Bluetooth tethering for the Nokia 6555

I had an AT&T connection with the typical Media bundle promo which drained about $10 out of my pocket and offered very little in terms of download / upload limits.

My phone (Nokia 6555) is good as a clamshell model, and is capable of bluetooth DUN, FTP, HFP, OPP, SAP and SPP.

After a bit of digging around the Net and AT&T's customer support, I finally managed to get DUN working on my laptop. The dialing number to be used is "*99***1#". No username, no password.

While doing this, make sure that you configure your modem speed to be the maximum 921600. It repeatedly defaults to 115200, so you need to step it up every time you connect. There is probably a fix for this, but I haven't looked into it yet.

The speed seems to pick up after a minute of browsing - I don't know if this is something my overworked mind imagines or it is a valid symptom.

After testing this several times at different locations, I figured it was time to move to the AT&T Media Max bundle.

The main reason for doing all this was that I wanted my laptop to be connected in places where I do not have the luxury of free and reasonably secure WIFI.
The necessity for this came while sitting in a Days Inn in San Diego trying desperately to use its weak WIFI signal to book a hotel in Las Vegas.

The ultimate proof that it was worth the effort came at a client site where they did not have guest WIFI or ethernet and I had to send status reports back to my team.
Quickly tethered the 6555, fired up DUN, connected to the Internet, started the Cisco VPN, started Outlook and started work.
The speed was good enough for me to not realize that I was on BT, not WIFI or LAN.
Of course this may be because Outlook is always slow, but thats a rant for a later day.

The only problem I seem to be having so far with this method of connectivity is that the 6555 heats up unbearably when using it as a BT modem. Then it starts draining its battery at an exponential rate. The heating problem can be mostly ignored, but the battery problem is difficult.
The only workaround I have right now is to keep charging the 6555 so that the battery cannot drain. But this means I have to be close to a charging location. In the car, its possible to have a car charger that charges the phone, but what about other times? I hope to find something that will let me be really free of fixed location constraints.

Finally, my new toy!

Every time I mentioned that I got a new AT&T connection, I was always asked, "So did ya get the iPhone?"
Now being the geek that I am, I was constantly embarrassed into saying no. However, it was for good reason - I didn't think getting a toy when I was barely setting up my new base would be a good financial decision.

About a month ago I finally convinced myself that I could afford to look for something. After a lot of research on various small form factor "laptop-like" devices, including the iPhone, Treo, various Blackberries and the Asus Eee-PC, I came upon the Nokia internet tablets.

What I found really interesting in the n810 (and its preceding 2 generations) was that it runs the Debian based maemo operating system.
After checking the specifications and the blogs, I eventually came up with a list of features that I wanted, and got in the n810:
- WIFI and bluetooth connectivity. WEP, WPA and WPA2 capable.
- email client capable of IMAP: claws
- browser capable of Javascript, AJAX, and flash
- chatting and voice clients: Pidgin, skype
- openVPN
- media players capable of decoding MP3, DIVX and other processor intensive formats: There are multiple apps which do this: Canola, mplayer, etc.
- VNC, rdesktop
- Utilities: PDF reader, FTP client, SSH client and server, calculator, etc.
- Upto 8GB micro SHDC external MMC card capable.

The unit also has a camera, a GPS receiver and a slide out QWERTY keyboard.
Pretty soon I hope to have at least one blog typed out completely from my n810.

MS VS .NET browser trick

I have seen emacs doing just too many things to the point of it being really silly.

I wanted to see if MSVS would also be able to do something special - no matter how silly.

Lets first browse in it: Therefore the first thing I tried was to "Open File" and point it to Google.
(Yes, I know - Ironic: Attempting to access Google from a MSVS IDE.)

Unfortunately this resulted in totally a different outcome. VS opened the HTML page as a text file. This is quite interesting, but not what I want. Lets try again.

Go back to the Open file dialog, type in the address and instead of just clicking Open, lets try clicking the small arrow besides the Open button.
No choices available to load it as a valid HTML page. Hmm, time to look at other options.

How about getting some help from the VS documentation? Lets get some F1!
Now this is interesting - "Online help as primary source"
After selecting this option and waiting for enough time, I see the help page with two drop down toolbars. One of those toolbars is the URL with the typical "ms-help://" address.

Type http://www.google.com/ in there and voila! We have Google in MSVS.

After a little bit of Wireshark digging to find out which browser has been used by MSVS : The User agent string is MSIE7.0

My default browser is Seamonkey, but I'm sure the devs at MS wouldn't be allowed to fire that up in Visual Studio...

This means that VS is firing up Internet Explorer only.
Is it using ActiveX to do this? I dont know yet how to find out.

Conclusion:
Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE's - .NET and above - use IE as the browser, over-riding your default browser settings.
Using IE, you can do all the things a browser does - webmail, Internet radio and so on.

Not exactly emacs, but conceptually similar.

EDIT:
A good friend (Nilesh) pointed out that:
"figuring out whether it uses the IE browser is easy... there is this tool called SPY++ that ships with Visual Studio"

Use VS tools to find out more about VS! Excellent recursive hack!