Blogging on the road, traffic, procedures and CMS

I'm blocked on the bus, in the traffic, after bad weather and a couple of small tornados have given their best to add some more entropy to the everyday caos in Rome.
The bus is surprisingly empty and I actually found a seat!
That's a chance to download a blogging app on the phone and see if it actually works; that' the blogging "on the road" and the "traffic".
If you read this it actually works!
My chosen app is "blogpress", works ok.

Procedures.
I work in a large company and am a customer of our IT department. Everything has a procedure, but to access the procedure there is a procedure to be allowed to submit requests, what a mess! You find out things are having problems when after days nothing happens, and so you start calling people and find out you have to submit a new request to someone else. So for me procedures = large waste of time.

CMS
I've been using CQ5 in the last few days. Wow, it looks quite a big jump ahead, but still we need tweek many things.

Got off the bus.. blogging while walking could be risky!!

Windows Mobile 6 on the Samsung i600

A couple of days ago I successfully upgraded the Samsung i600 mobile phone to Windows Mobile 6.
Having an Italian branded phone the operation was a bit tedious, it required de-branding the phone and setting the phone country to Netherlands in a hidden menu, downloading the upgrade from the Samsung website and setting the phone back to Italian.
The procedure is well described (in italian) in this forum.

The differences in the new OS appear mainly cosmetic, since the announced improved radio component software is very difficult to evaluate if not in a lab.

The most visible changes are some improved features in Outlook, which has better designed views and, for example, the possibility of deferring appointment alerts, previously they could only be deleted.

Internet Explorer is said to have been improved but the only difference I have perceived is an new animated logo, a blue ring.
Whereas rendering is still very bad.

A new feature which might be very useful, since software from Redmond is traditionally very buggy, is Windows update which, unfortunately, I have not managed to get to work (great if it was a bug in the bug fixing app!).

As far as previously present bugs, the Samsung RSS and Podcast apps are still internet configuration unaware and don't work through eventually configured proxies.
Too bad because one of the things I like in windows mobile is the logic behind the internet configuration.
You can add a connection and say, for example that it connects to your "office" and then configure a proxy that connects from th "office" to the "internet". But if applications don't read the configuration it is pretty useless.
Not that I will ever use this phone instead of an iPod!
I don't understand why the update is not easily available in some countries (the Italian, Austrian and French flags are shaded o the Samsung site), but as always when companies place stupid barriers the online community finds a workaround..

Getting the Gmail App to work on a Samsung SGH-i600 (blackjack)

On my Samsung i600, Google Maps works fine (its a windows mobile exe) but i had problems running the Gmail app, I would find the "download Gmail for Samsung Advanced MIDP2" link but I would receive an error on clicking.
It turns out that its a java app and there seems to be no JVM on the phone.
After some googling and surfing I found these instructions for installing a JVM, the Java MIDP emulator on the phone (from mxit.defza.com):

1. Go to handheld.softpedia.com.
2. In the search box type IBM MIDP and search (GO).
3. In the results page click the “IBM MIDP 2.0 Java Emulator” (Link) item.
4. Proceed to download. (It’s free; +-2.5MB size) You can choose any location when they ask you for the “download location”.
5. Install it etc.

Installed it and now, clicking the link installs the Gmail app which works, not at all perfectly and with horrible unreadable graphics, but it works.
Unfortunately the emulator is not well integrated in windows mobile and it is unable to detect my web proxy settings, so it works only on a direct internet connection and not on my office's private APN.