My compliments to the team behind the Chromium project

Google Chrome is without a doubt my favorite browser. I’m not alone it is fast becoming the most widely used browser on the planet.

I use the page translation feature a lot, mainly translating pages from Czech to English. Prior to Chrome 22 (which is in beta, not offical yet) there was a fairly serious bug which would stop pages translating if you clicked the back button. From this point on, not even a page refresh would correct this.

I was surprised to find the bug listed on the Chromium bug tracker site, and I thought the issue had perhaps gotten stale, so I decided to leave a ping and get a status update. I must admit I wasn’t expecting a useful response.

To my amazement I received an update saying the bug was fixed, someone had actually bothered to cross reference another issue and xref them! Wow. I immediately downloaded Canary and tested it, and it worked!

A day later the developer who fixed the bug emailed me with an explanation – again, I’m in awe at the hardworking, professional effort demonstrated by the members I’ve dealt with on the Chromium project. A massive thank you to Gavin P.

You guys are the best!

Can’t send an sms on your Android ICS custom rom? Read this

I haven’t used a stock Android ROM, well since I got my first ZTE Blade. During this time I’ve had no problems sending SMS messages (Text messages), but recently this changed.

I installed yet another custom ROM like any other and one day noticed I couldn’t send an SMS. I thought it might be something related to the ROM which was experimental, so I wiped the phone and cache and installed something I knew worked before – only this time around it didn’t work.

For about 2 weeks I thought my phone was broken but I found the solution.

If you’re using ICS and have the same problem this should sort you out.

Why this happens?

The custom rom keeps the original SMSC setting sometimes (SMS Message Center number) – this is basically a phone number and it will differ depending on your phone network provider.

The solution?

1. Enter the Testing menu by dialing the following:  *#*#4636#*#*

2. Scroll down till you find the SMSC setting – it will be blank, so press REFRESH, this will retrieve the existing setting. Mine ended up being “+447785016005″

3. Delete the number but keep the quotation marks, and full in your correct SMSC number – you can find this on the website typically of your network provider. If it isn’t there or hard to find, phone tech support and get the number, or else visit a branch in person. Fill in this number inside the quotation marks. If you get 145 suffixed to the end, just delete that too, it will recreate it for you.

4. Update the setting

5. Test send an sms it should work.