Wildfire Adventures

I recently bought the HTC Wildfire and, once more, I managed to get into some trouble with it. Here is the whole story:

I bought the Wildfire from Plaisio for about 280 euros. I also got a Blu-ray Disc of Avatar but I have no player to watch it, hehe. Anyway before buying it I was between it, some of the small Xperias (like the X10 Mini or the X10 Mini Pro) and Samsung Galaxy 3. I didn't really like the UI of the Galaxy 3 (Sense is much better in my opinion compared to TouchWiz) and the Xperias had tiny, unremovable batteries while emitting radiation enough to boil an egg. So Wildfire, although lacking a GPU and having too few PPI was the way to go.

The first impression Android gave me were better than those of any OS I've ever worked with. I don't know if this is inherent in Android or it is the HTC Sense UI that made the difference but everything worked exactly the way I expected. I was feeling at home although it was the first day I had used Android. I've never felt like that with any other mobile OS, not with Symbian, not with Windows Mobile (well I've only used some old versions).

Wildfire's hardware is nice. The phone felt REALLY sturdy and I think it actually is tough! A friend dropped his Wildfire from the roof of a house onto solid marble and it only got a small dimple in one of it's corners! If any other mobile had taken that fall he would be collecting broken parts from all around. Well, the back cover and the battery obviously fell off the phone but nothing was broken or bent. The camera is a bit crappy but I really don't give a shit about it... :-) The speakers are pretty good (Nokia E71, my previous phone, was somewhat better in this area to be honest). The screen is better than those of my previous mobiles but still you can see the pixels (while in almost any other Android mobile you can't) which is something I already knew before buying Wildfire. The good thing about low resolutions is that AFAIK you have more spare CPU time to spend on the apps themselves. The touchscreen is great with the anti-fingerprint screen protector I use. The GPS has an extremely fast acquisition (it only takes a few seconds to get a GPS fix) probably because it downloads the ephemeris data through 3G. The GPS reception is also amazing (FFS it even worked inside my house!!!). (BTW E71's GPS was really bad)

I really wanted to use TOR on my mobile so I had to root the device. And so I did three days after buying it. The rooting went well and only took a few minutes (during which a program called unrevoked took care of everything automatically for me). I installed Orbot (that's TOR for Android) but I couldn't make it work. Transparent routing was definitely not working although Orbot used admin rights. Anyway I gave up and decided to wait for a new Orbot version that hopefully would fix the problem.

I also installed Layar which seemed really cool but for some reason I couldn't use it. Points seemed to jump around strangely and it turned out that my compass module was not working properly. I confirmed that with other applications too. For example I installed a compass application but it complained about strong magnetic fields. I tried to calibrate it and it started working perfectly, until I exited the compass app and rerun it... For some reason my compass refused to save the calibration data. Every time the device started using my compass it was useless. Even jumping to another app for 3 seconds and then back to a compass enabled app, it would go mad again.

I would have taken it straight to the shop for a replacement but two things stopped me. First, I had rooted the device and according to many users that had voided my warranty. Second, most friends told me that they wouldn't replace it with a new one under the DoA terms since the device wasn't actually dead. I should have tried it but I didn't and now I regret it.

I did a factory restore and the compass started working for about one or two days. After that it went mad again... I waited till the 2.2 upgrade was released and tried to upgrade the device (so that I could finally send it for service since the upgrade would hide the rooting and bring back my warranty) but the device refused to upgrade. It just showed an exclamation mark after a while.

The first error I had to overcome was that the phone though the upgrade was unsigned... I don't know why but, thankfully, the rooting process replaces your recovery partition (the one that handles the upgrades among other things) with ClockworkMod which has an option to ignore signature checks. But then the installation script run and emited an assertion error which roughly informed me that I didn't actually own a Wildfire... Soon I found out that the reason was that during the root process the misc partition of my phone somehow got a bit corrupted and now the upgrade wouldn't recognize my phone. Some "CID" value was not correct... I used adb to read the CID value from my phone and it was correct (it was one of the valid ones). I still don't know why the script failed to read it. Anyway the only way to install it was to open the official upgrade on my computer (which is a zip archive), find the installation script and remove all the failing assertions. So I did and then repacked my custom upgrade zip. I managed to install it (wow) but then realized that OTA upgrades (Over The Air: the phone downloads the upgrade over WiFi or 3G and upgrades itself without the need of a computer) are more like patches so my phone still had the unofficial recovery partition and although the system wasn't actually rooted anymore, the root manager application was still installed in the system partition (which meant it couldn't be uninstalled). I then found a RUU (ROM Upgrade Utility) and run it on my computer, that way the phone was like it just got out of the factory line, ready to be sent for service.

I brought it to Plaisio again but they told me it would take about a month for it to go to HTC and return. What could I do? I am still waiting for them to call... They probably sent it to Taiwan. :-) I just hope for their own good that they don't scratch my screen (although it has a screen protector) or the phone's body. I will post something when I get it back. Perhaps a list with my favorite android apps.

BTW you can find my custom ROM along with some very long troubleshooting conversations here.

TORChat

[edit] Don't download this version. TorChat is developed again!

TORChat is an anonymous and encrypted Instant Messenger made by Bernd Kreuß. It's open source, written in Python and it uses the hidden services provided by the TOR network (TOR is not spelled with capital letters nowadays but I prefer it that way to remind me that it is The Onion Router).

The bad thing is that TORChat development stopped before some years and the bundled TOR version works no more. I've packed a version of my own including the latest stable TOR build. Everything is packed with UPX too. You can download my binary version from here. I will try to keep it up to date as new TOR versions come out.

While there is no reason not to trust my version (just decompress my executables with UPX and you'll see they are the same ones with those distributed officially) you might also want to download another nicely packed version from this website.

Oh and my TORChat identity is: 5leg5qw726nluaef

Timmy!

In Diablo2, to transfer items from one player to another you can either have a friend hold them for you or try dropping them on the ground, leave, and rejoin the server with the other player. But in order for the game room to stay open (and therefore the items to stay on the ground) you have to keep the game room open for about 10 minutes. I needed a simple program to count that 10 minutes so I made Timmy! (I like Southpark).

Timmy! is a simple (and portable) countdown timer. You define the timeout and it sits in your tray until the expiration, when it pops up a message box. I won't write anything more since the program is fairly simple.

Download Timmy! from here. (AutoIt3 sources included)

Take a look at the screenshots:

IPic

IPic is a small site I made. More like a simple, free tracking service.
Whenever you visit it, it will provide two unique links. The first one is a link to a 1 transparent pixel PNG which you can include in any HTML or BBcode you want. The second link will show you the IP of whoever viewed that picture in the past 30 days. I had some minor problems and it deleted visits after 4 days from the statistics page (instead of 30) but I think it's be OK now.
As for the legality of the site, I don't think it's illegal, Statcounter provides the same service by using javascript but in any case it's up to use to decide whether and where to use it so do it wisely.
Finally if you don't like the huge advertisement that appears on every page just install Adblock.

Visit IPic.

Asus eeePC 1005HA-GG

I bought this little netbook a couple of months ago (it was February I think). Now I can safely write my opinion about it and my experiences with it.

I bought it from Plaisio, a Greek store for 350euros. I could buy it form eshop, another online Greek store for 300euros but Plaisio sold it with a USB prepaid (Vodafone on Demand) broadband stick from Vodafone which costs 50euros on it's own. I wouldn't buy the USB stick otherwise but Plaisio had an additional offer for buying their combo: free broadband internet until July. In any case I trust Plaisio more than eshop.

The first impression was great. It had Windows XP Home Greek preinstalled and a version of Linux which I didn't really fancy so I only checked their main features and never used them again. After uninstalling Panda Antivirus (I replaced it with Avira Antivir) and the MS Office trials (I installed OpenOffice instead) I saw how few tools Asus had placed in the netbook. That was great, for the first time I had a laptop in my hands that didn't suffer from useless programs. The only laptop related programs were to control the CPU frequency, LCD resolution and LCD orientation as well as a program for auto updating these few tools. The touchpad responds nicely and supports double-touch for zooming in and out. It has no visible limits but I quickly got used to it. Secondly the loudspeakers are worst than the one on my mobile phone (Nokia E71). You can't even get the sound over 50% without completely destroying the sound (and perhaps you ears). The screen on the other hand is fantastic. Its native resolution is 1024x600 at 10.1 inches but you can go up to 1024x768 (scaled or panned) if you applications require it. The screen surface is matte so you won't have any problems using it in the sunny outdoors. The keyboard is fine. It covers the whole width of the netbook width and the only problem you will probably encounter is that it has tiny cross (the arrow keys), especially the up and down arrows which occupy the space of one normal key together.

In the next days I repartitioned the drive to reclaim the space used by Linux (which I didn't use) and to consolidate the pointlessly numerous partitions. I used an Ubuntu live USB and everything went absolutely fine. I could finally copy my Music which filled a 70GB partition.

Over the days I installed many different programs some of which were quite stressful for it's 1.60GHz Atom CPU and the 1GB of RAM. For example Freenet and NetBeans. "Coincidentally" both are Java applications. But still the netbook ran quite fast for my taste. The only thing that made it crawl was the Antivirus. I tried some other antiviruses too, like Comodo, but still the laptop was much slow so I disabled Avira's permanent protection... which lead to a big big adventure.......

One of the many small programs I tried is CleanMem which empties the cache memory among other things. CleanMem runs on specified intervals (usually every 30 minutes) using a Scheduled Task. At some point, for some reason, I opened the Scheduled Tasks and, apart from CleanMem's task I saw another task named A which after viewing it's properties, I saw that it was scheduled to run every first of the month. That task would run an executable in the system32 directory named cmmmon32.exe (which has one more "m" than cmmon32.exe an actual Windows application. I scanned the file with Avira and yeaaap it was a virus. I moved it somewhere else and then did a full system scan which found nothing more. I scanned the pc with many tools which reported nothing suspicious. Except for SpyDLLRemover which reported a rootkit process! The only way for SpyDLLRemover to detect this process was by brute-forcing openprocess over all possible process ids. I tried many, if not all, rootkit removers by many different companies but none could find anything. What could I do?

I did a factory restore. I tried to do it from the hidden partition but it seems that my repartitioning had somehow messed it up so I ended up borrowing an external DVD drive from a friend and using the DVD that accompanied the netbook (Imagine: Sony didn't bother to give a DVD along with my other laptop which costs 1000euros, Asus gave one with a 300euros netbook which doesn't even have a DVD drive, just in case you need it). So after the restoration process (which BTW used Norton Ghost) I did the mistake to run one or two programs before running SpyDllRemover which, as you imagined, found the rootkit process again. I was tired and angry. Was the image infected? The most probable explanation is that SpyDLLRemover was giving a false positive. But why would a process id "respond" to a openprocess call when there is not such process??? I don't see how this method could give false positives. I did that factory restore again, while sleeping on my bed next to the netbook, but the result was the same.

Anyway at that point a happened to have a Ubuntu Live CD looking at me so I installed Ubuntu erasing the whole drive in the process. Almost all devices worked out of the box with Ubuntu, the camera, the SD reader, the touchpad etc. The only problems was that I couldn't get any sound from my microphone and that I had no 3D acceleration since Intel is perhaps the only company that hasn't made any Linux drivers for their GMA graphic adapters. Also I had some minor problems with some big windows that couldn't fit in the 600 vertical pixels of my screen (1024x600).
More or less most things worked well on Ubuntu so in less than a day I had them heavily customized and had installed many programs.

At that point I had to take a 3 hours trip to Athens during which I decided to listen to some music. I connected my headphones and made a playlist full of Blind Guardian. After 45 minutes the girls sitting in front of me turned around and smiled at me while trying to say something. I quickly removed my earphones in order to hear what she wanted to tell me but before she spoke I already knew... Music was both playing through the earphones and the terrible netbook speakers, for 45 minutes, at 80% volume, in a public transportation bus, in the morning. "Could you please turn the volume down a bit?" she said, smiling. It's a miracle that I no one broke the netbook on my head.

After that incident (but mostly not because of it) I decided to try to install XP again. That time XP Proffesional English which I get for free from MSDNAA. So I did, and the first thing I run was a clean copy of SpyDLLRemover which found no rootkits at last. Then I installed Avira and then the drivers provided by Asus. After installing the drivers SpyDLLRemover started reporting again that rootkit. So after performing 4 formats and reinstallations in 3 days, loosing many hours of sleep in the process, I now know that some drivers created that bogus process which almost surely isn't a rootkit.

I also know that the virus I initially found had nothing to do with the "rootkit". I run the virus on a VirtualBox with XP and sniffed the internet traffic it generated. It contacted some random image hosting sites and forums (some of which in Russia) asking for some PNGs (that probably conveyed some steganographic data?) but all sites replied with a file not found error. So I guess that virus was not even up to date. I then found out that I got it from a torrent that I downloaded and which for some reason I forgot to check manually before running it.

Now I still use that last XP installation whithout problems. Well in fact I got two blue screens after upgrading the Realtek sound card drivers (I apparently used the drivers for 1005HA while I have 1005HA-GG) but I rolled back and everything is fine again.

Generally 1005HA-GG is a great companion and that's the first time I use that word for a computer. The best thing is it's battery. With 4400mAh, it lasts many hours. For example before some days I spent 2 and a half hours watching Cosmos and I still had 60% of the battery left. You can easily get over 7 hours with low brightness if you don't run CPU intensive applications. Also the CPU is not that weak. I can play Descent 1 and 2 perfectly. I can play Diablo 2 with only minor temporary lagging in overcrowded areas. And the slight overclocking from 1.6GHz to 1.68GHz that you can do with the press of two buttons is great for some cases. I also run Freenet, Vidalia (TOR), Google Desktop, Firefox (with more than 10 tabs open), Foobar2000, Pidgin and Skype at the same time and I see no serious slow down. The only thing that really makes the netbook crawl is the Antivirus. It's OK when you run only one program. But running it along with Google Desktop means that it will constantly scan files in the background.

[Months-long-break]

The previous post was written some months ago but I forgot to post it. I had neglected to post anything at all because of other activities. Here are some more info about the netbook.

At some point the fan probably sucked a hair or something and now makes a strange noise sometimes. I ignored the problem since it didn't affect the netbook but after one or two months the netbook started powering of randomly. No matter how much I try to recreate the problem, by overheating the CPU, I cannot make it power down. I run the CPU at 100% of its capacity and it didn't power down for hours, while it has powered down unexpectedly while I was just looking at my desktop without anything running. :-|

I phoned ASUS technical support and informed them of the problem, they gave me a link with an online form to fill and they would send someone to pick the netbook up from my house, for free. They only warned me (probably because I told them that it doesn't always happen when it gets hot) that if the problem doesn't show up I would have to pay the expenses to get the netbook back. So I tried to make sure that the netbook was actually showing the problem easily.

Well... the netbook is still on after two days, with the camera on to make some use of the CPU. Perhaps it's the air-condition in the room that keeps the netbook cool, if it's a cooling problem anyway. But that time when it did close unexpectedly while doing nothing, I was in the very same room, with the air-condition on!

So until I am sure I won't have to pay for, there is no netbook for me. I know drag my Vaio along with me, which after all that time on the mains power it mostly works like a desktop with a UPS, the battery lasts about 10minutes... :-D I get nervous even when moving it from room to room.