Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

Well, the move isn’t 100% complete; I still have to install MT-Blacklist, tweak the CSS, and do a few other things of that nature. However, I’m well on schedule to give pair the boot by month’s end.

Amazon is offering the Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone for a net payment of $25, e.g. you get a new phone plus $25. I played with one of these for a few minutes at the AT&T store in Ann Arbor last week, and it’s a very impressive device. The screen is brilliant and crisp, and the phone is much smaller and lighter than my trusty 7135. It also features Bluetooth, which would be extremely useful for wireless headsets and for tying to my laptop. (It also has some other cool features, like Windows Media Player 10, that I probably wouldn’t use). I have a few concerns, though.

First, I’m very used to entering text with a stylus; I’ve had a Palm for about seven years now. I don’t do a lot of text entry– mostly just appointments and such, so I think (but am not sure) that I’d be OK with using T9 on the phone keypad, but I won’t really know that until I have a chance to try it.

Second, I’ve been very satisfied with Verizon’s wireless coverage, both here and when I travel. I don’t know how good AT&T’s local coverage is, because I don’t know anyone here who has it, but (at least to me) it doesn’t matter how good the phone is if I can’t make or receive calls when I want to.

Next, it would mean going back to Outlook for syncing, instead of Entourage. That’s a problem because I often use Entourage to create notes and tasks while working, and Entourage can’t sync them with my Exchange server. That might be a deal-breaker. There are at least two Mac sync utilities for Windows Mobile devices: Missing Sync (which explicitly says it doesn’t support the SMT5600) and PocketMac (which, I’ve been told, has stability and support difficulties).

Finally, I’d have to replace some of the applications I now use. This probably isn’t a big deal, since most of them are games, but there are a few (like TikTok and Directory Assistant) don’t seem to have Windows Mobile counterparts. I’m also comfortable with the way DateBk5 integrates calendar and to-do data, and I don’t know if the mobile version of Outlook has similar features. In fact, it’s not even clear to me if you can install third-party apps on these devices; it seems to vary by carrier.

So, if you’re reading this and a) you use AT&T, b) you have an SMT5600, or c) you work for the MacBU, feel free to leave comments answering the above points 🙂

Update 1: turns out that Windows Mobile doesn’t natively support Outlook notes anyway. There’s at least one third-party app (SmartphoneNotes) that does, but I don’t know if it works on the AT&T phones.
Update 2: Two of my 3sharp coworkers wrote to say that AT&T coverage in our Redmond office is poor, so that’s a minus. On the other hand, the Windows IT Pro people want an article on Exchange ActiveSync, for which I need a device, so it looks like I’ll get one and take advantage of AT&T’s 30-day trial period. I found solutions for managing tasks and notes on the Smartphone, so if I can resolve the sync difficulties I should be golden.

Thanks to the brain surgeons at SIxApart and Pair Networks, my MovableType upgrade has quickly gone off into the weeds.

• Pair’s resource limits are killing the mt-upgrade30 script before it can finish, so there are no comments.
• All my comments disappeared because the upgrade script can’t put them in the new format
• MT-Blacklist doesn’t work, in no small part because of its terrible documentation, but also because Pair doesn’t give enough detail in their error logs for me to figure out what’s broken
• Some part of the upgrade ate all my CSS, so my layouts have reverted to standard.

I’ll get it fixed eventually. In the meantime, please be patient.

Now I know what Thomas is going to want for Christmas: a hyopallergenic cat. Allerca is busy “working to produce the world’s first hypoallergenic cats”. They’re trying to suppress the gene that expresses a protein called Fel d 1, which is actually what most cat-allergic people react to. It turns out that different breeds of cat produce different amounts of Fel d 1, but I don’t know which breeds make the least (or most; this page lists a few breeds, none of which I’ve ever heard of). I did find one cite that said that female cats make much less than males do– good to know.

Anyway, Allerca will sell you a hypoallergenic cat– assuming they figure out how to suppress the gene– for a mere $3,500, with a $250 deposit due now. Perhaps Thomas would rather have something else.

This is extremely cool! Worldwind is a live, 3D Earth globe with satellite and topographic data, backed by an extensive place names database. The zooming and panning effects are pretty neat on my laptop; tonight I’ll hook it up to the projector and show the boys. (Not coincidentally, it’s also a great example of what a Windows smart client should be).

As I mentioned on the other blog, Mac Office 2004 SP1 released today.

Excellent! Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2004. I haven’t found a list of fixes yet, and I’m away from my Mac so I can’t download it to try it out. It’s supposed to be available via the Microsoft AutoUpdate tool or directly from the MS Mac page.

PalmOne hasn’t announced it yet, but the new Treo 650 might very well be my ideal phone: it has the 320×320 screen I’ve been lusting after since Arlene got her Tungsten E, plus a thumb keyboard, plus Bluetooth, plus a camera. Best of all, it has Exchange ActiveSync. Various sources differ on which carriers will support it when it ships; Engadget says that Verizon will carry it, and over at TreoCentral there are several posts on Sprint and T-Mobile availability.

Continue reading →

Jon Udell has a very, very cool bookmarklet: click a button while visiting Amazon (or any other page that contains an ISBN in its URL) and automatically request the book from your local public library. (Way Public Library uses iPac as their catalog system, so that’s the button to pick on Jon’s page). What a great piece of work!

Last night, my inbound connectivity failed. As near as I can tell, the last inbound message spotted by the mail filter was at 2348, so let’s say the outage started around then. This morning, I called Buckeye as soon as I got up and noticed the outage. “No, Perrysburg is up. I’d have noticed a lot of calls if it were down,” said the support tech. He promised to call me back by 0830, which of course he didn’t do. When I called them back at 0915, lo and behold: Perrysburg is down, with no ETA for a fix. I called my sales rep to see whether this is expected support practice. I’m definitely wondering if I should go back to Speakeasy, even though it is twice as expensive.
Update: they did fix it about five minutes ago, and Mark was kind enough to call me and let me know that it had been fixed. Apparently the Perrysburg router failed.

So, to my dismay I found out that Buckeye doesn’t support voice-over-IP. I plugged in my Vonage box and got nothing but dead air, so I called their tech support and got the bad news. Apparently they’re testing it at a limited number of sites, and I’m asking them to add me to the test group. This may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that Buckeye Telesystem is an ILEC here in town, or that they’ve partnered with VoEx. Still, I really don’t like the idea that my service provider is filtering the protocols I can use. Their job is to sell me connectivity, not to decide how I use that connectivity. This isn’t a problem I ever had with Speakeasy, so perhaps I was hasty to switch away from them.
Update: As I noted in the comments, Buckeye does support Vonage. The problem was with my Vonage hardware (and, of course, with their technician making stuff up). I had a very pleasant conversation with Corinne Jensen of Buckeye Telesystem. She told me that what they’re actually testing is residential voice service, not using VoIP, to compete with SBC. I said “sign me up!” but it’s only available to employees at present. So, now it’s all good.

You’d think that I would have learned my lesson after my earlier post about free Xboxes, but nooo…
Lately I’ve been getting 5-10 spams a week for freeipods.com. The claim is that you can get a completely free iPod Mini (or 20GB, or 250 iTunes Music Store songs) for free. The deal is supposedly that you sign up with their service and complete one of their “offers”, ranging from the onerous (signing up for a GM Card credit card) to the simple (registering at eBay and bidding on something). Once you’ve done that, you have to get five friends or family members to complete one of the offers, and voila! goodies for you. I was reading Engadget the other day and saw that, lo and behold, freeipods.com is actually legit. What really confirmed it for me was seeing the conga line on FlyerTalk, plus this article.
Naturally, I signed up– I mean, who wouldn’t? My 15GB iPod is nice but has no headphones, dock, or remote, and the newer units are cooler 🙂 This falls squarely into the “why not” category. Now all I need is some referrals. The process is very simple:

1. Drop by the freeipods site
2. Sign up for one of the offers. The eBay offer is free and doesn’t require a credit card or other obnoxiousness. I signed up for AOL for Broadband because AOL, although annoying, is reputable, and I know they’ll cancel my free trial account when I ask them to.
3. You’ll get your own referral link. Get five of your friends, relatives, blog readers, or random street people to sign up using your referral link. (Feel free to post your referral link in the comments, too!)
4. Wait for the UPS man to bring your iPod.

This is the best description I’ve ever seen of Apple’s product development cycle.

Penton Media owns two of the magazines I regularly write for: Windows & .NET Magazine and the Exchange and Outlook Administrator newsletter. While at the grain elevator yesterday, I learned that Penton also publishes Occupational Hazards. Now there’s my kind of magazine!

I have two Gmail invitations available. Who wants ’em?