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Nokia PC Suite Backup Bug for Organizer

A couple of days ago I noticed that the calendar events on my e71 home screen went missing .

The area below [ image courtesy e71fanatics.com] was not showing any of my appointments not even the default "No Calendar Entries Today" . Even the settings under the "work" and "home" mode showed the organizer being an option to display . Playing with those seemed to have no effect .

After searching online , I was able to find people experiencing the same problem ( after they had used the back up option) but had no solution to it . I decided it was time to a factory reset.

I backed up my contacts , calendar entries using the Nokia PC Suite and reset the device . On boot up the screen came up and the organizer entries were visible again . The interesting bit was when i was restoring my contacts and calendar using the pc suite because the display disappeared again !!!!

As an experiment i reset the decide again and restored only the contacts and the display remained the same . I had to do my calendar appointments again manually, but everything is back to normal and my apps were installed.

So anyone else with this problem, the only way i have found so far is to reset the device at this point. If anyone has a better approach than this please let me know.

Installing QT Mobility on Windows

So i have been playing around with Symbian and QT development on my Windows XP VM .

The foursquareS project that I am trying to work on made a switch to the QT Mobility libraries to take advtange of some of the mobile functionalities ( such as location, maps etc ).

Now the library is great and works well. But installing it can be a little tricky as I discovered this past weekend . Even after moving the pre-built binaries into the proper location i was getting build errors along the lines of "WARNING: Can't find following headers in System Include Path
"

Here are the steps I took to install the libraries properly within my SDK ( Symbian SDK for FP 1 ) and get a build on QT Creator :-

Once you download the zip or tar file, unzip it at the same level and location as the symbian sdk. In my case the sdk was installed at C:\Symbian\9.2 . I unzipped the folder at C:\qt_mobility .
This step was key, because when you run the configure.bat and make the build files it looks in those relative locations for the sdk etc.

At this point if make is in your path, it will copy the files into the appropriate locations and you can check your set up by building the unit tests . You can then follow the steps in the install.txt to move the pre-built libraries .

Hopefully this helps out others running into the same problems I was having .

Setting Up QT Environment For Windows

So one of my main motivations to start blogging again was me regaining interest in mobile development after taking a stab at it with TrafficCam . TrafficCam was pretty awesome for its time because it was bringing back pictures of intersections and providing road conditions for drivers.

So now 3 years later , im working ( hopefully soon ) on another opensource application on the symbian platform using QT for an online service called foursquare .

So before one can get started , setting up the environment properly on windows can be quite a task, so ive written up a short tutorial that will help others set up on windows ( windows xp in my case )

What i learnt that order was key when getting things installed .

1) First based on your phone and target version of symbian get the appropriate SDK . I used the S60 Wikipedia Page to help me out on that .

You can download the appropriate SDK here

2) Install the Open C/C++ plug in for the sdk .

3) After installing the sdk you can head over to the Qt download site and get the latest version of Qt and Qt Creator . Makes sure you install this on the same drive as the SDK .

3) At this point you should be able to launch Qt Creator and use one of the example projects to get started.

By following the order, i found that the editor found all the locations of the builds, sdk by default . Not having to manually set all that is a real time saver .

Motivation ... Found !!!

Alright so I think I have the motivation again to restart blogging . My next post will start off with that .

I need to post again, just need the right motivatio

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Project Euler 63

Some more one liner fun.

I first had the program looking like this:-

total = 0
for x in range(1,10):
    for n in range(1,51):
        if n == len(str(x**n)):
            total += 1
print (total)

After a good look, I was able to reduce it to a 1 liner:-

import time
r = time.time()

print(sum(len(str(x**n)) == n for x in range(1,10) for n in range(1,51)))

print ( time.time() - r )

The parenthesis around print sure does require some getting used to.

Project Euler 43

While working on euler functions, i have managed to come up with quite a library of functions that I use to solve problems.

Today I was playing around with Python 3.0 to see how many of the libraries can be converted, refactored or removed while utilizing the new features of python. First one that can potentially go is the permutations function since itertools now has one.

So here is my ( brute force ) solution to 43 using the permutations from itertools . Takes around 15 seconds to execute

import time
from itertools import permutations


def checkForProperty(t):


    if (int(t[1:4])%2) != 0:
        return False
    
    if(int(t[2:5])%3) != 0:
        return False

    if (int(t[3:6])%5) != 0:
        return False

    if(int(t[4:7])%7) != 0:
        return False

    if(int(t[5:8])%11) != 0:
        return False

    if(int(t[6:9])%13) != 0:
        return False

    if(int(t[7:10])%17) != 0:
        return False

    return True
    



r = time.time()

print (sum([int(''.join(x)) for x in permutations('1234567890') if x[0] != '0' and checkForProperty(''.join(x))]))

print (time.time() - r)

Project Euler #41

After a while I went back to Project Euler to solve a problem. Boy those are addicting. Had some fun with the fairly simple #41

The idea was to find the largest n-digit pandigital that is also a prime. A n-digit number is pandigital if it makes use of all the digits 1 to n exactly once

Based on the simple isPrime rule I was able to rule out 8 digit and 9 digit pandigitals. This is because the sum of the numbers is evenly divisible by 9, sum(1..9) = 45 and sum(1..8) = 36. So this left me with the possibility that n <= 7 .

Here is the python code I used to find it:-

def isNPandigital(number):
    return set( [int(c) for c in str(number)]) == set(range(1,len(str(number))+1))


t = time.time()
primes = sieve(7654321)
answerSet = []

print "primes generated"

for prime in primes:
    if isNPandigital(prime):
        answerSet.append(prime)

print max(answerSet)
print time.time() - t

Opera mini and gmail

why can't I access my gmail accounts via opera mini but fine with the default browser ?

Been playing with the phone a little bit more over this weekend. I found 2 remote programs for S60, one being Salling Clicker and the other called Remote'Em All . Since remote is free ill be trying that and see how is it to set up VLC over wifi.

As for browsers, I tried the default browser, Opera Mini and Skyfire. Skyfire felt very laggy , slow and had some rendering issues. On the other hand opera mini is the superstar, fast rendering and havent come across a problem site yet. The default browser is also good, but if you are going to browse the web Opera Mini is the way to go

Remote For Nokia E71

Does any one know of some good software ( freeware :) ) that can act as a remote control for VLC or window media player over the lan ? Been hunting for something on the phone since I watch movies on my laptop connected to a big screen and it would be nice to control the playback over the air from the phone....any ideas ?

New Phone

So after a lot of research I finally went ahead and bought my first Nokia phone, the E71 . I bought it close to a month ago, and love it. Its packed with software and is amazingly good looking as well. Ill start posting more about the applications I have played it and my overall experience as a first time Symbian user after having used pretty much only Sont Ericsson phones in the past.