The Weezey Geek

Technical Flaw in Gmail Migration

2010-02-02T08:03:00.004-05:00

Since I purchased Google paid storage (200GB for $50/year), I migrated all of my mail out of my Google Apps account and back into my original Gmail account. I started to do this by copying and pasting folder using IMAP access via Thunderbird with the accounts opened. That worked pretty well except for the fact that it was slow and then I ran into bandwidth limitations of Gmail accounts so the process started taking a really long time.

To get around that I used the recommeneded method of Gmail account migration which is to set up the source account as a POP account from within the destination account. That worked okay for a while, downloading 200 messages at a time and then it stopped working for about a week and I more or less gave up.

Today I noticed that it started working correctly again so I guess Google fixed something, but I found a problem with the process. A while back my email campaign system didn't specify the date in the header when it was sending out messages so there were lots of messages in my Apps email which didn't have date headers in them so the date of the message was the date received by the email application. So it seems now that my Gmail account has downloaded all of those Apps messages, the date specified on them now is when they were downloaded again, instead of the original date of download. This makes complete sense to me but it was rather confusing when I searched for some mail this morning.

The end result here is that my mail is now all in one Gmail account. 6GB of mail used of my 207.2GB of storage.

The iPad

2010-01-28T13:20:00.005-05:00

I don't think Apple has taken this much heat over a device that I can recall. People think it's cool, but fairly expensive and it doesn't allow you to run more than one program at a time. The biggest heat has come from the name. People are already referring to the largest fully loaded iPad as the Max-iPad.

The writers at MadTV had already built their own iPads back in the day.

Update: As expected, Hitler's reaction to the iPad:

LED Board Demo'd

2010-01-28T11:29:00.012-05:00

Last night I was asked to demo the board for Guelph's technical community. Other than the fact that it kept freezing it went very well. Check out these photos from @kevinleehansen.

Me being introduced with the questions; Who are you? What are you demoing? What do you hope to get out of it? and What should the audience get out of it?

Sign froze while I spoke, but it did get stuck on the world "Quality." Couldn't have planned that if I tried.

About the freezing: It seems to be interference that causes the sign to freeze. The program "making" the pixels continues to run. I actually thought of last night, resetting the COM port before each cycle that way if there was lots of power/data interference around it would be a little bit more robust and should reset on it's own. Also instead of the cables all piled into the box below a little more organization would probably help. (Keeping the power cables away from the TWI wires.)

Thanks to all for a great night and thanks to the roundup for the photos.

The Final Product

2010-01-21T17:12:00.004-05:00

Here's the end result of all of my hard work building the LED board.

SB-900 and Gary Fong Universal Diffuser

2010-01-01T21:01:00.002-05:00

I mulled over my dilemma and settled on the Nikon SB900 Speedlight.

This photo was taken in the evening, but it looks like a bright, sunny afternoon in my living room.

My camera gear is growing nicely. I'm going to need a camera bag. Maybe for my birthday I'll ask for that, and maybe one of these bad boys.

Gear Dilemma

2009-12-27T17:13:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine is looking to buy the same Nikon D90 I have, kit lens (18-105mm) and all. She has expressed interest in buying my gear as I'd love to upgrade.

My dilemma is that I would love to upgrade my camera to the new D300s. It's the next in the line of the Nikon cameras and has some damn awesome new features. Like the ability to write raw and jpeg images to a compact flash and SD card at the same time. Using that, I could use the Eye-Fi card I'm getting from Google because I upgraded my storage to 200GB for $50, to write my jpegs to that SD card and still write raw images to the CF card. Quality and awesomeness in one.

The other reason it's a dilemma is that I'll have to get a new lens if I sell the 18-105mm but I've been eye-ing a 50mm or 35mm prime for a while (drooling over the low f-stop) so it's not a simple purchase of the D300S body (which doesn't sell as a kit).

The final edge of my dilemma is that the actual upgrade I wanted to take on this season was a top of the line Nikon SB-900 Speedlight. It re-cycles fast, it only needs AA 4 batteries and with a Fong Diffuser produces bright, soft, shadowless light.

I guess I have to keep mulling it over.

Multiple Peggy2s showing serial video

2009-12-18T11:32:00.008-05:00

So I've been working in every spare second for the last 48 hours to get my LED sign board built and part of the project was to have it showing live Twitter feeds. Standing on the shoulders of Mr. Clegg and Mr. Oskay, this proved to be a relatively simple task.

I built my first Peggy 2 in about 5 hours and then started fiddling to get the Processing video working and within no time I could write static messages on the board. The next setup was to make it work with two Peggy2s. Since I only had a few LEDs left over from the first, but a about 75 left over from making these for our wedding, I recycled them into the second Peggy so I could start coding and see some kind of result if my code worked successfully.

I wired up the two peggys in paralell via a breadboard to the Arduino and started modifying code.

The code changes were actually quite simple, I made a second header and data array so that the second Peggy2 has a different header that it acts on to change it's state and then coded that into the sketch for the second Peggy2. I looked at changing the TWI address first but I think the Arduino code would need to be modified for that and right now it just spews data without modification and I didn't want to mess with that yet.

I made the image 400x200 instead of square and then I made the renderToPeggy function loop through each array of 25x25 independently and send out each header and each chunk of data. That was all it took and now each Peggy2 acts on it's own data and shows it's own pixels though both are receiving data for the other. (This could probably be more efficient but I wanted it to work right away.)

I wrote a simple PHP script to gobble up tweets that I was interested in by following the API guide to search and dump them into a database. Then another PHP script to distribute un-seen tweets via a URL and then modified the Processing code to ask for a new tweet after one has been displayed. If there's nothing new the code just shows a random tweet from the last 10 in the database.

Next steps in the project are;

get the rest of the LEDs for the second Peggy2
put both Peggys in some kind of a case, possibly with a coloured insert in front of the LEDs
~~add the ability in the Processing code to show a logo or many logos between tweets~~

That's Nice But Where's Rich Signatures

2009-12-02T14:50:00.002-05:00

Google just announced default styling for messages in labs. My users are still aching for a way to include fonts and logos in their signature. I'd say this is a basic feature that's been hacked together by so many others it's time for the Gmail team to do it themselves as a labs feature.

Also, when are we going to be able to SMS Canadian numbers?

I'm very tired of waiting for all of these things especially since Google's charging for these services now. I'd happily pay three times what they're asking (or more) for the Gmail suite to be complete.

mini10 + Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-25T20:12:00.003-05:00

So I got my mini10 up to snuff in Ubuntu by following some instructions with proprietary drivers. I guess my next mission will be to roll them into a Chromium OS build, but first I guess I need to get my Chromium OS to build a proper image. Right now my best efforts have made me a blank blue screen when you log into the Chromium OS via the image or via the USB image.

Update: Apparently I ran the install-build-deps.sh from the chromiumos tree instead of the one from the chromium tree, so I seem to be missing many (345mb) dependencies, which would likely be why my ChromiumOS boots but shows not Chromium.

Gmail is Down

2009-09-01T16:08:00.002-04:00

Gmail is down. Quick, everyone update your blogs and tweet about it.

Update: Moron today's issue.

Dell mini 10

2009-08-31T18:40:00.002-04:00

So I got a Dell mini 10 and the first thing I did was install Windows 7, the second thing I did was open it up. Looks very plug and playable and I can swap out my GPS pci express card for an unlocked WWAN card and then I'll be able to browse the web from via my SIM card. I think life would probably remain more convenient to just use the iPhone's tethering feature however.

AudioCodes MP-118 FXO with Asterisk Voicemail Problem Solved!

2009-06-23T17:15:00.003-04:00

So I got a nice little AudioCodes MP-118 FXO gateway to plug into the analog lines so that they can go all voipish. Everything was going fine once I figured out how to make the thing plug into the system through it's configuration. All the docs I found online were for different versions of the AudioCodes firmware so there's wording differences and it makes it hard to configure. Once I had everything going it was fine and then I moved the lines to the system and then found a tragic bug. Apparently the AudioCodes box considers the call broken after 10 seconds in Asterisk's Voicemail application so the solution is to click on Search and search for Disconnect and then you can locate the "Disconnect on Broken Connection" setting under the Advanced General Settings page and then turn it to No. This solved the problem immediately and I could then leave 3 minute messages like before.

New iPod Shuffle Handles Play Lists and Tells You What You Probably Already Know

2009-03-11T12:34:00.004-04:00

The new iPod Shuffle now tells you the track you're listening to and once you sit through that text to speech engine they call VoiceOver interrupting your track, it reads off any play lists you've got synced up and then with a click on the headphone controls, you're listening to that track. Not sure why they didn't include a mic in the headphone controls so that you could use it as a headset for your iPhone as well. Must say that the new little tiny shuffle is little and tiny and pretty slick looking.

Google Adds Default Theme to Apps

2009-01-29T08:43:00.002-05:00

Looks like the wait might be close to over for the Gmail themes to come to Google Apps users as today when everyone opened up their Apps Gmail we all had the default theme in place. Still no link to change it (or for the new Offline Gmail for that matter) but soon grasshopper, soon.

Voice Controlled Helicopter

2009-01-16T10:35:00.002-05:00

Engadget reports of a voice controlled helicopter. Very cool. Read more

Picasa 3 Updated

2008-12-17T14:29:00.002-05:00

Google has just announced that their new version of Picasa 3 is up and running in all of the languages that they support. They boast about their name tags feature on the web but I for one want it in my PC. I take a lot of photos and I'm sure you do too and there just isn't enough storage on Google's web albums for everything I've got and I certainly don't want to share it all with the world either. I want to be able to take those cool name tags which relate automagically to the contacts in your Google Contacts list and have all of my local photos store that information. Is that too much to ask?

Google Chrome no longer in Beta

2008-12-12T13:28:00.003-05:00

I wasn't sure if Google Chrome would end up being another perpetual beta just like a lot of Google's other endeavors but apparently not. I'm running Windows Server 2008 and Chrome is constantly crashing. As soon as it's open for about five minutes now, it crashes. Quite tired of seeing that message and I was hoping the SP2 beta I installed or the new Chrome would fix it. Not so much. Of other interest is the fact that when I open up the About Chrome dialog box the message says it can't connect to the update server.

Ted Rogers Jr. Dies of Conjestive Heart Failure

2008-12-02T08:48:00.004-05:00

The richest man in Canada has died today with his family by his side. The Rogers media empire founded by his father will surely miss his leadership. Having seen his presentations, he had an amazing understanding of his business and the technology behind it. It will be interesting to see how much of an influence his board of directors had on the company after a period of mourning has passed. Will they follow the new Fido's trend to compete with Koodo?

Looking for sprinkler systems in Burlington?

The PNG Problem

2008-11-25T11:17:00.003-05:00

So I'm working on a new site and it calls for a lot of awesome transparent PNG images. They look spectacular and perfect but I started doing that age-old cross-browser test and they don't work in anything less than MSIE 7 for those Internet Explorer users which make up 80% of the site's visitors and and 30% of those users have IE 6. So what are my options here? I could keep the site as it is and make the users upgrade (after all, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and the latest IE all work just fine) or I could make a bastardized version of the site which swaps GIFs for the PNGs. I guess it's all up to the time it takes to get it done. I think for now, I'll plan to make a pop-up telling the user that even my puny iPhone's browser can handle these pages, so you should upgrade your shit. Maybe even a stream-lined update process is better than sacrificing the designer's vision.

Nikon D90

2008-11-18T22:01:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking and the more I think about it, the more I want a Nikon D90 Digital SLR. I love my little Sony DSCW150N but the image quality of the Digital SLR is beckoning for me. I miss high quality photos. Maybe before Ireland, I'll be able to justify the purchase on the small business dime. I was actually thinking of taking a photography course or something. If I can turn a hobby shot or twelve with a hot camera into some kind of weekend funding I think it's more than enough of a jump to bring in some extra coin and it's very different than the day job so it would keep the mind highly active in a different area on it's down time. To quote the great Wayne Campbell; "It will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine."... though there may be something newer and more amazing by the time I'm ready to buy, so who knows. Maybe it'll do full 1080p HD video or something... A must have before we have a children.

New iPod Touch includes Nike+

2008-09-09T14:20:00.004-04:00

Interesting news out of the Apple Let's Rock event and that's that the new iPod Touch will have the Nike+ receiver built into it.

Now I don't know about you, but I've started running big time this summer, training for the Scotiabank Waterfront Toronto Marathon and I can tell you that running with extra gear is hard to do. Running with a big ass iPhone sized, iPod Touch can be like running with a brick. What they should have done was created a new iPod Shuffle sized device which does the Nike+ thing. Then they'd have something. Clip on and run, only adding ounces to your running gear.

I guess their heart is in the right place, and hey; we only have to wait until Friday for better battery life and other improvements for our iPhone 3Gs.

Google Launches Chrome

2008-09-02T17:04:00.003-04:00

Google has taken the next step to world domination by launching their new open source web browser, Chrome. So far, so good. One thing I've noticed about having this lappy updated with 64bit Windows Sever 2008 is that you notice immediate performance increases when a program like this comes out. I was able to crash Chrome on my neighbours' system while exiting full screen on a YouTube video, but other than that, we're good. I guess the only thing I'd like in the immediate future is the Better Gmail 2 plugin for Chrome (it's amazing how much I rely on having the inbox count first in the title bar/tab) and a 64 bit version to take advantage of the bulk addressing and ramination.

Just noticed the resizable textareas... awesome. Every browser has always needed this. No longer will you be stuck in a tiny little comments text box, you can make it as big as you want. Totally amazing.

Make iPhone Ring Tones Easily and for Free

2008-07-10T22:48:00.002-04:00

On the eve of iPhone 3G day tomorrow, I found this article which explains how to create ring tones for free using iTunes and with the new release of iTunes 7.7 today, it still works! Why pay for a clip of something you've already paid for? There's much better things to spend money on, like your expensive data plan for example.

Google Talk on the iPhone, sorta

2008-07-10T00:00:00.001-04:00

Google just announced that they have a new iPhone interface for Google Talk. It's just using the web browser but it's a simple way to use Google Talk from your fancy new iPhone 3G. Only two more sleeps!

Google now indexes Flash, isn't that still a bad thing?

2008-07-02T09:30:00.002-04:00

Google has announced that their search algorithm now indexes flash sites and while it's good that buttons and the like can now be searched using Google, I still fail to find the merit of a site built in flash. If you search for something and happens to be on page X of someone's flash site, you'll still end up at he beginning of their movie when you land there from the search engine match. Maybe there's more to it that I don't get, but at this point this seems to be a moot point.

My favorite arguement for Flash sites vs. properly build sites is still this flow chart. Friends don't let friends use flash to build entire web sites.