From scouring the web, it turns out that the “sub”-model number and build date are important. My three drives were WD15EADS-00P8B0, built Nov 2009, firmware 01.00A01. There are reports that older build-date drives can be made to work; true or not, mine could not. Western Digital’s customer service is of zero help, blaming the problem on everything but the drive.

No more Western Digital drives for me. I’m returning these three as defective. I’ve put WD drives in my last three builds because they’re inexpensive and reliable. No longer. Back to Seagate drives (yes, even after their ST31500341AS firmware debacle).

1. cd ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks
2. vboxmanage createhd –filename new.vdi –size 24000
3. vboxmanage clonehd old.vdi new.vdi –existing
4. Open VirtualBox, select the virtual machine, and click on Hard Disks.
5. In the Attachments section, click on the existing image file name (old.vdi) and click the Select Hard Disk button to its right. This will open the Virtual Media Manager dialog.
6. Select the old image file and click Release. Remove the old image file (old.vdi).
7. Click Add and browse to the new image file (new.vdi). It will now appear in the Hard Disks list.
8. Click the Select button at the bottom of the Virtual Media Manager dialog.
9. Go download a gparted LiveCD .iso file. Click on the virtual machine’s CD/DVD-ROM settings. Make sure “Mount CD/DVD Drive” is checked, pick “ISO Image File”, and browse to the gparted ISO file you just downloaded.
10. Click the OK button at the bottom of the Settings dialog to close it.
11. Start up your virtual machine. Click in the window and press F12 to bring up the boot devices menu. Pick “c” for CD/DVD-ROM.
12. Run gparted, click on your partition, and resize it to occupy the whole disk.
13. Shut down gparted, reboot, and wait for Windows to check your new hard disk.
14. Celebrate!

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion m4
svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk gears-trunk
cd gears-trunk
wget http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-gcc433.diff
patch -p0 -i gears-gcc433.diff
chmod +x third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/xpidl
cd gears
make -s

The installable file will end up in ./bin-dbg/installers/ (that is, something like /home/foo/gears-trunk/gears/bin-dbg/installers), with a name like gears-linux-x86_64-dbg-0.5.34.0.xpi. In Firefox, pick “Open File” from the File menu and browse to that directory; pick the XPI file and you should be good to go. I’ve only tested it with offline gmail, but that seems to work fine.

The good:

• Nice case, display, keypad, and slider (if you want to call it that). Thicker than an iPhone, but about the same mass. HTC has a reputation among my peers for building phones that don’t last very long; we’ll see.
• Very nice UI. It only took a half hour of use before the interface became second nature and I stopped noticing it. The notification system (you have a message, weather alerts, etc.) is unobtrusive but useful.
• After upgrading to Android 1.5 (a.k.a. Cupcake), the interface is as nice as any phone I’ve used. The on-screen keyboard is very usable, the camera is snappier, and the UI got a bit glossier.
• Absolutely fantastic integration with Google services. (Big surprise, I know.) All your email contacts are in your phone book. Upcoming Calendar items can show up on your “home” screen as a widget. Google Talk IM sessions work seamlessly like texting but with your contact icons and such. You get the idea.
• The web browser feels snappier than the one on the other phone’s I’ve used (better panning and scrolling).
• Market has a ton of useful apps (a good ssh client, ConnectBot; a passable Google Reader client, Greed; etc.). The vast majority of them are free.
• Respectable battery life for a tiny computer. I don’t use the voice part much, but use the browser/email/etc. over WiFi a lot; I can go two days between charges.

The bad:

• The default browser can’t run Adblock Plus. Sigh.
• Marketplace interface could use some love: only two sort options, and there must be a better way of browsing a thousand apps.
• Turning on/off WiFi or GPS (to save battery) is cumbersome, requiring navigating several menus. Thankfully, the free Market apps “ToggleWiFi” and “Toggle GPS” make them one-touch.
• Built-in camera is pretty poor; though not atypical for a phone. Lots of haloing, fairly slow focus, low ISO, lousy automatic while balance, etc.
• The lack of multi-touch zoom is a slight hindrance on documents and some web pages.
• Developer’s kit can be tricky to install. Some pages haven’t been moved from the old Google code site, so I found broken links and out-of-date instructions.
• There doesn’t yet appear to be any easy way to run apps from the SD card. The phone will store your data there, but there’s limited space for installing applications. There’s are a few tutorials on doing it via command line, but I’ve not yet tried them.

Must-have applications:

• ToggleWifi: one-touch toggling of the WiFi radio; great battery-saver.
• Toggle GPS: one-touch toggling of the GPS receiver; great battery-saver.
• Ring Toggle: one-touch switching between ring, vibrate, silent. Faster than tapping the volume button many times.
• Greed (not free): RSS reader that ties in to Google Reader. It’s not a fantastic RSS reader, but if you use Reader already, the integration is well worth it.
• WiFi Tether for Root Users: only for unlocked phones, but makes your phone act like a WiFi access point (well, an ad-hoc peer, to be precise). Essentially allows tethering your phone to your laptop.
• ConnectBot: ssh and telnet client
• DroidRecord: use your phone as a voice recorder
• RingDroid: convert your audio files into ring tones; has basic editing like cropping.
• WeatherBug: a little slow and bloated, but the best weather app I’ve found. The weather alert notifications are nice.
• Magic 8-ball: shake and wait for your answer

All in all, a strong smartphone. If you’re already using Google services (gmail, calendar, etc.), this phone will very likely knock your socks off. If you aren’t, it’s still a good phone, but a harder sell.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

My result (while at work): “DeviceRect must compute these values from those supplied.” — Design Patterns, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

Sorry for the lack of interesting updates, but a few things have gone down in the past couple months that have kept me from keeping in touch. My company is closing down our office and moving the product elsewhere, so we’ve all been doing two jobs (our normal schedule work and trying to get everything transitioned to the new development team). Add in little things like doctor’s visits, a water heater cracking open, and some travel for work, and you have one busy and tired me.

It looks like things aren’t going to calm down here until Thanksgiving week, so until then: be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

svndiff ()
{
  svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r
}

Pass it anything you’d pass to “svn diff”: e.g., “.” for the current directory, a list of filenames, or options like –no-diff-deleted.

• lime
• lemon
• mango
• cherry
• indigo – not a fruit, but replaced “indulgence”
• oreo – my wife has convinced me that Oreos are definitely a fruit

All machines run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu, and several dual-boot and/or virtualize XP.