Tag Archives: BlackBerry

Freeing my BlackBerry

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Recently I had changed jobs. My earlier employer had a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and my BlackBerry HandHeld was locked by the IT policy. Since I used to use my own SIM as well as Handset, the policy which was pushed to my phone was pretty permissive. However certain things like the “Firewall Policy” as we  as the “Password Policy” was locked.

I had been lethargic for the first few days but finally decided to sit and clean up the policy. Unfortunately the BlackBerry Admin of my previous employer was too “lazy” to push a blank policy file to my device. So I had to manually remove the policy. A very good writeup on how to remove the IT policy can be found here.

However after completing the entire procedure I found that although the General Settings screen inside Security didn’t show any IT Policy present, I was unable to disable the Firewall. There was a small red lock icon displayed next to Enabled on the Firewall Options page. I could however disable the Password policy which further confused me. My first assumption was, the blank policy file which I downloaded and pushed must have been corrupted. However on further looking I found that its not the case. Poking around in a lot of BlackBerry related forum revealed that a second wipe should do the trick. The device is going to the second wipe now.

I however feel that is a functional flaw. Why would the device need 2 wipes in order to completely clean all IT policies?

Update 1: Wiping the BlackBerry didn’t help :( Need to look further.

Update 2: Found a much simpler way to solve the problem here. Turns out that RIM has been sensible enough and provided a mechanism to directly resetting devices to factory settings by using the standard loader.

Caller names not showing up for incoming calls on BlackBerry

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BlackBerry has been built from ground up for an Enterprise implementation. For this reason, Research in Motion has always tried to make sure that the platform remains secure. For this reason any BlackBerry device has the options of Encrypting the Data stored on it which it is locked.

All BlackBerry handhelds by default Encrypt the data stored on it, for example, emails, notes, address book contents. This definitely gives a lot of peace of mind to the user in case his phone gets stolen, as his data is safe and the thief can’t get it out by hooking up the BlackBerry to a PC. But this also has a problem. Due to the lack of processing power, sometimes the BlackBerry is not fast enough to decrypt the Address Book to show the caller name when there is an incoming call. This was precisely the problem I was facing. The caller name was not being shown intermittently.

This problem can be easily solved by going to Options->Security ->General Settings. Select to leave the Address Book unencrypted under Content Protection and things work fine.

Another day went by. :)

Back to the Old days

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Facts are stranger than fiction and history repeats itself.

Today while searching for my name is Google, I came across a very old post on Thinkdigit in which I had posted some comments in favor of AMD in the eternal AMD vs Intel Processor war. I was quite surprised at my own post because I myself have completely forgotten about the features of AMD that I have mentioned. The only sane explanation that came to my mind in favor of forgetting was lack of practice. But the time when I posted that comment, I was really in love with the technology. All that mattered to me was how much I was updated and acquainted with the ‘latest and greatest’ gizmos and technologies. It hurt a lot looking at my current situation.

Probably it’s time I look back into my old books. It’s time that I get back into the “learning mode” instead of the “earning mode”. But does that mean that my current philosophy of being someone is the ‘Corporate’ is completely wrong?

As per my limited understanding, the only reason why someone would actually want to be financially successful would be for a bigger house, a bigger car, a little more comfort. The reason why I am in the corporate is also not very different. But what I feel is, I have become highly mechanical. All that matters to me is my ‘current market rate’. Sometimes I feel so very frustrated. I just wish I had a time machine to return to my old school and college days. The days during which all which mattered to me was how much I learned, not how much I scored.

Probably it is really a good time for my Masters Degree.