PuTTY for mobile devices

PuTTY is an open source SSH client distributed under the MIT licence, originally written for Windows platform. Many system engineers use it as a handy tool to remotely connect to their Linux/Unix machines with the secured SSH protocol to administer the system from their desktop.

Nowadays, PuTTY has also been ported to run on mobile devices such as PDAs and smart mobile phones, so that you can access to your servers for emergency troubleshooting, restarting a service, rebooting the server, and so on. Of course, you need to have Internet access from your mobile device to your server, either using GPRS, 3G, Wifi, etc.

Here are some of the ported PuTTY for various mobile devices:

• PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 - http://coredump.fi/putty/
  
• PuTTY for Symbian OS - http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/
• PuTTY for Windows Mobile 2003 - http://www.pocketputty.net/
• pssh for Palm OS 5 - http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/
• pTerm for iPhone - http://www.instantcocoa.com/products/pTerm/

And you can see the PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 in action in my Sony Ericsson P1i here.

Backup P1i contacts from phone to M2 memory card

There is a built-in function to backup the Sony Ericsson P1i handphone contacts information from the phone internal memory to the attached M2 memory card.

To do so, in the Contacts application, tap on the More button to pop up the menu. The menu is so long that you have to scroll down to see the Contact Manager option (and this is the reason I have been spending quite some time before I finally located it). Tap on Contact Manager, and you are presented with 3 options:

• Synchronize - this will call up the Remote Sync application and allows you to sync your contacts / calendar / tasks / emails /bookmarks / notes information in your P1i handphone with a SyncML server in the network.
• Backup - this is the option to backup your contacts information from the phone internal memory to your M2 memory card. It will backup into \Other\Backup\Contacts folder in the memory card. 2 files will be produced: Contacts.vcf and Groups.dat.
  
• Restore - this is the option to restore your contacts from the M2 memory card to your phone internal memory. You can also tap on the \Other\Backup\Contacts\Contacts.vcf file in your M2 memory card to perform the restore.
  

If you have done a backup before, you will be prompted with a last backup information, and your new backup will overwrite and replace the previous backup files.

The new Maybank2u website is extremely slow

Maybank has changed their Maybank2u website to a new design since yesterday. Unfortunately, extensive use of AJAX has render the website extremely slow, to the extend that it is unusable most of the time.

Maybank should be well awared that although AJAX could bring some fancy user interface experience, as a trade-off, it greatly reduce the web application loading speed. Even great application from Google such as GMail which started to use AJAX extensively recently also experiences the same problem, and that's why Google has made available a special link to access GMail without AJAX as a backup plan for their users.

The slowness intensifies over secured SSL connection, which is a must for the bank online services. There is also increase vulnerability for the server to encounter Denial of Service (DoS) Attack, since even without attack, the service is already close to useless due to time-out respond time.

In addition, AJAX application performance is largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. This mean, the user's web browser play an important role in the AJAX performance too. AFAIK, Safari performs much better than Firefox in handling AJAX, and Firebox performs much better than IE 7 in handling AJAX. Unfortunately, I'm sure they have the most users using IE7, and least users using Safari.

Therefore, too much of AJAX on any website (or a full-Ajax-enabled website) is not a good idea. Maybank2u must find ways to resolve this problem, either to reduce usage to AJAX, or invest more money in upgrading their network equipments and servers. Luckily, they still maintain a link to fallback to their previous website interface. Not so fancy, but at least usable.