Great place to eat Indian food in St Albans

Went out for an Indian meal last night to a place called Samoji on Georges Street in St Albans.
We found the restaurant by looking on Toptable's website, link here, the reviews looked good and the sample menu interesting.
The restaurant is set back in between the shops of St Georges, so you walk down a alleyway (which has the feel of a hollywood film set) to get to the restaurant.
Once inside there are lots of exposed beams giving the place a very rustic and cosy feel (some beams are quite low so tall people need to be careful).
As it was a Tuesday night we went on the place was quiet, only one other diner but a couple did come in for takeaway.
We first ordered some poppadoms while we decided on what we wanted to eat from a very delicious looking choice.
My wife went for the vegetable dhansak with lemon pilou, while I went for the chicken balti with jeera rice and we shared a garlic naan, washing it all down with a nice Merlot.
We both found the food and the whole dining experience at Samoji excellent and would highly recommend this restaurant to anyone, so much so that we will probably go there again very soon.

Free version of GooSync to be discontinued

Email received from GooSync about discontinuing free version of GooSync

Since the first release of GooSync back in early 2007 GooSync has gone from strength to strength. Both the Premium and Free versions of GooSync have become market leaders in the over-the-air synchronization market. We have shown our continued commitment to our users over the years with a new infrastructure, further product development and enhanced support services.

We are also now happy to report that version 2.1 is now ready for release. Features from this new version will soon be rolled into the Premium version of GooSync. We also have 3 further updates planned for release over the next 9 months.

It has always been our goal to provide a professional service to all Free and Premium users. Given the exponential demand for GooSync over the last 12 months, it has become increasingly more difficult to continue this high level of service to both Premium and Free users.

It is therefore, with regret, that we are now discontinuing our Free service. For all of you that have come to love and rely on our free offering, we will be migrating the Free GooSync service into a new product “GooSync Lite”.  This new lite version of GooSync will have all the same features as the existing free version.

The Free version will become unavailable and synchronization will be suspended on Monday 19th October. To continue benefiting from all the great features of GooSync you will be able to purchase GooSync Lite for a yearly fee of just £5.99 (approx $10). We are confident that this is priced very competitively and will allow us to continue to offer the professional level of service and support you have come to expect.

Alternatively you can upgrade to our GooSync Premium service. This allows full contact syncing with contact backup, multiple Google calendars with appointments up to 365 days in advance, appointment attendees, task synchronization, multiple device support, AutoSync and iGoogle gadgets. Also included will be GooSync’s new features from version 2.1, such as Google contact group synchronization.

GooSync Premium is available for as little as £19.95 per year, £29.95 for a two year subscription or a lifetime option for £39.95.

We hope you continue to use GooSync and we look forward to working with you in the future.

Thanks,

The GooSync Team.

i8910 keypad codes

List of known codes for the Samsung i8910 HD. Key this into the keypad.
*#7380# – Soft reset the phone and restores default phone settings.
*#7370# – Hard reset the phone. Formats phone memory and restores default phone settings
*#62209526# – View MAC address with out removing your battery
*#0000# - View Phone version information
*#0228# – Phone test mode
*#1546792*# – Phone admin mode
*#1234# – Gives firmware info
*2767*3855# – Factory reset
*#1111# - Test mode screen. FTA SW Version. Don’t know what that is. I assume software version of some sort.
*#2222# – Test Mode Screen. FTA HW Version. REV0.3 – I assume hardware version.
*#3333# - Camera settings.
*#06# – IMEI

Syncing Google calendar and contacts with Roadsync on i8910

Got hold of a orange branded i8910 for a few days and thought I 'd try getting Google calendar & contacts synchronised with it.
Apparently all these phones come with Roadsync so this was a good place to start.
I first tried Roadsync which failed, then thought maybe MailForExchange (MfE) would work but that would not install so decided to return to Roadsync.

These are the steps I followed (from memory, it was earlier today so pretty fresh)

1. Firstly with Roadsync you need to register to get your activation code.
   Open Roadsync on the phone, then go to Options -> Help -> About, this shows your registration code.
2. Now go to https://store.dataviz.com/Regi&Add and add it, you should then receive the activation code.
3. Next from Roadsync go to Options -> Help -> About and click check for updates, if there are any then select the correct version for the phone, download and install.
4. (NOTE. Next from Roadsync go to Options -> Settings -> Settings -> Advanced options and click on Disable RoadSync and click ok.
5. Now when you open Roadsync you will get the automated wizard, put in your Google details, the wizard will initially fail but will retain your information.
6. After wizard fails you will be able to enter all the required details
   
   Username - Google Email address
   Password
   Server name - m.google.com
   Domain - None
   Use SSL yes
   
   
7. IMPORTANT - Once connected it will disable some some of the sync options, you needs to ensure Mail sync and task sync are off as currently not supported by Google and will cause calendar & contacts sync to fail.
   Also before starting your first sync you need to decide if you want to merge or wipe the existing contacts & calendar.
   Think about this carefully if you have existing contacts on the phone that are not on Google, in this case you probably want to merge and tidy up any duplicates in Google later.
   
8. That's it now sync away.

Next step is to find a decent mail client, normally would use Gmail app but have not updated for S60 V5 yet, it does work on this phone it could be better.

Freaked out by Facebook

Just got freaked out by Facebook, setting up a new account for my wife's bellydancing persona http://www.nylabellydance.co.uk.
After creating the login for the first time (not using her normal email and using her bellydance name) FB produced about 40 people that might know her bellydance persona and she knew 75% of them. Naturally I started thinking how did Facebook do this, especially as they were not all bellydance related contacts, freaky.
Only conclusion I can come to at present is that the surname I used was Bellydance anf FB looked for people with a bellydance or Nyla connection.

Not really got into the habit of blogging yet, as you can see my last post was a while ago.
Couple of nice applications I have come across recently are firstly Fever http://www.feedafever.com, this is a fantastic RSS\Atom aggregator, I like it so much I brought a second licence for it.
The other application is Wisestamp http://www.wisestamp.com for automatically inserting signature in web email clients such as Gmail. One of the great features is that you can add social profiles such as Blogger, Twitter & Facebook etc and display their funky icons.

Google Talk on E71

Trying out different IM clients on my E71 that work with google talk, so far have tried Slick and Fring. Slick is pretty nice, looks like to will have a licence fee when it is released. Fring is pretty good to and supports SIP, MSNm SKYPE etc, and probably the coolest part is it support Google Talk voice chat.
Had trouble getting the voice chat working at work, with 3G and wifi but worked at home, not sure if it was due to changing settings or firewalls. Will try at work again tomorrow.

First ever blog

Getting caught up in the excitement surrounding the setup of the Symbian Foundation and thought it was about time I started blogging having now setup twitter as well.
I have been involved in the setup of the Foundation since August, 2008 and now we are not far off from the launch which is keeping everyone very busy and on their toes.
I currently work for Nokia so not sure how much longer I will be able to be heavily involved in the Foundation setup, I do really hope I can work with the Foundation going forward.