Devakishor Soraisam » Personal

CM9 Nightly(March 9 release) on my Galaxy S2. Loving it, except for the scary experience this morning.

admin — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 06:55:48 +0000

I had rooted my phone a long time back, experimented with a few custom ROMs then, but choose to revert to the stock ROM as there weren’t many good options available. CM7 for SGS2 wasn’t out then and I didn’t wan’t an unstable ROM then. Few days back, a friend told me about how his android’s battery life increased drastically after flashing with CM7.1. The battery life for my phone sucked(a prob with almost all android phones) and the hope that it might increase after flashing a diff ROM got me excited. That, and the fact that I wanted to try ICS convinced me.

Googled/Youtubed a bit and installed the MIUI ROM by adyscorpius of XDA Forums first, after which I tweeted about the sad battery life and how slow it was. Then, another friend who knows a lot more about android/sgs2 than me and who also blogs about android suggested on twitter that I install CM9.

Now, CM9 isn’t stable and is a nightly release. I also know that a ‘nightly’ is a work in progress, not a stable release that is meant for the general public but intended for a few brave souls.. The CM9 nightly release even comes with this warning!!

** These CyanogenMod builds are highly experimental and unsupported.
**
** Please refrain from submitting bug reports for any issues
** you may encounter while running one of these builds.
**
** Submitting bug reports on nightly builds is the leading
** cause of male impotence.

The brave soul that I am, I went ahead with it. Like Rajesh said, it was a drastic improvement and I loved it. Played with the new interface, settings with it and was slowly falling in love. I don’t want to go on about the things I love, many people already love the CyanmogenMod ROMs, for good reason. That said, the main thing I was curious about – battery life, I wasn’t sure if there was any change there so I decided not to charge the phone at night as I normally do and see how much battery was left in the morning.

This morning was a shocker! Woke up to a phone call from my girl at about 9, phone was working fine then. Went to sleep vey late y’day(or today morn!) so went back to sleep. Woke up at about 10:30, with one eye half open I reached for the phone… and the damn thing wouldn’t wake up whatever button(power, menu, both volume) I pressed! Thought the battery was over and plugged in the charger but the charging animation didn’t appear… for a long time! Removed the battery, put it back in and plugged in the charger again… this time the animation showed, it also showed I had 50%+ battery left! But, the damned phone still wouldn’t start! Wondering if the battery was showing an error, I put it on charge for a little longer, removed both the battery and sim, put them back and tried starting it… it reluctantly did!

I checked the battery stats after that and this is what I saw:

Not sure how good an indicator this is as the phone was on standby most of the time, but this looks pretty good to me… when compared to my earlier stock ROM.

Now, if this indeed this shows the true battery levels… then, why wasn’t the phone starting/waking up? Yes, I know it is a nightly release I’m on and this kind of thing shouldn’t shock me, but I am still curious to know why/how this scary thing happened. So, if anyone of you installed CM9 on your SGS2 and faced similar prob and know how/why it happened, do share.

For now, I shall continue to use the CM9 and try to figure out what was the prob was…

Who would have thought..

Devakishor Soraisam — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:34:57 +0000

.. that this could ever happen in India?

When I was in college few yrs back(sigh! I’m old), me and a few friends made a small documentary video about the discrimination against sexual minorities in Bangalore.. as a small class assignment. We went and approached Sangama for help. Through Sangama, we got to meet a lot of people from the Transgender, Hijra, Gays, Lesbians, and other sexual minority communities.

We, the supposedly normal people can never understand the kind of struggle they go through each day, the discrimination they face, their sufferings… and all those for no fault of their own.

Recently though, good things seems to be happening for these communities..

Article 377 was read down, A transgender standing for elections… better late then never – a wise man once said .. or was it a woman.. or.. ummm someone from the third gender, quite possible, no?

My first Ubuntu convert..

Devakishor Soraisam — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:00:01 +0000

A friend was having some problem with his network driver(XP machine) and was unable to connect to the internet. Instead of trying to help him fix the prob, I ~~took advantage of the situation and forced~~ convinced him to install Ubuntu on his laptop today. He is happy that he can finally download porn again, and I’m happy to have another Ubuntu user under the same roof

But I ‘think’ my happiness will be short lived and the friend will ditch Ubuntu and go back to a pirated Windows copy. Don’t get me wrong, Ubuntu is a brilliant OS. I use it, and will continue to use it. It is just that, for a non tech-savvy person, I feel, the shift from Windows to Ubuntu(or any other OS) can be a bit difficult. At least in the beginning. A lot of learning to be done, bit frustrating at times…. especially when it comes to fixing a problem.

Well, I can only hope that he sticks with Ubuntu long enough to fall in love with it… like I did