So far the Iphone has been a great device. I have had better reception with this phone than my blackjack. The mail features are really easy to use and nice.

I did jailbreak on my phone to store / move files and so far it has been a fantastic device.

With this handy step by step guide, I was able to ssh into my phone and now I can use it as a modem.
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/01/jailbreak3g-win.html

Well I finally did it. I ended up with an Iphone. I spend every day at work developing and creating solutions in .NET and I finally abandoned my WMphone and went with an Iphone.

For one thing, my phone broke. My original Black Jack decided that it needed to stop taking phone calls ever 3 hours. A reboot would fix the issue, but for some reason I did not like that feature. Along with the cracked screen and the missing lcd pixels (thanks to dropping it from 6 feet) it was time for a new phone.

I tried everything I could to not get the iphone. I looked at all the windows options.

After trying all of these, it did not take me much to just get an iphone.

My web banking application died on me. It is good to see .net being used. But I would feel safer if they used a error page.

http://screencast.com/t/FQYmJMIChst

My favorite key is the “~”. I use it in most of my passwords. In the past many systems would not accept the “~” in a password. Recently this has not been a problem. However, I just got a new phone and realized that it does not have the “~” key when it allows you to enter a password. The phone allows for a “~” but not when entering a password.

Since my main password for work has a “~” in it, I can’t get into mail or even the system till I change it.

Here is a great article detailing the intial presention that gave us the MOUSE. It is amazing that such a simple thing has changed computing for everyone. This was 40 years ago.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1041_3-6248261-1.html

This is an interesting article. It is discussing who’s cloud computing will you be using

http://dcsblog.burtongroup.com/data_center_strategies/2008/10/waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop.html

Here is a great event from rackspace talking about cloud computing
http://www.rackspacecloudevent.com/

Also, some services that rackspace provides
http://www.mosso.com/ - rackspace cloud hosting

Rackspace Cloud Event from Sparksight on Vimeo.

I have always wanted a Cray computer. Even if it was just furniture in my home. I read today that they have a Windows version. Not that I would want a windows version but check out the specs.

http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/products/cx1/CX1_brochure.pdf

“Each Cray CX1 chassis can be configured with up to
eight blades. Blades can include up to 16 Intel Xeon
dual- or quad-core processors and up to 32 gigabytes
of memory per blade”

I need one.

After reading this quick article on slashdot I decided to try out Office Live again. I think I had tried it early on when they did a beta our announced it. So this morning I opened up IE on my home computer (which I don’t use that often at home) and went to office live (www.officelive.com). I had to create a new account with my Gmail email vs my hotmail email.

Since I use google apps very frequently I am using that as a start to my comparison. I use google apps for church, projects, and storing info I want to get to anywhere. The first thing I noticed when I opened officelive was that I had to install something. I was missing something called the liveoffice update 1.2. After installing and it trying to reboot I was able to make a new document.

Creating a new word document I was thinking it was all in the browser, but it appears that it uses my local copy of office. This is interesting because if I did not have office how would I be able to use the app. Overall the feel is very similar to sharepoint. Similar to sharepoint the action of creating and saving a document is a bit slow and difficult. I never know when to save or to close the document and if I have to save it locally or on the server. When using liveoffice it then prompted me again for a username and password when I tried to save. Come on.. I had given liveoffice that info when I first logged in.

After my first document I realized that liveoffice is not similar to google apps. The experience you have on google is fast and fluid. On Liveoffice I found that I had to enter in passwords and it opened office and took a while to actually save and use a document.

Overall just my 10 minutes of using liveoffice told me that I probably will not use it again. I know there are some great features above and beyond google apps (screen share, actual office documents, and shared calendars) but these are not refined enough for me to move over.

In the end I am sticking with google apps.

I often use ISO files (Live Linux cd’s, DVD ISO’s for video, DVD ISo’s for installing software.) In the past I have used tools to burn them or mount them.

Recently I have been using a simple tool called virtual clone drive (http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html) It is very easy to use and does not consume that much resources.

In the past I have used Daemon Tools (http://www.daemon-tools.cc/) to do this but that is a large install and does use a lot of resources.

Washing DC has signed with Google to deliver their office suite. Google Apps will replace MS office.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081012-washington-dc-latest-to-drop-microsoft-for-web-apps.html

This is an interesting trend that is happening. Companies abandoning the need to maintain software locally on computers (office, email, etc..) and use a hosted service that only needs an internet connection.

I am still interested in issues such as reliability and security.

I have been a member of a credit union since my first savings account. Now that I am married we have 2 accounts at two different credit unions. I have kept my original account and deal with another local Credit Union for our primary “banking”.

In all the years I have been a member I have always appreciated the benefits of “banking” at a credit union. Here is a great article that compares the two. http://lifehacker.com/5055408/why-choose-a-credit-union-over-a-bank
http://inovafcu.org/finance.talk/credit.union.difference.htm

I am often caught working on SharePoint and doing SharePoint development. This is an interesting task. There are a lot of options when working with SharePoint and doing development. None are really easy.

Some elements of development can be done with a little tool called SharePoint Designer 2007. Designer is really just an updated version of Frontpage. In this tool you can change elements on a masterpage, check in, update styles, and create basic workflow. If you have to do more than this or if you have some higher technical skills you will quickly leave Designer and use Visual Studio.

Using visual studio causes a few issues. First if you have XP or Vista for you development machine you are already at a disadvantage. Since you need SharePoint to develop for Sharepoint and XP and vista will not run vista you need to setup either a server or a vpc to develop. This was very frustrating for me. To get around this I have found a few tools to help.

1st there is an article and blog that claims you can run sharepoint on your vista box. I have heard of people trying this but it seemed too involved for me.

2nd - the option I like. Use a program called wsp builder. http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder/ This program allows you to create webparts or wsp files from your local machine (as long as you include the sharepoint.dll in the solution). So you can make a wepart locally and then deploy it to your sharepoint box.

Why would you do this. Well often you just have a few min to develop something and don’t really want to fire up a VPC to start coding. using wsp builder you can make the code base and then deploy the WSP to the server to test. Also, for deployment solutions from DEV -> QA -> production the WSP builder allows you to bundle all required files. This method is much cleaner than the xcopy / GAC method.

I have also found this very useful when doing design for SharePoint. In your solution you can create a directory structure the same way as the “HIVE” and the elements you ahve in your solution will be added to the WSP and then deployed to the server. So you can create a CSS directory and Image directory for your SharePoint design on the file system say in the _layouts folder. You can then deploy this through the wsp package.

There are a lot more features to the WSP builder, but I will leave it up to you to view the documentation. I use the Visual Studio Addin so I can deploy locally if I’m developing on the SharePoint server.

The recent federal government events that involve AIG and Freddy Mac, have made me start watching the news again. I realize how much I hate the news. People on CNN call for reform, Fox is asking the federal government how much help is too much, and NPR is wondering why we are helping the bankers. Overall they are blaming these companies for their practices and what they have done.

My own opinion is that we have a situation where the banks are only partially to blame. For years they have been using mortgages as a tool to have a solid return. They assumed that you and I valued our homes and would be willing to live up to our agreement and pay back the mortgage. The change in the recent years has been that we have not lived up to our agreement and are defaulting on mortgages.

So one of the main reasons for this “bail out” is us. The United States Citizens, we are as a group not paying back our debt. Therefore, the holding of these banks are falling in value (in some cases .22 to the dollar). We then, (news media) critique these companies for what they have been doing. Holding mortgages as investments, which was a common practice. But since we are not fulfilling our obligation these companies cannot fulfill theirs.

I am not saying that the banks are not to blame, they were part of the problem as well. They allowed people to get mortgages for 400k homes when a person was making 40k a year in salary. Of course a person who is making that much money cannot pay back the loan. However, the more I look at what happened I start to think it was our greedy society. More for less and we don’t care what it causes.

I think the bail out is a good choice, we can’t have our main underwriter and mortgage holders go under. Help them weather the storm and put in tools to help the banks get the right people the right loans and we may be able to make a come back. It is just going to take a while.

I’ve posted before about ISP’s limiting the amount of bandwidth you can use. In early August Comcast was ordered to stop it’s bandwidth throttling (here is a article describing what they were doing - http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/comcast-disclos.html)

I’m not against a fee for the amount of bandwidth you use, but what I don’t want to have happen is that I am being throttled or limited. If an ISP allowed me to purchase a specific amount of usage I would expect them to monitor my usage. However, in my current comcast agreement it does not state that there is a limit. From reading some blog posts I have seen / read that there is some type of limit that they will cut you off at. I am sure that I am under this limit.. but wouldn’t it be nice to know what that was.

The reason I would like to know is that since I use my cable modem for my home phone (VOIP), data backup, and entertainment (music). I would have to decide which ones to limit.

For example if I was getting close to the limit, I may set my Tivo to not download “Cranky Geeks” or I would not rent an netflix movie over the web. I could limit my offsite backups to every other day instead of daily. These are choices that I can make, but not choices I would like comcast to make.
It would be a very upsetting day if I tried to make a phone call and my VOIP would not work, and if I opened a browser and got a comcast page that said I was over my bandwidth limit.

In a world where nothing is free, I do not expect my bandwidth to be free. However, I do expect to know how much I can use and what the limits are.

All this ranting I did not want to forget that in the model that Comcast was using to throttle bandwidth they were actually selecting which protocols to limit (filtering). In a way they were really stepping on peoples privacy. It would be like filtering phone calls on a phone company level. Any phone call that had the word “P2P or torrent” in it would be dropped.