Fring access connection bug

Fring has a very critical bug: it tries to connect automatically to a random connection when you open it, including GPRS and WAP. With WAP it does not work and hangs. I opened a ticket at the Fring support site already and they mailed me that they are working on a fix to be available “in the near future”. In the meantime you must be careful not to start Fring when there is no WLAN available and to close it when you leave a WLAN area.

When you were not carefully enough and it tries to connect to a WAP access point, you can solve this issue for now by the following steps:

1. Go to an area with WLAN, make sure that you can connect to the hotspot. Createan access point for it, if there is not already one.
2. Change the profile to Offline (Menu->System->Profile).
3. Open Fring, wait until it states that the connection failed and offers to search for alternatives.
4. Choose Search WLAN. It will fiddle around and normally (hopefully) find the hotspot that is available and to which you can connect.
5. Select this hotspot for connection. The next time, Fring will connect to it.
6. Make sure to exit Fring when you leave the WLAN area.

It took me a while to find this out – and it is really very anoying when you can not stop this damn thing from trying to connect to somewhere it can’t connect to. I hope the bugfix comes out very soon.

New Phone: Nokia E60

I actually bought a new mobile phone… Not that I needed it urgently, but there are some circumstances that made the decision relatively easy.

First, I will change my contract with T-Com Germany to Call & Surf Comfort Plus. It includes – besides DSL 16.000 and of course the full wired phone / internet flat rate program – a Hot Spot Flatrate for all T-mobile WLAN spots! Since there are many T-mobile hot spots here, this means that I can go online almost everywhere: in the ICE trains, Mc Donalds (a reason to go there ;-), airports… The other reason was that I was a little annoyed by the synchronizing of my Outlook Calendar with my old Motorola RAZR V3i phone. It often happened that appointments were created twice, moved to different times or deleted. This is not the best thing that can happen when you rely on this synchronization. So it was time to change to a phone with better synchronizing capabilities and also with WLAN connection capabilities.

This is now the Nokia E60 for me. It can connect through GPRS, UMTS (if you want to pay this), WLAN, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB – the whole program. It has no camera… great since a camera is the very last thing that I ever missed in a telephone. It has the Symbian OS inside and a good calendar, so synchronization with Outlook works almost perfect now (the only issue is that time zones seem to be not supported). It is still slim enough to fit in my trouser pocket, so there is no need to carry around an extra bag for it. And it has a normal number keyboard, so that you can handle it with one hand. Perfect fit!

WLAN works great and with Fring I can now use Skype, GoogleTalk and other VOIP platforms directly from my phone. This means I can call home from abroad for SkypeOut rates (1.7c per min) – or call abroad very cheap… or call other Skype Users for free :-)! All this from my mobile with WLAN available… which is the case with the T-Com Hotspot flatrate. This is sooo sexxyyy ;-)

On the Net…

…you find funny things. Not every female will like this ;-) :

SimBiology

Lately I had a lot to do with SimBiology, our tool for modeling biological and (bio)chemical processes and systems. A really powerful and easy to use tool…

As we recognize, Systems biology has not arrived in the industry yet. It is more or less an academics topic, but I think it will be adopted in commercial environments very fast from a certain point in time on, as it happened with simulation techniques in other industries as well. There are successes in modeling and simulating bio systems and there will be more with nowaday’s computational power and the data we get from modern analysis methods. And MATLAB provides a powerful framework to combine data analysis with systems biology modeling and simulation!

SimBiology contains a desktop environment to build models and simulate them. The sbiodesktop makes use of sbio* command line functions in MATLAB and you can use them also for programming. So it is possible to write scripts for automation of tasks, develop algorithms for special analysis – and even to build a graphical user interface to simulate predefined models. All this can be compiled with ML compiler / Builder products (for Java, Excel and .Net) and deployed of course…

Here is a Glycolysis model (Nielsen et al., 1998) in the SimBiology desktop (click to enlarge):