I Own a MacBook

Posted on July 17, 2011 by bill

The iPad was a gateway drug. Sure I found it useful and helpful, but I now see it was just the first step in Apple’s master plan. October I got an iPad. February I buy an iPhone. Now I’m in the Apple world with two feet. Five months later in mid July I am now the owner of a MacBook Pro.

I’ve been travelling a bit more than normal over the last month and I do love the iPad for mobility. It works well if you just want to catch up on email and web while sitting in a coffee shop, but the Achilles heel of the iPad is content creation. I did get a keyboard case that helps with this, but sometimes you need a litter bigger screen or the workhorse programs. I’ve been thinking of getting a new laptop to travel with as my current HP workhorse laptop model is a bit bulky and getting a bit creaky. I got the change to pick up a 13" Macbook Pro this weekend at a very good price and it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.

I’m planning to use it as my primary laptop for everything other than .NET development for a couple weeks to determine if I really will keep it or resell it. I already see that my first software purchase will be either Parallels or VMWare Fusion to get access to my missing PC Apps.

There’s Going to be a Jailbreak

Posted on May 21, 2011 by bill

Updated this post in August 2011 with a few other jailbreak apps that I’ve installed since May

I did jailbreak my iPhone. Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t admit that online.

In any case I’ve had a jailbroken phone for a few weeks and have found a few apps that I think improved the experience:

Action Menu Plus – Just handy that adds some extra options to the standard copy/cut/paste options

CameraLock – Puts a link to start the camera on the lock screen. Pretty much taken from iOS 5

Five Icon Dock – Lets you keep an extra app in the dock

Five Icon Switcher – Adds extra icon to the switcher

Infinifolders – Probably my favorite app as I have way too many apps on my iPhone and this lets me organize them better

ManualCorrect Pro – Never again send an inappropriate text message to someone

MobileNotifier – Another one that probably becomes obsolete in iOS 5. Makes notifications less of a pain

My3G – Let’s you convince the phone it’s on wireless when its not

PkgBackup – I just like knowing all the stuff on my phone is backed up. Backed up to the cloud is even better.

QuickReply – Makes replying to text messages faster

My First Couple Months with an iPhone

Posted on April 16, 2011 by bill

A couple weeks after getting an iPhone in mid-February, I wrote up a few thoughts on the new phone. I thought that I’d add a few thoughts now that I’ve had more time to get used to the phone and really integrate it into my life.

In short I love the iPhone more now than then. I’ve used a smartphone since getting a Motorola MPx220 that ran Windows Mobile back around 2004. The iPhone works better than any phone I’ve had for just about everything. With every other smartphone I’ve owned I’ve restarted it at least every once a week. I have probably restarted the iPhone a couple of times in four months. Using the phone just feels natural.

I really think that apps do much to improve the experience. Without apps, the iPhone would just be a nice phone and not as useful as it’s become. Actually the apps are half the story and the other part would be data. Before I just used data for email and web browsing. Now I use data all the time for Twitter, maps, and really everything.

Most of the concerns that I mentioned in my first post still bother me. I did figure out how to get the alerts the way that I wanted, but I still feel it could be more flexible. Six years of having phones that managed being silent or making noise when appropriate spoiled me. I still find myself forgetting to set the phone to vibrate or, more often, forgetting to turn sound back on after a meeting. One feature my earlier phone had was the ability to set the phone to be silent for a set period of time when you could estimate how long you’d want quiet such as when going into a restaurant or movie and then it would turn sound back on automatically. I’d like to see that option.

The texting interface has grown on me. I’m using texting more now and I’m not sure if the iPhone has led to more texting or if my greater texting led to me getting more used to the iPhone interface.

I decided to Jailbreak my phone and will be looking at the Cydia store to round off some of the rough edges. Will report on what I find then.

Two Weeks with the iPhone

Posted on February 26, 2011 by bill

I’d never been that impressed with the iPhone until the iPhone 4 came out last year and I had the change to play with a friend’s phone. The only problem was the AT&T exclusivity and my issues with AT&T locally had led me to Verizon after a number of years as an AT&T wireless customer. AT&T has improved since then, but not enough to make me switch back (though they did finally deploy 3G data here back in early January). So I was happy to hear the iPhone come to Verizon in early February.

I purchased an iPad last fall and it had largely converted me into the iOS camp. I have no plans to replace my Windows computers with a Mac for day to day use, but using the iPad made me appreciate the simplicity of the system and the convenience of having a small and long life device for things like email, reading PDF documents, and the like. I’ve really noticed some amazing benefits of integrating it into my work life, but that’s another post.

Still the experience with the iPad had me ready to look at an iPhone when it came time for a new phone in June. The decision came a little earlier as the issues my phone had experienced since going for a little swim in a creek in the late summer had become much worse. Finally they reached a point of becoming too annoying two weeks ago so I walked out into a Best Buy one Saturday afternoon and walked out with a 32 GB iPhone 4.

I like it. The convenience of the apps cannot be overstated. As a phone the iPhone really isn’t any better than the Windows Mobile phone it replaced, but the interface is smoother and the apps make the thing a true PDA in addition to a phone. I’d have trouble going back even after just two weeks.

Even though I do love the phone I am surprised at some simple things the phone cannot do and may look into Jailbreaking to implement some of these. First the texting interface is a bit weak to me. I’m not a large text message user, but something about it just doesn’t working right for me.

I’m also amazed that the phone doesn’t have any way to automatically set it to vibrate or silent when my calendar shows me busy. My much derided Windows Mobile phone could do this before the first iPhone even came out. In addition the ability to configure alerts is weak. I really don’t want to hear a tone if I get an email at 5 AM, but I would like the phone to ring or alert me to a text message. I had an application on my Windows Mobile phone that would go to a silent mode at night for everything except phone calls for example and turn off bluetooth to save battery. So far I’ve not been able to find anything like this for the iPhone that doesn’t involve hacking the phone.

These are mostly minor things and they don’t dampen my overall enjoyment of the phone, but I’d really like to see some of these added in the next iOS version. And if I’ve missed any obvious fixes for the above problem, feel free to point them out in the comments.

Why I’m Not Sure I’ll Miss Borders

Posted on February 14, 2011 by bill

Understand that I’m a reader. I love books, have books, and will often buy a book that looks interesting knowing that I probably won’t be able to get around to reading it for weeks or months. When I travel I love to find a used bookstore and can spent a couple hours going through and leave with a stack of books so large that they have to be shipped home instead of packing in my luggage.

When I read the news that Borders is expected to file for bankruptcy this week it surprised me then my reaction was largely, “Meh.” It’s not that I dislike Borders, but honestly I just don’t go there for books that often. A lot of blame for the demise of Borders is being placed on the “Internet” much like it’s some vague evil force. In truth I’ll expect in the end management mistakes and being late to get into the online sales routes did most of the work to take Borders down this road. For me Borders never competed against the Internet. For me Borders competed against the fact that the nearest store is about an hour’s drive from my house and to be honest if I want a book it’s only about a fifty-fifty chance they’ll have it unless it’s the newest Stephen King or latest hot business book. Sure they can order it, but I can do that myself from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Books-A-Million and have it at my home in a few days.

In fact since I got a Kindle about a year ago, unless it’s a book I expect to reference certain ways, I’m just as likely to just buy the eBook and have it in a few minutes. I enjoy the book experience, but I’m finding more the ability to carry an entire library with me anywhere is just too much of a benefit to ignore. The ability to reference a book any time without having to remember where I’ve stored it means I’m re-visiting books that I’ve already read more than before. The ability to take time that otherwise felt wasted (waiting on an oil change or at the doctor’s office) and read instead makes me feel more productive and I am getting more read thanks to these small moments. Now that my phone has a Kindle app, I expect I’ll do this even more and not just when I expect to be waiting.

I don’t think books will go away and I don’t want them too. The truth is though that a lot of books are read, digested, and then simply shelved or resold. Something is lost perhaps in the move to eBooks, but I think more will be gained. I hope the used bookstore with the musty smell and surprise finds never goes away. I do think that the traditional bookstore will change, but I don’t think that they will all go away. Some will thought and it appears Borders might be the first.

GoToMeeting Codec

Posted on October 23, 2010 by bill

I tried to watch a recorded screencast yesterday only to keep getting an error that the correct codec wasn’t available. After some checking I figured out the video had been recorded using GoToMeeting and I did not have that installed on my new machine. If anyone else ever runs into that problem, you can download the codec at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/codec.

Updated and Cleaned Up

Posted on August 13, 2010 by bill

Sorry the spam had gotten a little out of hand. It should be cleaned up now. I’ve been tied up with some changes at work involving adding a new area to the one I already managed and had neglected the blog a bit. Also updated the blog software and made a few changes that I hope will keep things under control better in the future.

When Pricing on Kindle Books Makes No Sense

Posted on June 6, 2010 by bill

I bought a Kindle about six months ago. I’m a big reader and the idea of having a large number of books available along with the convenience of instantly delivery appealed to me. I live in a town with only one small bookstore and frankly they often don’t have a book that I may want so often I have to travel an hour to larger bookstores nearby to find things in stock or order online and wait days for delivery. For a lot of books I’ve found that it’s not worth the hassle of either option so the books gets stuck onto a list to look at some later time. With the Kindle, I can get the book right now and read immediately. It’s like having a large bookstore right next to my house.

I’ve come to enjoy my Kindle more over time as I get more familiar with the convenience of having a large number of books I can take anywhere. It’s surprising the downtime during the day where you have enough downtime to pull it out and start reading. I still buy plenty of real books and don’t plan to stop as some books work better in paper, but I’m starting to move more of my purchases to the Kindle.

So tonight I looked for a book online and found the following pricing. Note that the Kindle price is the highest of all the options on Amazon. In fact the Kindle version (set by the publisher) is $8.87 more than the bargain price and $4.72 more than the standard hardcover price. Apparently the paper for the printed book has a negative cost to produce.

Visual Studio 2008 Locks Up After Installing Office 2010

Posted on May 30, 2010 by bill

I installed Office 2010 on my development machine a few weeks ago. I didn’t realize that this was relevant to the problem I’ve been fighting in Visual Studio 2008 until today. The basic problem was that any time I opened an .aspx file, Visual Studio would lock up. It made making any web edits impossible and I’ve been having to edit these files in a different text editor.

I’d tried resintalling the last Service Pack without fixing the issue. So today I sat down to search for the problem and found and article called Upgrade or Uninstall of Office 2007 might cause VS 2008 Web designer to hang. The issue it turns out happens when you upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 on a computer running a 64 bit OS with Visual Studio 2008. It turns out that Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 share the web editing component and when you do the upgrade to Office 2010, the component that VS 2008 relies on is removed.

The fix is to go into Program and Files, click Change on the Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component, and then select Repair. Once that’s done Visual Studio 2008 will work as before.

Fixing Windows 2003 ASP.NET Tab Doesn’t Show in IIS

Posted on May 10, 2010 by bill

I ran into an issue this evening and wanted to document it for my own future reference and anyone else who might run into the problem. I had installed ASP.NET 4 onto a Windows 2003 64 bit server. I uploaded a test version of an application that is a port of an existing application converted to take advantage of some of the new features of .NET 4. After loading the application and setting it as an application I noticed that the ASP.NET tab where one would normally change the version wasn’t there.

After some false starts, I came across this blog post which describes much the same issue though my server was not running on VMWare, but another virtualization system. The fix it suggests is:

Stop IIS
Edit the MetaBase.XML file in %WINDIR%system32inetsrv to remove a line reading Enable32BitAppOnWin64="TRUE"
Start IIS

I did this and the tab did appear, but the result caused more problems that it solved. Several components on the web site refused to load under 64 bit only and as a result the server was useless. After changing the settings back to where they had been to start I looked some more and found another blog post that gave an alternative solution to “manually” change the version on a directory using the aspnet_regiis tool. To do this you use the –s or –sn options along with the path of the application. The path is not the path to the application on disk, but a application path that goes something like W3SVC/[x]/ROOT/AppPath where [x] is the number of the web site (shown on the listing of all the web sites in the IIS Manager) and the AppPath is the path from the root of the site to the application you want to set. The difference between the two options is that –s applies the change to the path you specify and any applications located below it while –sn only changes the settings of the application at the path and does not affect applications below it.

A good note is that an MVC 2 application no longer requires the wildcard mapping “hack” under IIS 6 with ASP.NET 4. Also make sure to allow ASP.NET 4 in the Extensions for your new web application to work too.