Upgrading an AT&T Dell Streak to Android 2.2

Back when there was a lot of fanfare, I bought an "unlocked" Dell Streak right from the dell.com web site. It arrived, and it was pretty clear they'd rushed it out the door with a kluged together Android 1.6 installed on it.  It was an unmitigated heap of garbage.  But they promised a forthcoming update to Android 2.2, with unlocked units getting the update as soon as it was available.

It turns out that most of the "unlocked" units (purchased at additional expense, since you didn't sign a contract with a carrier) were actually locked to AT&T.  You can't get the update.  Dell lists a manual download in their FAQ, but that one fails to install.  Doing a manual check for new system software results in a message that you're up to date.  Nothing works.

Well, from the seventy-fifth page of a thread on Dell's self-support forums, here's the update, which will install on your "unlocked" Dell Streak that's actually locked to AT&T.  Download it on the Streak's browser, then tap it to install:

  http://mobileupdate.dell.com/PackageProductionLocations/Streak_340_14844_31.pkg

It installed for me!  If you're in the same boat, I hope this helps.  Hopefully this cleans up some of my issues.  If not, I can just throw it back in the closet for another six months..

Fixing Bluetooth Pairing Problems in Windows on Bootcamp

You're running Bootcamp to dual-boot your Mac.  You're able to pair a bluetooth device on the MacOS X side of the house, but you can't subsequently get the device to pair in Windows.  Short story: you've gotta unpair it in MacOS, then pair it in Windows, and finally go back and re-pair it in MacOS.

• Bootcamp into MacOS X.
• Use System Preferences > Bluetooth to unpair the device.
• Bootcamp into Windows
• Use Control Panel (different sub-tool per version) to pair with the device.
• Bootcamp back into MaxOS X.
• Use System Preferences > Bluetooth to pair with the device again.
• It otter work in both environments, now.

Long story:  I think that basically, the device is getting confused because it's been paired with "a computer" just fine, and sees no point in re-pairing with the same computer.  I could be totally wrong.  But that'd mean that the MacOS side of things is just being especially clever, seeing that Windows is already paired, and re-using those connection credentials.  Basically, I'll bet the Mac is pretending to be the existing paired Windows sytem .. while Windows has no idea it needs to share.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Hopefully this helps someone else.  There are a bunch of discussions about this, scattered across the web, that detail the drop-pair-repair method.  But half of them are those stupid sites that've scraped someone else's content and plastered it with ads and premium-membership scams.  Honestly, I wish there was a Google preference I could set that'd just ignore those bozos every time I search.

I wonder how you'd determine that a site is scraped content with ads and membership offers.  If you just used domain name, they'd go and register new domains all the time to dodge the blacklisting.  Perhaps some sort of "deprecate sites with more than X ads" heuristic.  If anyone's got an idea, I'd love to hear it.

Kevin Kelly at TEDxAmsterdam

Continuing the lunch-time video habit, I ended up watching a speech by Kevin Kelly about "technology's story."  As a one-time Whole Earth Catalog editor, you might expect him to think outside the proverbial box -- he doesn't disappoint, dismissing how engineers see these tools, and talking about how we might consider our technology (without which we'd be toast) a seventh kingdom of life, with an evolution and urges of its own.

The talk is a very nice redux of his book, What Technology Wants, which I read a couple of months ago.  I found most of his written arguments compelling, peppered with a couple pies in the sky.  If Amazon auto-generated per-book hash-tags, I'd aim you at the comments my Kindle tweeted about the book.

In another intersection, I've been following the Quantified Self movement, another of his brain children.  I find the most interesting thing about "self quantifiers" is how easily we humans graft technology right onto our bodies.  (Nike+, GPS, bluetools, eyeglasses)  I guess we'll know what technology wants, once we're all cyborgs.

Mark Masterson (CSC) at OSCON

I'm continuing the trend on my lunch-time videos, watching more O'Reilly stuff, and today was Mark Masterson's presentation at OSCON.  He does a really interesting job of breaking down how enterprises balance the adoption of new technologies with risk avoidance.  The upshot, to me, was that risk calculations are based on the probability of failure, times the cost of failure -- so if you can't reduce the probability of failure, virtualization can certainly reduce the cost of failure.  I hadn't seen it put so simply, before.  Very interesting!  (BTW, here is Shanley Kane's post, that he references which I enjoyed.)