T-Mobile Smartphone Cheap Internet

Okay, I have a Windows Mobile Smartphone.  I want to get internet and email on my phone.  I don't want to pay $20 every month to do this.

It is possible to do it with the old $5.99 internet plan.  Here's what I had to do:

WARNING – This requires messing around with configuration files on your phone.  You can render your data connections useless if you do it wrong.

That said, I haven’t had any problems with this method.

Get the $5.99 internet plan on the account.  This required changing my phone on my.tmobile.com to something other than a smartphone.  I used a V3 Razr, as that's the phone I used to have. -Note that it may take 24 hours for this to go active on your account.

Delete all connections and proxies set up on the smartphone.

Install the cab from this page: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=395203. Get the tmobyjoe599.cab file, not any of the others.

Reboot the phone, and tada, your connection is active!

Now you can set up to sync with Exchange, surf with PIE, and do all kinds of stuff.  Please note that Hotmail and Windows Live will not work.  Some other applications can have their proxy/connection settings set manually to get them to work.

Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't, so your mileage may vary.  If it doesn’t work, try rebooting your phone.  If it really doesn’t work, try deleting all your proxy settings and reinstalling the cab file.  If you totally screw everything up, you can always hard reset :)

Ubuntu Stuff

I recently took the jump and installed Ubuntu linux (Hardy Heron, specifically) on my work laptop.  Here's some of my thoughts:

• The install was super easy. I had left some unpartitioned space on my hard drive after installing Vista, so I just had Ubuntu use that space.  Apart from that, everything was really simple.  Gone are the days of having to tweak the bootloader install location, manually screw with the grub.conf to get it to see the windows installs, etc.  The installation was easier and faster than any Windows install I've ever done.
• Ubuntu looks nice.  It's been a couple of years since I've played with any flavor of Linux, but the Gnome desktop is configured out of the box for clean, simple, operation.  I'm not a fan of the brown, but that's just me and that's easily changed.
• Sun's VirtualBox is some nice virtualization software.  As a developer, it's nice to be able to start and stop multiple machines with different configurations with ease.  Added plus: when Windows crashes, it doesn't take everything else with it.  And I can save a safe snapshot of the machine config to combat the "oh crap I screwed everything up now what do I do" problems.
• There is no great media player.  Everything I looked at is okay, but sub-par compared to iTunes and WMP.  BMPx looks like one of the better contenders, but I can't get it working right now.
• Firefox and Flash make for a volatile combination.  I get crashes all the time.
• No good native Microsoft Exchange client exists for Linux.  If you don't use Exchange there's a plethora of solutions (a plethora, jefe?) but otherwise you're out of luck.

So, bottom line, I like Ubuntu.  I'll probably continue using it for now, especially since I can use VirtualBox to run Visual Studio, NetMeeting, Outlook, and all the other windows-specific crap that my company hasn't gotten away from.

This Blog's Not Dead!

Okay, just a quick placeholder post, because I have to run off to a meeting. But I'm not dead!

It's been a busy month or so for me, both at work and at home. If you know me, I'll tell you about it sometime.

Anyway, there's more to come, stay tuned...