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My company recently upgraded me to a blackberry 8800 from verizon. As I was setting it up with my car for hands free I noticed it had a “Dialup Networking” bluetooth service. Something my previous 8703e didn’t support, I had to use a USB cable and it only worked in Windows under Parallels. So I set to work tethering it to my MacBook running Leopard.

For the most part, this was pretty straight forward. Made the blackberry discoverable, added it as a bluetooth device to my MacBook. In doing so, it prompted me and asked me if I wanted to use it to access the internet. So I said yes, and continued.

Then it asked for my username, dialup number, and password. I figured these were the same as the settings I had used on my old XV6700. Phone nubmer #777, user tendigitphone@vzw3g.com and password is vzw. Ends up they were, but there were still two problems to overcome.

1. Which modem driver to use.
Ends up this is pretty easy, just not obvious. In Network Preferences you click on the bluetooth modem connection and click the “Advanced” button. Other Vendor choose “Other”, then under model choose “Verizon Support (PC 5220)”.

2. Disable Compression.
After I had this working it would connect and disconnect after just seconds. I noticed some weird messages in the system log, after digging around on the Internet for a while I figured out the problem. In Leopard MPPE Compression/Encryption is enabled by default, and this isn’t supported. But there is no GUI option to turn it off. So you have to do it manually, here are the steps:

• Open /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
• Find entry for the Bluetooth connection
• Find “CCPEnabled” parameter for this entry and change the “1″ to a “0″
• Save the file, Reboot, and Connect.

After that I connected and worked just fine. One more of the strings that binds me to windows has been cut!

One of my instructors in college used to say “Never under estimate the bandwith of station wagon full of floppies travelling down the interstate”. While I haven’t ever had that experience, and really am not sure I ever care too, moving large amounts of data in a hurry is always somewhat interesting.

This week I was doing some upgrades on a server and had about 50GB of data I needed to move. The new server was equipped with SAS drives/controllers. I wanted to move this data quickly so my customers wouldn’t be cut off from the data for too long. Any type of network/share based transfer was just going to be way to slow. Ultimately I would have rather just put the drives from the old server into the new server, copy the data locally and remove the old drives. But since this server was setup for SAS it wasn’t an option.

The drives on the old server were IDE (yeah….OLD server is right). I asked a few people for ideas when Ron mentioned that they had some USB to IDE atapters they used for troublshooting, etc. He didn’t know if they would work on linux, but I figured it was worth a try. Sounded the the best option going, so I bought one from newegg.com.

This has turned out to be one of the best little gadgets I have ever purchased. I got it, and immediately hooked it up to the new server that was running Red Hat Enterprise 4 and immediately my test drive showed up….pretty much like a jump drive. I started doing some data copy speed tests and moved a 1.6GB file in one minute flat when connected to a USB 2.0 port!

So today I did the server upgrade. Removed the drives from the old server, used my USB to IDE adapter and within an hour had copied my 50GB of data to the new server. Thanks Ron!

No, not the kind “you get from kissin’”. The .NET platform project that allows you to run .NET apps on more platforms that just Windows. I heard about the mono project years ago, but until today really had no need to look at it. I have been avoiding .NET like the plague. However, when I started playing with the Amazon Simple Storage Service, I decided to use C# because XML deserialization was going to make the program a breeze.

I have gotten a nice little program going that I call S3Exploer that allows me to put files up and down with Amazon S3. But since I am a dual Mac/PC user, it has really been nagging at me that I would like the program to run on either platform. So I downloaded mono and began playing with it. I have to say, it is amazing, not flawless, but very good. So good it made me wonder why is it that an outside group can put something together that runs like this but microsoft hasn’t released a .NET VM for anything other that Windows?

With a little work, and a little cleanup of my code (mono actually uncovered a few areas I had overlooked) and a little playing with mono, I had my S3Explorer compiled in C# on Visual Studio 2003 on Windows running on my Mac in OSX! After about another hour or two of debugging/troubleshooting I had it fully functional on both platforms including a TreeView, a List View, XML Serialization/Deserialization, Cryptography (S3 requires hashes), WebRequest/Response, Input/Output Streams, Common Dialogs (Open/Save As), File IO….should I keep going?

As you can probably tell from this post I was quite impressed. If you want your .NET program to run on OSX or Linux take a serious look at the mono project.

I stumbled across this video the other day of this new interface technology that Microsoft is working on. It is an interface like they use in the movie Minority Report, which Tom Cruise was moving stuff around on the computer with just his hands in mid air. Pretty cool stuff. Like most new technology it still has it’s quirks, but it looks pretty cool.

http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6096513.html?tag=cnetfd.ld1

Today Microsoft Outlook decided it was time to stop checking my email and started giving me “Unknown Error ‘0×8004060C’”. First thing I did was to verify my server wasn’t have any problems…server was fine. Then I decided to take a look at Google. The first returned page pointed me here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q304863/. I thought “awesome, this is the exact error message”….so I started scanning the document for a resolution. I was happy to read ” 0×8004060C is a unique error code that is designated for a failure to deliver to a .pst file Inbox because the .pst file is full.”

So….if the KB document can be so clear that it is a “UNIQUE ERROR CODE” then WHY OH WHY does Outlook waste my time telling me it is an UNKNOWN ERROR…..GRRRR. If it had just said “Your PST file is too big, delete some of your junk mail and compress your PST” then I would have been happily on my way a lot quicker. Thanks Microsoft.

Earlier this year I met Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine.  He mentioned his column, which I had never really taken much notice of before.  However, I started keeping an eye on it a bit more as he does write about some interesting stuff.  His most recent addition is about how camera phones are ruining our memories.

I have to agree with Lance, that beyond a quick snapshot in a pinch a camera on your phone is pretty much useless.  I used mine once to snap pictures of a big rig that ran me off the road.  When I got the pictures downloaded to my computer I could barly make out the plate number or DOT number from the truck.  Useless

One of the first things I wanted to activate on my new 6700 was the bluetooth dialup networking. This is not enabled by default like it is on the xv6600. However, Google showed me these instructions at pdaphonehome.com

I am archiving the instructions here for my own use. I have already tried tethering to my laptop in Windows XP and it worked great. Got 120ish K per second.

1. Go to the PHONE application
2. ##3328873
3. enter code 000000
4. Select BT DUN
5. Click Edit
6. Choose enable
7. Select WMODEM
8. Click Edit
9. Choose enable
10. Push Save / OK
11. Push Ok
12. follow the prompt to restart your device

Set up bluetooth on your XV6700 to be discoverable, discover services from your laptop, you should see the bluetooth DUN available.

I had a run in with Outlook’s preview pane today.  A new mail message arrived, and for whatever reason, every time preview pane tried to load it, Outlook started going crazy.  It would use 98% of the CPU endlessly.  The problem was since this was the most recent message in my inbox, Outlook would automatically try and open it in the preview pane when I loaded Outlook.  So I was stuck.  I knew the best bet would be to disable the preview pane, load Outlook, delete the offending message, and re-enable preview pane.  But since on launch outlook would busy itself tryiing to do something with this message it wouldn’t let me into the settings to disable the preview pane.

I set out to find out what registry key I could set to disable the preview pane, and found out if you launch outlook with the /nopreview option it will do this for you.  I added this to my outlook shortcut, launched outlook, deleted the message, closed outlook, removed the /nopreview option and launch outlook again.  Problem solved.

While working on one of my web servers, I came up against a problem that required me to run a script every hour. However, due to the limitations on the NT Task Scheduler, I would have had to enter 24 different scheduled tasks to accomplish this. That is when I figured someone had to have written a “cron-like” scheduler for NT.

After a little research on the web, I found NT Cron, which was exactly what I needed. After a quick look at the documentation I knew that this was exactly what I needed. NT Cron runs from a crontab file just like its Linux counterpart, and allows you to run tasks pretty much however you want, down to every minute if you want too.

NT Cron comes in two distributions. One that runs as a standalone application, and one that runs as a service. Since this was as server I was installing on, I choose the service version. I then installed NT Cron following the supplied instructions and created my crontab file. Within a matter of minutes Cron was off and running, and running my scheduled task every hour.

The Crontab file has a line for each task that follows this format.

(Minute) (Hour) (Day) (Month) (Day of Week) (Command line)

Examples:
execute the program backup.bat every hour
0 * * * * backup.bat

copy some files every half hour
0,30 * * * * xcopy c:\docs\*.* y:\users /s

Story of my life, it was there all along and I was looking in the wrong place. With the bigdaddy update the Googlebot’s User-Agent string changed from “Googlebot/2.1″ to “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

This was throwing off the regular expression used by my stats program to detect the Googlebot. Fixed that and now I am enjoying regular visits.