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.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now on general release

Finally, the long awaited OpenOffice.org 3.0 is on general release now. Strong demand of this state-of-art open source office application suite made them to temporary changed their website into a simple download page only to overcome the traffic.

Pre-compiled installation package is available for download for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Intel-based Mac OS X in various languages.

Right from the opening screen, OpenOffice.org 3 has a fresh new look, with a new start screen, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements.

The Writer word processor has a cool new slider control for zooming, allows multi-page display while editing, has powerful new multilingual support, and boasts improved notes capabilities. As well as conventional office documents, Writer can now edit wiki documents for the web.

The Calc spreadsheet has been given another increase in capacity - now up to 1024 columns per sheet. It also has a powerful new equation solver, and a great new collaboration feature for multiple users.

Draw can now cope with poster-size graphics (up to 3sq metres), and Impress supports multiple monitors for presentations. Chart now produces much more clean looking graphics by default, and has a range of additional features requested by power users.

The popular built-in PDF export facility has been further enhanced with PDF/A support and a range of new user-selectable options.

OpenOffice.org 3 is now also available for the first time as a full Mac OS X application, bringing the power of the world's leading open-source office suite to a whole new group of users. And it's even easier than ever to persuade MS-Office users to upgrade to OpenOffice.org, with new support for MS-Access 2007 'accdb' files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS-Office Open XML files (MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 documents)

OpenOffice.org's support for extensions is really coming of age with OpenOffice.org 3. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add great features such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, and a whole new way of supporting additional languages.

Click here to read their official press release.