bu-bhut-sa

Groove IP with Google talk and Google Voice - pure joy

2011-12-08T11:11:00.001-05:00

This post is about my experience in setting up Groove IP with Google Voice and Google talk on Nexus S 4G (that is currently flashed to work just great on PagePlus)

Login to Google Voice and get a 'free' number. I could not port my number as Google Voice said that they do not support my area (at the time of writing this post).
Configure Google Voice to forward calls to Google talk in the settings.
Install Google Voice on the phone (It came pre-installed on Nexus S 4G); Login and set it to start everytime phone starts.
Install Google Talk on the phone; Ensure that the chat is turned off everywhere else. (Go to gmail->settings->chat tab->turn off) and save the changes. This is a *must* as Groove IP can forward call to only one google talk instance.
At this point, do not assume that calls get forwarded automatically to your phone (even though Google Talk is installed and is running). The forwarding will work on all other google talk instances, if they are logged in (in gmail, google talk application).For the forwarding to work on Android, Groove IP is needed.
Download and install Groove IP from Android Marketplace and set it up as follows:

Configure google username and password. If you are so paranoid about not giving out your google password to Groove IP, use google's 2 step authentication and provide that password. More info here
Check 'Accept Calls On Answer'
Check 'AutoStart'
Select Native Dailer Options->Built-in Dialer preference->Ask every call. This will popup a dialog before every outgoing call asking you to confirm if you would like to make that call using 'Groove IP' or traditional calling method. I like this very much. Later in the future, I might select another option 'Use Groove IP' on Wifi only.

That's it.

So far, the call quality is very good. (Needless to say, quality of the call depends on the Wifi though)

I would like to be able to do this for my other Android phone (Droid X2).

TruConnect Prepaid Broadband review

2011-12-02T14:06:00.001-05:00

I recently got an Android based Nexus S 4G phone and replaced my old Palm Pixi on PagePlus. I did not activate data as it was proving it to be a bit costly if I used data on PagePlus (Verizon MVNO) network. And looking at the historical usage of data on iPhone with AT&T (I was with AT&T for the last 2+ years), it seemed that I was rarely crossing 200MB/month and almost zeroed on Virgin Mobile for it -- But I'd still have to shell out $20 a month for 1GB (this is only if I got the Mifi device at Walmart). I almost resigned to the fact that I have to live with this.

That's where TruConnect comes. I accidentally bumped into this while reading some reviews on Virgin Mifi at slickdeals.net (Thanks to user PatrickShelley on that forum). TruConnect is *really* what I was looking for - A real pay-as-you-use 3G internet provider. TruConnect uses Sprint network - More info about them on their site here.

So I ordered a Mifi device a week or so ago and activated it just yesterday and I must say that the speeds are pretty impressive (after the initial activation hiccup). Works just fine out of the box. The best part about TruConnect is that you pay a flat fee of $4.99 a month (assuming you never use any data in that month). What makes this even sweeter is that one can 'deactivate' the Mifi and not pay that $4.99 fee! How cool is that. (There is some fine print here - something on the lines of Mifi needing activation atleast once in some 3 months or so - I am not totally sure on this though.Check out their website for more of these details).

There is very little info on the web about the experiences people had with this provider (aka reviews), thought would write my experience. I must refute few other reviews on the web that say TruConnect's customer service is not good. That is not the case. Agreed they do not have 1-800 number , but they responded promptly when I created a support ticket yesterday with the issue I had activating the device. Too, getting with someone on their online chat was instant and the representative was helpful and knowledgeable as well.

Overall, its very very good for someone who uses <~200-300 MB per month. Certainly not for high end you-tubers/gamers.

Thanks, TruConnect for coming up with an idea targeted at low-end 3G data consumption users like me.

TruConnect prepaid internet activation issue

2011-12-01T14:55:00.001-05:00

Well, I was very excited when I received the TruConnect Mifi 2200 router couple of days ago. Since it's a pay-as-you-go 3G internet (TruConnect is a Sprint MVNO) and the billing starts on 1st of every month, I waited until today (Dec 1) to activate it and this is the error I get. Tried different credit cards and same error. My bank tells me that the cards are good and are not flagged

When I contacted TruConnect's support desk, (initially created a support ticket) and later got hold of someone on chat (there is no 1-800-number, and that is OK), I was told that there is a 'system error at the moment'. Let me try activating after couple of hours and see what happens.

Update: I did try to activate it after couple of hours and I was able to succesfully activate and connect and surf.

Howto flash Nexus S 4G on PagePlus

2011-11-29T14:19:00.001-05:00

Here are the steps involved in activating a Nexus S 4G (Sprint version) to Page plus (thanks to user fibrizo at howardforums.com and user chrisngrod at cricketusers.com -- The details of those posts are below):

Note: I am using Windows 7 SP1 (64 bit)

Call up PagePlus and get a new phone number(MDN) and MIN number - Give them your phone's MEID number or HEX number. (something that starts with A and followed by couple of 0's). Both MIN and MDN will contain 10 digits.
Rooting - I used the procedure mentioned here and it works like charm. There is a video tutorial as well. Really a simple one-click root.
Flashing for Voice and Text (SMS) *ONLY*-

Search and download and install CDMA workshop 2.7
Download Samsung drivers from here and install. Make sure that phone is not connected during installation of these drivers. **DO NOT** install from the location where Windows asks you to install - Those will not work. Note that they are for a different model, but work just fine. SPH-D720 is the Sprint version of Nexus S 4G.
Dial *#*#8778#*#* on the phone - Select 'modem' under USB.
Connect the phone - The PC should detect the phone and when the device manager is opened, you should see this phone under COM ports -- Note down the COM port that this phone is on (COM1, COM2 etc)
Open CDMA Workshop 2.7. In the main tab select the appropriate COM port and click 'Connect'
Click Security tab and in password section, select 'Default Samsung'. Click Send. This will unlock the phone. A success message would be displayed as well
In the Security tab (again), under SPC section, type 000000 (six zeros), click SPC and click Write. A success message will be displayed
Click on NAM tab and type MIN and MDN in appropriate fields. One of them is named as is and the other one goes into Directory_Entry or something like that.
Click Write and a success message would show up.
PRL write - Download a pageplus PRL (google it for latest version) and click on Other tab and under PRL section select 'Universal' and 'NAM1' and click Write and select the PRL file location and that's it. A success message would show up
Click disconnect on main tab and remove the cable from phone
Dial *#*#8778#*#* on the phone - Select 'PDA' under USB.
Activate the phone by calling *22890.
You should now have voice and text (SMS) working.

I did not go further with activating/flashing MMS/3G related functionality as I do not need them. I plan on using TruConnect (a mobile wifi router with pay-as-you-go 3G internet). More on TruConnect in my next post when I activate it on December 1.

Big thanks to user fibrizo at howardforums.com. This thread over there was very useful.

Another big thank you to user chrisngrod at cricketusers.com. This thread was very helpful as well.

If-and-when I get around flashing the MMS/Data related functionality, I will update this post and/or write a new one.

There is something about ERI.xml to remove/replace the carrier name text that is shown on the phone's home screen and in other locations that I just did -- Its very easy.

Optimize/Reduce data transfer on 3G/4G (Ubuntu OS)

2011-05-04T09:24:00.001-04:00

There is a really good post on achieving this. Given the data caps and tiered pricing by the phone providers for 3G/4G services, it is very important that the data transfer be minimized on a operating system while the 3G/4G USB dongle is plugged in.

Browser related settings:

Create a new chrome profile for 3G purposes.

I created a new profile called ‘android’ as follows(I have a chrome ‘unstable’/dev build installed):

user@myubuntu:~$ google-chrome --user-data-dir="./config/google-chrome/android" -first-run
Create a launcher on the desktop that points to the newly created android profile and set the command string as follows

/opt/google/google-chrome %U --user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; en-US;) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version 4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1” --user-data-dir=”/home/<username>/.config/google-chrome/android”

Disable following in Preferences->Under the hood

Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors
Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar
Predict network actions to improved page load performance
Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google

Disable ‘Sync’ in Preferences->Personal Stuff
Disable the following in chrome://settings (type this in address bar):

Disable hyperlink auditing
Experimental location features

Use/Enable AdBlock/Flash block extensions in the browser and enable ‘click on play’ in browser so unwanted add-ons/data do not get downloaded at all.

OS related settings:

Stop update manager checking automatically for updates. (System->Administration->Update Manager –> Settings –> Clear all checkboxes in Updates Tab):
Disable Ubuntu One (cloud service)

Note : Configuring this 3G/4G friendly operating system as a virtual OS (using VirtualBox) gives the additional flexibility of configuring/using the host OS on a network interface that is different from the network interface used by the guest OS. This is especially useful at workplace where the host OS needs to be on the corporate LAN. The network traffic does not overlap/intersect at all!!!

Issue: PC player disconnects with Vulkano after nn minutes

2011-05-02T14:06:00.001-04:00

**NOTE** YMMV with this issue. I think that this issue has to do more with my router than with the Vulkano. So do not tinker around, just because you read this post and a workaround/fix is posted here. This fix may be applicable if you have the same setup as mine.

I have been facing a disconnect with Vulkano every 20 minutes from my remote PC player and I had this issue for about couple of days. Just had to configure the Dlink DIR-615 router (with a Hardware version C1 and Firmware version 3.11NA) as follows:

Change the router wirelss ‘mode’ from ‘802.11n only’ to ‘Mixed 802.11n and 802.11g’
Change the encryption to WEP, with a WEP key length of 64 bit (10 hex digits), Open authentication a WEP key 1 as default WEP key.

(other settings that are not changed are:Enable Auto Channel Scan – Yes, WirelessChannel – 7 [greyed out], Channel Width – Auto 20/40 Mhz and Visibility status is Visible.)

As a learning from this, I think that it is always safer to connect the Vulkano (or any client) for that matter using a wired connection with the router, especially when watching any (live in particular) video streams.

There have been no (yes, ‘0’) dropouts ever since.

Placeshifting with Vulkano and tata sky and airtel

2011-04-08T10:47:00.002-04:00

Well, continuing on my cord cutting adventure, I recently got a place shifting device at $99 (on sale) at myvulkano.com and I am very happy with the initial experience.
Not much is available on the web with people sharing their experiences (similar to my scenario), hence this post.
The hardware(set top box) is called Vulkano Platinum (for those familiar with SlingBox, this is very much like it). This does not do HD streaming (and I did not need it anyway, given my upload speed limitation where this set top box is located/installed).
More specs can be had here and here.
Few key notes:

Voltage supported is universal (110-240v)
Does not have an on/off switch – This is good, because the box will turn on automatically in case of a power blackout/restore.
PC Player is good
Remote support is good (out-of-box, it has support for US based cable/satellite boxes and their remotes)
When the PC player is set to full screen, + and – keys are channel up/down and the number keys in quick succession will be the channel numbers.

I installed the box in Bangalore, India and hooked up with the tata sky (not tata sky plus, not tata sky HD, just regular one) set top box. Vulkano support team helped me with the remote codes (S0898_Axum.bin) for that set top box. In fact, this file is already available when the PC player is installed in the following folder:
C:\Program Files\Monsoon Multimedia\Vulkano\Setup Wizard
The PC player also comes with a tata sky remote ‘skin’ so that the remote in the PC player looks exactly like the original tata sky remote. How cool is that!
Another nicety with tata sky is that they provide an additional set top box free of charge – A dedicated STB for Vulkano is always good. Otherwise, remote watching and local watching will have to be content with 1 channel always – Any change in channel locally will affect the remote viewing (in PC player) and vice versa.
The ISP there is Airtel (with max. uploads of 1Mbps). Works pretty good at speeds as low as 400kbps.
Iphone player works great too.
The only flip side to this experience is that the PC player does not work all that well on my AMD laptop (single core CPU V-120 with ATI 4250 HD chipset) – Perhaps a future update to the player will resolve this. I have this laptop as HTPC connected to my Hitachi 51F59 TV. Somehow, I need to get this to work on my laptop.
On an Intel dual core Pentium D+XMA4500, it is flawless.
Both of the PCs are running Windows 7 (64-bit)

Update: The issue on single core CPU laptop was resolved after replacing the CPU with a triple core CPU (AMD Phenom II N830). I suppose, the PC player requires a double core CPU *at the least*

Another glitch seems to be with the local viewing – If the TV is connected to Vulkano for local watching, there seems to be slight latency/frame delay- This seems to be more evident with sports channels (eg., soccer) – I wonder why the local output needs to be taken through encode/decode cycle when a ‘bypass’ may just work. Perhaps a future upgrade of firmware will resolve this.
Next step – To get PC player to work with MCE remote (since the channels can be changed with the keyboard keys - #5 above)
All in all, I am happy and excited with this step bringing me closer to the complete cord cutting.

Cambridge silicon radio compatible bluetooth driver – bluesoleil or ivt corporation

2011-04-08T10:21:00.001-04:00

I recently got a USB bluetooth dongle for about two dollars and when I tried pairing my headset (Rocketfish RF-MAB2) with it on an Windows XP, it would not work.

After a bit of scratching-my-head-and-googling, I realized that the default bluetooth drivers that come with XP are of no use -- So the next thing was to find a compatible driver and guess what – The dongle did not have any accompanying software. Well, that makes sense since I paid just about $2 for it and I got it from focalprice.com.

So it seems that bluesoleil drivers are compatible with this dongle (manufacturer as detected by XP is Cambridge Silicon Radio or CSR). But the recent versions of driver from bluesoleil come at a cost.

I then read on the focalprice forum that an older version of bluesoleil driver works – Take a look at the first post in this link.

And yes, it works like charm on XP SP3. (It seems that the bluesoleil drivers, when installed, show up as drivers by IVT corporation)

Good luck.

“Microsoft Excel cannot access the file error” with .net app with Excel 2010 related code

2011-02-11T15:06:00.001-05:00

Problem:

I have a .net app that uses Microsoft Excel API and it works just fine if I run it as a standalone. When I try running it as a scheduled task on Windows 7 (64-bit), it gives the following error:

“Microsoft Excel cannot access the file '\\share\file.xls'. There are several possible reasons:

• The file name or path does not exist.

• The file is being used by another program.

• The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open workbook.:: at Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Workbooks.Open(String Filename, Object UpdateLinks, Object ReadOnly, Object Format, Object Password, Object WriteResPassword, Object IgnoreReadOnlyRecommended, Object Origin, Object Delimiter, Object Editable, Object Notify, Object Converter, Object AddToMru, Object Local, Object CorruptLoad)

at ….”

Solution/workaround/Fix:

Create a ‘Desktop’ folder under “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile”

Thats it. The scheduled task runs just fine now.. (Credit goes to this site)

Native boot VHD - supported operating systems

2010-12-14T09:12:00.001-05:00

Recently, I downloaded the VS2010RTM eval version VHD from Microsoft and wanted to configure that VHD for a native boot on my Windows 7 Enterprise with steps listed here.

Upon reboot and selecting the new VHD to boot from, the process would hang (System Repair starts) and it says it cannot repair and would shut down. This happened couple of times and I initially thought it to be a corrupt VHD. But quickly I realized that it is not the case since I was able to start the VHD by connecting it to a Windows Virtual PC (Windows VPC) on Windows 7 without any issues.

Upon searching a lot on the web, bumped into this post where it is said that the *only* supported operating systems that can be inside a VHD to make that VHD natively ‘boot’able are

Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2

<quote>……Because of these enhancements to core parts of the system, native VHD boot only works for VHDs containing Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and not earlier versions of Windows. Native VHD boot in this release does not support BitLocker, or hibernation (which includes resuming from hibernate).</quote>

Guess what – The VHD I downloaded has Windows Server 2008 (not R2!)

Well, that explains it!

First experiences and Less know things about Chrome OS (cr-48)

2010-12-10T14:26:00.002-05:00

First off, Thanks Google for sending the free notebook my way.
I received my notebook yesterday and its been a great experience so far.

Few specs: (type chrome://system/ in the address bar)

hardware_class IEC Mario Pony 6101
CPU Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N455 @ 1.66GHz
Kernel Linux localhost 2.6.32.23+drm33.10 #1 SMP Thu Dec 2 21:40:37 PST 2010 i686
GOOGLE_RELEASE 0.9.128.8
CHROME_RELEASE_DESCRIPTION 0.9.128.8 (Official Build 9d2c13d8) beta x86-mario

I tried playing around with it for a while and here are a few observations --
For everyone:

Verizon Activation: Was a little difficult. It failed couple of time while registering and gave me a 1-800- number with MDT (fake phone number), Location code and pending order number. When I called the 1-800 number, they asked for my phone number and I provided the MDT number that helped them help me in completing the activation.
Verizon Data access: Do not search for the data plans etc on verizon.com. There is nothing there that talks about chrome os/cr-48 and its cheaper/free data plans. Upon activation, the 100MB gate is opened. It is only after the 100MB is completed, will you be able buy more data (this again is from chrome browser on the notebook. Wrench->Network manager->Verizon 3G options)
Data flows through Wifi or Verizon when both are enabled?: I had disabled Verizon (cellular radio) fearing that my web surfing etc would go through it even though I had wifi turned on as well. But fear not, according to this info from google, Verizon data route is used only if there is no other wifi route that can be used. That’s nice, Google.
No file manager: Get used to it (atleast for now).
Sign up *every* month for 100MB quota: According to this help article from google, “Although you only need to activate your access once, you'll need to sign up for the 100 MB on a monthly basis.”
Cannot buy more data unless 100MB is used up: Yes, the ability to buy more data from Verizon is not possible, unless the free quota is exhausted..Good thinking, Google and Verizon.
Free 1ooMB per month for 2 years: Enough said.
Credit card info: This is required, even if you need to activate the free 100MB plan. Google/Verizon say that it is required for identification purposes only according to this help page. Hmmm.. I had to provide the same as well. Let me see if I get charged more than what I intended to buy data plans (if at all)

For geeks:

Shell Access: CTRL+Alt+T opens ‘crosh’ shell and I knew that. What I did not know was that the real shell cannot be opened in crosh. I thought I was able to do it all the while and realized that Google OS is put under a ‘release’ mode on CR-48 and the full featured shell is disabled. To get there, the notebook needs to be put in developer mode as documented here and here.
Function keys: Again, the notebook keys do not have F1,F2 etc.. Again from the link above, it seems that they can be accessed as follows: “The top-rows of the keyboard on a Chrome OS Notebook are actually treated by Linux as the keys F1 through F10. Thus, the [ => ] key is actually F2 and the [ <= ] key is actually F1”
Kernel messages: Will be in terminal 8 (Ctrl+Alt+F8)
VT-2: Virtual Terminal 2 (Ctrl+Alt+=>) will have the instructions about command line access

Will update this post as and when I find more interesting info.

A-la-carte TV channels – ivi.tv

2010-09-13T09:22:00.001-04:00

A-la-carte TV is now available, nation… http://www.ivi.tv aims at providing exactly what many of us have been waiting (what seemed like forever!). Recently got a HTPC for myself and been wanting to cut the cable with a WAF. These folks have a nice channel lineup as of now (mostly seattle and a few NY based TV channels) going at $4.99 per month. Whoa!!

~~I will pull the trigger once all the channels are available on eastern time zone~~. Actually, all NYC channels are on eastern time.. Meh!

I am not so sure at this time, if they have plans of offering cable channels – TBS/Food Network/Comedy Central etc. Will pull the trigger once I find a solution to this.

Too, they have their own player – Don’t know if ‘Windows Media Center’ (Windows 7) is supported..

Will update this thread as and when I find more on this.

Stay tuned!

media center (PVR software) – wmc, boxee and more – Phase I

2010-08-12T09:02:00.001-04:00

Since I got the HTPC, I have been researching (try/test) various media center tools on Windows 7. So far, I have tried the following with the goal of having ‘unified’ experience with these criteria:

Ability to play mms streams on internet – Phase I
Comedy Central videos(Daily Show,Colbert report) – Phase I
View other videos from other channels(Travel Channel/History Channel/Disney/Cartoon network/NBC/CBS/ABC to name a few) – Phase I
Ability to view my dish network channels (till I give it a boot) and over-the-air channels – Phase II
Occasional net surfing – Phase I
Do all of the above with a MCE remote possibly – Phase II

The ones in Phase I are must have and the rest I am currently researching on.

Here are the tools I have tested so far.

Windows Media Center (WMC) – #3,#4,#5 can be added to its ‘extras’, ‘stretch’ the videos to fill the full screen (not bad to view on my 52”, actually), tv tuner (live tv) support, really great forum support. Another nice site is hack7mc.
Boxee (beta) – Great UI, but cannot configure ‘live TV’ (see Phase II above). This can be added to WMC ‘extras’ using this launcher or this one.
Zinc.TV (beta) – Great to surf web and play videos, but flash video stutters (its a beta,what more can I expect). This can be added to WMC ‘extras’ using this launcher. Firefox based. Adding AdBlockPlus manually eliminates all ads.
Kylo.TV (beta) – Flash video stutters. This can be added to WMC ‘extras’ using Kylos’s installer itself. Firefox based. Cannot add adblock plus. Awful web surfing experience (that have ads/popups..)
Hulu – Great place to view videos from different channels. Disney is not supported as yet. Boxee search now return Hulu videos. This can be added to WMC ‘extras’ using this launcher or this one.

By far, Windows Media Center seems to have an edge above the rest for the reasons mentioned above.

I am planning on testing the following soon:

XBMC (Boxee is built on the top of XBMC, they say). So this one *may* have more to offer than Boxee.
SecondRun.TV (cool add-on to WMC, per internet)
Few plugins for WMC from hack7mc (esp media center studio, heatwave)
Orb (to use as an alternative to slingbox) – I still need to do more research on this, though.

bye bye O!Play .. hello HTPC

2010-08-05T22:33:00.000-04:00

I have returned my O!Play, not because it wasn't working, but I wanted "more" from a media center (after having tasted the ‘blood’ :) ).So I bought a $298 laptop (Acer Aspire AS5251-1513) from Walmart lastweek that will be my HTPC. It's been great so far. It has AMD V120 CPU + 2 GB DDR3 1066 RAM + ATI Mobility Radeon 4250 - Streams Flash 10.1 HD streams like breeze. Have installed Boxee beta on it (has Windows 7) and I must admit that it has one of the coolest UIs that I have ever seen. The *main* and probably the *only* reason is that Boxee has out of box support for Comedy Central streams (The Daily Show and Colbert Nation).

More on the pros of HTPC (vs cons of ASUS O!Play in a later post) -- I don't think I will regret not waiting for Google TV or Boxee Box (both to be released later this year)..

Few notes on the setup:

Interactive Keyboard – Been using IOGear’s wireless keyboard with trackball (RF) – It has MCE support inbuilt, and it’s fantastic. Few keys are mapped easily to Boxee, but need to figure out mappings for other keys later. This keyboard works just great with Windows Media Center.
Flash - HD streaming(Flash 10.1) works great on wireless 802.11N (I think its connecting at ‘G’ speeds)
mms streams - I have added “mms” streams as asx files in my Videos folder and made Boxee run these asx files. Works fine, with a slight delay in running them and ‘buffering’ at times. (Windows Media Center plays these instantly though, without any buffering issues). Will have to test more to conclude this though.
Hulu – Register on Hulu and have Hulu remember you login. Open Boxee and Hulu shows show up in ‘TV Shows’. Don’t know if the tiff between Hulu and Boxee is resolved. I didn’t have to use the workarounds(firefox cookie or bookmarklet) mentioned either.(In fact, I don’t have firefox on my HTPC!)
TV – I have Hitachi 51F59A (rear projection HDTV) with 1080i . Have connected HTPC to it via HDMI and the 1080i @ 30Hz works quite fine (except that the fonts on the TV get very small). I have set the HTPC to run at 720p to get a better visibility of the screen. For some reason, I was hoping to run 1080i @ 59/60Hz, but I can’t seem to. I need to study more on this subject. Initial setup had an ‘overscan’ and I could modify it via ATI Catalyst – That’s fantastic!!(No tools like powerstrip etc).
Silverlight – Have not tried it yet. It seems Netflix uses Silverlight and I don’t subscribe to Netflix.
Boxee tweaks – In the settings screen, have set the HDMI audio instead of Analog and could see the change in the quality of audio in my TV’s speakers.
Windows Media Center – For a day or two, I tried this and things look good here (can add Hulu add-on etc), but had to ‘ditch’ it (even if it temporary) due to lack of it’s ability to stream Comedy Central videos.
Have not been able to find the following channels(shows) supported on boxee as yet (out of box or via repositories or any other way) – Food Network, Travel Channel, History Channel.

Next step(s) -

Find out repositories/3rd party plugins to get to shows on channels mentioned in #9 above.
Explore TV tuner with remote (so I can use only 1 remote for my Dish STB(till I let it go – see #3 below), HTPC and over-the-air networks) and remote viewing of Sling/Hava (see #2 below)
Sling/Monsoon Hava – Would like to have a SlingBox back in my home country so I can view all the channels here remotely.
Cut the cable ! (Dish in my case)..

_layouts/Reorder.aspx and associated problem – MOSS 2007

2010-07-22T14:55:00.001-04:00

In the last post, I have written a workaround to reorder items in a list in MOSS 2007 (and WSS3). When the user clicks on ‘Change Order’ menu item in Actions menu, s/he will be navigated to the _layouts/reorder.aspx page with the listid sent as a querystring parameter. So far so good. You see the list items (100 at a time) and you should be able to ‘reorder’ them. Very soon I realized that there may be a stupid bug (trying to be careful with my choice of words) in the software(MOSS 2007) that will limit the item reordering to the items displayed in that page. That is, it allows to reorder any item within 1-100, 101-200, 201-300 etc among those ranges correspondingly (since the items are ‘paged’).

Investigating a bit further, there were couple of other querystring parameters used to implement this paging functionality like “PAGED”, “PAGEFIRSTROW”, “PAGELASTROW”, “p_Order” and I tried manipulating them and realized that they didn’t help in any way..

Anyone encounter this and have a workaround (without having to access the 12/16 hives/hard drive on the server?). In fact, I have posted this issue on a Microsoft forum and will update this post if-and-when I get a reply (from the forum or otherwise)

Item reordering in MOSS 2007 list

2010-07-22T14:43:00.001-04:00

There was a requirement that user should be able to reorder the items in a Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) list. I knew that column reordering was possible and stretching that paradigm a bit further, item reording was possible for a ‘Links’ type of list. But there is no out-of-box support for any other list type. The only other tool I had access to was Sharepoint Designer. There was little (limited) help available on the internet blogosphere. Here are the details on how to achieve it:

Open the AllItems.aspx (say) for the list in sharepoint designer and switch to ‘code’ view of that page.
Search for the tag <ListViewXml xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2/ListView">
After Type=”HTML” (or anywhere in that tag) insert the following text: OrderedView=”TRUE”
Search for Query in the same tag. Sometimes you may find <Query/> indicating that there is no(empty) query associated with the listview. Replace it (or insert the following somwhere after </ViewFields> ): <Query><OrderBy><FieldRef Name="Order"/></OrderBy></Query>
Save the file and navigate to it in the browser.(Click OK on the dialog that this page will no longer use site definition)
You should now see a “Change Order” menu item in Actions menu.

Note: If you make any changes to the view (AllItems.aspx) via browser (eg., add new column to the view, add a sort column etc), would erase the changes made for the item reordering. You will have to do the above procedure again to restore the item reordering functionality.

Play more with ASUS O!Play - Should I, Shouldn’t I ?

2010-07-13T15:31:00.001-04:00

Just bumped into this thread and read the first post by dfeedmo that goes something like

…

“most Realtek 1073DD HDD media players (some e.g are O!Play, PlayOn!, AP-110D, and Xstreamer) can be flashed with firmware meant for other players based on the same chipset”

Should I, Shouldn’t I?

Playing with ASUS O!Play – Part 3

2010-07-12T20:11:00.001-04:00

Part 1 of this series is here.

Part 2 of this series is here.

Yay!!

My modded version of 1.17N works like charm. To summarize, so I do not mess up anything, I modified the metafeeds favorite feeds URL that was set by peculias7 and rebuilt the image and deployed it to the ASUS O!Play via USB stick and it worked.

Detail:

As mentioned previously in part 2 here (how to modify firmware… towards the end), I have followed the instructions by creating a Ubuntu 10.04 (32-bit) in a virtualbox environment with the only exception of building unyaffs according to the patch available on this site (There seems to be some problem with retaining user permissions etc). Thanks, Bernhard for the patch. And thanks, Kai.Wei.Cn for the unyaffs utility.

Make sure that when you run mkyaffs2image utility, run it in the parent folder and place the .img in the parent folder itself. Mail me if you need more info on this.

Lastly, before rolling the yaffs2_1.img file into install.img, you can always double check the yaffs2_1.img file built by re-extracting to another temp folder, and verifying the changes you made are indeed there (in my case, I double checked the menu.rss file). You can also compare its size to the original one (it shouldn’t vary too much in size too).

Links to modded firmware:

1.17N(NTSC) – Has Youtube and metafeeds (changes inspired by peculias7) – Metafeeds link points to metafeeds.com’s “main” channel. Here is the rapidshare link. and the checksum is

MD5: 9F83CAADC3EC76BE1B87E0D7E53F39DB

Don’t know if I will put a PAL version (if I get more requests for PAL version, I might do it).

Playing with ASUS O!Play – Part 2

2010-07-12T11:59:00.001-04:00

Part 1 of this series is here.

Moving on, a few things ‘nice to have’ are NAS storage, bittorrent support and an inbuilt ‘transcoder’ (I know asking for an inbuilt transcoder for a media center is too much as transcoding takes a great deal of CPU power)

Then i bumped into this site by Oleg Voice. It’s in russian, but feel free to use google translate. It has many cool features (the ones that I mentioned above and others):

Remote support on smart phones (Yes, I could use my iphone as remote to control the box).
ftp support
Bittorrent support
swapondrive
Edit favorites links for internet tv stations and radio stations
Mediatomb
Samba
Most importantly, access/edit/modify all of the above via a web interface !!!!

Read more on these ‘mos services’ here. Thanks, Oleg for all your hardwork and quick replies on my questions.

I have installed 1.17N from ASUS (overwriting modd-ed 1.16N from peculias7).

Right now, I am in the process of learning how to mod the firmware by creating my own channel on metafeeds.com. Great info for starters here: (Thanks, Tito !)

Just installed Ubuntu 10.04 in a virtualbox environment. The firmware I am planning on playing around with is the modded one(1.16N by peculias7) – The intention is to understand what/how the original author modified ASUS version to add youtube/metafeeds support and add my own channel to it -- More on this in a subsequent post…Stay tuned.!!

Continue to Part 3 of this series.(links to modded firmware will be available in Part 3 towards the end of that post).

Playing with ASUS O!Play – Part 1

2010-07-12T11:29:00.001-04:00

I got an O!Play Air (HDP-R3). about 2 weeks ago and I have been playing with it ever since. So far, I am thrilled at what this media player can do, given that ASUS has made its firmware ‘open source’ (Yes, it has linux inside).

Detailed product specs here. Basically, it has a Realtek 1073DD chipset with Venus linux inside (ver 2.6.12.6)

It came pre-installed with 1.05N version of firmware.

The potential for a media center STB (set top box) like this is tremendous. No wonder google has announced ‘Google TV’ at the recent Google I/O.

My home network is configured as follows:

Cable Modem (at farthest end towards ‘internet’) –> Vonage router –> DLink Wireless N router –> (DIR-615) –> Home PCs/iPhone/ASUS O!Play

After reading a few posts that describe TKIP not working (or slowing transfer speeds) on this model, I disabled TKIP on my DIR 615 (WPA2 is enabled) and the clients are connected at ‘g’ speeds with the router. (More on this in a later post).

Initial Setup:

..was a breeze !! Yes, All I had to do was to connect my HDTV (Hitachi 51F59A) with HDP-R3 via HDMI and boot it up. It detected that my TV was 108oi @ 60Hz (Hurray!!) – This was one of the things I feared the most before buying this model – If it supports my (old, rear projection) HDTV, and there was hardly any info available on the web.

First time, it automatically took me to the setup screen and I was able to select network from the menu and select wireless and i could select my DIR-615’s SSID and enter the password with onscreen keyboard. That’s it. Got a IP from the router and it’s on the grid!! Another yay! moment here.

UPnP:

I then connected to my home PC (Win 7, x64) via UPnp so I can access the videos/movies that I had stored on it. All I had to do was to disable firewall on the PC, Open up Windows media player and in the share menu, allow the videos/pictures/other folders to be visible to all devices on the network. Then using remote, select Movies->Folders->UPnP on the TV and I was able to see my home PC. When I selected the home PC, it asked for a username/password and I provided the username/password that I use to logon to my PC in the following format – machinename\username for username and password… and that’s it! I was able to see the movies folders and play movies !!!

Feeling comfortable and excited, I then proceeded on to make a few changes:

Installed modded 1.16N (thanks to this site) – The modded version has Youtube support and metafeeds.com support. Best part it the metafeeds.com part – It has a few HD feeds that I was able to watch on my TV without a glitch! Go to metafeeds.com to see how you can use it to create your ‘own’ channels. Currently, I am in the process of modifying the modded image to include my ‘channel’ – Will update this post later on my ‘learning’. Bottomline, this metafeeds stuff is simply fanstatic. Thanks, peculias7 (author of the modded firmware).
Meanwhile, ASUS released 1.17N version. I upgraded firmware to this version. Personally, I think/feel that the remote ‘lag’ has reduced greatly with this new version.

So far so good. But this has limited inbuilt support for video streaming sites like hulu, netflix, comedycentral (I cannot live without ‘The daily show’ and ‘Colbert Nation’) and the like. That’s where MediaMall’s PlayOn comes in. Its a $39.99 (first year) and $19.99/year (second year onwards) subscription based upnp server that streams videos from these sites so the media center(HDP-R3) can play them. TVersity is a competitor to Playon in this space. And, there is a free-er(in some sense) alternative – MediaTomb.

Continue to Part 2 of this series. (links to modded firmware will be available in Part 3 towards the end of that post).

Async execution of tasks using TPL

2010-06-29T14:34:00.001-04:00

I was working on a project optimization and ran into this scenario where .Net 4.0 TPL (Task Parallel Library) is to be used to make things a bit ‘faster’. Typically, Parallel.Invoke(..) would run the statements inside it in parallel and then return to the next statement after Parallel.Invoke(..). But the requirement in my case was to have the main thread(say) continue with it’s execution while Parallel.Invoke(..) will be executing async-ly. Following code achieves that [using Task.Factory.StartNew(..)]

In the following example, FunctionA() and FunctionB() will be executed in parallel, and Statement2 will be executed only after Parallel.Invoke(..) is completed.

Example: Main thread waits for Parallel.Invoke() to complete
//some code goes here
Statement1;
    Parallel.Invoke(
                    () =>
                    {
	      FunctionA();
                    },
	    () =>
	     {
	       FunctionB();
	     }
                    );
Statement2;

In the next example, FunctionA() and FunctionB() will be executed in parallel, and Statement2 (and the statements following it) will be executed as well (main thread will not be blocked for the ‘parent’ task to complete.

Example: Main thread does not wait for parent task to complete
//some code goes here
Statement1;
Task parent = Task.Factory.StartNew(
                            () =>
                            {
                                Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
                                {
                                    FunctionA();
                                });
		Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
                                {
                                    FunctionB();
                                });
                            });
Statement2;

Please comment if there are better alternative(s) to this.

Live Writer Beta !!

2010-06-28T16:17:00.001-04:00

First post using Live Writer Beta (aka Windows Live Wave 4). I am still waiting for the hotmail live wave 4 to roll out…

Write Beta is no different from the earlier version, except that it runs only on Vista/Win7/Win 2008 Server (Sorry, XP folks!!) and it has some ‘ribbon’ interface.

Not too many bells and whistles as was spoken about it(atleast this tool).

Twitter is over capacity.

2010-05-07T10:51:00.001-04:00

I started to ‘tweet’ lately .. And today I get this ‘busy’ message. How often does that happen?

Cisco VPN Error 412 on home network

2010-05-06T16:16:00.001-04:00

Had to enable IPSec/VPN passthrough in your router chain on home network and the VPN just works!

(I was getting the error 412 though I could ping the VPN servers and all of my firewalls are disabled.)

Solved!

microsoft skydrive or facebook docs?

2010-04-30T12:55:00.000-04:00

Why two things to do the same thing..

Microsoft, you already have skydrive -- why *force* users move towards docs.com?

I dont get it (atleast for now)..

Nice feature, facebook - I like it.