Archive for January, 2009

Nokia n73 key scancodes to remap your keyboard

January 31st, 2009

The gallery button on my Nokia n73 is broken, and because I bought a used phone that has passed it’s warranty, I couldn’t send it back to be fixed.

The only solution was to remap that key to another key when the camera is in use. Luckily there is an app called MagicKeys for the Symbian OS that does exactly that. Unfortunately, Nokia has some strict policies about the release of apps on the Symbian OS that makes it very difficult for many developers to write apps for the phone, so many have released their app “unsigned”.

Unsigned apps can’t be installed on an unhacked Symbian OS (you will receive a certificate error), but you can follow this short guide to hack your Nokia phone (works for most N series and E series phones).  Note that this will void your warranty, if you have a non-functioning button and still have warranty on your phone, I suggest that you send it back for repair.

After patching your phone, install MagicKeys which you download from here.

The program uses keyboard scancodes to map keys, and different mappings can be defined for each app. It’s not easy to find scan codes for Nokia phones, but I’ve stumbled upon this set of key codes for the N73:

* – 42
# – 127
Number 0 – 48
Number 1 – 49
Number 2 – 50
Number 3 – 51
Number 4 – 52
Number 5 – 53
Number 6 – 54
Number 7 – 55
Number 8 – 56
Number 9 – 57
Left Soft Key – 164
Right Soft key – 165
Green Key – 196
Red Key – 197
Pencil – 18
Backspace(C)-Key – 1
Menu Key – 180
Multimedia Menu Key – 186
“Joystick Left” – 14
“Joystick Right” – 15
“Joystick Up” – 16
“Joystick Down” – 17
[OK]-Key – 167
Gallery Key – 230
Volume Up – 162
Volume Down – 163
Camera key (focus) – 226
Camera key (take pic) – 227
Power Off Key – 166
Open Slider – 168
Close Slider – 169
Open Multimedia Keys – 172
Close Multimedia Keys – 173
Multimedia Key Pause/Play – 182
Multimedia Key Stop – 183
Multimedia Key Forwards – 184
Multimedia Key Backwards – 185
Navigation key -239

I suspect that most nokia N series and some E series phones will have similar scancodes.

This link has been very useful in my search to find scan codes for the phone.

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SIFE UNSW: the revival of frugal

January 30th, 2009

Well not quite.

Let me explain. For the past couple years, I’ve been the IT Manager of SIFEUNSW, the UNSW division of a much larger organization Students In Free Enterprise, which aims to bring young entrepreneur’s attention to non-profit charities.

One of the projects that we had in 2006-2007 was “Frugal: The magazine that made cents”, pun intended. The goal was to create an self sustaining online business magazine targeted at young people. Every week, the SIFEUNSW team working on frugal would approach people to interview, write guides to educate young people about personal finance, etc.

I only joined SIFE shortly after the end of the SIFE year (July), and did not see this project in operation, but from what I can tell, it was quite successful. Unfortunately, Andrew, the project leader for Frugal had already graduated that year and would not be participating in SIFEUNSW in the following year. Progress for the project halted as the beginning of the new SIFE year came around.

This is not uncommon for a project at SIFE. Much of the focus of SIFE is around an international competition held every year in July where hundreds of university students from various countries in the world present their projects to a panel of judges in front of an audience of fellow SIFErs, sponsors, charity workers, and successful entrepreneurs. SIFE teams spend so much time preparing for this competition, that once it ends, there is a period of relief and celebration that usually means down time for projects.

Unfortunately for Frugal, we never recovered from that down time and we were just short of making the project sustainable which would only require a few volunteers who enjoy writing, and a few regular guest posters a month, but building a team like that is easier said than done when nearly all of our human resources are business students who are busy studying and often also working.

The project has revived in the form of “Fully Frugal” which is a video version of the project with similar goals, but there has been no new content on Frugal since mid 2007.

Oh, and why is frugal ‘not quite’ reviving? I just noticed a 30% increase in traffic on website this month reversing a slow downward trend.

frugal_sife_trend

I wonder if the financial crisis is making people google for financial advice and driving up the traffic. The site is pretty well SEO optimized despite not having any new content for over a year.

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Paralysis in the absense of deadlines and abundance of todos

January 29th, 2009

The size of my todo list is increasing linearly, yet the rate at which I’m doing those things is increasing only logarithmically. This is getting worse, not because the amount of things I have to do is accelerating, but because there are so many things to do that I am overwhelmed, so instead I do nothing. This is paralysis.

Paralysis occurs because having too many things to do has additional overhead that prevents things from being done at their normal pace. You have to make a choice about what to do next, but there are too many things to choose from. Furthermore, most of the things on the list either has no definite deadline or the deadline is too far away to provide a sense of urgency. This results in paralysis as a result of a phenomenon called the paradox of choice.

In essence, choice is normally good in moderation. Most people would assume that more choices will always make us happier, but the reality is that too much choice makes us less happy, there is so much to choose from that we don’t have the time or motivation to assess each one. As a result, we either make poor decisions by picking a random one, or we give up and don’t make the choice at all.

That’s why we need specific deadlines. Deadlines make the choice for us. If you have to finish that report tonight then it make sense to  decide to work on it rather than that boat in a bottle that you’re building for fun. There is a consequence if you don’t finish that report tonight, but no consequence of you don’t finish that model boat.

Consequences act as penalty to missing those deadlines. They are the motivators in reducing your todo list. After all, a deadline without consequences is not a deadline at all. The harsher the consequences the more motivated you will be. Missing your laundry day might only mean wearing your less fashionable, but clean cloth for a week, but missing the deadline to pay off your gambling debt might mean a broken leg thanks to a friendly visit from a goon or two from the casino. Some people might consider the former to be a harsher consequence.

Consequences have to be enforceable. A penalty that can be mitigated or avoided is only as effective a motivator as the consequence after mitigation. Consequences should be genuine, and externally enforceable. Setting your own consequences for missing a deadline doesn’t work because it’s easy to mitigate, but if you transfer the enforcement to something you can’t control, say “the man” to enforce the payment of your parking ticket, you’re much more likely to pay it off than if you had to enforce the penalty of throwing away more money all on your own.

To recap, as advice to myself and anyone else with large todo lists:

1. Make deadlines

2. Make sure those deadlines have consequences

3. Make sure that you’re not the one enforcing the consequences. In fact, make sure you have no control over the consequences at all.

If you can’t mold your todo list to have those properties, then maybe randomly chosing to do one of those tasks is the best you can do.

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Imaginary Social Constraints

January 29th, 2009

For the past few month, I’ve had quite a few ideas for blog posts that remain reluctantly unwritten. The main reason was that this blog was being imported into my facebook, and although this is a public blog, I didn’t want those posts to be ‘announced’ to my facebook friends.

There is a fear that having them see those posts might make them change their opinions of me–for better or for worse. Although those people might find and read my posts here anyway, I feel more comfortable writing if it isn’t announced to everyone I know. Realistically, this fear is purely psychological, the ‘threat’ isn’t there. Most of my friends won’t read what I write, and even fewer if any will judge me on what I write. Besides, what do I care if someone judges me about what I write? Fear is irrational sometimes, but as a [de]motivator, it is much more powerful than reason.

The limbic sytem of our brain that controls our emotions and behavior has been around since the mamalian brain. It governs our instinctive behavior towards fear which is to mitigate the threat that’s triggering the fear. It’s constantly making subconscious judgements about the enviroment to regulate our emotions. When I’m aware that my post will be announced on facebook, my insecurity about what I’m writing creates a sense of fear and I respond instinctively by ceasing my writing efforts. The pre-frontal cortex of the brain controls the higher level reasoning and planning associated with the modern human behavior. It is much slower than the limbic system, but it is much better at long term decisions. My analysis of my insecurity revealed that my limbic system has made an irrational decision about ceasing my writing efforts. The threat simply didn’t exist. Yet I realize that the limbic system has a much greater control over our behaviour as a response to our emotions. The prefrontal cortext has more control over our behavior when we’re not experiencing any strong emotions like fear, anxiety or anger, and without those emotions, we can make better decisions. Otherwise, the response chemicals released by the limbic system is too strong and as a result we might behave irrationally.

I have this blog here for 4 reasons:

1. To improve my writing skills.

2. To rant about things that are interesting, annoying, remarkable, [insert adjective] to me.

3. To reveal more about who I am to friends and the world.

4. To bookmark thoughts that I have had that might be useful to me or anyone else in the future.

Having these posts published on facebook automatically was keeping me from doing 1 and 2, but it does do 3. Removing it from automatic posting will trade 3 for 1 and 2, And given that those 4 things are arranged roughly according to importance, I think it’s a good trade off, especially if it means more posts here more often.

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