Well still waiting for my laptop to be fixed so I never got around to posting my items from SIGGRAPH. In the interrum I’ll share all that I’ve discovered about the T509.

Lets start at the beginning. How to unlock the T509 and let you roam free in the world using any SIM card you wish.

Now lets go over what these mean, the first code selects the network lock, the second code deactivates the lock and the final code displays the lock status and should inform you that all of your locks are currently undone.

So now you are free to roam about the world using any SIM card you choose. Of course some services like T-Zones or equivalent will not allow you to use them once your phone has been unlocked. These may be circumvented simply by changing some settings on your phone or re-activating the network lock.

I’ve also found this code to be useful:

This is the hardware test mode which allows you to verify speaker and microphone functionality, as well as the camera, etc. Not to mention there also is this very handy feature which allows you to increase the speaker volume on your phone. So for those of you complaining that the t509 is too quite, consider this your solution. Of course I’m not going to tell you what settings you should change it to because I haven’t played with it myself, the onerous is on you to do it yourself or do a google search to find someone who has.

I have verified that all of these codes do in fact work on the t509 at least with whichever software revision I have on my phone. I’ll look that up. I also have a whole slew of other codes but which I have not yet tested, I’ll see if I have time this weekend to evaluate them and update this post.

Lastly I’ll cover (until I verify a few codes) how to create your own ringtones for transfer to the phone via BlueTooth. Unfortunately it requires you to ‘buy’ a piece of software. Quicktime Pro to be exact. After installation of QTPro you simply open the MP3 sample you would like to use and follow these instructions:

After that transfer the 3gp file over to your phone using BlueTooth and you will finally have the option to set the ringer as a ringtone.

Enjoy the phone.

Considering I struggled for about a day to think of the easiest way to do this I feel completely stupid that I forgot how to randomize a set of mysql results in PHP. Especially after remembering the secret to it all. Simply adding ‘ORDER BY RAND()’ to your SQL statment.

The source of confusion is in the fact that once you have a set of rows from MySQL in PHP you cannot randomize them. The calls are retrieved individually through a ‘mysql_fetch_array’ or similar call and there isn’t anyway to randomize the object returned by ‘mysql_query’. So in an effort to prevent myself from forgetting this easy fix I’m documenting it here. I also hope it helps someone else.

Goddamn. I can’t believe I forgot something that simple … it’s like forgetting how to tie your shoes.

On Digg today there was this AWESOME article about programming languages. While the LISP portion of the article became a tirade about how great LISP can be in the hands of engineers, a point was made that made me stop and think. It’s definately the same opinion I have, something I’ve had for a really long time. It’s the title of this article, a quote straight from his.

How IDE’s in the world of programmers always get SO much in the way of what needs to be done. While not being an Emacs user (I learned VI first, and being in school don’t have the time to learn anything else). But the point remains valid none the less. So many people I’ve worked with in my career seem to spend much of their time worrying about the IDE they are using rather than worrying about programming. I’ve actually heard the excuse that Java is easy to work in if you have a good IDE so many times it literally makes me ill everytime it creeps up again. Who gives a shit about whether I’m using Eclipse or JDeveloper?? I’m not reliant on them to try and take away the fact that Java sucks. That it has many issues which have lingered in the language for YEARS, and Sun has done nothing to address them. Just because Eclipse can help you doesn’t make Java better.

Anyway. The remainder of the article is worth a read, I just thought the quote above was prophetic enough for me to comment on it a bit.

I’m an OpenBSD user, have been for a very long time. Aside from my server at home my primary OpenBSD machine is my laptop. I’ve been pushing the limits on this old 333Mhz Dell for quite some time and OpenBSD isn’t always the easiest to find software for. Don’t get me wrong, OpenBSD has a really large library of free software available as packages. However, due to their strict licensing requirements (for good reason) some software packages have been either overlooked or even removed from their list. Seeing that I’m currently working on graphics as part of one of my classes I find it necessary to be using the GLUT (GL Utility Library) for my projects. GLUT was at one time included as a package in OpenBSD but it was removed several versions ago for reasons already stated.

Though the software is still available for download for Unix, this of course means it must be compiled and installed manually. So for my reference and hopefully yours, I’ve included the directions for doing so below.

Start off my untarring the files. “tar -zxvf glut-3.7.tar.gz”. This results in the creation of the ‘glut-3.7′ folder, looking inside we find a mass of README files. I’ve taken the liberty to read them for you, though you should read them anyway (teach a man to fish….).

GLUT provided an imake file to aid in the portability of the software. To make use of this and make the package on OpenBSD simply type ‘mkmkfiles.imake’ This generates the the needed Makefiles for the next step. This step and the following will take some time to complete so have patience. When this is completed follow up with a simple ‘make’.

If these steps have completed successfully you should have all the files you need. These files will be distributed throughout your ‘glut-3.7′ folder. To finish the install of the GLUT package we must locate these files and move them to folders included in our GCC search directories. To accomplish this first I must preface with a little information. As of OpenBSD 3.3 the new XF4 added the Mesa library bindings to the default install. Therefore if you are running XF4 and OpenBSD 3.3 or greater you should already have the necessary libraries. These Mesa library and header files are located in ‘/usr/X11R6/lib’ and ‘/usr/X11R6/include/GL’ respectively.

It is up to you at this point how to handle the final installation of your GLUT files. Take all of the files located in your ‘glut-3.7/include/GL’ folder and copy them into your ‘/usr/X11R6/include/GL’ folder. Then take the ‘/glut-3.7/lib/glut/libglut.a’ file and copy it into ‘/usr/X11R6/lib’ folder. This is for consistency. Since the Mesa libraries are already installed in the X11 directories it makes sense to co-locate the GLUT libraries with them. Of course you could always copy the contents of your X11 libraries into your standard ‘/usr/include’ and ‘/usr/lib’ folders as well. Thirdly you could even create symlinks in the later folders pointing into the former (eg. ‘ln -s /usr/X11R6/include/GL /usr/include/GL’).

Any of these should allow you to correctly compile your GLUT applications. Of course remember to correctly link your libraries at compile time. Good luck.