

4. Blogroll

Updated it.

5. Footer

Warning: DO NOT READ IT!!(and don’t say I didn’t warn you after you finish reading it) :P

That’s it for today. That’s the first time I’ve written two blog posts in one day. I hope I can write a lot of posts during my 2-week holiday. :)

(Image created using Obamicon.me)

One month ago (on St. Valentine’s day LOL), I bought a new domain (sjdvda.com) and unlimited hosting plan from DreamHost and another domain from GoDaddy(which is still under constuction). BTW Thanks to Kurt Avish for the coupon code :D. As most of you know, I had previously been blogging using the Tumblr blogging platform on sjdvda.tumblr.com at first, then on sjdvda.co.cc.

On my new domain, I’ll be using WordPress for all my blogging needs (Goodbye Tumblr…). In the next few weeks, I’ll write a post with the reason why I’ve changed platform, the key word here is Customization. I hope this will be a new start for me as I have not written a post since January and I’d really like to blog more often, so don’t forget to subscribe to the new RSS Feed or by e-mail.

I started completely from the ground for this new blog, with only the posts from my old blog and nothing else (I couldn’t find a way to import the comments  :cry:).  During the last month, I’ve learned about WordPress, plugins, FTP, Domains and a lot of interesting things :)

Independence Day at school

(left: our country, our pride. right: our country, our shame. Image from orange.mu)

Yesterday I went to school for the independence day “celebration”, though I can hardly call what happened a “celebration”: It totally sucked!!

I was standing in the sun, wondering why the hell I had gone to school  O_o, less than quarter of the students were present!! Among the 6 classes of Form 5, only 16 students had come to school! When they first put the music of the national anthem, only a few students were singing and almost no sound was heard. So they had to put a version with vocals so as not to lose face! :? That’s not really weird as the students in Form 4 and Form 5 didn’t have any practice; there had not been any rehearsals or schedule. The proof here is that no pupil even knew who would be the guest of Honour before we saw him!!  :@ :@

If I had not enjoyed myself with some friends after school, my entire day would have been ruined! :@ (BTW Thanks Akshay, Saif, Niddy & Doomesh). This decline in patriotism really pisses me off, how can we move forward if everyone thinks about leaving the country??

If anyone has something to say, the comment form is below :)

There was a time when hi5 was actually cool, it was unique, it was great.

3 years ago I joined hi5 because all my friends were on it, it was my first social network, after some time I discovered Facebook and I found it better because of the applications and the status updates, but I still used hi5 because it was different!

Now hi5 copies almost everything that Facebook does; first came the status updates, then the applications, now there’s even chat!! What’s the use of joining two social networks when they are nearly the same??? That’s why 2 months ago I changed my hi5 status to “Saajid is tired of hi5, prefers facebook now”. I haven’t accessed hi5 since that.

Some reasons I prefer Facebook over hi5:

1. Too many UFRs

UFRs (Unidentified Friend Requests) are the requests you recieve from people you don’t know and you probably don’t want to know. (BTW “UFR” is a term I picked from a mashable article, but I don’t remember which one).

UFRs are easily recognizable:

1. They normally have profile pictures with actors/actresses/sportsmen/celebrities
2. Their profiles are rarely updated
3. They don’t reply to your messages and chats

I have about 120 friends on hi5, and I don’t even know half of them!! On the contrary, I have 230 friends on Facebook and I know most of them. I have a rule: since a month ago, when I get an UFR on Facebook, I look at the profile of the sender and if no info is provided, I send him/her/it (there are indeed some animals on Facebook, I even have some chimps in my friend list TVR!) a message. If they don’t reply after some weeks, I remove them from my friend list.

2. hi5 applications suck!!

I find most hi5 applications pale copies of Facebook applications. There are indeed many useless Facebook applications, but some apps are really cool!! There’s also a lot more apps on Facebook than hi5.

3. Not compatible with many services

hi5 is not compatible with many web services. For example, if I want to sync my Facebook status with twitter (which I’ve been using a lot lately) or vice versa, I have the twitter’s own Facebook application which will sync my Twitter status to Facebook and FriendFeed which will sync my Facebook status with twitter. hi5 isn’t even supported by FriendFeed.

4. I don’t like the hi5 themes

I find Facebook themes much better as they put emphasis on the content rather on the design.

The reasons above are why I don’t access hi5 anymore. The only 2 advantages I find with hi5 are:

1.They allow “vanity URLs”. e.g. http://sjdvda.hi5.com instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=526038179. Currently Facebook doen’t support this but it’s coming sometime soon according to the help page.
2.Custom HTML is allowed.

I know it’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post and the reason is that I took a lot of time to adapt to the new school schedule after the holidays :( But hopefully I’ll get some more time with the school hours back to normal…

Looking forward to seeing you guys again and don’t forget to comment if you liked this post :D

During the last week I’ve changed many things in my blog.

1. First of all, my blog address is not sjdvda.tumblr.com anymore, I used the free co.cc service to change my blog address to sjdvda.co.cc (similar to the media guru).

All previous links and my RSS feed will be redirected to the new domain.

2. I now have a banner at the bottom of the page besides my Facebook badge for MicroTalks, the Mauritian Lounge.

3. I changed the comment system, older comments are now shown first and the text box is at the bottom.

4. Added a twitter status badge.

5. Commenters now have the option of commenting using their Facebook account using Facebook Connect:

My resolutions for 2009

1. Decide if I really need 23 e-mail accounts ;D

2. Blog more often, even during school days.

3. Get better results at school and try not to get my iPod confiscated everyday by the rector :P

4. Learn HTML and CSS.

5. Tease my friends more and try to be more sarcastic.

6. Not sleep at 4 a.m. everyday.

7. Read more books!!! I read about 2 or 3 books per week, I’ll try to read 4 or 5.

8. Create a website for BVSSS along with Joyshan.

9. Blow up the Microsoft headquarters so that everyone switches to Mac.