DeuceTech

I got off to a good start with this site last year, but I abruptly found it difficult to continue writing.  I don’t know what happened to me back then, but now I finally feel like picking up where I left off, so here I am.

A lot has happened in the last year and a half.  At work, I developed the software and procedure to automate our PC refresh cycle.  I actually went out and helped with doing those refreshes, along with our Macintosh refresh cycle.

I got an iPhone, used it for a year and then got an iPhone 3G.  I learned about the pleasures of “jail-breaking” that phone. That was at work.  At home, my T-Mobile contract ran out and I ended up doubling my bill by going with AT&T instead of MetroPCS, which would have knocked off about $50/mo. from my family’s phone expenses.  The two 3G iPhones and two “regular” 3G phones along with the unlimited SMS plan and earlier “free” nighttime calling add-ons have a lot to do with the fat bills I am paying now.

I installed a new stereo in my car with Bluetooth telephone support.  I renewed my Sirius satellite radio service with a lifetime subscription and got a new radio to go with it.  I even learned how to take some engine components off of my car, clean them, and put them back to make it pass the smog test and to run better.

I got a new 24-inch Intel iMac, moved to a new home, and set up a new home network with three different routers, two of which are running Linux-based, 3rd party firmware.  I bought a 1TB hard drive and an enclosure to put it in and then I got a 1.5TB drive and another of the same enclosure, an Antec MX-1 which I will write a review about later.

My latest move was to terminate my cable TV and cable/VOIP telephone service.  I had already begun watching most of my TV shows and movies on-line, so it was an easy move that is saving me about $100/mo.  I also used those government DTV coupons to buy a couple of digital converter boxes, so I am getting some TV over rabbit ears again for the first time since I got cable back in 1978.

I also bought a nice color-screen Garmin GPS to replace my plain old eTrex.  I had big plans to get back into geo-caching with my kids, but we haven’t gone once since I bought it early this year.

That’s what I’ve been up to during my extended leave and it is a preview of what I’ll be writing about in the near future.  Hopefully it will be interesting to all of you and maybe my experiences and recommendations will help some of you.

Oh, one more thing.  I’ve grown my hair out longer than it has been since I joined the Army back in 1985.  It is as long, thick, and curly as it was back in my high school years, kind of like Gabe Kaplan’s hair in his famous TV role; That’s why I chose the title above, someone at work saw my hair one day and said, “Welcome back, Kotter!

I recently had an email exchange with someone asking about whether a Treo 700w would work with our Exchange-based email system. I initially told him that basically any Windows Mobile device currently sold would work with Exchange and the Direct Push technology that was added to Exchange 2003 SP2 recently. After a couple more emails, I finally gave my extended analysis and recommendation as follows:

In the world of Windows Mobile, you have two basic choices: Smartphones such as the Motorola Q, and true PDA phones (with a stylus and touch screen) such as the Treo 7xx series. The PDA phones are a little more versatile because of the better input method, but the Smartphones generally have much better battery life with almost the same ease of use and functionality. One major difference between the two is that Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones do not have mobile versions of Word and Excel, so you would have to purchase a 3rd party application if you need to edit these types of files on the device.

I carried a Treo 700w for about 6 months and I have been carrying a Moto Q for about 8 months now, so I have experience with both, along with 5 different BlackBerry models over the last 3 years. Both of the Windows Mobile devices are unstable, meaning that they freeze up, turn off, or reboot by themselves periodically. The Treo battery lasted about 8 hours maximum without making any voice calls, so I ended up purchasing a second charger so I could always have it plugged in at home and at work. The Q battery life has been better; about 24 hours or about 40 hours with the extended battery.

I have to admit, I really prefer the BlackBerry over any other device. The battery life is close to 3 days, it is 100% stable, it has a better user interface and applications are just easier to use. Now with the BlackBerry 88xx series, including the 8830 which is available from Sprint, it even has the multimedia capabilities (video and music playback)that were missing before.

My bottom line is this: 1) If you want the best device for staying in touch, go with the BlackBerry 8830 from Sprint. 2)If you feel you really need to go with a Windows Mobile device, the Motorola Q is the more stable choice with the best battery life, but get the extended battery. 3)A Treo 7xx is not really bad, if you really need the additional functionality it offers then get it, but in my experience, it is a little too buggy for me to recommend it over the others.

I mentioned Sprint because the user had told me that he was a current Sprint subscriber. He ended up buying the BlackBerry 8830 from Verizon because they gave him a very big discount over what Sprint would would give him. He was very happy when he got it and we set up his email, calendar, etc. on the device. I will write in my next post about my own experience with the Verizon BlackBerry 8830 and other recent devices.

Many of you may remember Apple’s foray into, and perhaps genesis of, the PDA that was known as the Newton. Still more probably have no recollection of it since it was one of the more notable products that got axed upon Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in the late 90s. There’s little doubt now that it was Jobs’ specific series of actions and brilliant, sometimes shrewd, leadership that led to the rapid salvation of the Apple ship and its continuing success, but at the time, the sudden loss of the Newton line was decried by many as a mistake and deemed a tragic loss in the then emerging world of the handheld computer/PDA. It was an incredible gadget with almost no peer save for the USRobotics Pilot which evolved into the PalmPilot. I won’t get into the differences between the two or technological superiorities of one over the other; this is very subjective and there is a ton of existing material to be had on the subject by searching online. There is also the subject of WindowsCE/Pocket PC that comes into play in this discussion since it also appeared at about the same time, but again, any curiosity about its early history and development is better satisfied by a bit of online research.

My main point here is simply to say that the death of the Newton years ago has always left what has been perceived as a hole in the PDA world that has left many people speculating as to what the PDA would be like today had it not been dropped from further development. The Palm Pilot and Windows CE were left to duke it out for many years and I would argue that, despite several advances on both platforms, neither has really ever progressed enough to make it stand out as the undisputed “must-have” handheld computer. Both platforms have had a lot of success and each has its staunch supporters, but overall, I think it is safe to say that the PDA has always been more of a “good idea” than an actual realization of a technology that everyone must have.

Personally, I have owned a couple of Palm devices, a couple of Pocket PCs, and more recently, several PDA telephones, including a Palm Treo, a Motorola Q, and a handful of different RIM BlackBerries. My experiences with the non-phone devices was that they worked well enough and had a lot of third party applications to do just about anything I ever wanted or needed. However, their lack of continuous data connectivity, bulkiness, poor battery life, and need for a stylus usually led to them being left on my desk rather than being with me whenever I had an occasion to use them. My experiences with the Treo and the Q were only marginally better in that the integration with continuous data connectivity and a telephone meant that I carried them with me more often, but they still suffered from most of the negative aspects of the earlier devices. In the end, they sat on my desk more than they should have, too. Out of all of them, the BlackBerry has turned out to be the one that I use most. All of the models I have owned share the same pluses: they are small, the batteries last for days, they are easy to use with one hand (no stylus), they are more stable than anything else I have used, and they run just about any application I can think of a need for. I always have my BlackBerry with me and it just works. Sure, some of the previously mentioned devices may have more memory or faster processors, but they are buggy, bulky, battery hogs that I just never felt comfortable on my belt like the BlackBerry does.

Back to the iPhone. While it is true that the iPod has had a few PDA functions built in since the beginning; games, notes, and contacts, these are functions that most users never even think about using. Now we have the iPhone that is poised to become the ultimate PDA. As it stands now, in its released first incarnation, it has a telephone, a web browser, a contact list, an email client, and it does photos, video, and music better than any device we’ve seen before, even its iPod predecessors.

There are some holes in its present functionality, document editing and limitations on cut-and-paste operations being two of the most notable, but this is after all, just iPhone 1.0. It is inevitable that the iPhone will be refined quickly and these shortcomings, as well as others that are already apparent to the early adopters, will all be addressed. While it is hard to say that this is really the new “Newton” it is the rebirth of the Newton concept as is evidenced by its leapfrogging of the competition. It is set to take an even greater lead it continues to be developed further and I think it is safe to say that it will never be axed as its spiritual predecessor was almost 10 years ago.

I had expected to get an iPhone yesterday, just like so many other people, but it just wasn’t in the stars. One of my roles at the university where I work is that of “primary data-enabled wireless handheld device tech” AKA “BlackBerry Guru” or “the guy that knows how to set up email on any device even if you just went out and bought it without checking with us first to make sure we can support it.” We have a large number of wireless users, several hundred, mostly consisting of university management, department heads, other (sometimes self-declared) VIPs, and most of the technical staff who need to be reachable 24/7. Since I am kind of the “go-to guy” for these things, I always carry a couple of different types of these devices and I change them often so that I know how to support all of the VIPs who just want and need them to work. Even our wireless account person has trouble keeping up with all of my device and phone number changes.

Her’s is often an overworked and thankless position and personally, I think she should get paid a lot more for what she does. Whenever there is a new model of BlackBerry, wireless Internet card, or something completely new like the iPhone, she is invariably inundated with new orders and requests for service changes or upgrades which all just get piled on top of the existing multi-carrier, multi-department billing nightmare she has to plow through daily. She relayed to me early in the week that she expected to be standing in line either at an Apple store or an AT&T storefront to acquire several iPhones when they became available on Friday. Fortunately for her, prior to her going and wasting a day in line, she learned that the iPhone is not available to business & government account customers, so she avoided what was sure to be an unpleasant experience, at best.

Many others were not so fortunate. It seems that many, many others went and either waited in line for hours or walked in during the post-rush/pre-sellout window enabling them to leave the Apple store or AT&T store with a couple of iPhones in hand, or more correctly, in the cute little iPhone bag. Most got them home or took them to work right away, tore into the packaging, and began the activation process via iTunes on their Macintosh or Windows PC. At some point in this process, all became painfully aware that they could not activate their new toys on their business accounts. Some opted to either convert their existing business line of service to a personal line or opted to open a second, completely new personal line just to be able to begin the activation waiting game that many iPhone buyers are still going through even the day after . Still, some frustated business purchasers decided to just return the shiny $600 brick to the store and get their money back rather than be held over the coals by AT&T. Well, it seems that they will happily accept all returns for a nominal 10% restocking fee, so imposed because the outer packaging is no longer intact. Some took the hit right away and accepted the partial refund, but others decided to wait until Monday morning so they can contact their account representatives and scream about their disatisfaction over the whole ordeal. There is even talk by some about a class-action suit to fight the $50 or $60 “penalty” for being a business customer who did not know that they were not invited to the iPhone party.

I don’t know what the reason is behind this alienation of their business customers, perhaps it is a logistics issue that they will resolve a some later point, but who knows? Some of the businesses they have pushed away now only spend a few hundred dollars per month, but others, like my organization, spend anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars each month on these devices and services. I don’t have an MBA, but it doesn’t seem clear to me where the logic is in disappointing this class of customer, especially when there are already numerous problems being reported as a result of the Cingular-AT&T metamorphosis. There are already many complaints about Apple’s decision to go with Cingular/AT&T for their iPhone service which still does not seem wise due to the inherently slower speeds of their EDGE data network and relatively poor voice-call sound quality in existing devices such as the BlackBerry line on their network. Time will tell how all of this plays out, but I am glad that I’m not an AT&T employee manning the phones on Monday morning.

I went out on a call recently because one of our computer users reported that she could not create a new calendar entry in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. When I arrived, she was not at her computer and no one in the area seemed to know where she was or when she would return. Upon checking the machine, I found that she had two instances of Outlook open along with about five or six Excel spreadsheets. I expected that I would have to repair the Office installation, so I needed to close all of the open applications. Of course, as I closed each item, I elected to save each one to avoid losing any of her work and so, I just saved each spreadsheet to its existing name and location. After I closed everything and reopened Outlook, I found that it was working properly and so I left without doing anything further. By the time I returned to my desk, one of my coworkers had already been on the phone with the computer user who had called because “all of her work was gone!” I immediately called her back and explained that I had simply saved each item without changing any of the names or locations, so each file could simply be reopened from wherever she had originally created and saved the documents.

The real problem, as it turned out, was that she had received one of those spreadsheets as an Outlook email attachment and she had opened it without ever doing a “Save as…” to save it locally. She had been working for three hours inputting new numbers into the spreadsheet and had never once stopped to save it somewhere like her desktop or her “My Documents” folder. Then, prior to my arrival, she had just walked away from the computer, still without ever saving her work. I had her search for the file by name and then by modification date, but when the file was found and she opened it, she said it was the original file without her changes. During all of this, I insisted that I simply saved all of her files and I alluded to the fact that she should have saved something that was so important and that she had put so much time into. I said something to the effect that I would never have worked on something like that without saving it and I certainly would never have walked away with something like that open and unsaved knowing that someone was coming to repair a problem. She became somewhat defensive telling me “well, that is you!” and “I didn’t think you would come so soon!” I ended up going back to her office to help search for the temporary file which I knew held her saved work. After I got there, she admitted that she had reopened the original file from the email and saved it again which meant that she probably had overwritten the one that I had saved earlier.

The final thing that came out and the one that troubled me most was that she new exactly how and where to dig down through the hidden folders and files on her computer to the place where Outlook stores its temporary files such as attachments that are opened from withing an email. I told her so much too. I told her that the fact that she knew how to do that so easily indicated to me that this was something normal for her and that it really was a very bad practice. I certainly was never impolite to her, but I wanted her to realize that this data loss was a result of her own mistakes, not because of something I did wrong. In the end, she made the statement that she had “learned her lesson” to which I responded that despite the loss of three hours of work, maybe this “lesson” would help her to avoid an even bigger loss later on.

When I first got the idea to make this site, I did not consider that it would be a such a new experience in and of itself and be something that I would write about. Making a web site was not even in my preliminary of topic ideas, but as I encountered the issues that I did, it just made sense to me to write about the process. I know there will many other issues as I go on and there are several steps I went through on the site already that I haven’t posted about; I will revisit this process and write more about it later. One step that I had not even considered originally is that of monetizing the blog which I accomplished with Google’s AdSense. I will detail how I did it later; I am just amazed how easy it was and even more that it is already making me money, about $20 in the first day alone. Considering that the site still in its infancy and most, if not all, of my visitors at this point are my friends and colleagues, it has been a pleasant surprise that should only get better as my content and readership increases.

I finally got the favicon to display in Internet Explorer, along with Firefox and Safari which I already had working from earlier. This took three steps. First, I installed a plug-in for Photoshop which allowed me to save the image in the ICO format. This can be found and downloaded here. Second, I changed the code that used to reflect the change in the image format so it now looks like this: <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://example.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon”>
<link rel=”icon” href=”http://example.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon”> but since I’m using XHTML instead of HTML, each link ends with “/>” instead of just “>”. The third step was to add the following directive to my .htaccess file to tell Apache how to respond to the request for the ICO extension: “AddType image/x-icon .ico”. I still have my original favicon.png in the site root too, so between the two methods, all of my browsers now display the favicon on my XP, Vista, and OS X machines. I’ve been too lazy to boot into any of my Linux installations to test it, but I’ll get around to it soon. For further reading, check out the “favicon” entry in Wikipedia here.

I worked yesterday on making my favicon which is the custom icon that shows up next to the address and in the saved links/bookmarks/favorite lists in the web browser. Basically, if you create a PNG image file that is 16×16 pixels, rename it “favicon.ico” and then save it at the root of your web server, it should, theoretically, be seen by the web browser and displayed whenever your site is loaded or the address is saved. That seemed to work okay when I viewed the site on my Macintosh, both in Firefox and Safari. Windows was another matter; it did not appear in any of the three browsers I have installed on my XP machine: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, and Safari. I found a code snippet on the W3.org site that, supposedly, adheres to the current Web standard and should force the browsers to display the custom favicon, even if it is saved as “favicon.png” which is how I have it now. After this change, and a small correction to change the HTML code to XHTML, it now displays correctly in all browsers on both platforms with the notable exception of Internet Explorer. I tried recreating the favicon as a 32×32 image, as suggested by a couple of my friends, but it still does not seem to load in Internet Explorer. It’s not a big deal, but I would like it to show in all browsers and on all platforms equally since it makes my site stand out with a small mark of uniqueness. I will keep working on it until I get it to work.

I’ve been trying to make it so that the site always loads with the “www” in the address regardless of whether or not it is entered in the address bar of the browser. This apparently improves the Google PageRank rating since otherwise the site may get processed as if it were two distinct sites with two different URLs: one with “www” and one without. This is discussed in detail by John Chow and his readers here. I found several methods to force that action on various sites. The most popular method seems to be the addition of some redirect code in the “.htaccess” file at the root of the site, but it just did not seem to work for me at all. I also tried to do it via the “index.php” file with some similar code, but that was even worse as I kept getting syntax errors. Finally, I tried a couple of WordPress plug-ins with mixed results. Ultimately, it was the “enforce-www-prefences” plug-in authored by Mark Jaquith that worked for me. He has a nice site with good content and many other plug-ins and it is called Tempus Fugit.

I just spent several hours experimenting with changes to the stylesheet “style.css” file and finally tweaked the header fonts and colors to how I like them. I’ve never really played with CSS before, being the old-school HTML guy that I am, but it really is not too hard to figure out. Of course, there is a ton of material online that makes it easier to figure out what to do. The W3Schools website is a great resource, not just for CSS, but for all Web programming and mark-up languages. It is amazing that they have such a complete collection of learning material available for free. You can find the link to the right of this page in the featured links section.