mcbeen.com

Jenn… neverwhere.com is coming, but you blog is back up at jenn.mcbeen.com.

Joe… Your blog is back online at joe.mcbeen.com

The BBS is backonline as well. Complete miracle.

I'm staring at CPG right now trying to figure out how I want to attack it. We'll see.

So it seems that godaddy and netsol don't like each other much. I tried going the easy way, and just pointed network solutions at godaddy. No go. either email worked or the website….not both. So…what the hell… we'll just move the domain right? Nope… I updated my contact info a few weeks back, so netsol won't let me. It's for my own good you know.

It looks like I'll be able to function for now… I went ahead and move authority for my domain to netsol for the first time, and I am now managing all entries on their servers. So far so good.

What's more fun, is that I have been wrestling with this for a couple days now… and no response from netsol or godaddy for assistance.

Sink or swim right?

I have had my iPhone for a little over two months now. This would be my third smartphone… and my first since abandoning the sector a year ago. “Smartphones” are an oxymoron. Generally they are dumb. They store and access tons of information, but know nothing. It’s the classic confusion between knowledge and intelligence.

As an IT engineer, I am forced to get these devices to work reliably on our networks. In general.. it sucks. For example… the current “cheap” smartphone, the “Q”, is on everyone’s list. It has a reasonably nice screen, confusing nonbutton-softkeys, and very stiff keyboard. I was delivered one a couple weeks back, charged with getting in setup for our OWA server. No problem… just put in the address and… what the… what do you mean I have a certificate problem? The Q does not come with the latest set of root CAs, so I’ll need to add a couple in… no problem right? just copy them down and click them… What do you mean I’m not allowed!?
Turns out this is regular problem for the “Q”. So much so that Microsoft has developed and released a special verizon certificate app. I’ll just go down load it… copy it to the “Q”… and run it. Oh… I have to go setup a custom folder to put my certs in… ok, whatever… Now, lets run the app… click the certs… ok first one done… ok now the intermediate… WTF?!?!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT IS NOT A VALID ROOT CERT?!?!? Of course it’s not you stupid phone. Just import it!

Well… This went on for days. Litterally. I tried certificate chain downloaders. I manually created CAB files from my certs. I tried unsupported utilities (from microsoft) that no longer exist on the internet. Nothing worked.

I was finally able to get around the problem by REGISTRY HACKING THE PHONE. That’s right. I had to HACK THE REGISTRY ON MY PHONE to get a root certificate chain installed.

And this is supposed to be “enterprise ready”

Thus leads me to the first myth of the day:
“The iPhone is a consumer gadget that is not enterprise ready”
I guess this can be translated to, “If I don’t have to fuck with it for a week, it’s not sufficiently hard enough to use to justify my job”. After I got my iPhone, it was on our mail server, using push services in less than 7 minutes. It was so simple, that anyone who has sent a home email account with an ISP could do it. That’s a large number of people.

“The iPhone touch screen keyboard is inaccurate and slow”
“Physical keyboards are better”
“I want to be able to type without looking”
I have yet to measure my words per minute on the iPhone. What I can tell you, is that I have typed out multi-page emails on the iPhone. They were typed very quickly. I did not have to get bandaids when I was done from clicking hard “Q” buttons.

The autocorrect on the iPhone is frustrating when lost. I find myself pointing at my computer throughout the day saying, “You know, my iPhone would have gotten that right. Why can’t you?” The autocorrect is a true killer feature. It is what allows quick typing without excessive focus on hitting the right key. There are some obvious ones it can’t get. For example: dog vs fog. Both have roughly the same pattern on the screen. That’s about the only draw back to it I can think of.

The screen requires very little contact to type. When watching smartphone users try the iPhone for the first time, they make the exact same mistake I did when I picked it up. Pressing too hard. When you do that, it creates a huge target area, which can lead to mis reads. The best touch is the one you can barely feel. By using a lite touch, you can type excessively fast, and your fingers do not hurt.

Typing without looking. I think some one made this one up on the fly without thinking. These are smartphones. They keyboard is attached to the screen. What… do you close you eyes while typing? seriously? Some would say it is for typing in the dark. But again, that’s from lack of experience. The iPhone has no issues with darkness. Or bright sunlight for that matter.

Accuracy. I don’t know how else to put this. The algorithms apple uses to figure out finger position is black magic. I do not understand it. It should not be possible. With a co-worker testing me. I loaded up a search for all pizza restaurants in the quincy area. It came up with four. Two of them happened to be very close together in the default zoom level. They completely overlapped, except for a couple pixels. I was able to reliably click on the requested push pin every time. It is important to point out that there is no screen calibration tool for the iPhone. Apple is doing something very different here, and everyone needs to figure out what it is and copy it. It will change computing. Here we have better than stylus accuracy with a finger tip, and after less than a week with the device.

“GSM on the iPhone takes five minutes to load an email”
I’m not even sure this deserves a response. It doesn’t. But this is typical of the baseless FUD being spewed these days. So, how long does it really take? Text emails are instant. Doesn’t matter how long they are. An Apple HTML email with a couple logos, like a receipt, takes seven seconds. But how about the mother of all emails. A weekly itunes alert. These bad boys hurt even desktop readers… so what’s the damage? fourteen seconds to full readable html layout, twenty seven for all images to complete loading. That’s about ten times better than five minutes. My gripe with the email app is that it does not support rotation. According to apple’s guidelines, it definitely should. Maybe in a future release.

“Apple will never update the iPhone. Cellphones can’t be patched”
1.0.2. Next.

I guess at some point I should go back and link to all the sites these claims were made from. Maybe. We’ll see.

For now, how about we measure the iPhone on merit, vs baseless slander.

For me, it is worth every penny of it’s cost. Some (Steve Balmer) would argue that it is the most expensive phone ever, and that would be more than a little in accurate. Right now a treo 650 goes for between 300-450 dollars without a special plan. Basically the same price range. Unfortunately, ATT does not offer a rebate/deal at this point. Maybe some day.

Once again, I hit a wall when trying to integrate all my databases here at work. This time, I was stymied by the fact that even though Cisco CCM runs it’s database on MS SQL server, the system does not use native date/time formats. Instead it decides to use the industry standard… number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. So I have a huge long integer. No problem right? I’ll just put it through Crystal’s formula engine. Except I get an error telling me the year is out of range.

Turns out the Crystal Date functions are based upon DAYS, not seconds. and the base date is 1900, not 1970. So, in order to make this work, I need to convert our integer from seconds to days, and then offset our number by 70 years. So what’s the solution?

CDateTime ({call manager date value}/(24*60*60)+(Date (1970, 1, 1)-Date (1900, 1, 1)))

You are welcome.

So… there is this really bad nasty out there right now. Fortunately, the researchers have been busy and have found a couple ways to help dealing with this bad boy… but they forgot one small detail. How in the hell are you going to get registry changes out to the thousands of hosts on your network? Well, here you go. it is a GPO extension that allows you to push registry changes out to all of your machines. You will need to install a client GPO extension on each machine, but this is done through a GPO as well. You can find the client extension in the program files folder after you install the admin software on your machine. I have deployed it here on a mixture of xp and 200o machines without trouble. No reboots either. Drop in your changes and a couple hours from now you can rest a little easier.

Seems Dell has taken the most interesting step of deleting their online forums. The Register has a great quote related to the fiasco:

Part of the problem seems to have stemmed from Jeff Jarvis, a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner, who summed up his anger in a letter to a Dell VP, saying: “This machine is a lemon. Your at-home and complete care service is a fraud. Your customer service is appalling. Your product is dreadful. Your brand is mud.”

I could not sum it up better. And I have evidence to back it up… Just search my Blog.

Well, this stint was short lived. The iPod photo, with it’s lovely features and wonderful screen… is once again going back to it’s creator to work out some serious stamina issues. I was hopefull when it first came back in the mail that it was working better, but a few days with it has shown the same bizzare battery drain issues as before. I called Apple to work things out with them, and they feel it could possibly be a defect in the unit, rather than the battery. That would explain the constant drain problem, and while the playtime is not what it should be. I can’t even get through an 8-hour work day. It looks like the unit will be replaced this time through. I wish they would have spent more time with the unit, or called me when they could not find a problem when they had it last time. They did offer to replace it at a local Apple store, but unfortunately, there are no local stores. 🙁

I had quite a little scare here that I forgot to write about. I bought an iPod photo last month for my trip to china in august. Unfortunately for me… the battery started acting up two weeks after I got it… I started to freak out thinking that maybe my car adaptor was frying batteries or something. It would charge ok, but the charge would only last for 6-8 hours, and if I left it over night it would be deadthe next day. I sent it off to Apple to see what they could come up with. I was quite concerned when the dispatch showed up as returning the original item. But the pack arrived today, and my ipod was inside, fully charged. Yea! Maybe I messed up the charging profile or something. I’m just happy to have my iPod back!

I discovered today, and confirmed with Symantec tech support, that there is a problem running Symantec Client Security (antivirus) on windows XP. Starting a week ago, we began to notice here that random machines were showing up with 20 or more “disconnected” drive letters. I’m not talking about the normal disconnected drives we have had since Windows 95. These phantom drives go no where, and cannot be disconnected or remapped. And they are not nice enough to stay off “normal” drive mappings. If a mapped drive letter is “taken” by this bug, you cannot get it back. And If all driver letters are taken, then you are truly screwed. Attempting to “net use /delete” results in an error telling you the resource cannot be found. Trying “net use \\server_name\drive” results in an error telling you the resource is in use. Fun fun fun.

We tried service packs, hot fixes, deleting profile, and creating new users. No luck what so ever. Luckily, after some brainstorming, I decided to try removing Symantec Client Security v10. This corrected the issue.

Symantec at this point does not know why this problem is occurring, or when a fix may be found. The current estimate is for MR1 in 4-8 weeks.

The Red Ferret Journal seems to have broken a story that showed up on slashdot earlier last week. It’s the printer I have always dreamed of building… only better and crazy fast. This thing is a monster. Some quick math by Bad[k] comes up with a consumption of about 1 liter of ink per hour… and that come to about 9000-12000 pages of full color prints.