Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

I’ve been idly considering buying a Tablet PC for a while. I went to Sams’ yesterday to look for toilet paper and paper towels, and I ended up with an Acer TravelMate C102 tablet. This is one of the original Tablet PCs; it has a Pentium-III 800 CPU, a 20 (or maybe 30, I forget) GB drive, and 256MB of RAM. It also had lots of scratches on the case and a little sign saying “last one– $1168”. At that price, and given Sams’ 6-month return policy, that seemed like a pretty good deal. (It turns out that the listed price of $1499 is actually more than what other Sams’ sell the same unit for $1387). Anyway, once I got it home, I was able to bring it right up, install the 27 security patches that WU recommended, and start tableting.
For now, it’s hard to tell whether I’ll keep it. Microsoft Reader is terrific (especially since MS is giving away three free full-length books each week). I love the size and form factor, realizing that this isn’t a replacement for my trusty ThinkPad. On the other hand… this unit is practically obsolete by tablet standards; for another $500 I could get a newer unit with a much faster CPU and more RAM (the C102 I have is limited to a max of 256MB). The keyboard has a terribly sticky space bar, and the rotating latch on which the screen pivots is very loose. Those should be fixable under warranty, though, so I’m going to keep this one for a month or so and see if I use it enough to justify keeping it. If so, then I’ll decide whether to keep it or buy a more powerful version.

Dad’s GPS-to-laptop cable suffered a bit of a failure: the DB-9 connector on the PC end pulled right off. I searched valiantly at Google for “GPS III cable pinout”, only to find lots of chatter about using GPS III or III+ units for APRS. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. In a fit of despair, I went to Garmin’s site and found a FAQ on PC wiring. That in turn linked to a PDF wiring diagram. I’m posting this in hopes that Google will index it so that the next person with a salt-rotted cable will be able to quickly find what they need.

I’ve tweaked the site layout to accomodate the presence of Google AdSense ads. I think they’re unobtrusive, and when you click on them you help support the cost of maintaining this site. There are still a few browser-specific bugs in my CSS layout, which I’ll gradually eliminate as I get better with CSS. Thanks for your patience!

So, thanks to Julie’s inspiration, I now have Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever as my phone’s ring tone. Bring on the fireworks. This process was relatively straightforward:

1. Install Kyocera’s MP3 maker, which takes an MP3 file and produces a .pdb file.
2. Move the Sousa file out of my iTunes Music folder and put it back in my shared folder where it’s supposed to be
3. Sync the shared folder with my ThinkPad
4. Run the MP3 utility, producing a file named “stars.mp3.pdb”
5. Helpfully rename the file and copy it onto my SD card.
6. Struggle with figuring out why the file doesn’t appear (hint: it doesn’t appreciate being renamed to “stars.pdb” vice “stars.mp3.pdb”)
7. Say “to hell with it” and sync the phone normally
8. Soft reset
9. Profit! (no, wait, that comes later)
10. Notice that the ringtone appears in Prefs Phone where it belongs.
11. Crank up the volume and enjoy.

(And let’s not forget that traditional toast: “God bless the United States, and success to the Marines!”)

This is extremely nifty. From Dave Farber’s IP list:

With today’s release of AIM4.6b1.1131, the capability has been added to
allow AIM users to send SMS messages to mobile phones. All you do is type
the message you want to send as an SMS into a new IM window and change the
screenname field to +16175551212. Replace 6175551212 with the phone number of the SMS-capable mobile phone. The “+1” is the country code, which is required; however, I don’t think AOL supports non-US numbers yet, but they
do plan to.
To utilize this cool feature in iChat, simply type Shift-Command-N for a “New Chat with Person,” and enter the phone number in the above format. When you send the message, you’ll receive confirmation from AOL that it was sent. Pretty neat!

I tested this and it works like a charm. Finally, a use for iChat 🙂
Update: As Mike Wendland and I found out, it does matter if you enter the “+1” before the phone number.

I got some interesting statistics on TechEd today. Based on the number of people who physically attended each session, messaging and development tools/technologies had almost exactly the same number of attendees– within 2%– even though there were twice as many dev sessions as messaging sessions. That’s completely opposite to what I would have expected. Interestingly, the security and web servics tracks had about th same number of attendees and sessions, but security attendees turned in twice as many evaluations. I guess the web services folks were too busy blogging 🙂
Happily, the security track got the best overall rating (7.5, w00t!), thanks in large measure to the redoubtable Steve Riley– he placed two sessions in the top 10 overall. However, he was humbled by Kimberly Tripp, whoever she is, who got 4 on SQL– guess I’d better hit one of her sessions next year.)

For those of you who couldn’t make it to TechEd this year, here‘s the presentation that Andy Webb and I did. (In fairness, I should give props to Rob Howard, from whom I got the idea to post my deck.)

In years past, all the TechEd and MEC evaluations have been done on paper forms that were scanned. This gave quick results (last year at MEC, I had my numbers in less than an hour after the session), but if you couldn’t coax attendees into filling out the form, too bad for you. This year, Microsoft extended the process to allow attendees to fill out online evals up to a week after the show. (Denise describes it here). Accordingly, my numbers weren’t fully baked until last night, but now I have the final scores (n=61): overall score was 7.9/9.0, with speaker scores of 8.3 (knowledge) and 8.1 (presentation skills), and a “how does this apply to your work?” rating of 8.0. I’m delighted! These numbers are good enough that I don’t have to go to TechEd China or Malaysia! (That’s a joke, although with MGB looming I’m happy to not have any more extended travel right now).

Among all the other TechEd bloggers, I was delighted to see that Denise Smith has a blog. For those who don’t know her, Denise does an incredible job each year juggling the myriad demands of various speakers and track owners. If she posts enough juicy behind-the-scenes details, she’ll no doubt be the star of next year’s blogger meeting.

The TechEd speaker support folks worked some magic over the weekend and found me a hotel room. This might not sound like a big deal, but when faced between the choice of sleeping on a park bench near the Dallas convention center or having a room, I vote for the latter. As I write this, I’m in the air; after I arrive, I have to hit the speaker’s lounge and make a few changes to my slides, then I’m free until rehersal at 7:30. After that, the magazine folks have scheduled a dinner at Landry’s, but it’ll be an early night– I have a challenging presentation tomorrow and I want to be fresh.
Update: the bloggers’ meeting was really cool. I only caught the first 20 minutes or so, thanks to one phone call from home and my session rehearsal, but I enjoyed what I saw. I was particularly aware of being one of the only non-developers there– I guess I’m the token systems/admin guy. This is a bit of a reversal for me, since my degree’s in CS and my first career was writing code. Perhaps I should get back into it.
Lots of cool stuff on the show floor, but nothing I can report on; I didn’t attend any sessions, either. You’ll have to get your meaningful news elsewhere. Though I did have a great dinner with Paul Thurrott, Michele Crockett, Kim Paulsen, and a bunch of other cool folks from the mag, it was all gossip and no news 🙂

This is pretty cool: an aggregated site (or wiki) of bloggers who are speaking at or attending TechEd. I just added myself, but my blog isn’t there yet. Dan Fernandez listed his session picks; I already listed mine over here. I arrive midday Monday and will hit the bloggers meeting, have dinner with the Windows & .NET Magazine folks, and speak on Tuesday afternoon. In between, I may actually get to go to a session, but more likely I’ll catch up with various vendors, friends, customers, and potential customers.

All right, here’s the link: Stickers For Hackers. Now please send me my free sticker. (Hat tip: J-Dawg.)

This has many cool applications. I don’t know what they are, though.

So, this is my first real opportunity to test Outlook 2003’s cached mode on a real road trip; I’m in Seattle for an Exchange 2003 airlift. I use Outlook 2003 for three accounts: my home account, my work account, and my Microsoft account. The first two are homed on the same server (for the time being), fronted by ISA Server so I can access them without a VPN. The third requires me to VPN in to Microsoft; at least, it did before I enabled RPC over HTTP yesterday.
I made sure to let Outlook catch up my MS mailbox before I left, with the happy result that I could plow through the 2500+ unread messages in it while flying to Seattle, but I ignored the other two to give cached mode a fair trial. When I arrived at the hotel, I plugged in my laptop, signed on to the in-room broadband connection ,and ttweaked my HOSTS file to point to the external IP of the mail server. While unpacking, I let my personal account sync; while brushing my teeth and sleeping, I let the work account catch up. When I awoke, I had a full inbox, which for me is the equivalent of having the morning paper waiting on the front step when I get up. I was able to blitz through the accumulated mail and get right to work. I left the hotel and went over to the convention center for breakfast and registration. After registering, I was able to plug in to a network drop, quickly pick up new mail in all three accounts, and enter the keynote session. Throughout the day, I could pop in and out to send queued replies and pick up new messages with a minimum of disruption. If only synchronizing offline files worked as well as this does! Big kudos to the Outlook team for building something that “just works”.

This is really cool: a useful, well-implemented, legal, reasonably priced way to buy and download music. It supports mobile devices, CD burning, and lots of other stuff. At $0.99/song or $9.99/album, I’m planning on fleshing out my collection. bbum has some good technical details on how the system works. Windows users, eat your heart out. Wait… I’m a Windows user too. Curses! Cognitive dissonance!
Update: Actually, this might turn out to be a problem. I normally listen to my music in three ways: on my desktop Mac, on my Windows XP laptop, or in the car. The Mac and car are no problem, but music from the Apple Store is encoded with AAC, not MPEG-3. There’s no AAC codec for Windows, and apparently burning AAC to CD and re-ripping to MP3 produces crappy quality. This might be a problem, at least until Apple ships an AAC codec for Windows.
Update again: I’ve bought a half-dozen or so tracks from the store. The experience has been flawless so far, and it’s nice to be able to fill in some of the holes in my collection.