I have been seeing many people's blog that use Feedburner has that "xx readers" icon showing and wondering how many people subscribe to my blog via RSS feed and how it works.



After seeing this and some digging around, I have the answer.

Basically what it does is simple; When a feed publisher robot hit a site, it left a signiture in the HTTP USER_AGENT variable. In there, it reports how many user(s) is watching this feed. i.e.

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 4 subscribers)

So, I enhanced NP_BotTracking to take and present the information.

Mean to write about my Motorola Ming PDA phone I pick up last year while I am in Guangzhou.

The phone is fairly small, since the phone has no keypad (using vitual one on screen). I think it's even slightly smaller when compared to O2 Atom. The main attraction of the phone is its transparent flip that allow user to see the screen under it. It has a 2.0 MP camera that can take pictures and video. The picture quality is decent under good light condition, but still coming short in lower light, even just indoor lighting sometimes. The phone come with a 512MB transFlash SD, I replace it with a 1GB one.

The phone is running Linux and come with many applications that I needed from a PDA, such as todo list, calendar, note, alarm clock, world clock, and calculator. It has other build-in tools like email client, web browser, voice recorder, photo editor, and dictionary. One neat application is the function to scan and import business card, I didn't really use it since I do not trade business contact often with others. There is also a FM radio build-in.

Another useful function is a handwriting recognition that able to write in English and Chinese. Since I do not know how to type Chinese using any input method, this is a god-send. The function works relatively well for my ugly writing.

It supports GPRS, and act as modem. The bluetooth function allow sharing pictures/ringtone/files with other phones or with my Thinkpad T30.

It has a Java VM that can run games and other java applications. In fact, I was able to run a java Google map program that use a bluetooth GPS receiver and connect via GPRS to get current location information. However, GPRS is not fast enough to allow speedy map update and very expensive.

Video and mp3 are handled by Real player. The phone can connect via USB and act as a storage device. I am able to download podcast to the phone this way.



However, the phone is lacking in many area:
- no EDGE, no Wifi, EDGE (and a reasonable price service) can allow me to use my GPS with Google maps.
- todo list has only 3 priorities, wish there is 5 levels. Also it will be good if I can only show only one priority of tasks in the todo to hide lower priority one.
- alarm setting in calendar rather limited, i.e. can't do 1.5 hours before appointment, or remind 1 day ahead. Also, I cannot change the snooze interval when I go the reminder, where I can only cancel the reminder otherwise.
- bug that when finding recipient in compose SMS, some names begin with "." didn't show
- addressbook category rather limited, only up to 6
- addressbook address field is a bit short, sometimes not able to put in full address
- sweat and grease stick on flip easily, worst in the summer
- no auto timezone adjustment. it's a GSM network standard function.....
- cannot change ringtone volumn and other sound volumn seperately. I found that alarm and reminder is too loud.
- cannot freely custom all buttons on the desktop (only the right hand side one... would like to chage the browser one as well)
- hope more locations for world clock
- note cannot configure default files location like in camera, and the last open location is not preserved when open a new file
- cannot backup todo list to transSD
- the playlist in real player is too short (50 songs)
- it will be nice if there is a free-hand note program like Windows XP tablet 2005's Journal