Christopher Miller's random thoughts

There should be a Blue Rhino for Electric Cars

2013-05-15T10:37:00.001-04:00

What if the car companies came together and come up with a standard for replaceable electric car batteries? It takes hours to charge an electric car battery. That just pretty much limits the use of an all electric car to local use for small amounts of time. It also limits the number of vehicles that could be charged at any time.

I’m starting to see charging stations around here where you can let your car charge up during the day. But it doesn’t help if you do errands all day and you are not parked in any single location. At some point, you’ll have to call it day and head home to your own charging station.

What if you could get around the charging period by using swappable batteries? You could go a gas station and they would swap out your depleted battery with one with a full charge. It would be like the “Blue Rhino” model for swapping gas grill tanks. That’s where you bring your propane tank in the hardware store, the grocery store, etc. And they give you a different one already filled. You are in and out in a few minutes and the store can service many more customers at peak times. The Blue Rhino people come in and swap the tanks with fresh ones. It’s a good model and works pretty well.

For electric car batteries, this is not a trivial problem to solve. The biggest one is that every car has a different layout for their batteries and they are not designed to be swappable. This would require major design changes for the car companies. Plus you would have to have the infrastructure to support a network of batteries. There would have to be away to easily remove the exiting battery pack and attach the new one. The filling stations could recharge the batteries overnight when the rates are lower.

If the car companies could come to a standard for the charging port (which avoided the betamaxing of the electric car market), they could come up with a standard battery pack. You could have a mix of replaceable batteries, plus a fixed set that was optimized for that car. You don’t need to have a full set of batteries to be swapped, just one large enough to go 50 miles or so. That would make it easier for car designers. They can design a rack that provides easy access via the trunk or a car, but have the rest of the car to place the other batteries.

There should be a smart network for locating battery packs. When your battery is low, the car could check for the closest filling station or car dealership that had full batteries in stock. This would take some of the fear out of running out of battery power while you are out and about. You have a smart phone app or web page show the closest station, or just add a 3G/4G radio to the car.

Someone should design a smart rack for the battery packs. This rack could charge all the battery packs, eliminating the need for someone to swap charging cables. It could also report it’s status and location to the smart battery network in real time. When your car told you that fresh batteries where at the Mobil station 2 miles down the road, that information would be current and accurate. You could also bring fresh smart racks to locations that were running low during a busy day.

This also helps with another issue that electric car owners deal with: rechargeable battery packs have a finite life span. Lithium Ion batteries typically last 3 years. By swapping batteries out, you are not stuck with a battery that’s at the end of it’s life cycle. You can have government subsidize the cost of replacement batteries or factor it in as part of the cost when you swap the batteries. Either way, you avoid financial hit at the 3 year mark.

If we could do this, I think we would see more electric cars on the road.

I git it now

2013-05-13T16:40:00.001-04:00

Sharing code across OS X and Windows was a bit more challenging than what I had expected. We have our own TFS servers, but Xamarin Studio on the Mac really can't do much with them. XS does support git, so I have been using a local repository on the Macbook to version control the source code. I needed to have that source backed up in a sane mannor.

Local TFS servers do not support git (yet). So to get the git repo into TFS, I need a transfer station of sorts. My other work development box is a Windows 7 machine with access to our TFS server. The fun part is getting the code from OS X to Windows without having to do a bulk copy each time.

The first thing I looked at was gitstack. Gitstack is git server that you can use to push your local repo up to. I spent a few hours, but I could not get the Macbook to push the repo up to it. I'm sure it works somehow, but my basic ignorance of how git works is probably a factor. I don't want to have to think to use version control. Tools should not get in the way of the development process.

While local TFS doesn't support git, TFS in the cloud does. I went in and created an account. I then created a new project by clicking the "New Team Project +Git" button. This will bring up a dialog that will let you create a new tem project and specify git as the version control.

By default TFS uses a Windows Live account for credentials. You can add a secondary set of credentials so that you can pass in a user name/ password to authenticate. I found it non-intuitive to find that option a second time. Follow these steps to create (or edit) a second set of credentials for your account

Login into your TFS account.
In the upper right corner of the screen, you will see a gear icon. Click that gear to go to the control panel
In the upper right corner of the screen, you will see your name or email address and a drop down chevron. Click the chevron and select "My Profile" when the dialog opens up.
The "User Profile" dialog will appear. You can change your avatar and display name here.
Click on the link labeled "CREDENTIALS". This will switch to the Alternate Credentials tab on the dialog.
Now you can enter in the secondary credentials. The user name must be alpha numeric only, you can't use an email address.
Click "Save Changes" to save the new credentials.

Now you can use those new credentials when pushing or pulling changes from git. On the Mac, you store those credentials in the OSX keychain so that you will not be prompted each time. I found that the osxkeychain helper that was installed with the OSX version of git to be completely broken. I manually installed a newer copy based on the instructions posted here.

On the OS X side, I had installed git and it was on the search path. I opened up Terminal and in my source code folder, I used git to clone the TFS repo using the following syntax:

git clone https://myteamname.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_git/myproject

This created the folder for the project with all of the git bindings. From within Xamarin Studio, I was able to perform local commits and that worked just fine. I tried to do a push from within Xamarin, but it failed because I had different local git credentials than I did for TFS. I could not find anyway from with Xamarin Studio to specify the git credentials. I've posted a question about that in the Xamarin forums, I'm hoping it's something simple.

But I can push and fetch from the command line, so I just created a bash script file and I run that to synch with the remote report. There are some OS X GUI clients for git, Harry Wolff reviewed some of them here. Right now, I'm going to stick to the command line until I grok git. At the end of the day, I have what I wanted: a local git repo on the dev boxes, with a master repo in the cloud.

Getting Hyper-V to work on a HP Envy23

2013-05-09T12:57:00.000-04:00

I finally got Hyper-V working on our HP Envy 23. For Christmas, I had bought a new PC for our family. We have a shared PC in a our family room that everyone uses for email, browsing, etc. At the time I was working on a Windows Phone 8 project and I needed a machine that could handle that development. My own PC was running Windows 7 and you need Windows 8 or better for Windows Phone development.

Actually, you need better than Windows 8 for effective Windows Phone development. To run the Windows Phone 8 emulator, you need to have Hyper-V installed, which requires Windows 8 Professional and a machine with the virtualization enabled in the chipset.

We wanted an all-in-one PC. It’s in a shared family space and a AIO will take up less room and generally look nicer. Dell had some interesting models, but you couldn’t get one with Windows 8 Pro, just Windows 8.

With HP, you could get a machine with Windows 8 Pro. So I ordered an Envy 23 with an i5, 6GB of RAM, and Windows 8 Pro. It is a nice machine with a good 23” touchscreen. We went from a huge mess of power cables, USB cables, and assorted wires, down to just a power cable and an Ethernet cable.

HP Envy 23

As a side note, while this machine has decent WiFi built in. I prefer that ancient Ethernet technology. Our house has so many devices using WiFi, anything networkable that's not mobile goes on Ethernet. I had a few rooms wired for CAT-5e years ago and I use Powerline adapters where the cables don't reach.

As typical of a new PC designed for home use, hardware virtualization was not enabled out of the box. I had to go into the BIOS screen and after a bit of searching, I found the virtualization setting under "Security". I don't know why they put it there, but that's where it was. So I turned it on and booted up into Windows. Since Hyper-V is not typically installed on a new machine, I had to install it. Pretty easy to do and took less time than trying to find the virtualization setting in the BIOS.

I rebooted the PC and it hung on the loading Windows screen. Turned off the virtualization setting and it rebooted just fine. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling Hyper-V, didn't fix it. After trying multiple combinations, it was obvious that virtualization and Hyper-V didn't work. I called HP support and they said that Hyper-V was supported on this hardware and that either I had installed something that conflicted with Hyper-V or I had a hardware fault.

I didn't agree with either assessment, but I had to follow along with HP's support. When I bought the machine, I had bought 3 years of priority support. I usually don't bother with extended support, but it was the cheapest way to buy this machine. They shipped out a new machine and a week later it arrived. Fired up the new machine and enabled Hyper-V and virtualization. Same problem. That both ruled out a machine specific hardware fault and ruled out the installation of another app being the root cause.

At this point, I just wrote off the problem and sent back the new machine. Other than the Hyper-V problem, the rest of my family was very happy with the Envy 23. I ended up building a new machine from scratch that happily runs Hyper-V, so I no longer had the pressing need for Hyper-V on the this machine.

But not being able to run Hyper-V on a machine with the CPU and OS that clearly support virtualization bugged me. Last night, I did a quick search on "Envy23" and "Hyper-V" and saw a few hits. I was not the only one with this problem. The first match was on "Enabling Hyper-V and restarting results in a hung system...". It was posted by another developer with a similar Envy 23 machine and was seeing the same problem.

Someone had responded to that message that he had fixed the same problem on his HP laptop by updating the Bluetooth adapter's driver. He had included a link to another message thread in a HP forum with details about the version and where to get the file.

The problem seemed to be with the Ralink Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter. Various people had version 9.2.10.6 of the driver installed. When they installed to version 9.2.10.10, the problem went away. That sounded like an option worth pursuing.

So I decided to roll the polyhedral dice and try installing that driver. Now normally, I'm not a fan of installing hardware drivers unless I know that they are specifically for the hardware that I own. It's a commodity part and most likely uses a driver for a family of related parts. Also, I back up my machines to a Windows Home Server box. The worst thing that happens is that I hose the machine and have to do a bare metal restore.

I downloaded the driver and starting installing it. As part of the install, it uninstalled the previous version and I had an "uh oh" moment. My mouse and keyboard connect over Bluetooth, updating the driver could affect them. Fortunately, they worked through the process. After installing the update, I rebooted the PC and everything seemed to work just fine. The mouse and keyboard still did mouse and keyboardy things, so I knew that Bluetooth was still operational.

I rebooted one more time and enabled virtualization in the BIOS and booted up the machine. This was the moment of truth. The PC booted up normally and I was able to verify that Hyper-V was installed and functioning normally.

So, that brings us back to why it failed with the original driver installed. I don't know why a Bluetooth driver would hose the operating system when Hyper-V was enabled. That is so random, it's not something that I would have considered as a the root cause. From reading the messages on the HP forum, it looks like someone had reinstalled the OS and had needed to download the Bluetooth driver. When they installed the latest version available, they were able to boot with Hyper-V and made the connection that the Ralink driver was the root cause.

My journey into the Center of Gravity

2013-05-06T13:05:00.001-04:00

Last Friday I was given a tour of the Center of Gravity (COG). What exactly (and where exactly) is the Center of Gravity? It’s full name is the Tech Valley Center of Gravity and it is a community of technical and artistic creators, makers if you will. They have a permanent makerspace in downtown Troy, NY and their grand opening is today.

I was lucky enough to get a tour on Friday from one of directors of board at COG, Laban Coblentz. While their location is new, they have managed to collect a fair of equipment already. There is a lot equipment that can be used now. From old time drill presses to laser cutters, from soldering stations to a bio lab. They are off to a good start.

You can sign up for free as an associate member, that will get you a membership card and the opportunity to purchase day passes to access the equipment in their makerspace. If you plan on doing a lot of building and tinkering, then you’ll want to step up a full membership at $60/month) or “Super User” at $100/month. The paid membership gives you full access to the makerspace and includes safety training.

If you need to fabricate some one off parts for a project, they have a couple of 3D printers. In a couple of years, you’ll be able to buy one a Walmart, but right now it’s hard to get access to one around here. When I did my robotics project last fall, I could have used a 3D printer to make the mounting pieces.

For additional pictures of the COG, the All Over Albany blog posted a large set on their site.

Notes on attending Xamarin Evolve 2013

2013-04-23T13:59:00.001-04:00

Last week I attended the Xamarin Evolve 2013 conference in Austin. It was, hands down, the best conference that I have ever attended. It was divided up into two days of training, plus two more days of conference sessions. I attended all four days and the training days alone were worth the price of admission.

I’ve been using Xamarin.iOS for about 5 weeks now. I’m working on an iPad prototype for a companion app for one of our existing desktop apps. I’ve been amazed over how well the Xamarin tools worked and I’ve been able to get a nice app up and running. I had just enough exposure to Xamarin to be able to appreciate the training that I received.

They broke the training into two tracks, Fundamentals and Advanced. I had enough entry level experience with Xamarin.iOS that I wanted to mix and match the sessions, but the training rooms filled up to capacity so I stayed in the Fundamental track. The session instructors were top notch and they had Xamarin TA’s floating around the room to keep everyone on track. Of the code examples, there was less typing of code and more uncommenting out of blocks, but that was OK. On the track that I was on, this was new ground for many people and have of the experience was learning how the tools worked and how iOS design patterns worked.

One smart thing that Xamarin did was to send out the course material a week before the conference. The sessions made extensive use of the sample projects and it saved a lot of time to have that preinstalled. Instead of including the slide deck from the session, they included what looked like chapters from a training manual. hat is much more useful than a slide deck.

During the conference keynote, Xamarin CEO (and co-founder) Nat Friedman had two surprises for us. The first one was a Xamarin native iOS designer. This will free us from the horror of Interface Builder. It only works with storyboards, but has the ability to work with custom components and saves us from the general head scratching weirdness of Interface Builder.

The other surprise was big. Xamarin Test Cloud is a cloud based testing platform that lets you test your apps on hundreds of mobile devices. With 1500+ devices, the Android platform has become increasingly fragmented. You have to deal with multiple carriers, multiple screen resolutions, and multiple versions of Android. Test Cloud will let you upload your app to their site and select which mobile devices to test it on.

It has a UI scripting language so that you can test your app the way a user would do it. You will get a report of which devices passed and which ones failed. You get screen shots of each step, that allows you to visually verify that the correct results would be on the device.

In addition to testing UI interactions, you get machine profiling as well. You can see memory usage, CPU usage, and response time. This is a game changer, no one else has this on the market. If I were still doing Android coding on the native java tools, I would switch to Xamarin just for the Test Cloud usage. No one knew how much this will cost, but Sourcegear’s Eric Sink summed it up best (and I am paraphrasing): “It’s going to cheaper than what I would pay a QA guy to do all of that manually.”

The hardest part of the conference days was picking which session to attend. I’m a big fan on Jon Dick’s ZXing.Net.Mobile scanning library, but his session was scheduled at the same time as Nic Wise’s MonoTouch Dialog session. I needed help with MT.D more, so it was off to that session. Xamarin filmed all of the sessions, so at some point I’ll be able to see the sessions I missed.

Another great session was Stuart Lodge’s session on MvvmCross. The MvvmCross library provides XAML-like binding to Android and iOS, and allows you to create cross platform apps using the MVVM design pattern. If you are supporting iOS, Androids, and Windows 8/Windows Phone, you really want to look at this library.

Wally McClure did a session on mapping that I liked. I like the way he does his presentation. He went around meeting the session attendees before he started, that was a nice personal touch.

I did miss the comedy show on Tuesday, Xamarin had set up a mini-hackathon and I lost track of the time while doing that.

Tuesday night, Xamarin rented the park across the street from the hotel and had a series of food trucks providing the best that Austin had to offer. The giant sized Jenga was pretty popular.

I got to meet and talk with Miguel de Icaza. He was funny and very bright. He asked what I was working on and what I thought of the training.

Wednesday had a great UI session by Josh Clark. Called “Buttons are a Hack”, it was about how to use touch interfaces to design beautiful apps that anyone could use by just picking up the device and exploring. Any session that starts out with a clip from “This is Spinal Tap” is a winner.

One of the cooler things that Xamarin did was to provide 30 minute sessions with one of their engineers. That time was available for questions and code review. I set up my session a week before the conference and one of their support reps had me sent in some screenshots and a list of questions.

When it was time for my session, I was able to get all of my questions answered and I was able to verify that I was using some of the iOS internal objects correctly. I was pretty sure I had it right, but it was nice to have the code validated.

Since we were in Austin, a bunch of us went out one evening to see the bats at the Congress Avenue bridge. About a million bats nest under this bridge and they all leave at dusk to go feeding. It was incredible to watch them all fly out. There were so many, that from a distance they looked like a cloud,

Evolve 2013 was a great experience. I learned a lot and made some new friends. I’m looking forward to Evolve 2014.

postscript:
More Congress Ave Bat pictures can be found here.

Why was microphone button on the iPad virtual keyboard disabled?

2013-03-17T23:03:00.001-04:00

After demoing some voice dictation with an iPad app that I am working, the microphone button stopped working. It was fine for one demo, disabled for the next one. I could not figure out what had changed. I kept seeing numerous references for setting the dictation option and making sure that the iPad had a network connection. Stuff like this forum posting on discussions.apple.com:

It should be in Settings > General > Keyboard > Dictation, and will only then appear on the keyboard (to the left of the spacebar) if you are onlines - is that where you are looking in Settings ?

I had a good WiFi connection and I didn’t have a Settings > General > Keyboard > Dictation option. I tried rebooting the iPad, no change. The strange thing was that it working at 2pm and not at 5pm and no changes had been made to the iPad. We have a pool of iPads that we sign out for testing, this one is the 3rd generation iPad and I have removed all of the apps that other people had installed. The iPad has iOS 6.1.2 installed.

I saw the Bluetooth icon on the status bar. It was not lit up, so it wasn’t connected to any devices. So I went into the Bluetooth settings and saw this:

I don’t have ZAGG Keyboard, but someone else must have paired this iPad to one. In between the demos, I had borrowed another iPad that was in a ZAGG keyboard case. It must have been in close enough proximity to the one that I was using so that my iPad picked up the other keyboard. I turned off Bluetooth and the microphone button was back on the iPad keyboard.

That makes no sense. The iPad was not connected to the ZAGG Keyboard, but it still disabled the microphone button on the onscreen keyboard. I could not reproduce this with another iPad running iOS5 and a Logitech keyboard. The microphone button stayed enabled with the keyboard on and off. One thing comes to mind. Apple and the keyboard manufactures need to come up with a keyboard button definition for the microphone. If you are using an external keyboard, it’s annoying to have to bring up the onscreen keyboard to voice dictation.

Today I learned that my daughter has never seen a 3.5” disk

2013-02-10T00:42:00.001-05:00

I was watching my 10 year old daughter work on a story in MS Word 2007. To save the document, she was going into the Word menu to select save. I asked her why she just didn’t click the save button. She said “What save button?”. I pointed out the save button that is just above the Home tab.

She thought that was the print button. She had no idea that the save button glyph represented a 3.5” disk. She’s never seen one. I have some around, but it’s been years since I have actually used one of those guys.

I dug out an old 3.5 disk and gave it to my daughter. She had no idea what is was. And was not impressed when I explained to her what it was.

The 3.5” disk had a good run, but it’s been 15 years since Apple came out with the first iMac without a floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but now the 3.5” disk is deader than a dot matrix printer. Which is another piece of computer technology that my daughter has never seen.

For the last 20+ years, it has been common place to use a disk icon for the save button on toolbars and menus. I don’t think twice about it being obsolete technology, I just “know” that a disk image on a button means save. But for a 10 year old, she doesn’t have that frame of reference to identify the functio. From her viewpoint, the closest match is a printer, their icons can look a bit like the disk icon.

The problem is that we really don’t have anything now to replace that image. What other object represents saving a file, and can be drawn in a 16x16 matrix? We’ll be carrying around that image for years after the last disk falls part.

We carry around other baggage like that. It’s like dialing up someone on your cell phone. I can’t remember the last time I used a phone that had a dial on it. But the terminology is so well established, we just associate dialing with the act of placing a call. It’s time to come up with some new visual metaphors.

A quick photobook order on Shutterfly

2013-01-16T23:50:00.002-05:00

A $20 coupon code from Shutterfly showed up in my inbox a week or so ago. I could spend it any which I wanted on Shutterfly, that was pretty decent of them. And of course I kept putting off using it. Yesterday, I get another email telling me that I have one day left to use it.
So I decided to do a picture book. I went into Picasa and selected about 150 or so pictures from the last 12 months and uploaded them to my Shutterfly account. And then procrastinated until 10pm tonight. It took abut 90 minutes, but I was able to make a family "year in review" book for 2012. After placing the order, they generated the code to display the book as a widget on this blog. Which is what you see below.

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly allowed me to customize my photo book just the way I wanted.

I like using Shutterfly. It's one of those services that just plain works and I can upload my photos directly from Picasa without having to think about it.

The HP Printer Display Hack (with financial goodness)

2012-09-14T17:19:00.001-04:00

The HP Printer Display Hack article has been posted to the Coding4Fun site. This is an article and application that I wrote that lets you display a stock price on the display panel of an HP (or compatible) laser printer.

The app is written in C# with WPF and it periodically checks the current price of your favorite stock and sends a PJL command to the printer to put that price on the display. It comes with a Windows Installer, written with WiX.

You can read the article at Coding4Fun. The source code and a precompiled installer are up on CodePlex, I would like to thank Brian Peek for letting me ~~steal~~ borrow some of the TweeVo code for the UI bits.

Taking Office 365 for a spin

2012-08-21T23:41:00.001-04:00

As the leader of the Tech Valley .NET Users Group (TVUG), I have the opportunity to use Office 365 for a year. I’ve become gypsy like in my use of PC’s for working on documents and now seemed like the right time to give it Office 365 a shot. Stay tuned…

Every 30 seconds, the cursor would turning into the spinning donut of death

2012-07-16T21:32:00.001-04:00

I was working from home today when I kept seeing something strange. About every 30 seconds, the cursor would go from normal to busy. It would last for a second or two and then go back to normal. 30 seconds later, the cycle would repeat. I didn’t matter if I was doing anything or not, nothing interfered with the cycle.

This drove me nuts. First thought was a virus or some other nasty. Did a full Microsoft Security Essentials scan and a full scan with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Both were clean.

I even took Roy’s advice to no effect.

Nothing showed under Windows Task Manager, so I pulled out the big gun. The Sysinternals Process Explorer. Process Explorer will show you a whole lot more than Task Manager. In addition to the currently active processes, you can see the stuff that each process will load. I left the process window open for a few minutes on the second monitor. I immediately saw a pattern. An app named ScanToPCActivationApp was loading another app named HPNetworkCommunicator over and over again. HPNetworkCommunicator would load, the donut would spin, then the process would exit.

I recently bought a HP Officejet 6700, a printer with a mind boggling amount of tech for a sub $170 price. It’s wired and wifi network ready out of the box and that’s how I have it hooked up. On a wired connection. When I first powered up the printer, it connected to my wifi network and grabbed the IP address 192.168.2.34. After switching over to the wired connection, it kept that IP address. I didn’t have any quarrel with that choice so I installed the printer drivers and the PC’s all connected to it at 192.168.2.34.

This printer has the ability to let you scan at the printer and send it to a PC. It’s a neat trick, but requires an app running in the background. That would be the ScanToPCActivationApp app. Something was causing it to constantly check to see if that printer was available. So it was time to check our connection.

One of the 8 billion features of this printer is it’s very own web server. It lets you manage the printer, allow printing from other devices (iOS, Android, etc), check the ink levels, and probably order pizza. It also provides a quick and simple way to verify that the network connection is valid.

I opened up a browser and typed in the 192.168.2.34 IP address. It timed out. That’s not good. I went over the printer and checked the network settings. It reported back that it was on 192.168.2.34. So it looks like a conflict of some sort with that IP address. I checked around and could not find any devices on that IP address. Which means the offending device is probably turned off at the moment. I’m going to have to keep an eye out for the device with that IP address, it will be back.

So I decided to change the IP address of the printer and have the router make that a static assignment. Since I already have a laser printer using 192.168.2.99, I gave the HP the next one down, 192.168.2.98. First I changed it on the printer, then I changed it on my router. The Netgear WNDR3700 Router that I use lets you assign a static IP address via the MAC address. Getting the MAC from the printer is easy, it will display it on it’s touch screen or give you the option to print out the network settings.

The last step was to tell each PC that the printer was on a new IP address. HP has a simple utility called “Change IP Address”, which I ran on my PC’s. On this machine, I had to type in the new IP address, on the others it discovered the printer again. All in all, about 5 minutes to make the change. After making those changes, a quick peek at Process Explorer showed that ScanToPCActivationApp had loaded HPNetworkCommunicator just once and everything was back to normal.

If you take your printer offline or remove it from your network, you will want to disable the ScanToPCActivationApp app from running. Otherwise it will be constantly checking for a connection to the printer and firing up the HPNetworkCommunicator process over and over again. To deactivate ScanToPCActivationApp, do the following:

Open the HP printer app. There are multiple ways of doing this. You can double click on the printer icon in the “Devices and Printers” dialog if you have Windows 7. From the “All Programs” menu, select “HP”, then the folder for your printer, then the icon for the printer.
Under “Scanner Actions”, click “Manage Scan to Computer”.
When the “Scan to Computer” dialog opens, click the “Disable” button and the clear the checkbox “Automatically start Scan to Computer when I log on to Windows”.

Those steps may vary slightly, based on your OS and HP printer model, but the actions should be roughly the same.

Thinking about Windows Phone 8

2012-06-22T15:03:00.001-04:00

I watched Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 Summit on Monday and I came away impressed. My phone contract is up and I have been holding off on getting a new phone. I knew that Windows Phone 8 was coming and I didn’t have an urgent need to get a new phone. Between that and the Surface tablet, it’s good to see MSFT putting some skin into the game.

The new screen resolutions and shared code base with Windows 8 are very attractive features. I like how multitasking has been enhanced but not in the wild west flavor of Android. My Droid 2 can slow to a crawl, depending on what is running. I would like to avoid that user experience.

I also like the redesign of the start screen. They had wasted real screen estate in WP7, the live tiles are defining feature of the OS – more is better. The extra files will look noisy. You can use a blank tile to create some space between tiles, that may be easier on the eyes.

If you are existing Windows Phone 7 owner, you get a facelift of the new start screen with the 7.8 update, but you don’t get new OS. People are pretty ticked off about that. It is the nature of the business, just ask anyone who bought an Android phone a year ago. Some of them will get Android 4, most will not.

The Nokia’s Lumia 900 looks like a decent enough phone, but I’m on Verizon Wireless and they really are not playing in the Windows Phone arena. That phone was never an option for me. Verizon has stated publicly that they will carry Windows Phone 8 devices. They wont be out until the end of the year, so I’ll have to live with an aging Droid 2 for a while longer. Having Verizon be a serious player will really open up the market for WP8.

As a developer, I want to get my hands on a WP8 device and writing some code for it. I’ve played around with Android development, but I would prefer to use C# and XAML over java. I hope that MSFT can pull this one off.

Need to kick my Windows Home Server every now and then

2012-05-01T23:31:00.001-04:00

For some reason, my HP MediaSmart Server EX495 seems to be locking up. It's very infrequent, but when it happens, I can no longer access it and I have to boot it with severe prejudice. Something is crashing, but I have not been able to determine what is the culprit.
.
I need to spend some quality time with my WHS box to figure out what the problem is. In the mean time, I'll use the Roy Trenneman method, except via software control. I want to get the box to reboot itself, once a week.

Ultimately, WHS is a child of NT. I don't need anything fancy to schedule a restart. The tried and true "AT" command will do the job. This AT, not that AT. What I need to do is pretty basic, I want to reboot the server every monday morning at 6:00am. To do this, I followed the following steps

Open a Remote Desktop connection to the WHS, using the administrator account.
Launch a command prompt (Start -> command).
After the command prompt opens up, type the following text:
```
at 06:00 /every:Monday "shutdown /r /t 0"
```
Logout

We have created a scheduled task that will execute the shutdown command. The "/r" parameter is what forces the restart. The "/t 0" means no wait before restarting. That should bandaid my server until I have some time to track down the root cause of the problem. It will give me more time to ponder the question that every WHS user thinks about: "Why can't Microsoft market Windows Home Server?"

Kill all the SQL connections for a DB or app

2012-04-25T14:57:00.001-04:00

One of customers needed to be able to clear all of the connections to a database before running some maintenance tasks on the database. So the question came my way and after searching the Internets, I ended up with the following T-SQL code

DECLARE @spid INT    
DECLARE @getspid CURSOR    
declare @KillCmd nvarchar(128)

-- create a table variable to hold the results of the call to sp_who
declare @k TABLE (spid INT, 
  ecid INT, 
  STATUS VARCHAR(150), 
  loginame VARCHAR(150), 
  hostname VARCHAR(150), 
  blk INT, 
  dbname VARCHAR(150), 
  cmd VARCHAR(150), 
  RequestID int)

-- fill the table variable
INSERT INTO @k EXEC sp_who

-- Create a cursor to use to walk through the table variable
-- that matches the database we want to filter on
SET @getspid = CURSOR FOR 
	SELECT spid 
	FROM @k 
	where dbname = 'YourDatabaseNameHere'

OPEN @getspid    

FETCH NEXT FROM @getspid INTO @spid    

-- For each row in the table, create a kill command
-- kill does not work with variables, we need to
-- execute it with sp_executeSQL
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 
BEGIN
  SET @KillCmd = 'KILL ' + CAST(@SPId as nvarchar(10))
  print @KillCmd
  EXEC sp_executeSQL @KillCmd
  FETCH NEXT FROM @getspid INTO @spid
END

-- cleanup
CLOSE @getspid

DEALLOCATE @getspid

The way it works is that we call the sp_who system stored procedure. This procedure returns a set that lists current users, sessions, and processs. From that set, we can get a list of all of the connections for a database.

Since we need to work with the rows of that set, we create a table variable named @k and populate it with the result set returned from sp_who. You need to match the number of fields and the field types (or pick field types that SQL can convert automatically).

Next, we create a cursor and iterate through the rows that match the database name that we want to kill the connections on. We are using the kill command to kill the connection. You basically call kill with the session id to kill, and that session is terminated. In this example, we are matching on the dbname column. You could easily match by loginame or hostname, depending on your needs.

The kill command has a slight little kink, where you have to pass a literal value to the kill command. It doesn’t work with variables. If you try it, you’ll get an “incorrect syntax near…” error message.

To get around this, we fill a string variable with the kill command and the session id. We then call sp_executesql to execute our dynamically generated SQL statement. It looks somewhat less than elegant, but it works just fine.

This was written as inline SQL so the customer could add it to his maintenance script. You could easily make sproc out of it and toss it into the master database.

I’m bothered by the idea of using the homeless as office infrastructure

2012-03-13T07:02:00.001-04:00

There has been a lot of comments regarding the use the of homeless people at the SxSW Interactive conference as roving hotspots. BBH Labs, a NYC based marketing company, did an experiment where they sent out homeless people carrying 4G wireless hotspots. They wore shirts that said “I’m XXX, a 4G hotspot”. You paid what you were felt was fair, and the proceeds would go to that homeless person.

Part of me thinks it was a great idea. That homeless person was providing a service to you and some money was put in their pocket. But it just doesn’t feel right to me. You are basically using a human being as office furniture. It’s too close to the scene in the movie “Bruno”, where the Bruno character has hired Mexican workers to be human chairs.

One of the things that bothered me was how they were labeled. “I’m Clarence, a 4G hotspot” is dehumanizing. A subtle change of the wording to “I’m Clarence and I’m carrying a 4G hotspot” and you have a very different meaning to the service provide. Instead of using Clarence as the service, you are using the services provided by Clarence.

BBH was inspired by Street Newspapers, run by North American Street Newspaper Association (NASNA). A street newspaper is a newspaper that is focused on the homeless and and poverty issues. The vendors are poor and/or homeless and they go out into the street and sell the papers. The vendor gets a cut of the proceeds. The harder they work, the more money they can make. They are contributing towards their own income. And they are telling their own story. When you buy a street paper, you are buying content written by poor and homeless people. There is a connection between the vendor and the content.

The human hotspot is a different experience. It’s a passive role, you basically just stand there or follow people around. There is no connection between the human hotspot and the Wi-Fi service. That business model is much closer to the human furniture of “Bruno” and than it is to street vendors selling newspapers.

I think BBH had good intentions, but the implementation was flawed. They might have been better off having a set of fixed 4G hotspot stations that was manned by poor or homeless people. You still get your Wi-Fi, but they could set a table with literature and presentations about how the poor and homeless are suffering and what we could to help. Instead of a homeless person following you around like a feudal serf, you could have bought an access pass that provided coverage from each hotspot table. Instead of being a passive piece of the conference, the homeless would have been active participants. That’s better for everyone.

I wouldn’t condemn BBH, they at least tried something to help out the homeless. It was an experiment, they can take the feedback and retool the project for another festival. This is something that would work at other festivals or large scale conferences. You would still man the stations with homeless people. They could talk about their issues while signing people up for the Internet coverage. Verizon Wireless and AT&T could provide the 4G hotspots. They would sell timed access at a discount and provide a portion to the homeless or poverty program that they would sponsor.

Ratcheting up the scroll with my Logitech mouse

2012-01-23T23:18:00.001-05:00

With the PC that gets used by the family, we use a wireless Logitech mouse. It’s the VX Revolution. It’s a few years old, but it has all the functionality that we need.

I was using it tonight and the scrolling was, for the lack of a better word, wrong. The wheel usually scrolled with a nice ratchet. You moved the wheel, and you would feel a nice soft click as it scroll.

Tonight, it had stopped clicking and the scrolling was too sensitive. You would scroll down a page and when you lifted your finger off the mouse wheel, it would roll back a tiny bit. This would cause the page on the screen to jump back a bit. It was very jarring and annoying. What did I do to this thing and how do I fix it?

On my home dev box, I have a Logitech MX Revolution. Kind of like the big brother to the VX. On the MX, I could switch the wheel between the free spinning mode and the ratchet mode by clicking on the wheel. That didn’t work on the VX. I tried playing with the Logitech SetPoint utility that allows you to tweak the mouse settings. No dice, nothing jumped out.

When in doubt, see if there is an updated mouse driver from Logitech. I had 6.2 installed, the current version is 6.3. So I grabbed the general Windows 7 setup exe for SetPoint and installed. And that’s when the Logitech driver fell down. Their all in one installer installed the 32 bit driver instead of the 64 bit driver. Usually that’s not a huge deal, but it looked like they installed the 32 driver AS the 64 bit driver. It crashed as soon as I loaded it.

OK, back to square one. I uninstalled the newly broken driver and when back to the Logitech site. Sure enough, I saw a link for the 64 bit only version. I grabbed it, installed it, and it ran with out crashing. It didn’t let me change the scroll wheel behavior, so I was back to square one again.

When in doubt, RTFM. I took a peek at the user guide for the VX, from the Logitech site. Guess what gang, on the bottom of the mouse, there’s an oddly shaped switch control.

Figure 1 – An oddly shaped control

It’s hard to see in this picture, but the smooth circle at the top right of the switch puts the mouse into free wheel mode. The gear shape at the bottom left, puts the mouse in ratchet. Somehow the switch had been changed to free rolling mode. I flicked back to ratchet mode and life was good again.

An open letter to Newport Television

2012-01-14T09:40:00.001-05:00

This is a copy of an email that I just sent to Newport Television, owners of WXXA-FOX23

Please forward to Michael DiPasquale, Vice-President/Asst. General Counsel at Newport Television

Dear Mr. DiPasquale,

I am a Verizon FiOS subscriber in the Albany, NY area. I have noticed that you have pulled WXXA-FOX23 from Verizon FiOS TV because your carriage agreement expired on January 12, 2012. My understanding of this is that your company, Newport Television, and Verizon could not come to an agreement over the rates.

As someone who watches WXXA, I am one of your customers. As such, I would like to share my opinion. I don't know the details of your carriage rate negotiations, but I think you should settle with Verizon.

I don't want to pay more for a channel that I can get over the air (OTA). The FOX network programming that I watch is mostly available via the FiOS Video On Demand (VOD) service. I won't get to see the show when it airs, but I'll see it within a week. And it will be commercial free. I like my DVR, I watch TV on my schedule.

With your channel being OTA only, the only time I'm going to watch it is going to be for sports. I liked watching the FOX23 news, that was one of the few shows you had my attention through commercials. And that was the same for FOX sports. I can put up with the annoyance of switching to the OTA signal for the sports, but for the rest of your coverage, I'll just skip it.

FiOS coverage is still small in the Albany area, but the areas with FiOS availability tend to be the higher income areas. We are the people that your advertisers want to reach. You have better access to the subscriber numbers, but I would expect that you are no longer available in 10,000 household in middle to upper middle class neighborhoods in this area. If I were an advertiser with you, I would be negotiating for a lower rate on commercial air time.

I don't know the detail of your negotiations with Verizon, but if you are asking for a higher rate, I really think that you should reconsider your terms. I don't know the state of the local economy is in Kansas City, MO; but it's not that great here. Please consider this during your negotiations with Verizon FiOS.

sincerely,
Chris Miller
Slingerlands, NY

Replacing GetHostByName with GetHostAddresses

2011-11-10T01:06:00.001-05:00

I’m working on some C# code that needs to send some data over a socket connection. The user can specify the destination by name or by IP address. I was using syntax like the following to get the address

IPAddress addr = Dns.GetHostByName(host).AddressList[0];

IPEndPoint endPoint = new IPEndPoint(addr, 9100);

That worked, but VS2010 spits out the following warning:

'System.Net.Dns.GetHostByName(string)' is obsolete: '"GetHostByName is obsoleted for this type, please use GetHostEntry instead. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=14202"'

So I replaced the call to GetHostByName with GetHostEntry. When I passed in the IP address as a string GetHostByName, it threw an error, "No such host is known".

That's not good. I didn't want to use obsolete code, but the recommended replacement wasn't working. I did a bit of searchnng on the Internets and found that GetHostEntry attempts to do a DNS reverse resolve and that doesn't always work. As it turns out, GetHostEntry is not the only method that can be substituted for GetHostByName. GetHostAddresses will return the IP address for the specified host. I was able to use the following code without any warnings:

IPAddress addr = Dns.GetHostAddresses(host)[0];

IPEndPoint endPoint = new IPEndPoint(addr, 9100);

And we are good.

An odd way to post

2011-09-30T20:20:00.001-04:00

This short little post was composed with the Blogger iPhone app. It's running on my iPad and I'm using the BlueTooth keyboard that HP made for the ill-fated TouchPad.

It works, but I'm limited to basic text entry. No fancy HTML was harmed in the making of this post. You can include images, which is something I guess. I would have liked an app that let you enter in HTML markup using something like markdown.

On the plus side, the HP keyboard is nice way to enter in extended amounts of text on a touch only device. Most of the keys work. The media keys work just fine, but most of the TouchPad specific keys are ignored. With the exception of the search key, that invokes the iOS search box. For $20, it's a good enough BT keyboard for my needs. It's HID enough.

I went back and edited this post with an app called, BlogPress. It's not Windows Live Writer, but it's good enough for posting from a tablet. You can do some basic HTML formatting. It's a bit quirky, especially when scrolling at the bottom of the page. The text looks like it's dropping of the bottom of the page and you have to drag the page back up. But it works.

Location:Home,United States

How to set the DevExpress ASPxScheduler current time line marker to only appear for the current date

2011-07-13T11:26:00.001-04:00

I’ve been using the DevExpress ASPxScheduler with one of our WebForms apps and it’s been a pretty good experience so far. It does pretty much what I need for it to do and I have been able to bend it to do things that I want it to do.

One feature is that it displays a marker on the scheduler to represent the current time. This is a feature that Outlook does on its calendar and the ASPxScheduler by and large is trying to mirror that experience. In this case, they behave slightly differently than Outlook. In Outlook, the time line marker only appears when the calendar time span includes the current date. If the calendar view does not include the current date, you don’t see that line.

(Image of the scheduler control showing the time marker taken from the online documentation)

With the ASPxScheduler, if you have time line marker enabled, it’s always being displayed, no matter what the date is. That is a little bit counter intuitive and doesn’t match the Outlook model that DevExpress is trying to following. As it turns out, it was easy to change that behavior.

You can use the VisibleIntervalChanged event of ASPxScheduler control and make the time line marker behave like Outlook with a single line of code:

protected void ASPxScheduler1_VisibleIntervalChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ASPxScheduler1.OptionsBehavior.ShowTimeMarker = ASPxScheduler1.ActiveView.GetVisibleIntervals().Interval.Contains(DateTime.UtcNow.Date.AddMinutes(1));
}

We use this event to enable the display of the marker when the current date is being displayed by the control, otherwise disable the marker. The call to GetVisibleIntervals().Interval returns TimeInterval object, which is a DevExpress.XtraScheduler class that represents an interval of time for the current scheduler view. You can use the Contains() method to check if a DateTime or TimeInterval object is contained within the interval. Internally, the ASPxScheduler uses UTC time, so you want to pass the current date as UTC. We add 1 minute to the time otherwise the DayView for the previous day will include the current date.

This functionality works for the version of the ASPxScheduler that was current at the time this was written, v2011.1.5.

Binding an Enum to a DataSource

2011-06-08T13:56:00.001-04:00

I had some code for an ASP.Net Webforms app where I need to present to the user a list of options that were define as Enum. I want to populate a combobox with the enumerated type values and do it from code automatically. This is the Enum in question

enum PrintColorSchema {
    Default = 0,
    FullColor = 1,
    GrayScale = 2,
    BlackAndWhite = 3,
}

To make things more interesting, I wanted to exclude the first item in the list, “Default”. One way to do this would be to manually populate a select list with the values from the Enum. While that would work for this Enum, I wanted to find a way where I didn’t have to hard code the values.

I added a DropDownList control to the page and in the code behind, I added the following code:

ColorSchema.DataSource = 
    Enum.GetValues(typeof(PrintColorSchema))
        .Cast<PrintColorSchema>()
        .Select(en => new
        {
            Value = en,
            Text = Wordify(en.ToString())
        }).Where (en => en.Value != PrintColorSchema.Default);

ColorSchema.DataTextField = "Text";
ColorSchema.DataValueField = "Value";
ColorSchema.DataBind();

What we are using is a bit of LINQ to convert the Enum to an IEnumerable collection of an anonymous class. That class has two members, Value and Text. Value is set to the enumerated type and Text is set to prettified version of the enumerated type. That function looks like this:

public static string Wordify(string pascalCaseString)
{
    System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex r = 
       new System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("(?<=[a-z])(?[A-Z])|(?<=.)(?[A-Z])(?=[a-z])");
    return r.Replace(pascalCaseString, " ${x}");
}

The code

Enum.GetValues(typeof(PrintColorSchema))

converts the Enum to an array of constants. The next part

.Cast<PrintColorSchema>()

returns an IEnumerable collecttion from the array. The code

.Select(en => new
{
    Value = en,
    Text = Wordify(en.ToString())
})

returns a new IEnumerable<> collection of an anonymouse type. That type has the enumeration element as the Value and that element converted to a string as the Text. Since the elements were in "PascalCase", a simple RegEx function was used to split the text into multiple words, The final Where operator is used to filter out the first item from the list.

The HTML that gets rendered:

<select id="ColorSchema" name="ColorSchema"> 
    <option selected value="FullColor">Full Color</option> 
    <option value="GrayScale">Gray Scale</option> 
    <option value="BlackAndWhite">Black And White</option>
</select>

Which renders like this

For this Enum, all the code was overkill, adding three <option> elements to the <select> control would have been less work. Where this is handy is when you have Enum types with many elements or when the Enum type changes. If the Enum type changes, no modification to your code is needed to update the combo box. One less place in the code to fail. And that is a good thing.

There was a Time Warner Cable Disconnect Technician in my yard this morning.

2011-05-03T10:25:00.001-04:00

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a Time Warner Cable (TWC) Disconnect Technician. I went out to get my paper and he had the cable junction box open. He was clipping the wires going my house and my neighbor’s house. We had both switched to Verizon FiOS TV and were no longer paying for any TWC services.

He came over to me and asked if he could ask a few questions. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was very friendly. He is a Disconnect Technician. He was driving all over town, clipping the cable wires to houses that had switched from TWC to FiOS. Since FiOS TV went live in Bethlehem last month, TWC was bleeding customers all over town. He didn’t give me any numbers, but he said a lot of people had already switched and TWC management are pretty upset.

He is also a disgruntled ex-employee of TWC. At one point he was a TWC employee with the full benefits, at some point they terminated his position and hired him back as a contractor to TWC. He was not happy about the change from being an employee to being a contractor. He wasn’t the only employee that they did this to, it must have been a cost cutting move on TWC’s part.

He asked me about the services that I was getting and how much I was paying. Oddly enough, he though I was getting the TV channels through a dish. He literally didn’t know that FiOS TV was a Verizon package of channels. He said that he was thinking of getting FiOS service for himself.

He did say a few times that the local TWC management were upset over the subscribers losses to Verizon. They don’t have much to offer existing subscribers who want to switch. They can’t compete on the technology side, but they can compete on the cost. Raising their rates a month before FiOS TV rolled into town, was not one of their smarter moves.

When I went to the local TWC office to cancel my service and return the equipment, the staff there made no attempt to keep me as a customer. They asked where I was moving to, and they were surprised when I said I wasn’t moving. But they did not ask why I was dropping the service or ask if there was anything that they could do to get me to stay with TWC. It would have been a pointless effort, I was already on FiOS TV and there was nothing that TWC could offer to get me to switch back. Still, it’s general business sense to keep your existing customers.

One week with FiOS TV

2011-04-05T00:59:00.001-04:00

It’s been a week since I switched from Time Warner Cable to Verizon FiOS TV. After years of having only one choice in my town for cable TV, Verizon just started offering FiOS TV. While I appreciate the quality of support that I had received from TWC, I was ready to switch providers. I’m getting better technology at lower price from VZ.

I already had FiOS Internet, bundled with the Verizon Phone service. I had TWC digital cable with a single Set Top Box (STB) and a CableCARD for my TiVo HD. I was able to get their digital lineup on two TV sets, and a limited selection of their lineup on the analog channels on two more sets. I love my TiVo and had two Series 2 boxes on the analog cable, and a TiVo HD connected to the digital cable. The combined total of FiOS Internet, TiVo subscriptions, phone, and cable, came to around $200 a month. My FiOS Internet connection speeds where set to 20 MB/s down, and 5 MB/s up.

I upgraded to the FiOS Extreme Triple Play package. This gave me a selection of channels a little better than the selection that I had TWC digital cable. I also gained a faster Internet connection, rated at 25MB/s in both directions. Over the last week, I did spot tests at different times and I was getting results like this:

If you use any online service for printing digital pictures, you’ll appreciate that upload speed. On the days where I need to work from home, the connection to my office network is fast enough that I feel like I am at the office.

Since FiOS TV is digital only, I retired my Series 2 TiVo units. They had been in use since 2005, it was time to say good bye. TiVo customer support was nice enough to transfer my TiVo HD to the cheaper rate that I was paying on the Series 2. I ended up getting the Verizon multiroom DVR with three set top boxes. Each STB would be able to access the shows recorded on the DVR. That wiped out the loss of the Series 2 boxes. For the TiVo HD, I got a CableCARD so it could get the FiOS TV Channels.

Installation was pretty straight forward. The installer was friendly and professional and had done a lot of FiOS TV installations. The CableCARD installation was new to him, and we’ll get to that in a minute. Since I had had FiOS Internet for the last 5 years, most of the installation prep work was already done. He just had to check all the coax cable connections.and hook up the new hardware.

Time Warner had done a pretty good job with the coax wiring over the years. The installer only had to do a couple of things with the coax wiring, mainly removing the splitters from the the two TV sets that had the Series 2 boxes.

The first thing that was installed was the FiOS router. He installed an Actiontec MI24WR (Rev F). This router took the Ethernet cable coming in from the Verizon ONT and provided the FiOS Internet over WiFi and through the Ethernet jacks. It provided CATV and TC/IP to the DVR and STBs over the coax cable.

While this appears to be a decent enough router, my existing Netgear WNDR3700 router has better hardware for WiFi. After the installer got the Actiontec working, I hooked my router to the Actiontec. I had to make some minor changes to the Netgear to let it coexist with the Actiontec, then I logged into the Actiontec and turned off it’s WiFi radio.

It takes a while for the DVR and STBs to come online. While we were waiting, we tackled my TiVo HD. This was installer’s first experience with a CableCARD, so he let me help him out. But first, I need to explain something about using a CableCARD with Time Warner.

Time Warner Cable uses a technology called Switched Digital Video (SDV) to be able to provide their channel lineup with their existing bandwidth. Usually when you have cable TV, all of the channels that you can get are sent over the cable line at the same time. Your TV or STB knows what frequency each channel is on and when you change the channel, the appropriate frequency is selected. Nothing new here, it’s been that way in form or another since the days of Uncle Milty.

With SDV, only the channels being watched in your general neighborhood are going over the wire. When you change the channel, the STB requests to have that channel provided. If that channel is already being sent your street or apartment building, then you get the current frequency of that channel. Otherwise the local office enables that channel and tells the STB what frequency it’s on.

A TiVo box has no idea how SDV works. So the TiVo people and the CableCARD people came up with a device called the tuning adapter. It sits between the TiVo and the cable and TiVo knows how to talk to the tuning adapter. When you change the channel on the TiVo, it sends a message to the tuning adapter, which in turn does the SDV dance with the office, and the end result is that you get your channel. When it works, it’s fast and transparent to the end user. My experience with the tuning adapter was that every few months or so, it would lose the ability to get the channels and you would have to reboot it. This functionality isn’t unique to the TiVo, the TWC DVR and STB just have it built in.

FiOS TV does not use SDV, so I didn’t have to deal with any tuning adapter nonsense. We pulled the TWC cable card out, unplugged the tuning adapter, and plugged in the VZ supplied CableCARD. TiVo is very helpful with CableCARDs. When you insert new one it, TiVo automatically displays the information that installer needs to get the card activated. With TWC, the installer had to call in the information from the card. It took a few tries to get it working. With FiOS, the installer had an app that he installed on my PC and he was able to activate the card easily.

The TiVo immediately saw that the card was activated, and we went through it’s guided setup to tell it that it had a new cable provider. For some off reason, Verizon had not notified TiVo that my zipcode was covered by FiOS. I had called TiVo a few days before the install, and they provided me with a list of zipcodes that would work. I entered in the closest one in, and my TiVo was now in FiOS country.

After telling it that it was now on FiOS TV, the TiVo connected to it’s mothership and downloaded the new lineup and channel guide information. It then migrated over the season passes from the old TWC channel numbers to the channel numbers used for the same stations on FiOS TV. I was amazed how well that worked.

We have been using the FiOS TV for a week now and we are very happy with it. The picture quality appears to be noticeably better than TWC. Verizon does not apply any additional compression to the programming, and it looks like Time Warner Cable does.

The FiOS DVR is very good. Very easy to use and works great from the STBs. On a scaled from 1 to 10, where the basic TWC HD DVR is a 1 and the TiVo HD is a 10, I would rate the FiOS DVR a solid 7. If you never used a TiVo before, you would be very happy with just the FiOS DVR. While you can’t pick a show to record from the STB, there are mobile apps iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web, that let you easily program the DVR. The DVR has a 500GB drive, big enough to record 50 to 70 hours of HD programming or 200 hours of SD programming. That’s about 3 times more storage than I have with the TiVo HD.

The software running on the DVR and STBs is much nicer than the software running on the TWC STB box. It’s much snappier to navigate and is just better to use.

There are few drawbacks. I lost BBC America HD, I’m going to miss that channel. FiOS TV does have the SD channels, so I still get to see the shows. It just wont be in HD. I know, a “First World Problem”, but I did want to be fair. It sounds like they are planning on adding BBCA HD, but I have no idea when.

If the hardware fails, I have to call and have a replacement shipped to my home, As of right now, there is no local store for getting replacement hardware. And any TV set that you want to watch FiOS TV with is going to need a CableCARD or cable box. The days of just plugging the coax into the back of the TV and letting the TV tune the channels are over.

I was a loyal Time Warner Cable customer for close to 20 years. Their service was professional and they did the best they could with dealing with SDV issues. And they had no way of matching the Internet speeds that I have had with FiOS. Verizon has the advantage with the newer technology. With the cancelling the two TiVo subscriptions and consolidating the cable, phone, and Internet, I will save about $40 to $50 a month. Since I’m getting more features for less money, I’ll count that as a double win.

Initial impressions of the Netgear WNDR3700

2011-02-17T07:02:00.001-05:00

I recently upgraded my home network with a new router. I have Linksys WRT54GS router, running a custom firmware called DD-WRT. DD-WRT provides a lot of extra functionality that wasn’t available with the stock firmware. It’s the closest thing to a free lunch that you can get, computer-wise.

I’ve had the WRT54GS for a couple of years and it was starting to show it’s age. I needed to reboot it about once a week or so, or I would lose network connections. It also predated the 802.11n protocol, and my iPad and one of my laptops support N. I also wanted a router that supported gigabit speed LAN ports. So I’ve been in the market for a while now.

Last year, Netgear released a few new N ready routers. The WNR3700L was designed to be used with custom firmwares. Netgear even created a website, MyOpenRouter, to support the enthusiasts. It has a fast processor (480mfz), gigabit ports, and supported G & N on the 2.4ghz band. I came this close to buying one.

Then I read up on the next size up router from Netgear, the WNDR3700. This is a dual band router. You can configure B/G/N on the 2.4ghz band, and A/N on the 5 ghz band. You can keep the N devices at the less crowded 5ghz, and leave the G devices at 2.4ghz, It also has a faster (680mhz) processor. This router was listed as a powerful router on the DD-WRT site. So I spent the extra money and bought that one instead.

The first thing I learned was that I bought a WNDR3700v2, the 2nd generation model. DD-WRT was not supported for this model. It turns out that Netgear based their firmware on the OpenWRT project, so out of the box it came with nearly every feature that I wanted. It had support for updating my DynDNS account, static IP addresses, IPv6, guest networks, a shared USB drive, DLNA, etc.

It doesn’t have everything that DD-WRT has. It doesn’t have a VPN server. With DD-WRT, you can run PPTP and OpenVPN servers. I use PPTP for a few reasons. The main one was to be able to get a secure connection to my home network so that I could open a remote desktop session to my home PC. I could also use the VPN connection to access sites that would be normally blocked by the network that I was connected to. The WiFi network at my local car dealer blocks all of the social networking sites. When I’m waiting for my car, I would open a VPN connection so that I could check Facebook and Youtube.

Using a VPN also provides a level of security when you are on an unsecured WiFi network. By encrypting your traffic, your are less likely to have someone capture your data. The pptp protocol is not completely secure, OpenVPN has better security. Apple, in it’s infinite wisdom, does not provide OpenVPN support on iOS. I could open a PPTP VPN connection from my iPad, but there’s no way to get OpenVPN to work. Well, there is a 3rd party OpenVPN client for jailbroken devices, but I’m not going down that route. At any rate, PPTP is still more secure than unencrypted traffic.

So the WNDR3700 was pretty close to being good enough with the OEM firmware. Since the WRT54GS was running a PPTP server just fine, I decided to keep it around and use it just as an access point. That’s part of the joy of DD-WRT, it’s vary easy to customize a router for special needs. On the DD-WRT site, there are pretty clear instructions for turning a router into wireless access point. This is all I needed to do:

Change the IP address of the old router. Since the WRT54GS would be wired to the WNDR3700, they couldn’t have the same IP address. I changed the WRT54GS from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.2.
Configured the DHCP server on WNDR3700 to use the range 192.168.1.5 to 192.168.1.254 for handing out IP addresses. This would make sure that nothing else would get the 192.168.1.2 address.
On the WRT54GS, set the WAN type to disabled and disabled the DHCP and DNSmasq services.
Set the WAN port on the WRT54GS to be a LAN port.
Configured the WNDR3700 to forward the PPTP port, 1723, to the IP address now reserved to the WRT54GS. Any request for a PPTP connection from the outside would now get redirected from the WNDR3700 to the WRT54GS.

After making those changes, I wired the routers together, I opened a VPN connection to my office PC and RDP’ed into it. From my office PC, I opened a VPN connection to my home network to verify that the PPTP server was accessible, It worked the first time. That’s rare for me, but I’ll take that for a dollar.

I’ve been using this router for a week and it has been rock solid. There are a few quirks, the UPnP had some issues with Windows Home Server, but that was easy to work around. The wireless range is much better than what I had with the Linksys. I probably would have been good with the single band WNR3700L, but I am happy with it’s dual band big brother.

How I patched a Dell workstation with a firmware update from HP

2011-02-15T12:17:00.001-05:00

About 18 months ago, I got a Dell Precision T5500 workstation. A decent PC with a Xeon quad core processor which has bee a pretty decent box for doing development with.

About a month ago, it started acting very flakey. I would be doing my work and the display would go all wonky on me. I would see crawling vertical lines going down the display. After a minute or two, the colors would get very dark and the computer would stop responding.

A reboot would restore the machine. There were no warning signs, nothing in the event logs. One minute it was running, the next it was locked up. This would happen about once a day or so. Not enough to keep me from using the machine, but enough to warrant getting it fixed.

We have Dell Priority support, which we hoped would help resolve this problem. We bought this machine with Vista and it had the free upgrade to Windows 7. We had bough a bunch of these machines, another one was having a strange crashing problem as well. Because I had installed 64 bit Windows 7 on it, Dell said it was not supported.

That annoyed our IT manager. He then engaged Dell support to fight the good fight. He called BS on that one and their response was for him to uninstall the current video driver and install the latest Dell approved driver. While he was doing that, I stated doing my own research. They had a Plan B, but that involved swapping drives without machine and wouldn’t have actually resolved anything. We hoped to avoid Plan B.

This T550 came with an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 video card. It’s a basic workstation card with enough horsepower to drive 2 displays. I had kept the driver updates current with whatever Windows Update suggested for it.

We downloaded the files from Dell, and ripped out the current driver. The Dell drivers refused to install, claiming that there were no supported devices installed. The IT guy had downloaded the recommended driver, which supports a motley crew of NVidia cards. He found a NVS 295 specific driver on the Dell site and started downloading that. Peachy. While he was fighting with my machine, I had found some clues in the NVIDIA forums.

I was not alone. Other Dell owners had reported similar problems with that video card. This post has a screen shot that was similar to what I was seeing. Another post described applying a NVS 295 firmware update from HP’s web site. This was posted by several Dell users as working. Since it's on the Internet, it must be true. The IT guy didn't want to flash the Dell with the HP supplied file, but I convinced him by using the following three arguments.

It's a video card BIOS firmware, not for the motherboard.
If we brick it, Dell has to replace it as it will no longer be a software problem.
You can't beat the entertainment value of flashing Dell supplied hardware with HP supplied updates and having it work.

So I downloaded the firmware from a HP page labeled as “NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 Video BIOS (ROM) and Flash Utilities”, and the latest driver from NVIDIA. The Dell NVS 295 driver download completed first and we ran that. It would not install because it couldn't find the video card. We then ran the HP flash updater, which immediately recognized the missing NVS card and happily flashed the BIOS. After rebooting, we ran the NVidia supplied drivers and they installed without incident.

It’s now been a couple of weeks and my T550 has been running non-stop without any failures. While I don’t understand why HP is only known place in the Googleverse that has a NVIDIA firmware update, I’m just glad that someone released it.

Updated: 2/6/2012
I recently had a comment on this post that I did not publish. That person posted anonymously and put his email address in the post. I don’t think he wanted his email address published (and you’ll see why), but I will include rest of the post:

I have the same problem, and I am unable to track down that flash utility! HP apparently doesn't support it anymore. Would you by any chance have it still and possibly throw it up and media fire or some other site for me to download?

The link I had listed no longer goes to the correct page. HP updated the article and broke the link. That’s how the Internet works folks, nothing is truly static. That’s why we have search pages. That HP link takes you to a page that has a search box. If you type in “”Quadro NVS 295” in the search box and press the submit button, it comes back with a list of pages. At this time, the top page on the list is the current page for the firmware download. Since HP can and will change the link, I’m not going to make any effort to keep my page in synch with HP.

Since HP holds the copyright to that download and is still supporting, I don’t think it’s 100% kosher to put that file up on a file sharing site. If HP abandoned it, then I can see a reason for making the file available. But there’s no need when you can easily download it from HP. It took less than 5 seconds to find the updated page.

One final point. About 7 months after writing that post, the problem came back. In all likelihood, a Windows update has a conflict with the card and/or the drivers. Since the machine was still under warranty, I had Dell send out a replacement card. It failed right after booting up with the same problem. I was done with that card. I ripped the card out and replaced it with a higher end card.