Editing the Sony Ericsson handphone theme with Themes Creator

I find that the themes (yes, more than one...) downloaded from the Sony Ericsson website for my P1i mobile phone have a logical bug with the listing checkbox. Once the theme is applied, the unchecked items will all shown as checked, and the checked items shown as unchecked.

After some troubleshooting and confirmed that the problem is with the theme, I found the way to fix it by editing the "checked" and "unchecked" icon to the order, and here is the way.

First of all, you need to download the theme file in .utz format into your computer. Make a copy of the file and change its extension to .zip. For example, download Shards.utz, make a copy named as Shards.zip.

Then, unzip the file Shards.zip with PeaZip or 7-Zip or any other file unarchiver tool.

Use a graphics editor to edit the file named as ListboxCheckbox.png in your unzip folder. Here is how it looks like before and after the editing.

Before:

After:
(you may right click to download this edited file)

You can now use the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator to open the file Shards.utz. To fix the problem, go to "List View" tab, and click on "Check boxes". Then, click on the Import button to import your edited ListboxCheckbox.png.




You can then see from the preview display that the checkbox is showing correctly by now.

Save the theme file Shards.utz and transfer it to your phone. You have to ensure that Shards is not in use as the current theme in your phone. Delete the existing Shards theme, and install this edited one. Woolah! You are done.

Malaysia Salary Guide 2008/09 from Kelly Services

I have been waited for this for quite a few months.

Kelly Services published their hardcopy of Malaysia Salary guide 2008/09 around June 2008, but the softcopy only made available on their website yesterday.

You might notice that the figures in this guide is comparatively lower than those published in the ZDNet Asia IT Salary Benchmark Survey 2008 and Robert Walters Global Salary Survey 2008. One probable reason I found out is that Kelly Services' Malaysia Salary guide focuses on executives with less than 5 years of working experience, hence we can't expect the figure to be too high. In the guide anyhow, a Lead Electrical Engineer with 7 years of experience gets a salary range from RM5,000 to RM15,000.

Click here to download the Malaysia Salary guide 2008/09.

You might probably also interested to read on:

• Result of Robert Walters Global Salary Survey 2008
• Result of ZDNet Asia IT Salary Benchmark Survey 2008
• JobsDB Compensation and Benefit Survey Report 2009

Benefits of having smartphone

I wrote about "Choosing a mobile phone" last week, and I've chosen the Sony Ericsson P1i, which is a feature rich PDA smartphone that has been around in the market for more than a year and is still a hot pick for many people. I believe now is a good timing to buy it, as its price has dropped for a few hundred ringgit since its launch, and has been stabilized and maintained over than past 3 months.

This is my first smartphone, and I find it very interesting compared with the traditional mobile phone. If you are a technology savvy who like to explore, modify and hack around the phone, then smartphone is your choice.

When I got the phone (supposingly for the Malaysia/Indonesia market), I found that Chinese was not supported by its original firmware. The first thing I did is to replace its firmware with the Singapore version with Chinese support. And now, it can read and write Chinese in SMS as well as all the installed applications. Its touch screen handwriting recognition now can recognise Chinese writing too!

Beside this, other benefits of smartphone over traditional phone include:

• There is no limit to the contacts information (only limited by available memory). Traditional phone has fixed limit on number of storable contacts.
  
• There are a lot of applications in vast variety available (free and non-free) for its OS, and the number keeps on increasing as development is continuous. Traditional phone is very much restricted to Java based small applications/games only.
  
• You are able to modify (mod) and extend its existing features, such as adding the cool Touchlight function with its camera light. This feature is available in some other mobile phones, but not in the original specs of P1i. There also exist mods to the camera to add more function (such as continuous shots) and enhance the photo quality.
  
• You are even able to explore and hack into the Symbian OS file system, tweaking it for faster and better performance.
• You are able to upgrade the applications that come with the phone to a newer version.
• You are able to add plug-in to its web browser, such as enabling the capability to display flash animation.
• ...

Well, if you are not keen on mods and hacks, and will probably use your phone as-is without installing additional application too, then the benefit of having smartphone to you is probably having bigger memory for contacts/SMS/MMS etc. If you like mods and hacks, you can find quite a lot of such discussions in various Internet forums about your phone.