Automation Adventures

About a week ago I got the exciting news that WebIS was releasing their Pocket Informant for the BlackBerry. I have used Pocket Informant on my PocketPC before, and was impressed with the features that it had - I never used all of them!

The BlackBerry version is not as extensive as the PocketPC one (a lot of settings seem to be missing - unless it was because it was the Trial version), but the look and feel were identical between the two versions. And as is mentioned on their website, the PocketPC version took over 8 years to evolve into its current form. Their goal with this version was to get the most important Pocket Informant features onto the BlackBerry.

There is one major drawback that makes me not want to buy this version however: in the week that I’ve had it installed on my BB Pearl, the application has slowed to a crawl, slowing down the entire phone with it. And slowed it down so much that I couldn’t make a call anymore. At other times, I was informed that the BlackBerry had terminated Pocket Informant because it had become unresponsive. This may have been an interaction with other applications on the phone, but to have a phone that won’t make or accept calls is not a good thing.

You can buy Pocket Informant for the BlackBerry for $19.95, or download a limited trial version here.

For about a week now I’ve had problems synchronizing my Blackberry Pearl 8130 from Verizon with our Blackberry Enterprise server. Nothing synchronizes: email, calendar, to-do lists, etc.

After trying several options suggested around the net (take out battery, turn wireless synchronization off and back on), with no results, I thought I’d have to secure wipe my Blackberry again. Hesitating to do that, I was playing around with the phone last night, and noticed that the message folder for my enterprise mail was missing. Now completely convinced I had to bite the bullet and wipe the phone, I went off to a restless night of sleep.

This morning, I was browsing through some of the options in Settings, and I noticed in Security Options an entry named Firewall. Curious, I selected it. It showed the firewall enabled, gave me options to block certain incoming messages, and showed how many messages were blocked because of Incorrect Encryption keys. 1159 were blocked??? This gave me an idea: I’ve had problems surfing to certain sites with the browser, while others worked fine, or were slightly slower than normal. I reset the counter of blocked messages, and try to access one of the sites I had problems with (www.zoho.com). Sure enough, it didn’t work, but upon checking the Firewall option, it now showed me 1 blocked message. Hey! Some key is corrupt!!!

The fix turned out to be very simple:

• Go to Options
• Go to Security
• Go to General Settings
• Scroll to the bottom where the Services are listed
• Place your cursor on Desktop
• Click the menu key and select Regenerate Encryp…

Not only did this allow me to surf to pretty much any site I had problems with before, my phone went through an automatic activation and showed me it was now synchronizing again with our Blackberry Enterprise server.

A fairly quick and simple fix, that is much faster than completely wiping your phone, and go through a new Enterprise Activation.

This week my car was in the shop, and as a loaner vehicle I had a 2008 Ford Focus, with Ford and Microsoft’s new Sync system.

The car itself is OK. I normally drive a Ford Taurus, so the Focus is a little smaller, but I used to drive a Renault Clio back in the Netherlands, so I’ve got no problems with a smaller car. Actually, in about the 3 days I was driving it, I managed to get the average MPG up from 25 something to around 31.6. Not amazing, but better than the 19+ MPG we get out of the Freestar, and the 22-24 MPG for the Taurus.

You can tell the Focus is the low-end model of the Ford line-up. The sun visor feels a little cheap, there are some other things that make the car feel less sturdy, and whoever designed the cupholder inserts has never put a cup in one - and tried to remove it (hint: I think the rubber insert should stay in the cupholder, not around the cup as a misformed bottle warmer.

On to the tech part - the Sync system. Sync is a voice-controlled system to control phone and audio. A wide range of phones and audio devices (read: portable MP3 players and the likes) are supposed to work with it. I have a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and a 3rd gen iPod, pretty standard equipment, so I didn’t expect any problems.

The pairing of the phone over Bluetooth went smooth. And every time I started the car, it connected to the phone quickly and without intervention. The only time I had an issue was when I got in the car around 11:15PM, and Sync didn’t connect to my phone. It took me a minute to remember that the phone turns itself off after 11PM…

Hooking up the iPod to the Sync system was a little more complicated. The steps in the Sync manual describing how to connect your music player through a USB cable - didn’t work. The system maintained there was no music player. After a little bit of fiddling in the menus I managed to tell Sync it really

had a music player. After that, I was able to select songs, artists, albums, genres etc., but my play lists were completely missing. At least I was able to play music and the likes! But my confidence in the manual was pretty much gone.

And then the issues started:

• I like listening to podcasts. Some of them are pretty long. And I don’t like leaving my iPod in the car. However, when you stop the engine and the Sync system, or disconnect the iPod, it loses track of where it was in the “song”. The only option you have is to fast-forward to the point where you left off - a fast-forward that only skips 5 seconds at a time, at a speed of roughly 10 seconds skipped per real time second. To get back to 1 hour and 15 minutes into the podcast, I had to press the fast forward button for about 8 minutes. On top of that, roughly after every 20 minutes of the “song”, the fast-forward stops, like it thinks you can’t be serious about skipping that much of the “song”.
• While I was listening to some music, I received a phone call. I was able to answer the phone call, and talk to the person on the other side. The music had stopped. After terminating the call, I was still in the phone menu. The voice commands were now focused on the phone, not on the media. It took me roughly 3 minutes of yelling at the voice system and pushing buttons to get my music to play again. At least it continued where I left off.
• The “Help” command in the voice system can be handy, but at times is completely useless. I use voice recognition because I’m driving. The system knows I’m driving, because I’m not allowed to do certain setup options. Then why, pray tell, does it tell me after asking for “Help” 2 options, one of which is to “see the manual”??? Should I whip it out and read it while I’m doing 65MPH? Not a very safe suggestion.
• To this day I cannot ask the system to play an artist or album. I can play genres, but only if I select it through the button menu. The voice system claims no knowledge of any music on my system, be it an
  artist or a genre. Apparently it is supposed to index your music files, after which these voice commands work. But: “Indexing” doesn’t appear in the Sync manual index, and neither does “Factory defaults” and some other useful options.

The Sync system is a very useful idea. It aims to keep your hands on the wheel, and the heads-up display helps keep an eye on the road. But it misses its goal when I have to fumble around on the dashboard because the voice recognition can’t switch from phone to media, or recognize half of the commands. My phone is equipped with voice dialing, and does a great job of understanding me (I can even call my wife, who has the same unpronounceable last name as me - and the Pearl understands who I want). I can’t believe the Sync system has such a hard time.

All in all, it feels like a Microsoft Windows product. It looks OK, but not very intuitive. It halfway works, but I’m waiting for version 2.0. At least it didn’t blue screen on me….

For the past two days, my Blackberry Desktop software has crashed when it was trying to read the Outlook calendar entries. Rebooting didn’t help, and I really didn’t want to reinstall software and go through the pain of resynchronizing.

Luckily, the solutions was relatively simple. After Googling around for a bit, I came across this post on BlackberryForums.com, describing an easy and effective way to make my Blackberry’s calendar match my Outlook calendar (again).

The KB entry referenced (KB 11703 on the BlackBerry Technical Solution Center) describes the procedure for Windows 2000/XP. The procedure is similar on Windows Vista, the only difference is that the Intellisync folder is located at C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\Intellisync. You don’t even have to reconfigure the synchronization settings - after deleting the Intellisync directory, start the Desktop Manager and synchronize your Blackberry.

But I have to agree with the post directly below the solution: I wonder what got it messed up to begin with…

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