Will hopefully be getting some free time in the coming weeks to sort my life out! I have loads of drafts to finish off, music to record, projects to finish up and [even] more photos to organise. More soon..

The reason I felt the need to do this is that I don’t want to spam my flickr photostream with social photos that have a very limited shelf life. The way I see it is that most people will take one quick look through and then that’ll be it. Validity expired.
My existing plogger page works nicely, but you have to import every photo into the database before it’ll show up. An extra step that I can do without. Also, the sub-categorization of albums isn’t really relevant for my catalogue of goings out! (Poet and not aware.)
Starting on a new install late last night was patently a bad idea, as I am incapable of putting something down ’til all problems, however small, have been ironed out, and the CSS in particular has been hacked to pieces. Once it got to around 12.40am this morning though, I thought “f*** it I’m too tired”, reverted back to the default theme (ish) and left it alone. Someone really needs to knock up a wordpress/zenphoto integration plugin so that creating a page with an embedded gallery is simply a matter of whacking a put_my_gallery_here() in the template code. Plogger does have that…but it’s not as swish and AJAXy. Basically, flickr pwnz. Good job guys.

All this said, I present to you nights out & social gatherings – which will suffice until one or all of the issues I mention have been tended to :)

Enjoy.

I even managed to get IE to behave (I think), incredible.

Actually I’m sure it’s better explained on the Behaviour page, so you’re probably better off checking there if you’re interested :)

Incidentally and interestingly, a couple more links from that page (via the Sam Stephenson link at the bottom of the page) lands you at projectionist (tumblelog) – which I was looking at just yesterday via here (and the subsequent link). Seems it’s not only a small world, but a small web too ;)

Anyway back to the matter at hand. You see, among the problems that have had to be overcome to get bluetooth going, there is the fundamental issue that Windows XP SP2 is not designed to be able to handle bluetooth communication with devices other than keyboards and mice. Then there’s also the fact that the chipset manufacturer, Broadcom, refuses to make the latest drivers publicly available, referring you to the overall product manufacturer, whose driver release is about 5 revisions out of date. Fantastic eh.

By default, when you install the drivers that come with a bluetooth dongle Windows automatically reverts back to the proprietary bluetooth driver. In other words it ignores what you just did. Perhaps non-savvy users would be beaten at this point, who knows, because now you have to select the M$ driver, choose update, then manually proceed to pick out the one you just installed, and voila. Actually if you want to have a decent chance of getting things working like this, you have to follow this kind of quirky routine, which did need doing..

Now this was good enough to get my Orange SPV C500 working with ActiveSync over bluetooth, but the headset just didn’t wanna know. So next problem was to try and source an updated WIDCOMM driver that would be compatible with my dongle. I already said that Broadcom don’t share these, but I managed to download them from somewhere in Taiwan, and guess my way through the self-extractor as all the characters showed up as question marks :)
This driver revision was 4.0.1.2101, a fair bit higher than the manufacturer supplied 1.4.2.10, but the driver .inf file didn’t contain any information about my particular device. At this point I thought I was going to have to hack together the old driver file and the new one so as to fool the system into thinking it was appropriate, but this seemed like too much hassle so decided to keep searching.. Fortunately, through trawling some forum posts I managed to track down a working version based on driver version 4.0.1.700. For both generic driver sets, the install involved installing the drivers, then killing the bluetooth service, renaming & patching some system files, and patching some application files (in the latter case there was some kind of licensing set up that refused to co-operate with my dongle, but fortunately patching took care of this :). Oh yeah and even after that I had to delete and reinstall the bluetooth COM ports and perform a raindance before my phone would talk to ActiveSync again. Fun & games huh? So, fu Broadcom. I still have your latest drivers, so stop pulling this kind of shit.

So why don’t things just work? I have to say that, given my vast troubleshooting experience, I’m not at all surprised when they don’t. Oh no, that would be far too much to expect. But would manufacturers in other industries get away with this behaviour? I don’t think so. It seems that if you want to be at the cutting edge you have to accept that you’re going to be an active beta tester for the hardware companies involved. Don’t expect much help from customer support either, because generally they’re no wiser than you are :) Would this whole scenario be avoided by switching to Apple though? If I had the money I would already be using a 15″ Powerbook, and am currently still trying to justify the future expenditure.

It’s no wonder that bluetooth hasn’t taken off to the extent predicted, but when it’s this much hassle to get a headset working, well, is it any wonder. Boo.

At this point, I find myself asking, “wouldn’t it have been so much simpler on a mac?”

Seeing as I’m struggling to write comprehensibly right now I guess this will have to be answered tomorrow, but for now, go me. I win again, M$.

I’m off to see if the concept of sleep cycles really exists…

• www.cookie.pl
• www.agencynet.com (insane)
• www.shauninman.com (check the nav thing at the top)

and my original favourite – derbauer.de

You can get it here, please refer to the original page and the file itself for usage instructions.