Recently I finally got fed up with my mobile phone and decided to get a new one. My good old T-Mobile Wing and I had a nice few years but phone had some serious flaws, namely that it was slow and frequently running out of memory, and was ending up in situations where taking out the battery was the only possible fix.

The title of this posts reveals which new phone I ended up getting, but I have to say that Nokia (or any other Symbian-based) phone wasn’t even a remote possibility when I started looking. I put together a set of criteria on what is important to me and then did an extensive research online, and even went into some local mobile shops to check out phones in person. I completely accidentally stumbled upon Nokia 5800 XpressMusic review and to my surprise – it won hands down!

Here is what I was looking for…

Good phone, damn it!!! This is about signal strength, sound quality, battery life (even - shock - being able to change the battery), stability and responsiveness, and the form factor (large, and especially very wide, flat screen is pretty but really not handy for a phone). It is unbelievable to me how some recent “cool” phones completely miss the mark on this. 5800 totally aced all of the above – after all this is a Nokia phone (call it my Euro-trash snobbism but we love our Finnish phones).

Fun and cool: Yeah, I am done with the business phones. They are either ugly, or those that do look nice are not much fun. 5800 is a head-turner and tons of fun!

Great (full) browser: At the very least being able to browse full pages, preferably with the Flash support. Since I quickly narrowed down my choices to a touch phone this is also about a nice touch navigation. 5800 comes with Nokia’s WebKit based browser which works great, satisfying all of the above. Hell, it even supports feeds.

Works good as a music player: This does not mean fancy interface for “flipping” through music which I find slow and clumsy, and anyway I don’t really want to _look_ at my phone while I listen to music. Rather this is about being able to play popular music formats, select music effectively, and use the standard headphones. I hate non-standard (USB included) headphone jacks! Since 5800 sports a standard 3.5mm jack I can use my nice noise canceling headphones with it.

Syncs my Exchange contacts and calendar over the air: I keep all my contacts in Exchange so this is very important. But note that I left out email syncing. That is on purpose since I am either always next to a desktop/notebook computer, or I can just browse to OWA and see all my email. Nokia 5800 comes by default with “Mail for Exchange” app that does that, as well as syncs the email inbox.

Well supported OS that makes sense: What I mean by this is that I didn’t want silly proprietary one-off Operating Systems written just to get a few gadgets on the screen but rather an OS that third party developers care to write apps for. Also preferred not to take OS governed by fruity fascists, or one made to lock you into particular services and advertising schemes. (no links, interpret that as you wish ;-)
Symbian may at first look like a little odd choice, but there’s no doubt it has tons of supporters and existing applications. In fact, with 5800’s support for Symbian S60v3+ apps, Java apps, as well as Web Widgets, I am discovering new apps and games daily…

Inexpensive, unlocked, international: I was and am expecting lots of fun development in the mobile space in the coming years so I didn’t want to pay too much for the phone now. At the same time I travel reasonably often and usually internationally, so it would be nice to be able to buy and use cheap local pre-paid GSM SIM cards while abroad. Clearly this also meant that phone had to be quad-band GSM (so some US providers that don’t use GSM were quickly disqualified) and it was preferable not to switch carriers and take another contract.

Decent camera: I am not looking to replace my camera with the phone but being able to take decent photos when I forget the actual camera would be nice. 5800 comes with 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash.

Multiple input methods: Being able to use touch only is a must, given I decided to get a touch phone, but I actually really liked my old phone’s stylus and handwriting recognition. Nokia 5800 provides both. I never have to use stylus, and full-screen-landscape-keyboard is fantastic. But the stylus is there and handwriting recognition supported.

Some other fun things that 5800 has are GPS (enables some very useful apps), very good video player (kind of silly to watch videos on the phone but I suspect Maksim might like it), TV Out, Office and PDF file viewer, voice control, upgradeable memory (what a concept!), it syncs my Hotmail and other inboxes seamlessly, and so much more…

Phone is, of course, not without a fault. Double-touch approach to touch-UI is questionable (one to select then one more to execute; though this really does save one from incorrect input and I really got used to it), browser likes to default to a mobile version of a page, connection manager settings are way overly complex (should be as simple as “use wi-fi if available, otherwise use data connection”) and some apps like to offer their own separate connection settings, camera is not good enough to replace your main photo camera (like some other recent phones can), MfE only syncs inbox emails not the subfolders (or at least I didn’t find how to set that up)… but these are minor compared to all the great things about this phone.

One single major problem, actually with buying any unlocked 3G phone, is with 3G frequencies. This one has proven pretty much impossible to satisfy with an unlocked phone, at least without me switching providers (from T-Mobile to AT&T).

It turns out that EU and far east all use different 3G frequencies than the ones we use in the USA, so European/World phones don’t support US 3G networks. And since I insist on GSM for voice my only choice of providers is T-Mobile or AT&T. Lastly, since AT&T doesn’t have a signal where I live I really have no choice whatsoever - T-Mobile it is. And their 3G frequency is the weirdest of all and has the least phones supporting it. So phones that are advertised as US 3G phones actually support only AT&T network.

Since there is no such things as “tri-band” or “quad-band” 3G phone I was unable to find 5800 that would support T-Mobile’s 3G network. I don’t care much, phone’s wi-fi support is great and EDGE works well in other cases.

Now, if you have, or plan on getting, this same Nokia here is some really cool (and all free) software for you to install:

• Shozu – share your photos, videos and status on any of the major services, track Facebook friend status, and much more.
• Nimbuzz – perfect messaging, with support for all major IM services, as well as VOIP; has version optimized for Nokia 5800 with perfect touch-UI
• amAze – free navigation software! (Nokia Maps is far better but you need to pay for it after first 30 days)
• Google Maps – maps, local search, directions, traffic… all using the built-in GPS
• Nokia Photo Browser – stunning 3D photo browser with magnifier, face detection and more (check out the video at that link)

And then there are tons of other apps (YouTube client, weather widgets that use GPS to detect your position, Fring, Paint Pad, X-plore, RoadSync for advanced Exchange syncing support etc) and games (Touch Piano, Block Breaker, Prince of Persia, and piles and piles more).

Brief comparison with iPhone is in order, I guess. I quickly disqualified iPhone because using AT&T and spending tons of money were not options for me. It could have been a serious contender  but even then I think Nokia 5800 would still have won my heart.

I do think that iPhone’s interface is more polished, that Safari is a better browser, and that there are more apps for the iPhone.

On the other hand, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is cheaper, is a better phone, battery seems to last forever (and can be changed), form factor is more handy (narrower than iPhone), haptic feedback is wonderful, there are tons of free apps, multitasking and task manager work like a charm, camera is better than iPhone’s, and really – it is a phone about choice rather than having something pushed down your throat. Last but certainly not least – not everyone has 5800, so it really does get a lot of attention (who cares about iPhone anymore, anyway?)

BTW, I am not alone – recently it has been reported that Nokia has sold 3 million units of 5800 XpressMusic in just over a quarter, and that 5800 is a best selling music player in the UK, surpassing even Nokia’s expectations (in spite of their abysmal earnings results).

Part of me hates to say it (those who know me will know why) but after many many years I am finally LOVING MY PHONE!

Ah, Bruges, the Venice of the North, one of the best preserved medieval towns in the world… you just have to love it! Like they said in the “In Bruges” movie: “It's a fairytale town, isn't it? How's a fairytale town not somebody's fucking thing?”

Hell, just look at this red-door-with-reflection detail. If I framed a large version of this photo I could easily sell if for hundreds of dollars at the local art festival!

Wifey has several blog posts with photos of the beautiful Bruges.

Of course, for me one of the main attractions was beer!

Those are Leffe Bruin (my favorite) and Steenbrugge (Bruges's own, also great) Belgian abbey beers. My other favorites, also consumed during our visit to Belgium, include Duvel, Grimbergen and Chimay.

I could live in (or near) Belgium just to have a steady access to those beers…

When in Brussels for sure you must have Mussels with fries… just don’t call them “French fries”, they actually originate from Belgium.

But first something that really made me laugh. This is a display window for a souvenir shop in Brussels, in vicinity of the Manneken Pis.

The label claims this is a “Limited Edition” T-shirt. Indeed. Given the endless government crisis in Belgium perhaps Obama taking over is not completely out of question.

American influence can be seen in more ways than just through the open support for our new president. Check this out!

Unfortunately this Scientology center was closed so I couldn’t improve my life on the spot and get rid of my body-thetans. Could this be because Belgians consider Scientology to be a “criminal organization”?

Anyway, to wrap up, mussels in Brussels are indeed wonderful. If you find yourself at the Grote Markt try a nearby Chez Leon restaurant; they’ve been in business here for well over hundred years.

I am finally able to find time to blog about the trip we took to Europe last Christmas. My wifey already posted about all the wonderful things from our trip but I wanted to point out a few random things that caught my attention.

Firstly, if you know me you’ll know I love coffee. And who would imagine that land of the afternoon tea is also the land of the 24/7 coffee?! It turns out London has almost as many coffee shops as Seattle, only far fewer Starbucks ones. That being said, if you get a chance do drop by Starbucks in London – pastry being offered is totally different from what you can find in USA, and far far better (example: the one in Covent Garden was offering Belgian chocolate cake… yum!)

I really enjoyed this excellent coffee in a small quiet place in Kensington:

Most omnipresent chain was “Costa’s” who’s trademark decoration is a chocolate star:

Boxing Day sales in London were totally crazy. Check out these Selfridges ads:

These turned out to be warning signs really, since Selfridges was attacked by hordes of people trying to buy that discounted Louis Vuitton or Prada bag… Maksim and I had to escape out of the store while wifey stayed behind to bravely fight the barbarian invasion.

One of the most messed up things about UK is that they are driving on the wrong side of the road (saying “left side” doesn’t express my feelings accurately enough). I wonder how many dead tourists it took to add these signs to the London streets?

Driving on the left side should go the way of the…

Dodo!!! (yes, this was just a silly excuse to include a picture of Dodo I took at London’s Natural History Museum)

All in all, we LOVED London and we had great time and tons of fun!

For years now I’ve been running a dual monitor setup at work on my main (development) machine. Most recent setup consists of two gorgeous 24” WS Samsung SyncMaster monitors running on nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS video card.

A few months ago I realized that I have a spare 20” monitor and wondered what it would be like to setup a triple monitor configuration. And now I cannot believe I ever lived without it! I am now able to keep my email/Outlook always visible on the left monitor, source code editor/debugger in the middle, and the rest (usually browser or remote session) on the right. Amazing!

See for yourself:

Wonderful gizmo that made a third monitor possible is EVGA UV Plus+ external USB video card (no, it is not a typo, they actually called it Plus-Plus… doh!). UV16 can only push resolution up to 1600x1200 but that happened to be perfect since that’s all that my 20” Samsung (third and left most on the photo) can handle.

If you do set yourself up with three monitor desktop you might want to visit this and this for some nice backgrounds…

As I was casually checking on Slate’s “Eight Years of W” political cartoons I ran into this fantastic one:

Ha! So I guess I am not the only person bitching about electoral college and vote equality…

As I am celebrating Obama’s victory, I have to reflect on a few more completely crazy things related to voting in USA.

Let’s start with this. MSN page leads to the article with the following quote (the article keeps changing so I’m not linking):

Obama reached the 270 electoral votes he needed for election at 11 p.m. ET, when NBC News projected that he would win California, Washington and Oregon.

Apparently after this McCain phoned Obama to congratulate him. But wait, “NBC News projected”? What does NBC news have to do with projecting election results?!? Shouldn’t that come from oh, someone like say government?!?

OK, let’s assume that statement above is just MSN nonsense and this info did come from the government. However, Obama was proclaimed victor before Alaskan voting stations closed!

Shouldn’t that be like illegal?!? I mean, imagine yourself getting ready to vote in Alaska, checking out news and seeing that Obama already won… would you still go to vote? No, you wouldn’t.

Some fine folks in Alaska got stripped of their right to vote, I say. It should be forbidden to release any results, even start counting until everyone has voted. Period.

Of course, nobody cares much about poor Alaska which has only 3 electoral votes.
(and you wouldn’t vote if you were say a Democrat in a state like Oklahoma or Wyoming because you knew that all electoral votes will go to Republicans anyway)

And don’t get me started on having to register to vote. Last time I voted was in damn Croatia and what they did is simply send every citizen mail saying “this is where and when you vote”. End of story.

OK, I let out some steam… now back to celebrations!

Or maybe not! All thanks to this Electoral College mess.

I was just looking up early presidential election results on this fine MSNBC site and here’s what I saw:

At first look you would say – hey, Obama’s kicking McCain’s ass (103 vs. 58)!!! But then if you look at actual number of votes, McCain actually has more votes! WTF!!!

For anyone that remembers Bush vs. Gore elections, you know that Bush won with less votes. In fact, Gore received about half a million more votes than Bush. I mean, really… In today’s USA does it really matter if you’re voting as citizen in WA (11 electoral votes) or TX (34 electoral votes).
Just give every citizen one equal vote, damn it!

To make things worse, look up Wikipedia and you’ll see that the origins of this system are with German kings and nobles and some Christian elections (doh!). You will also find this amazing quote:

Electors are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but in practice pledge to vote for specific candidates and voters cast ballots for favored presidential and vice presidential candidates by voting for correspondingly pledged electors.

Wow (a very very bad wow).

If I ever become a dictator in some third world country please remind me to change voting system to this electoral college nonsense, and give places that I have a strong grip on most electoral votes.

Then I will be able to say things like this: “I see you guys voted 99% against me – too bad you only have 3 electoral votes. These other guys that voted 51% for me (so 49% against) have 20, and all those votes go for me. Muhahahahaha!”

What democracy?!!

BTW, as I was typing this the image has changed. You think it got better? What BS!

That silly exclamation mark in the title comes from the sticker wifey and I got today after voting (couldn’t find the exact same image online to use here).

Both of us voted for Obama for president, of course. Man, do we need a change in this country! And Obama possesses charisma and smarts than we haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter for sure, possibly even since late John F. Kennedy.
Let’s hope he wins and brings us the change we need.

Note for our good Trinidadian friends: it is done.

As far as state of WA goes I also voted for Chris Gregoire as our governor (easy choice), and for congress I voted for Darcy Burner. To be honest I know very little about Darcy (though I do know she’s an ex-MSFT employee!) and close to nothing about her opponent. But someone that opposes Darcy sent tens of pamphlets to our mailbox, all explaining how terrible she is and what a trouble-maker she would be in congress.

Oh, really? Well, Darcy’s opponents – thanks to you I cast my vote FOR Darcy, and you people should get a life and learn some honesty, instead of spending all that time and money on silly smear campaigns.

And now – fingers crossed! Go Obama!

First US Presidential election since I became a citizen is coming close… the question of course is who to vote for!

Now, it is fairly easy for me to know who NOT to vote for. For most people out there it may seem that makes my choice easy, as it leaves me with no real choice.

But it has always annoyed me to no end that the USA, supposedly democratic country, is ruled by only two parties both of which are rightwing in the eyes of rest of the world.

The way to democracy, my dear compatriots, is to have many parties, from extreme right to extreme left… and all of them with some power. When they are forced to enter coalitions with each other, that’s when you actually are getting somewhere.

So with some amusement today I found a web site that is supposed to help one decide: glassbooth.org. And who knew – it is a pretty Web 2.0 site that takes you through a small quiz then points out similarities with presidential candidate’s standpoints.

I am pleased to announce that I have now found who to vote for. All hail Cynthia McKinney!

P.S. For the curious Obama and I mainly differ in our opinions on gay rights (apparently Obama doesn’t support gay marriage), education (money may not be everything that education needs, but I think it sure would help) and bailing out idiotic financial institutions (apparently Obama’s OK with that).

[Edited to explain my positions on issues I called out about Obama]

Yesterday we released IE8 Beta 2!
I was proud when we shipped Beta 1, but this release is oh so much bigger!

I was planning to blog about this yesterday but a certain party and... uh... aftermaths of that party got in a way. Let's just say I ended up with "a writer's block".

And now, better than anything I might say, check out the IE8 videos and see for yourself all the wonderful things you can do with IE, and in particular with two of the features that I worked on: Web Slices and Accelerators!

My favorite video has to be "The History Of Slices" though. I mean, it manages to mix together Woolly Mammoth nuggets, samurai and Web Slices... how can you beat that?!?

Now go and download IE8 and "be a part of the  next great human advance"!

- Yours Truly, Accelerators/Web Slices/RSS IE Developer

The Olympics are done and here are the final results for the men's Water Polo:

1. Hungary
2. USA
3. Serbia
4. Montenegro

Compare that to my best and worst case scenarios I wrote about few days ago. Yeah. I'll never do something like that again.

BTW, congratulation to Hungary, they deserved the gold.

I'm not much into sports or following the Olympics (and I've had more important things to spend my time on). My favorite event so far has been the Opening Ceremony, that should tell you something. But now something wonderful is happening in men's Water Polo, and even I am unable to fight off the silly, completely unfounded and unreasonable national pride.

The final four countries in semifinals are Montenegro, Serbia, USA and Hungary. Given that I am Montenegrin + Serbian mix, and I also have USA citizenship, this finally hits the target!

Semifinals will play out on Friday 8/22, with final being on Sunday 8/24. Check out the NBCOlympics (BTW spell checker thinks this should be changed to "Narcoleptics"... LOL) for schedule and to set up the alerts. I'm hoping for my ideal results:

1. Montenegro
2. Serbia
3. USA
4. Hungary

Montenegro is a current European Water Polo Champion (with Serbia being second and Hungary third), but it didn't have great time at the Olympics so far. Hungary appears to be the favorite for the gold. My worst possible outcome? Just reverse the above list.

So tomorrow and Sunday I'll be a fan boy and will be wearing my Montenegro T-shirt. As an added support, and something all of you can do as well, I'll be sitting on YouTube watching Rambo Amadeus (World's Mega Emperor!) videos:

• Don't Happy Be Worry
• Balkan Boy
• Godine Kurcu Prolaze (you do NOT want me to translate this!)
• Moj Skutere ("Oh, my jet ski")
• Don Kihot i Sančo Pansa ("Don Quixote and Sancho Panza")
• Motel Černobil ("Motel Chernobyl")

I realize a lot will be lost on those that don't speak Serbian, but trust me - this is better than Monty Python; seriously - these are all worth watching!

Yes, yes, I know... and I am still proud to be Montenegrin. :)

I love Portable Apps! I have a USB Key that never leaves my side, loaded with a nice selection of apps that I can run directly from that key.

This morning I needed one of those applications and I navigated explorer to my flash drive only to be greeted by CA's eTrust warning dialog informing me that it has found a virus in one of the EXEs and has "cured" it.

I quickly ran a scan on all of my USB key and eTrust found several another infected programs, all with exactly the same infection: "Win32.FakeAv.CX". All of the infected files were reported as cured. I took a sigh of relief and looked up the EXEs - they were GONE. Done, deleted, dead, no more, expired, goooone. Some "cure".

At this point I was starting to be upset so I decided to look up more info on this virus, get some consolation on what major disaster I avoided, though at a cost to my productivity. And I found... nothing! There were variations on the virus name, but no exact match.

Now I was beginning to be suspicious so I looked up the last time AV signatures were updated. It was this morning. So the new signatures brought down a description for this mysterious virus that nobody else knows about or mentions, and somehow that hit all my portable apps... I don't know, sounded fishy to me. Just in case I disabled real-time virus check and limited my work to only the apps I know are virus free for a while.

Sometime later I did another search on Internet but now I did find hits - from other people hitting the same problem! It turns out CA's eTrust AV engine has a thing for some setup and uninstall programs. Those are the ones it mostly found this "virus" in. Check out the search results for yourself. Oh, and people noticed about the portable apps.

Worst of all, I didn't find any good way to report this to CA. Some folks posted to their forums, but no answer so far.

CA, c'mon, give us some info and fix this mess!
Alternatively let us know that this really is a crazy virus infection and you just saved the world. Just don't ignore the problem!

UPDATE 2008-08-21 @11:00 AM: It appears CA has fixed the problem (not that you could tell from any of their web sites or announcements!) and rolled out new signatures. If you're out there using CA's AV software I advise you to force-update signatures to avoid random EXEs being deleted from your box.

This was taken mid April on a nice day when Maksim felt particularly talkative. We actually talked for 10 mins already when I decided that Maksim's "no" mood and corresponding eloquence should be captured on camera.

I took the video in 480p WideScreen 854x480 (a.k.a. DVD quality) and exported into WMV which plays perfectly. But MSN Video managed to totally screw that up during encoding. BTW, I tried YouTube as well and it did the same thing exactly.

Seriously, move into 21st century folks!

In the meantime you'll have to enjoy this video in squished form. Too bad. But nothing can hurt how cute, smart and all around wonderful Maksim is. ;-)

Recently we traded in our BMW X3 for something very different - a BMW 330 convertible. And Maksim LOVES IT! Wifey just posted a video of Maksim enjoying his ride...

Yes, besides a ride Maksim also loves airplanes.

And a small note - his nose is not dirty, that's a consequence of extreme downhill ride on his toy car, and then landing on his face (gave daddy a heart attack).

It has been quite a while since I had some time to sit down and play a game to the end. So once wifey and I decided we'd take a few days off last week I at once jumped on Valve's Steam and ordered myself "Portal".

And what a fantastic game! Of course, it is very short but that's what I needed anyway.

I have to say that I was really happy to play this game on a PC, after all the XBox playing I did recently. It is amazing how easy and natural it is to play First Person games with keyboard and mouse.

There are levels in Portal where you have to jump into the portal, fly out on the other end, then in the middle of jump turn around and shoot out another portal hole - there's just no way I'd be able to do that with the console controller.

The game itself is tons of fun, with great script, amazing puzzles and really innovative gameplay mechanics. Highly recommended. I know I'll be coming back to it to try and defeat extra challenges.

For years now I've been saying that Firefox add-ons are either useless or a similar one can easily be found for other browsers. Well, today I have to admit I was wrong. I present you with AmIOnMySpace FF add-on:

Finally! Now could someone please do this for IE?

It has been a while since I posted anything about Apple. So to make up here's something fun:

Thank you, Lenovo!