Eclair to Froyo - Mission Accomplished!

With the craze to get hold of a new mobile and jump on to the Android band wagon, I got myself a Samsung Galaxy S I9000 few months ago. I bought this from Abu Dhabi on my way back from a US tour and since then I've been pretty much in love with the phone. The mobile came with the Android 'Eclair'  version of course with many awesome stuff running on top of it.


However, once I got word of the Android 'Froyo' upgrade being available for the Galaxy S, I was impatient to get hold of it, mainly due to the tempting reviews of Froyo being pretty faster compared to Eclair and also the new feature set it provided.


I have a buddy (Sandu) who also got down a Galaxy S from UK, and one fine weekend, he did the Froyo upgrade like a breeze. Now that the guinea pig was through, I wanted to do this too (No disrespect bro! :) ).


But, when I tried to get on with it, I came across all sorts of obstacles, probably due to the Middle Eastern version of the device (I could be wrong here). Samsung Kies is the application that is 'supposed to' connect my mobile to the PC. But, despite how many Kies distributions I tried, I could never get my device connected to the machine. Perpetually the software was trying to recognize a device. Also, I heard from Sandu that the Android version, build number etc were different on his mobile. With a heavy heart of having to stick with Eclair for longer, I started my research on reasons for this and possible solutions.


Thanks to the power of Google, I managed to come across the second way of doing the upgrade using the simple flasher software - also release by Samsung called Odin. This looked like a very elegant way of doing it compared to Kies because i could use the downloaded firmware file and use it offline in contrast to Kies which performs a long download.


The tutorial by Neal Pradeep is what I referred to and this had the clear guidelines on how to perform the upgrade. If you are someone waiting to do the Froyo upgrade, do follow this tutorial. He also has many other Android tutorials which are really handy.


So, once I got hold of the pre-requisites specified in the guide, I backed up all my data (sms, call history, contacts etc) and applications using a neat backup tool called My Backup. Then I started to perform the upgrade step by step as specified with my fingers crossed becasue I had no idea if I was about to throw hundreds of dollars away.


It was a matter of less than 20 mins, and voila!!! My Galaxy S was upgraded to Froyo!


Few things I noticed when I did the upgrade:

• In my case, Odin connected my mobile on 2 ID:COM ports. This is ok. If this happens to you just continue.
•  The PIT file we should download did not have the valid .pit extension. Add this manually in case you are not able to navigate to the file via Odin (should be trivial)
• Be patient once the phone gets restarted. The long first time boot up is really long! I had to wait for about 10 minutes.
• based on my experience, if it about flashing the phone, Odin seems to be a very elegant way of doing it.

	Previous	Current
Firmware version	2.1-update1	2.2.1
Baseband version	i9000XXJF3	I9000XXJPY
Kernel version	2.6.29 umts_scm@S1-BUILD05 #2	2.6.32.9 root@SE-S608 #1
Build number	ECLAIR	FROYO.XWJS7

Now if you'd excuse me, I have to attend to my Frozen Yogurt! :)

R.I.P Timmy

They say that a dog is man’s faithful friend, and my pet dog Timmy was someone who really proved me that, being with me for 13 long years. It was quite feeble for a while and today around 10.00 a.m. it had died a silent death bringing sorrow to everyone at home. This post is a small tribute to Timmy and I would like to recap some of the memories I have.

Timmy came in to my life in 1998 when I was in year 8. This was a time when we were taken from the school for the Junior National Badminton Championships. On the way back we stopped at our master in charge’s wife’s house and there were the cutest Lion Pomenarians I’ve ever seen. Having the need to own a puppy, I immediately decided to take one of them and I noticed this brownish pup that had a unique color. When I picked it up, I got to see the mother’s love in the dog world too. I remember how Timmy’s mum growled at the rest without letting anyone else come closer to me when I was holding Timmy, and when we got in to the van, she came closer looked me in the eyes as if to say “take good care of my kid” and then left. So, Timmy had the longest journey of his life on that day, from Homagama to Bandarawela which is close to 200km. Tough puppy, eh? :)

The first few weeks were not so exciting coz you know, I had to clean up half of the house each morning. Ah before I forget, there is a reason why I named him Timmy – I once had another dog named Timmy, and after a while we lost him. Maybe it was stolen or it wandered off. So, I named this pup Timmy to remember the previous dog.

Slowly time passed away, and Timmy grew to be a playful puppy, and my evenings were filled with playful moments with him. When teeth started coming out it was quite hard to keep the slippers coz Timmy bit in to each of them. However, after few months, it got quite sick and apparently it had got a phlegm problem. So, for few days we had to feed it milk and porridge along with the medicine. I remember how Manjula - my classmate back then – came and helped me do this drill after school. Fortunately Timmy made it through and from then grew to be a healthy dog.

After I taught him fetch we had a different consequence. He started thinking that it needs to bring back everything we throw away. So, every morning we used to have a pile of garbage at our doorstep coz Timmy used to fetch everything from the garbage pit. Anyway later on he got to know what exactly we needed, and became a very good fielder when my dad and I played Cricket at home.

Timmy was very intelligent. He is always the first to greet when any family member comes back after a journey. Even when my father came home in a different vehicle he had the instincts to run up and greet. Also, he was very particular about the meals he got. If he didn’t like it he used to topple the food over with his paw and fill the plate with sand using its snout. It wasn’t very fond of the bath and we had a tough time when he started understanding the Sinhala word for having a bath. Whenever he heard the word, he used to either run in to the kennel or go and hide under the car. So we used to set the bathing environment and lure it in to it by placing a biscuit trail like Hansel and Gretel found their way back :) . Anyway once it got the first splash of water it used to become cooperative.

Timmy has bit me twice. The first was during a vaccination. The needle might have hurt him, and it kept on gripping to my hand while the vaccine was injected. The second was actually my fault where I went and pulled the bone it was gnawing on.

Time went by, and once I left school and went to Colombo for studies and work, I missed the companionship. But whenever I got home Timmy was always there to welcome no matter at what time I got back. I remember how it runs up to the three wheeler to greet me, even when I reach home around 2.00-3.00 in the morning, and kept jumping up to me while someone opens the gate for me to get in. It is during these times that I was at home, it got a good brush to its coat and the occasional hair trim. We never had to chain him or prison him in the kennel for long hours because despite being a good watch dog he was extremely obedient and knew his boundaries very well.

The post can go for on and on with so many memories I have which keep flowing in to my mind on this sad day. Timmy wasn’t just the guard dog or our pet. He was like a family member to us, and in the alms giving we had in our house couple of months back we wished him good health and got the blessings too. I am sure that will have an effect and result in a pleasant afterlife for Timmy.

I wish I’d meet him one day as a friend – only if I could know it is him!

A true friend is tough to lose... 

Specially when they leave a paw print in your heart forever..!

QR Codes - Embrace!

Being away from my blog for some time (around 5 months) I felt like giving it some new life. Even I was bored with the old template which was filled with graphics and thought of going to a simpler standard one – and hence this dark theme which will load faster and... oh well, will at least save some power :)

Anyway getting back to the topic, seeing these 2D bar code around, I was enthusiastic to investigate more on them. Among the types like CM , PDF417, MaxiCode , DataGlyphs etc I was really interested in one category I have been seeing around quite often which encodes data in the form of squares.

This type I am talking about is officially known as QR Code (Quick Response). A code can store up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. Since it stores a bunch of characters, this text can be anything, ranging from a name, URL, contact information, or even a geeky way to represent of a short romantic poem! This has been mainly used in the Japanese automobile industry to track production line elements. But, today its utility has expanded to a broader scope and is being used to store different types of information in different domains - specially marketing.

Here’s my contact info in QR Code (basically ‘MY’ QR Code) :




As you would have already seen, my blog already has its own QR Code.

ZXing’s neat online utility to generate your own QR Code can be found at http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

The google visualization API has all what you need to embed QR Codes in your web content. The chart API will show you all the options available. The following is the simplest form of getting what you need embedded.

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=WIDTHxHEIGHT&chl=YOUR DATA STRING" />

I already added the ‘QR Droid’ android app to my mobile and I am loving it already. This allows me to embed all sorts of info in QR Codes and also retrieve them pretty effectively.

Happy QR Coding!