Windows Mobile 5 Is a Piece of Junk

I used to have a Verizon XV6600 with Windows Mobile 2003. Now I have a Verizon XV6700 with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5). For some reason, I believe that WM5 does a worse job at managing memory than 2003 did. It is really unbelievable that a product like this can get worse.

With these PDA phones, the memory is divided into two: one section is for "Programs" and one section is for "Storage". In 2003, the user could change the allocation and give more to "Programs" or more to "Storage" depending on which needed more memory.

With WM5, you cannot! This is insane! So my device, which came with supposedly 64Mb of memory, is completely out of storage memory, but has 17Mb of program memory free. Nothing but errors in this scenario!

If anyone has any tips, I would welcome them.

Hotspot at 30000 feet

Technology is awesome. I’m sitting in seat 39C of Lufthansa flight 414 from Munich to Washington, D.C. At 30000 feet, they have a hotspot! How cool is that. In the US, the airlines make us turn off all “radio” equipment including our WiFi cards, but European airlines encourage their use.

Which brings me to another observation: freedom in the US isn’t much different than freedom anywhere else. You are free to do what they allow you to do. Example, in Germany, I was permitted by the government to drive as fast as I want in the left lane of the autobahn. It was an awesome experience and I wish I had had a sports car or something that went faster than 230km/h.

I will miss Germany… until next time. Such is the life of a road warrior. But next time, I will try hard to fly Lufthansa.

Twisting the Truth

Sometimes, NPR just really irritates me. Maybe it is because I'm a little right of center and they want to pull me all the way to the left, and that just irritates me. Maybe it is because their "view" on things is so consistently anti-right. Maybe it is because they don't consider ALL things on "All Things Considered".

Yesterday's annoyance was their stupid report on a mysterious report that the Republicans MUST be holding back because SOME DEMOCRAT said so. Surely they could have found more support than that.

But the real problem is this: the assertion that we are creating terrorists by the power vacuum that WE (Americans) have created in Iraq. WE'RE NOT CREATING THE TERRORISTS. The "peaceful religion" that they subscribe to is creating terrorists. Why can't they call a spade a spade? Why do they have to
hide all the atrocities committed in the name of Muhammed?

If you want to read some real news, then check out this site:

WARNING: There are some gross pictures.

When ActiveSync Won't Work

I have a Verizon XV6700 Windows Mobile phone. This thing is fantastic, and I really do love it cause it is both a phone and a PDA in one tight package. But sometimes, it just don't work.

My recent problem was that it would not sync with my PC. Unlike most errors with syncronization, I actually had an error number this time! ActiveSync reported that there was an error 86000108 when synchronizing with the Exchange server. I did have the latest version of ActiveSync installed (version 4.2).

So I did a little research, and found some hints, but ended up finding my own solution. I went into ActiveSync, then Tools->Options, and I deselected all of the options. I did a sync and it worked.



I then went back into options and turned on each option one at a time, syncronizing after each one. It took a while, but eventually I got them all done and now I am functioning. I have no idea why :)

My girl can run!

Well, my wife signed up for a 4 mile leg of a women's relay race at the Philadelphia Marathon! She's very excited (and so am I)!!! She started her training today and pushed a stroller with our youngest in it for 2 miles. Took her about 25 minutes, but it is a great start. She also had a big hill to climb coming and going, so I think her flat times will be much better. She's never run before, so she is a complete novice. This is awesome!

Voice Command Over Bluetooth

Sometimes, it really helps to have an explanation. Sometimes, things just can’t be done, and it just helps to know why. You might not like the results, but it still helps to have an explanation just to make your life feel complete. This must be why the scientists keep trying to figure out the meaning of the universe.

Me? I’m just wondering why Microsoft Voice Command does not work over Bluetooth with my Windows Mobile 5.0 XV6700 phone from Verizon. I finally have my explanation. This kind Microsoft employee has put my mind at ease.

Of course, now that I know why, I can’t wait until they fix it and give me an update!!!

Fast, my ass...

I hate speeding tickets. Of all the useless things out there, speeding tickets are at the top of my list. In case you were wondering what pre-empted my rant, I just got a ticket the other day. The cop said that he was going 110 MPH and couldn't catch me. If I hadn't gotten to my house, he wouldn't have caught me. I didn't even know he was back there. He told me he felt "unsafe" driving at those speeds. I think he's a wimp.

First, there is no way that I was going 110.

Second, I was driving on a completely empty road at 1 in the morning. Here in PA, nobody is out at 1 in the morning. The road was completely empty, and even though I was speeding, I did not see another car for 5 miles from my house.

Third, it was a big smooth road that easily supports a car going 110+.

The speed limit laws are arbitrary. They are stupid. Now it's going to take a year for the points to get knocked off. And if there is anything stupider than speeding tickets, it is PA's point system. Thanks PennDOT. Thank you officer whateveryournamewas. I feel safer already.

Oh, I should mention that about 9 months ago I reported a drunk driver. I led the cop right to him. The cop confronted him. The cop did not arrest him. The cop did not even give him a ticket. This was a drunk driver that I personally witness almost hitting 2 other people (one pedestrian, one car).

Stupid ticket. Stupid cops. Stupid state.

Like I said, I feel safer.

The Secret of Man

“Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymphs that sing sailors onto rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the sinister secret urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.”
Dean Koontz in Velocity.

Hunting season is almost here...

... and I am very excited. We found a nice cottage to stay in while we scour the hills of Cambria county looking for the elusive giant rat that we call deer. My dad and brother are going to come up from Florida this year, and we're going to all get together up there for a week to bowhunt. I can't wait!

You Know What They Want You To Know...

So my buddy from Argentina called me last week:
Him: "I heard New York City has been without power for the last 5 days."
Me: "No way. Not possible. Haven't heard anything about it up here."
Him: "Well, that's what my father-in-law read in the paper."
Me: "Your father-in-law is nuts. You told me that yourself. He's probably reading a paper from the 70's."
Him: "Maybe you're right."

Why was I so adamant that he was wrong? Because I am a news fanatic. I read the news constantly, especially cnn.com, foxnews.com, and news.google.com. I also sometimes read my local paper's website. None of them had alerted me to this rumor of NYC being without power for 5 days.

Then something weird happened. The next day, I visited the Houston Chronicle to look at their warehousing situation. In the waiting room, they had one of their papers. I picked it up. I read the first page. Then the second. Then I got to the third. It turns out that 100,000 people had been without power in NYC for 9 days! Look close, it is buried towards the end of the article.

This news about the greatest city in the US being without power for so long had been hidden from me for more than a week. I know more than I care to know about Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq, which are half a world away, but I don't find out about a major event that is happening 3 hours away. Something is wrong. I think that I am putting way too much reliance on internet news.

Visual Studio 2005 Smart Client Setup and Deployment Woes

I gotta tell you, the new CAB builder that comes with Visual Studio 2005 is a glorious failure. It is glorious because it is intuitive, easy to use, and simple. It is a failure because it doesn't friggin work.

Sure, it will build a CAB. And sure it is easy to setup the first time. But everytime we open the project a day or two later, all sorts of dependencies are out of whack and it won't build, even if nothing changed! And it hides so much that it is difficult to trace where exactly the failure is. I'm really getting fed up with this tool. I can't wait for the next service pack, cause this one is an abomination.

Successful Weight Loss!

I have lost 100 pounds! That's right! Yep! 100 pounds! I've lost 5 pounds 20 times. 5 times 20 equals 100! Woohoo!

How to perform a self-vasectomy...

You wanna talk about a bad day? This is a picture of a Dell laptop (according to the article) exploding at some kind of convention. Imagine if this had been on somebody's lap? I just moved my laptop to the table! :)

XV6700 Firmware Update

I'm going to give credit where credit is due. These dudes have found and installed the firmware updated for the XV6700 update from Verizon. Supposedly, this fixes the WiFi problem AND voice recognition problem, which should have been on the phone to begin with.

Make a Decision

"An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides." - John H. Patterson

I love that.

To lose is to win...

I found this very brave lady on blogger the other day. I've never posted my weight on the net. And I probably never will. And I'm a guy, we don't usually worry about such things. But she's done it, and she's fighting hard!

I've always struggled with my weight. As a programmer, I don't get a lot of exercise. And I love to eat. And I don't like vegetables. Or fruit. Or artificial sweeteners.

So you would think that a diet like the Atkins would work well for me. And it does. The problem is that I cannot stay on that diet for very long before I just get sick of all the meat and protein bars. It does work well, though. I recently went on it for 3-4 weeks and dropped 10 lbs. I went off of the diet and I've kept those 10 off, but I need to lose 40-50 more.

But I really want to exercise. Well, want is a strong word, but I really need to exercise. That's the tough part.

So I started running, and lifting weights again. With willpower, and a little less travel, I can accomplish my goals. There are a lot of people like Gigi that are in the same boat.

What's the Theme?

I subscribe to many different blogs, and many of them I enjoy. Most of them are technical in nature, but a few are not. But one thing I am finding out is this: the blogs that are successful, the ones that have a lot of readers, and a lot of commentors, are the ones with a theme. It doesn't seem to matter what the theme is, as long as it has one.

So how does one come up with a theme for a blog? My life has many facets that are exciting to me. Whether it be work or play, I've never narrowed my life down to just one thing. So how does a blogger do it? How do you boil everything else out of your life until you have just one thing to talk about?

Everytime I post here, I realize more and more that this is pointless. If there's no theme, it won't be found, and if it isn't found it won't be read.

Setting up an Earthmate GPS with Mapopolis

Here are some simple instructions on how to setup an Earthmate Bluetooth GPS, with Mapopolis 4.7, running on an XV6700 or (PPC-6700 if you have a Sprint phone).

These instructions assume that you have downloaded and installed Mapopolis 4.7 or later. If you haven't done that, then do that first.

Next, turn your GPS on. Make sure you hold the button for 2 seconds, otherwise it turns back off again. You'll know it is on when the blue light is flashing.

Next, pair the GPS with the phone using the Bluetooth Settings -> Devices -> New Partnership. When pairing, make sure that you select the "Serial Port" option on the Selected Services page.

After they are paired, you need to configure a COM port for the GPS. You didn't need to do this with Windows Mobile 2003, but with 2005, it seems to be a necessary step. Still in Bluetooth settings, select the COM Ports tab, then New Outgoing Port. It will ask you to select a device to create the COM port for, so select the "Eathermate Blue Logger GPS". On the next screen, select COM6, and check the Secure Connection. That part is done.

Next, you need to configure Mapopolis. In Mapopolis, go to Tools -> Settings -> GPS Communications. Set the port to COM6 and the Baud Rate to 4800. I also have "Retry Failed Connections Forever" checked, but I'm not sure that is important.

That should be it for setup. Make sure that you have a good lock (if you do, the green light on the GPS is lit), then within Mapopolis, go to Tools -> GPS, then hit the big Start button.

Shopping

I took my wife to the King of Prussia mall this weekend. What a great place. 40 Restaurants! Unbelievable. If you want the best Irish food around, get out on the perimeter of the mall and go to Kildare's. Awesome food. Awesome drinks.

One less Islamic extremist...

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is finally dead, praise be to Allah. In case you've been living in a cave, Zarqawi has been responsibile for lot of death and destruction in Iraq. Not just US soldiers, but innocent civilians as well. But I think even the guys living in the caves knew that.

Unfortunately, it is not the end. We will never get rid of Islamic extremists because they are only doing what they were trained to do. In the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Mr. Spencer lays out why the extremists cannot stop what they are doing: they are simply following the instructions given to them by Muhammed in the Koran. He does it by quoting the Koran. Quite frankly, I'm appalled by people who try to shut up these kind of messages and books with their accusations of "hate". The Koran needs to be heard! And criticized. Just like the Bible is in Western culture.

Windows Media Mobile and Storage Cards

I really hate annoying messages that occur with no explanation. But being the "hunter" that I am, I am duty bound to find the cause and destroy it with no emotion. Windows Media Mobile is no exception.

I was getting this warning, error, popup, whatever you want to call it, everytime I turned on my PocketPC: "A storage card was inserted. Do you want to search it for audio and video files?". I'm running Windows Mobile 2005, which has Windows Media Player Mobile v.10 installed. I have a 2Gb MiniSD card installed, but it does not have any media files on it, since I have no time for such fun stuff.

So here's what happened: my work voicemail gets automatically emailed to me from the phone system at the office. These emails have the voicemail attached in wav file, which I then open on my PocketPC and play so that I can get my office voicemail wherever I am. Since they are wav files, Windows Media is the program that starts up to play the file. The email program puts the file on the storage card because it has more space and that is where it cache's attachments. Windows Media automatically adds the file to the Now Playing list, which it attempts to update everytime the PocketPC device is turned on.

So the solution was simple. Go to "Now Playing" -> Menu -> "Clear Now Playing" and the close Windows Media Player. Problem solved. Simple like that. I'm still not sure that my solution is the best, or most permanent, but at least I'm not getting annoyed as much. We'll see what happens if I actually do start putting some music on that card.

Adding Powered Devices to your Car

So I got this new car mounting device for my car to hold my phone/PDA. It is a very clever device, and wanting something that is a little more permanent, I opted for the straight wired device. The problem is, I don't know the first thing about adding a new powered deivce to your fuse box. This thing only draws 1-2 amps, but I have no idea how to add it. I tried searching the web tonight, but didn't find much. In fact, everything I found had more to do with replacing your stereo. So where does one find such a thing?

My new PDA/Phone

It is finally here!

Outline of William Johnstone's Books

This guy has written a lot of books.

Code Monkey Song!!!

This is worth two posts in one day! Be sure to hit the play button.

Patience

I really want this phone. In fact, I want it so bad, that I ordered it more than 3 weeks ago. Why am I ordering it instead of going down to the local Verizon store? Because I’m a business user. In fact, I manage 25 cell phones for my company. Verizon doesn’t want me to do that at the store, they want me to do that through their Business Center because I’ll get “better service”.

So, I wait…

 

What's your backlog?

First, you have to read “The Back-Logged Life”.

 

Then, you have to complete this survey. These are my numbers;

• Voice-mail messages at work: 5
• Voice-mail messages at home: 0 (does that mean I don’t have any friends?)
• Voice-mail messages on my cell: 2
• SMS messages on my cell: 0
• Hours of television on the TiVo: 0 (don’t have one!)
• E-mail messages at home: 8
• E-mail messages at work: 1121
• Items in my feed reader: 0 (I need to reconfigure it)
• Books on my nightstand: 2
• Pending projects at work: 12
• Pending projects at home: 12

Obviously, my big problem is email at work. I get about 100 per day and I never really catch up with them all. One thing I’ve started doing recently is not answering them right away. I’ve noticed that if I answer right away, then the recipient answers right away with another question, and it sort of becomes a bloated chat session. Of course, important customer emails have to get answered, but the rest of them, well…, I’ll get to them.

 

 

 

 

 

MSDTC Challenges

So we have this clustered SQL Server scenario with two servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server. Node A has the database running and Node B has DTC running. Every morning, at random times, the DTC stops working. When this happens, we have to restart both DTC and the database server. Try searching for that on google.

Are you a software developer? Are you looking for a job? Do you want to live in an area where there is very low crime and lots of old farmland to build your house on? Then I want you!

You must love to work. You must love software. You must love solving problems. You must be able to say "I did that!" with your chest thrown out proudly and your head held high. You must be willing to go to and see new places.

We're looking for software developers in the York, Pennsylvania area. Check out our posting here.

Recipient List in SmtpClient

Sometimes, which is more than frequently, I find huge holes in documentation for software products. I am no one to judge, since the documentation for my own software document has had its issues in the past, but when a product has an install based of hundreds of thousands, I would expect a little more.

 

Today’s exercise in futility is brought to you by Microsoft. I really do like Microsoft, but I like being sarcastic, too, so please forgive my negative vibes.

 

Anyway, the situation is this: I’m using System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient to send an email from an automated process whenever there is a machine failure on one of the big machines that my software interfaces with. SmtpClient is very cool. It is very powerful. With these three lines of code, I was shipping off emails to all my friends and family at a rather steady pace:

 

SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(mymailserver, mymailserverport);

smtp.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(myusername,

     mypassword);

smtp.Send("blah@blahblah.com", tothesepeople),

     mySubject, myError);

 

 

The problem was this: what do I use for a delimiter for the second parameter tothesepeople (the recipients) in the SmtpClient.Send function? You can find the documentation for that function here. Read it twice. It doesn’t say whether you should use a semi-colon, a space, or a bunch of carats. But have no fear, I figured it out rather quickly and I am here to provide you the answer, completely free of charge.

 

As is obvious to the most casual of observers, the answer is… ding, ding, ding, the COMMA! On a US keyboard, it is to the right of the M and below the <.

 

So rather than the standard format of Outlook, which is myfriend@hisdomain.com;myotherfriend@herdomain.com

 

You need to use:

myfriend@hisdomain.com,myotherfriend@herdomain.com

 

ThreadStateException in ComboBox AutoCompleteMode

So we received this error recently. We have a fairly complex multi-threaded FAT client application that uses some of the new functionality of the Visual Studio 2005 ComboBox, namely the AutoCompleteMode. The problem that we had occurred when we would load the ComboBox from a handler that was triggered from another form. (Picture form 1 loading form 2 through events.)

Interestingly enough, the ONLY control to have this error was the ComboBox, and the ONLY time it generated the error is when AutoCompleteMode was set to true.

The fix was simple enough:

Thread.CurrentThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);

We've been running about 5 days with that line of code added just before the AutoCompleteMode, and things have been working fine. I'm not sure what other side effects we'll see.

What bothers me the most is what little information I could find on this error. I found many posts all over where people were able to produce the error, but nowhere that the fix was spelled out. That's one of the few fixes that we had to find without support documentation.

Some people just don't get it...

http://entertainment.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=222507&GT1=7703

You gotta read that first. The reason there hasn't been a women president of the US, yet, is because they are trying to hard! The goal shouldn't be to "put a woman in the white house". The goal should be "to put the best person in the white house".

The less you try, the more natural it will occurr.

Where's my immigrant?

There's one thing that I don't understand about this immigrant day boycott: isn't it really only hurting the businesses that hire immigrants? Let's assume for a second that company A hires immigrants, has a good product, and good deliveries. Let's assume for the next second that company B does not hire immigrants, has a good product, and good deliveries. Now, today, company A has just ticked off all of its customers, while company B has made them happy! So don't the immigrants really lose?

Meat processing companies come to mind. There are some meat companies that do very well by hiring immigrants, especially ones without papers (I think some people call them illegial aliens). Other meat companies do not hire immigrants (or only legal ones). So today, those companies with a lot of immigrants would be at a distinct disadvantage.

Good luck to them anyway. I hope they get what they are looking for, as long as it isn't world domination!

Yet Another Lame Blogger

Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.