The Cruisemaniac

Configuring Mail for Exchange on S60 Devices

Jun 222009

I’ve come across more than a couple of instances in the recent past (the most recent being prashanth) where people had trouble setting up Mail For Exchange (MFE) on their Nokia S60 devices. So, I decided to do a step-by-step howto on how to get it installed, setup and running on your S60 phone.

I have used a Nokia 6210 Navigator (S60 FP2 device) for supporting this blog post, but any other S60 3rd edition / 5th edition device would conform to more or less the same process. Now, here goes…

There are two ways you can start off your setup of MFE on your S60 device:

Hunt down the MFE icon hiding somewhere in the Installations / Applicaitons folder and start off the setup process…
Start setup from the Messaging app and move forward to install MFE and continue the setup. We will be looking at this approach in the blog post.

The only difference between the two approaches is that in the first one already has MFE installed on your device and you just go ahead and type in your magic keywords and it just works! In the second case, you type in the parameters and then it proceeds to install MFE (whose sis file Nokia has happily stored somewhere on your phone) and then apply the magic and get going!!!

So… starting with it…

Open the messaging app -> New mailbox. Select Yes for the question it asks.
You should now be presented with the E-mail setup wizard. Start it off… we’re just a few more steps away
The wizard will then show you a disclaimer. Just accept it to move to the next step. It will then check your GPRS (NOT WAP, GPRS = DATA = THE COSTLY WALA CONNEXUN ) connectivity to the internet and then the setup part of your process starts.
Continuing on… The next set of screens prompts you to enter the Email ID, password.
At this point, we’re halfway through the process. The wizard will now show a list of protocols that are “possibly” supported by your email id. One of them is POP3 / IMAP4 (which is the defacto thingy, but not what we’re interested in) and the other being, Mail For Exchange. This is shown in the screenshots below:
Once MFE is selected, you will be presented with dialogues to enter your Windows Username and the Windows Domain Name against which you authenticate yourself in your organization.
In the next dialog, you have to enter your mail server URL. This is the URL of the exchange server you have at work.
At this point, the installation of MFE starts on you system and proceeds to show you the Sync settings menu.
Pressing the center softkey on the Content synced settings item brings up the detailed settings for your MFE setup that you have done. Here, you can tweak your Peak, off peak settings, Sync when roaming settings, and all the works…I’ll leave it to the screenshots below to do the explanations…
Once you are satisfied with the settings changes you have made to the profile, Select Options –> Full resync. This will clear out any pre-existing sync data and refresh it with the latest data from the exchange server.
Once the Full sync is done, the MFE profile you just created gets saved and you can see the status of the sync process as it happens.
After closing the wizard, you must be able to see a Mail for Exchange folder in your Messaging application. This indicates that you have an MFE profile setup on your phone. Once the sync is complete from the previous step, you will see a new mail indication on the Home screen as indicated by a small ‘@’ icon in the top right near the battery indicator.

You can haz push corporate emailz!!!
Another feature that MFE provides is the Company directory lookup. This is basically the Addressbook feature that Outlook provides when you type the name of the recipient and press Ctrl + K. The app is named Comp. Dir.

So there ends the step-by-step walkthrough for setting up MFE on your S60 devices.

Now comes the interesting part, Troubleshooting.

If your sync has suddenly stopped working, chances are that your backend has cut you off for a while a.k.a. maintenance.
Another common issue is the MFE not working after a FOTA upgrade. This is rectified by deleting your existing MFE profile and creating a new one with the same settings.
If your MFE setup keeps harping about the server being wrong (step 7 in how-to above), try it with the https://mail.yourmailserver.com url.

I hope this helps someone with regard to setting up MFE. Until the next post… Chao!

Four Years of IT

Muh Life View Comments

Jun 042009

Yesterday (Jun 3, 2009), I completed 4 years in the IT industry. Its been a wonderful experience starting from TechMahindra (Erstwhile Mahindra British Telecom) back in June 2005 all the way to Sasken to Teleca and Nokia now in 2009.

This landmark achievement in my life definitely deserved a blog post… So here goes a list of experiences / learnings that I hold close to my heart and have mattered to me the most. I’ve just jotted them down with out any structure / format blaming intensive lack of energy to sit and “compose” a blog post about my historic and memorable achievement:

The initial days in TechM as a fresher have been the most amazing days of my life till date. PERIOD. Training, Practice, Tests, Training, Practice, Tests… In mellu speak, simbly oosssoome!!!

And when I look back at what I’ve done in the last 4 years, there are moments that give me a lot of pride and there are some where I’m going: “Dude!!! WTF!!! You god-freaking-seriously did that???” :-O . But as I’m ME, I’m just gonna blame everything on fate and let the WTF moments pass and leave them for laughing at myself waaaay ahead in the future.

There is one important learning that I’ve kept steadfast and very close to my heart for all these 4 years… Something very simple, yet amazingly effective. And that is to NEVER SAY NO TO INFORMATION. Of any kind… A lot of people who know the cruisemaniac would agree to this… I’m not talking about rule validation and sanity testing here… I’m just talking core-dump!

That was something I learnt from my first ever PM at TechMahindra. Keep searching, keep learning, and it will all come back and help you one day. I’m still waiting for that “One day” though!

Coming to the next learning, I’ve learnt to fight where its necessary and be subduinng where necessary. People skills play a huuuge part in corporate life. Being frank may first offend people… but it sure helps in the long run. If i can commit to a deadline, i commit whole-heartedly. If I cannot, I make sure my seniors know that I cannot!

Which brings me to the next very important gospel… EMail is for record keeping! Not only for fooling around with silly forwards! I’ve learnt not to take work from my managers unless the specs of what I have to do are written in an Email and sent to me! Lets face it… IT takes its toll on everyone… All of us want the short way out… But remember, the short-cut always fucks you up! ALWAYS!

Next up, Always experiment… I’ve always wanted to figure out things on my own… Make mistakes and fuck things up… thats how you learn! Atleast, thats how I learn… I’m sure this mentality has brought me a full circle in Symbian. Starting off from Apps, I went down to the Subsystems and Frameworks, dirtied my hands on multimedia engineering, user interfaces, Platform support and Integration, and currently handle Build and Release Process management, whoa!!! That felt good when I typed it in! The crux, its there for the taking… Go Ask… Show interest, show commitment, it has happend for ME! It can happen for you!

Shifting jobs is not a bad thing! You get another chance to make a different set of mistakes in the name of work! That has helped me tell my managers upfront what I’ve done and what my goals are… It gives people a window to fit you in and experiment…

And of course… the last but not the least part: Its a totally unrewarding rat-race… you win some, you lose some… keep your spirits up and keep running. Rat or not, it doesnt really matter! You’re in it for the money and the perks… Figure out your path, and walk it!
<<<Something more must come here>>>

<<<apparently it wont>>>

Chao…

Synergize your workhorses

Tech Zone View Comments

May 052009

A lot of us have a multi-PC setup these days. Be it at work or at home, the cables and the multiple mouses are surely a confusion! Well, a way out exists… infact, an open-source and completely cost-free way out of the mixup exists. Say Hello to Synergy, the opensource, multi-OS compatible Keyboard and mouse sharing application.

Download Synergy from the sourceforge website here. Install it and have it running without a reboot.

The configuration for Synergy is very simple.

You choose one of your multiple PCs / laptops on your table as your server.
Next up, you would need to configure the positions of the other PCs with respect to the PC acting as the Synergy Server. Eg: Laptop is to the left of PC. EeePC to the left of Laptop. Laptop is Right of EeePC, et al.
Start off Synergy on the server
Hook on the clients to the server by providing either the hostname of the server or the IP address and voila..
You can haz one keyboard and one mouse for multiple peeceez!!!

With respect to my setup as above, synergy runs on the Ubuntu desktop. The Keyboard and mouse from the desktop is used by both the laptop and the eeePC.

For the ubuntu fellows, synergy is available in synaptic package manager. Just apt-get it as:

sudo apt-get install synergy

The package manager installs both the synergy server (synergys) and the synergy client (synergyc). Synergy server needs a configuration file named synergy.conf which needs to be pointed to when starting the synergy server. A very detailed help document for writing the synergy.conf file and for starting the client and server on ubuntu is here.

Well… thats that about Synergy. Looks like i covered an app I liked a lot in pretty much good detail… and oh… yeah, you can share the clipboard across PCs… Ctrl+C on ubuntu and Ctrl+V on windowsXP! Kickass!! B-)

My Calculations on the Nanna-Nano!

Muh Life View Comments

Mar 222009

There’s about a couple of weeks left for the Nano to start hitting showrooms and the streets… There does not seem to be a lot of excitement in the market about the 1 lakh rupee car other than for the reason that well… its a one-lakh-rupee-car!

What however spurred me on to write this post on the Tata Nano is my analysis on the thought process put in behind the vehicle. The nano is not just about a car that costs one lakh rupees… Its about a huuuuuuge time-bomb thats gonna go off the moment Ratan Tata says Go! A time-bomb thats going to start ticking in every CEO / MD’s office when they realise that the market is no longer theirs… The rules to the game they started just got re-written… The processes and manufacturing setups they had just got a royal trip down the drain…

Here is my statement of reason:

The Target Market:

The nano is being targeted at a market that is extremely price sensitive. When you bundle this with international grade quality, you get a direct WIN!!! The nano is also targeting a segment that is already booming, the small car segment, but here, they’re changing the rules of the game. Same quality merchandise, slightly smaller quantity, but perfectly priced to just touch the lower segment.

The same technique a vegetable vendor uses to compete against retail stores. Same quality, more or less same source for the commodity, easier availability, lower price. I’d go with the vegetable vendor for tomatoes and paalak as opposed to walking into an air-conditioned Spar supermarket.

The Volume Game:

From what I understand of selling commodities in a market, there are two distinct ways I’ve noticed people do it with:

Sell it at high prices because of quality and brand value and make the cut based on profit per commodity sold a.k.a Mercedes, Honda, Apple <AND>
Sell it at low prices at lower profit margins and make the cut based on volumes moved a.k.a. Bajaj, Nokia, Saravana Stores, et. al.

Tata, as we can see, is playing the game using strategy no. 2. “One Lakh Rupees” is an amazing price point!!! They have been able to achieve this in a way no one else could imagine. They have reduced cost of production by bringing all component vendors under one roof (a.k.a. one production area / SEZ) thus reducing transportation costs. They have also convinced component vendors to operate on a volume based margin and make smaller but numerous profits rather than making one big million dollar sale and taking a 15-20% profit margin out of it.

The Pricing Model:

The pricing of the “One Lakh Rupee” car is directly attributed to the afore mentioned to points. But hey, This for me is absolute ingenuity. The teams inside Tata have hit the nail bang on the head with the pricing and in addition to it, they have also looked into making the one-lakh car easily affordable for people that would want to own one. Their tie-ups with numerous banks offering loans is a gimmick they picked up from Bajaj ( the guys who started with Zero % Auto-finance) and pushed it across to make sure that the work put in does not go to dust.

The concerns:

This is a very important point. Yes, the Nano is hitting the roads in a couple of weeks from now. Hyundai and Maruti must be peeing in their pants right away! How they would handle the uproar is something i cannot fathom citing lack of business sense!!!

But what I’m more concerned AND interested in looking at, is, how Two-wheeler manufacturers are going to respond to it. Bajaj, TVS, Honda, and the likes are now going to get kicked in the nuts. This is how Tata is positioning itself in the market:

Hey, you’re buying a bike, you are taking a loan of 65k+ and getting two wheels. Here’s the thing: Take a loan from us, We’ll give you a nano, it has 4 wheels instead of 2, you can pay us back at the same rate that you’d pay back for your 2 wheels, and guess what, 4 people can travel at the same time and you wont get wet too!!!

Bajaj is already in the news for planning to make 4-wheelers but there is a lot that needs to happen before they can compete with such a sound business plan!

The forgotten JLR:

The nano has created so much of news for Tata (good, bad and otherwise) that the 2.3 billion dollar Jaguar – Land Rover has slipped to the sidelines… What Tata would do to get Jaguar into the market is something we would have to wait and see…

Closing Note: Will I buy a Nano?

The answer currently is NO. My reasons: Well, they are personal. I have never been comfortable with a small car. I am used to the larger ones and that would be what I would pick up.

DISCLAIMER: Nope, I am NOT a market analyst. Nor am I a business guy. I’m just another lame Software Engineer who put in a bit of logic to the equation of the Nano to come up with the post This blog post came out as a result of the conversation Saurabh Minni a.k.a. the100rabh and I had this morning.

Chao…

What made the BCB8 website???

Muh Life View Comments

Mar 222009

The answer to the question: “WordPress”.

Well, thats about one of the main reasons why we moved away from the system of the Wiki that has always ruled the BCB systems till BCB8.

The other main reason why we felt that wordpress was better suited than Wiki is thus:

A wiki, is a collection of documents linked to each other. There is only one hierarchy to the structure… and its FLAT.

WordPress on the other hand is multi-leveled AND allows for a relationship that has always ruled the Barcamp like scenario: A content provider AND the content provided. Which when translated to the BCB scenario relates to:The Speaker and the content associated with the person’s talk / discussion.

So there goes, wordpress it was! And then started the work of tweaking it to make the Content Management System manage the content and the content-providers and participants the bridge. And what resulted at the end of it is what we have on the BarcampBangalore website currently.

The best learnings out of working on this whole thing, in my opinion is thus:

Mixdev IS GOD!!! He is one of the most complete and most awesome of coders I’ve come across!!!
There is a plugin to achieve every conceivable functionality in wordpress!!! << Tip from @mixdev and @the100rabh. And yeah, I vouch for it!!!
There is no touching the subsystem that has been done in making this website. All that you see on the website is completely delivered by just the theme! <<KICKASS>>
Following and achieving point 3 hence makes sharing the code that much easier!!! And that much less code to understand and modify.

The code of the barcampbangalore theme (for lack of a word for the theme name, thereof) has been put up for download and further work and development on Google code here. There are some bugs, as there is always with very good quality code and since it is open to all please feel free to spread the word around and have people use it and do leave comments and tell us how amazing we are

And there goes 2 hits with one stone: My first wordpress theme AND my first Opensource project! W0000t!!!

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