On 09/09/09 apple released the updated ver. 3.1 os for the iPhone. I was very excited to read about it on apple.com website and couldn't wait to get the update installed on my iphone 3G. The added features as described on apple.com are:

iPhone OS 3.1 also includes these features and updates:

Out of excitement I decided to update my iPhone OS to 3.1 and after that the worse happened. After the update I noticed that my contact list is blank. Then I got a popup warning like.."Microsoft Exchange requires encryption which is not supported on this device", and I only had the option to disable the account. So my exchange emails disappeared, my calendar went empty and my contacts were gone, because all were in sync with my exchange. Then I thought I might be able to restore to my last version from the iTunes software update directory. Surprisingly enough, only the last version (v 3.1) was available there to restore to. So there was no way I could go back to v 3.0 or v 3.0.1. So now I have my iphone with no exhchange email, calendar or contact sync over the air. Later I had to manually sync my calendar and contacts through iTunes on the pc where I have exchange email set up in my outlook. I have all my contacts and up to date calendar events on my phone, but no email sync or over the air update of calendar events. I was reading about it through google search and found out that l am not the only unfortunate one. Apple has included exchange mail box security enforcement on the device (those are set up exchange server admins). So if your server admin enabled device side encryption, you are in back luck. Because iPhone 1G, 3G do not support device side encryption. iPhone 3GS support it, so 3GS users will not experience this problem. Hopefully apple will come up with a solution for the device. As for now, the apple support site is asking for exchange server admins to disable this security feature on the server, so that device side encryption is not enfoced. I do not think the server admins will be happy about this and it's an acceptable solution.

I had this cool mobile pc from Sony for a while now. I was kind of getting tired of how slow XP would run on this machine and multi-tasking was almost impossible due to small amount of RAM it had on this (512MB). Most probably because of the tons of bloatware that came installed with the default Windows XP Pro installation from Sony. When Windows 7 RTM was released on MSDN recently, I wanted to give it a try on my machine. I started looking on Google for other people who installed Windows Vista, Windows 7 beta or Windows 7 RC on their UX series ultra mobiles and learn about their experiences. Most probably I was looking if all the hardware on the UX will work in Windows. After getting convinced that Windows 7 runs quite well and grabbing all the available Vista drivers for the UX, I sat down to install. I have a Lite-On external usb dvd writer and connected it to the UX. I did the first installation and it took about 20-25 minutes to complete, which was quite fast compared to earlier windows installation experiences. Surprisingly enough 85% of the UX's hardware were recognized and installed by Windows 7. The only major hardware that was not installed was the web cam. Then I grabbed the driver package I downloaded earlier that I found on http://www.micropctalk.com/ and install the missing hardwares from there. The link is shared on this thread - http://www.micropctalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5617&page=14. And the direct download link is: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0CIQ4TEV. I am not sure how long it will be available though. Because I also found a few other links on the thread, that was broken already. In the download package, the instructions say to install the hardware in a certain order and the folders are numbered accordingly. If you follow the order, you will be fine. However, you won't need to install all of them. Windows 7 will pre-install most of the hardware for you. You will mostly need to install the driver for the mouse stick, software for the touch screen, utility for the special buttons, Sony Event Manager tool, Sony Firmware Extension Parser Driver, Sony Notebook Control Driver, Sony Utility Dlls, Sony Shared Libraries, Sony Power Management, Hard drive protection driver form Misc Drivers folder, Camera Driver & Applications and other Sony bundled applications such as the Sony VAIO Control Center tool, wireless switching utility, zoom utility. Alternatively you can also download the drivers from Sony's support site, which might be a bit confusing, because those drivers, patches etc. were targeted for windows vista. In other words, you will not need to download all the drivers and patches from there and install on windows 7, just get the applications and drivers you need, that windows 7 did not pre-install for you.

Please note that if you don't install the special button utility and the sony event manager, the zoom buttons and the touch launcher button on your UX will not work. I was having problem with those buttons for some time and finally figured out the reason was the Event Manager tool not been installed. 

This is how it's looking running windows 7. You may have noticed the RAM usage is near the red area. Mine came with 512Mb of RAM and I am not surprised to see the usage up to that level. However, the UX is much more responsive than it was in Windows XP. I got rid of the restore partition, which eats up about 7GB of space on the hard drive. Now I have around 20GB of free space after the installation. I have yet to install more software on the UX as I need. But Windows 7 comes with all the important tools and software you need to do on this tiny yet powerful machine. I think Microsoft did a great job on making Windows 7 less hardware power hungry, more stable and the footprint to run on smaller hardware profiles. I was reading about people successfully installing and running windows 7 on their old intel mmx hardware with 128Mb or RAM, which is quite impressible based on the features and power windows 7 presents.

One thing I want to mention though, I was unable to get the back side camera to work with the camera utility, only the front camera is accessible with the tool right now.

I know this has been posted by many people already on different web sites and forums. Still I am posting the Arduino (Atmega168) fuse bit settings, as it appears in AVR Stuido 4 programming  interface:

Fuse bits:

Lock bits:



Please remember the programming sequence:

Step one: Flash the appropriate boot loader

Step two: Set the fuse bits

Step three: Set the lock bits


I hope this helps. I myself looked for this information earlier and it was not easy to find them all together.

Arduino:

I came across Arduino while surfing the web for micro-controller related projects and initiatives. I think it is one of best platform for beginners to start playing with micro-controller programming. The great thing about the arduino is the IDE, which is greatly designed for ease of programming for beginners. However, you certainly do have the option to go into deep programming, but it is very simple if you are familiar with the micro-controller hardware (Atmel AVR architecture) and C++ programming. The arduino IDE languge is very similar to C and Java programming. It has a lot of built-in ready to be used libraries like LCD display interfacing, Stepper motor control, keypad library and lots more.

Learn more about Arduino at: http://www.arduino.cc

Here are some photos of arduino board:

I will start posting information about things I like to work with besides my daily job in this blog. Mostly related to electronics and specially microcontroller related projects, developments, code samples etc. I mostly work with ATMEL's family of microcontollers (8051, AVR), so all topics will be related to those.