a day in the life

Has anyone been having trouble with their Blackberry devices? I’ve been getting these messages for the past few days. I’m on AT&T using a Bold 9000.

Hey everyone. Just checking in to say hi. I started by adventure last week on Wednesday when I drove out I Milwaukee to visit my friend Mark and since the weekend of the 4th I’ve been in downtown Chicago chilling with Stef and now Brett and Keil.
It feels so good to have the freedom to do something like this right now. So free.

Big things to come.

Something that has been on my task list for the last 4 months, and pissing me off royally the entire time, has been to figure out why Group Policy settings for Proxy Settings have not been applying to Internet Explorer 7 clients. The policy has worked fine in Internet Explorer 6 but after upgrading to Internet Explorer 7, the function ceased to work. Apparently, this has been an issue for a lot of users:

• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=223293&start=0
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-7343-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=276924
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-7343-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=264665
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-1035-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=262676
• As well as many many Experts-Exchange posts.

SOLUTION!
While some users had luck after checking Proxy Exceptions to make sure no invalid characters were included, many were still faced with the initial problem. After months of looking for a solution to this problem, the big M$ decided to FINALLY address the issue with a knowledge base article (which was only posted THIS WEEK on March 10, 2009). According to Microsoft, the issue is related to Internet Explorer 7 no longer supporting the Gopher protocol. As a result, if you customize a GPO to include Internet Explorer Proxy Settings, you MUST NOT INCLUDE GOPHER. Simply leave the field blank, close the GPO and refresh the settings on the client computer. Like MAGIC the settings now appear! Woohoo. Check below for a short guide.

Guide:

1. Open the Group Policy Management Console and navigate to the GPO holding the settings.
2. Navigate to the Proxy Configuration Settings located at User Configuration/Windows Settings/Internet Explorer Maintenance/Connection and configure the Proxy Settings field.
   
3. In this example, every field is set to the same server and port. Do not use the option "Use the same proxy server for all addresses."
   
   
4. Simply delete the entries on the Gopher Field, click Apply and then Ok.
   
5. From the Client machine, open a command prompt and run "gpupdate /force".
   
   
6. Check your IE settings. The proxy configuration should now be applied!

Let me know if this works for you!

It’s official.

Good news Blackberry Bold owners! Loopt officialy supports the Blackberry Bold now Download it today!

My good friend and avid Arch user Travis just put together a great review and guide to the Tracks GTD web app. Check it out!

I make no claim to having any real skill making panormas. Instead, I use the very handy app DoubleTake by Echoone. Brent tool all of these pics.

Getting closer to the mall.

Gathering by the Washington Monument

Washington Monument from the WWII Memorial

Pacific – WWII Monument

Atlantic – WWI Monument

The Mega Monument Panorama

I also created a Quicktime VR file from the Mega Monument Panorama. SHIFT = Zoom In, Control = Zoom Out

To Frank Potter @ Loopt for helping make this geo-tagging experience possible!

I’ve put together a short video (~ 6min) about how to create ringtones for a Blackberry using GarageBand on your mac. Soon to come are Quicktime Pro & iPhone variants.

[display_podcast]

YouTube Version

Working with OS X, Windows, Active Directory and other network services as much as I do, I came across a great tip when adding a leopard based machine to a AD domain today. After you bind the machine to the domain, make sure to enable the option called “Create mobile account at login”, especially if the machine is a notebook. I’m not going to say I learned this from experience, but hey you get the drift.

After binding to your domain, select “Show Advanced Settings” and select the “Services” tab. Open the Active Directory settings and enable the Create Mobile Account at Login check box and confirmation box if necessary.

I’m using the iPhone/iPod touch WordPress client. Not too shabby if you ask me!

My project for the semester in my CSE 541 Project Planning and Management course:

Your assignment is to plan and manage the development of software for a reconfigurable cockpit simulator for an advanced stealth fighter. The instrumentation is identical to the actual production version. This is a tool for pilot skill and mission training. The simulator must provide a high-fidelity representation of the actual fighter’s response to the controls. As the stealth fighter is modified over its lifetime, the simulator must be capable of being modified to reflect those changes. It should also be reconfigurable for different fighter variants used for different missions. The hardware interfaces are stable, available and well documented. This is a standalone system. The software of the aircraft’s control responses, Aircraft Model, World Model and Aircraft Controls are available as COTS products. As the new project team, you must conduct the planning, designing, construction, testing and delivery of one of the simulator subsystems (see Block Diagram). One Team will be the Lead System Integrator (LSI) and will coordinate the work of the other teams (subcontractors).

This is going to be a fun semester.

I have gone ahead and posted all of the Adobe Flex 3 projects I worked on during the Fall 2008 semester at Oakland University. The course focused on Human Computer Interaction and User Interface. Check out the demos!

The Tikitag first kit has arrived! Check out the unboxing pictures below! The box and packaging is very minimal and the tags are very, very small.

The tag is about the width of a small paperclip.

Had to take it apart

Well, I am HAPPY to announce that Phase 1 of the MacMini in car server project has been completed. I have successfully installed the power supply and router for the MacMini in the BMW 325 Wagon Project. Sparing you the details of the project (those will come later), let’s go through the steps I went through today.

This project starts in the trunk of my wagon. Since the plan was to install the MacMini into the trunk of the vehicle, I started my expedition in the CD Changer/Satellite Radio compartment of the trunk. Since I do not have the CD changer or satellite radio, the trunk compartment has both connections waiting in the trunk. Each of the connections has two components: power and optical connection. For this project, I will not be using the optical connections but the power instead. 

The power connectors (Brown & Orange+stripe) are connected to the plug as one, but can be separated from the kit. The first step is to separate the power from the optical block. Once the power has been separated from the optical block, I cut the power cords and attached quick connect adapters to the ends of the wires, for both the CD Changer and the Satellite radio connections. This provides me with power for both the Primary and Secondary power connections that come out of the Carnetix power inverter system. Once the power connector was separated, I cut the power cords and crimped on the quick connect ports. 

Now that the power has been separated, I went ahead and crimped on the corresponding quick connect clips to the wires on the cable supplied by Carnetix. 

Notice that all the quick connects are crimped on and ready to go. ?The next step for the install involved finding  a 12V source that only came online when the car is in Ignition On mode. Luckily, there is a 12V power plug located in the trunk right next to the compartment for the CD Changer, et all. I connected the ignition indicator wire to the positive line from the 12V source.

This completes the power requirements for the MacMini + BMW system. Now that the power has been configured, there are two more steps to completing the phase: the fon router & connecting to the aux audio input. Save that for Part 2.

Once upon a time, many a year ago, the internet was born. And with that came the need for web hosting companies (web-hosts). Soon the land was filled with hosts, some dedicated and others just resellers of the more expensive services.
On a nice Winter day in 2001, I purchased my very first domain name for ten years! Not being familiar with how the domain names and hosting worked, it took me about a week to figure out that I needed to pay for hosting in addition to buying the domain name. This is where my web hosting adventure begins.

While I can’t remember the name of my first webhost, I do recall they were limited to static HTML pages with no included database technologies and cost me about $5/month. At the time, that was a lot of money to me. That web host worked out very well for me, considering my site was statically generated using Microsoft Frontpage 2000. Unfortunately, that web-host went out of business and decided to transfer all their customers to their "parent". I use the term parent loosely because they were really just the wholesale distributor of hosting service. It was this experience that opened my eyes to some of the real workings web-hosting online. Any Joe Schmo can buy hosting in bulk from a larger company and resell it in smaller packs. Not a bad idea on paper, but obviously not the best for the customer either. This was the end of my experience with my first hosting company.

As I went back to the tubes to try and find another host company, I found it hard to gauge wether or not a web-host had their own servers or was just reselling for another company. Since the prices for dedicated hosting were astronomical compared to that of shared/resold hosting, I decided to narrow my search down to something within my price range. After doing a bit of research, I decided on a company called based Reyox, out of Seattle, Washington. At $9.95/month I thought it was a pretty fair deal. At the time, I selected Windows hosting (not really knowing anything different) and I continued to use Frontpage to build static sites. It wasn’t until I started to build more dynamic sites that I became frustrated with Reyox. At one point all of the Reyox sites got hacked my some hackers in Hungary. My entire site was destroyed along with some of my friend’s sites that I had recommended to Reyox. During my time with Reyox, I always thought it was interesting that when I contacted the support people, I would always be dealing with the same person, Asher Saeed. It wasn’t until after I left Reyox that I realized he owned Reyox and was the only person running the show.

My next stop in the web-hosting world was a company called MediaTemple. I was referred to them by a friend who had raved about their exceptional service, customer service and automated tools. At $20 a month, MediaTemple was more expensive compared to Reyox, but I needed a reliable host with no BS. During my first year of service with MediaTemple, I was relatively happy with their service. They offer all the services you would expect from any Linux provider: PHP, Apache, MySQL, ssh acces, etc. It wasn’t until after my first year that I really started to experience problems. The problems started with the MySQL and PHP simply flaking out at any time up for up to 10 minutes at a time. When I first contacted the support team at (mt), they told me it was because there was a heavy load on my sites. At first I just accepted their explanation, but when it started to happen on a daily basis, and especially when I was working on web projects for my classes I couldn’t stand it anymore. As you can see from the MediaTemple , the issues were originally documented by (mt) at the end of February and continued all the way through May 14, 2008. If you ask me, that is unacceptable for any host. I was giving a presentation for one of my academic projects and the web app completely crapped out. It was right then that I decided Media Temple had to go.

I’m now on a new host. One that is owned called Mosso. They pride themselves on offering both Apache/IIS 7 and everything you would expect from both of those. At $100 a month, it is the most expensive host I have ever used, but it definitely has paid off. I have been on them for 3 months now and from a service standpoint, I have been really happy with the performance of the sites, databases and server side scripting processing. In my opinions, the only thing missing in Mosso is SSH shell access, but I hear it’s on the way. Mosso also has one of the best Reseller interfaces available from any host I’ve used, especially for web developers who handle everything for their customers.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with Mosso and I would recommend their service to anyone looking for excellent web hosting. I know the price is a bit steep, so if anyone is interested just post a comment and we can work something out with the reseller interface.

Hey everyone. I just wanted to take a moment and fill you in on what has been going on with my life. I know it’s been a while since my last post, but a lot of this have happened.

First and foremost, the semester from hell has finally ended, and with a BANG! I received Academic Honors with an overall GPA of 3.61 (4.0, 4.0, 3.9, 3.3, 3.0). Winter was a really busy semester and I have a lot to show for it. Take a look at my academic projects page and get a feel for the systems I helped create this semester.

Second, I have a new job! After years of dealing with my boss’s inadequate understanding of technology and lack of managerial skills, I no longer have to work for the evil wench at the library and will be starting at my new job next week. Not a moment too soon, considering my boss went crazy when she heard of my resignation and not only copied my entire computer, disabled my network account, changed all the admin passwords and even made my full-time counterpart go from computer to computer to change the local admin passwords. I thought my last day was May 5, but whatever.

Third, I have some new articles in the pipeline including the Mac Mini Car Integration, Using and iPod/iPhone to Remote Control Your Life and my Letter to the Board.

As a senior at Oakland University, I must take a course where I work in a team and am assigned a certain project or task and we spend the semester developing a solution to the problem. Oakland changed the senior design project this year for Computer Science and Computer Information Technology this year and my project was selected by the professor to be showcased in front of the department’s advisory board. Anyway, long story short, it went very well. Have a look for yourself!

 

What is wrong with this picture?

Well today’s the day.I’m up and running on my primary desktop with Windows XP SP3 RC. Haven’t noticed any speed increase, but time will tell. I’m Running SP3 v.3264.  Loading Vista SP1 RC also. It’s taking forever…

For those of you who didn’t know, earlier this year I was having a great deal of trouble using Lenovo’s System Update application on my x60 Tablet. Well thanks to a good friend over at FreePeters.com, we were able to solve the problem with one simple command. Any guesses as to what it could be?

If you guessed auto-tuning, you are CORRECT.

From now on, I will be disabling auto-tuning on every Windows Vista Machine I ever work on. To quickly run this command, open up an command shell with elevated privileges and type the following: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled Volia.  Please, spread the word about this extreme annoyances and how to get around it.

SOLVED!!! SEE BOTTOM 

 UGH.

In my career working with computers and technology, there is nothing I hate more than having to make a call to tech support. Without trying to inflate my ego, I like to think that people generally call me to help them with their technology related troubles, so when I end up having to call tech support, I usually expect to be treated like a complete noob by the support representative. And don’t get me wrong, I know first hand technical support is like, so making the support reps job any worse doesn’t help me. Generally, though, I have found overall if you are clear about the problem, you can either play dumb and they will repair the issue or you can play smart and they will repair the issue. Unfortunately, that was not the case this time.

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad x60 Tablet PC that I bought in the beginning of 2007, before Windows Vista was available pre-installed. The computer was eligible for a Windows Vista Business Express Upgrade and I participated in the program and received my Windows Vista Business Express Upgrade DVD in March 2007 and waited until now to install Vista. My problem now stems from the Lenovo ThinkVantage Technologies application called System Update. At it’s core, System Update is a pretty sweet program if you ask me. The application detects what kind of system you have (Serial & Model Info), goes online to the ThinkPad package repository, fetches all the necessary drivers, applications, patches and updates and then installs everything for the user.  I’ve used it many times in XP and it is quite remarkable. From an administrator’s point of view, it’s the easiest way to build and setup images for new computers. Gone are the days of individually downloading and installing drivers! Anyway, down to the problem.

I installed Windows Vista Business Edition with no trouble on my tablet and proceeded to go online and download the most recent version of System Update (3.01). All was well until I went to run the application. System Update has a 3 step process: 1. Determine model and retrieve relevant package info, 2. Prompt user to select appropriate packages, 3. Download + Install said packages. My problems begin in step 1. When running XP (and how SU should work in general), System Update usually takes no more than 30 seconds to determine and download the repository xml list. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with Vista and my tablet. SU spent 15 minutes determining my machine type and downloading the list. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, I selected the packages and began the automated process. Again I was plagued with insanely slow download speed, but in good faith let the machine download overnight. To my grand surprise in the morning, every package failed to install. Even better, Lenovo ThinkVantage Support told me it was because of a bad Vista install (that I messed it up somehow) even though I had installed Vista fresh 3 times to try and fix it myself.

After nearly giving up, I discovered another program part of the TV SU Suite called Update Retriever, which goes online and fetches all the available packages for specified Machine Types and stores them locally. While that program didn’t work under Vista, it did work under XP (which I just happened to have made an image of before upgrading to Vista). After loading XP back, retrieving all the updates, reinstalling Vista and configuring System Update to look locally, it would appear everything worked. Man, what a bitch.

I called Lenovo support back today in reference to my case as I am still unable to use System Update properly and to my delight, they are just going to send me the Vista recovery media for my computer considering I have an active license from my OEM Vista copy! Hopefully I’ll have the discs in 2 or 3 days and we shall see how it goes!

This problem is solved by disabling autotuning in Microsoft Windows Vista. See the update post!

After enjoying a couple months off from school, I find myself back in class four days a week learning basic biology. I, of course, have been using my laptop coupled with my favorite note taking app for Windows to take notes (paper + pencil is so archaic, duh). But for the first time in my academic career (outside my computer science classes, I should say), at least 1/2 of the students in the class are also using notebook computers to take notes! This is great proof that my generation (± a few years) are becoming more comfortable using computers for more than just Internet, email and media.

On that note, I have to say I am so sick of seeing people use Microsoft Word (Mac + PC) to take  notes for classes. While most people immediately flock to the o-so-familiar Microsoft Word app to record text, there quite a few applications for both platforms that perform much better for the task at hand.

Starting with OS X (as I started my note taking career on a Powerbook), there are of course the usual suspects: TextEdit (included with OS X) and Microsoft Word for Mac ($149). These two apps will do the job, but not very well. TextEdit is limited in functionality and Microsoft Word is heavy and not Intel native. This is where The Omni Groupcomes in. When I purchased my first Mac (Titanium Powerbook) it came with a program called Omni Outliner from The Omni Group. After messing around with other the other applications, I found Omni Outliner to be the best at keeping notes, thoughts and attachments in one simple workspace. The application is light (especially compared to Microsoft Word), Intel native and follows Apple’s Inspector driven interface. But best of all, Omni Outliner comes standard on EVERY Mac that ships, and it’s a full licesnse.

Omni Outliner makes it easy to:

• Use rich style sheets to define your document’s template
• Add attachments directly to the file (not just references, be embedded files)
• Easily create multiple bullet styles, including check marks for lists!
• Easily create bookmarks throughout your document for quick reference
• Export to multiple file formats, including PDF, XML, PlainText, RTF and more

For those of you who use Microsoft Windows as your operating system, fear not. At the launch of Office 2003, Microsoft added a new application to the suite called One Note. At it’s core, OneNote is a digital notebook (which I believe to be heavily inspired by the emergence of Tablet PCs) that can be used for note taking, project management, brainstorming and more. It features a familiar WYSIWYG interface with a few exceptions. First, there is no save button. OneNote is always saving, always tracking changes, and therefore requires no manual saving. In OneNote 2007, Microsoft released new features that allow users to make audio and video recordings of meetings or lectures, for example (hardware dependent of course) as well as share their notebooks with other users and collaborate simultaneously. As far as the Windows world goes, there isn’t any comparison. OneNote 2007 delivers the best note-taking product I have ever used and I highly recommend it to anyone using their Windows based PC to take notes. Download a free trial from Microsoft here, but students rejoice! There is an Academic edition of OneNote 2007 available also!
Microsoft One Note 2007 Academic Edition – $44.95 from Academic Superstore