Feb 20

My Treo likes to reboot

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First off, I love this phone. I think it’s the greatest convergence device ever made. In its defense I work it extremely hard- my treo runs java, acrobat, google maps, excel, word and a bunch of other apps I use daily. It can record phonecalls, give me directions, take hours of video, show me current flight times, play mp3’s, read RSS, sync with all my info, and can probably pilot the space shuttle with a little more tweaking. Right now it can do just about anything except send or receive phonecalls. Instead it has taken a liking to rebooting every 15secs when it’s in phone mode.

The guy at the Cingular store said I needed to upgrade the firmware. Having remembered seeing a post by Ben Forta warning that this was a messy upgrade, I googled around a bit and confirmed that there are many horror stories from people saying the new firmware is more unstable than the last. My phone is past the point of instability though and is now unusable at this point so I figured I have nothing to lose by trying the new firmware. So I read through the instructions and dove into the process.

I downloaded the installer for my CNG version, fired it up and saw the intimidating screen on the Treo:

Step 1 Backup went smoothly- sweet. Step 2 Started flashing the ROM and got about 90% when a small error message popped up on the phone and said ROM upgrade unsuccessful. I threw some salt over my shoulder and hit the hotsync button again. This time it seemed to go through a different series of screens on the treo and threw the following error this time on my laptop:

Your Cingular device revision 1.02 cannot be updated to a Cingular device revision 1.17

Well that’s unnerving because if there’s some intermediary upgrade between .02 and .17, I sure can’t find it anywhere. I googled for that error and got nothing. I hit the palm site and searched their support for the error and unfortunately got the expected:

Crap. So I did a hard reset on the Treo, knocked on my wooden desk, threw another pinch of salt over my shoulder and tried the upgrade again. Now it’s in an endless reboot loop. I was half-expecting to see this error:

At least then I would feel like it was being straight up with me. I’m hesitant to go back to the Cingular store tomorrow as last time I was there their idea of custotmer service was spelling out the URL of the support site for me. And all in all, I have found Cingular’s service to be infinitely better than Sprint’s hamstermaze . At this point I think the best chances of resolution are if anyone happens to have a good contact at Cingular who would sympathize and hook me up with a new 650. If you have such a contact I would be greatly-indebted as I do really love this phone and Palm OS and would seriously like to keep using it. This is more a testament to a great device than anything- when you’re willing to put up with this kind of frustration to keep it. My Israeli roommate tells me that cellular stores in Israel are entirely different and will bend over backwards to please customers- they’ll rip open a box and give you a new phone on the spot to keep you happy. All this hot on the heels of yesterday’s toilet incident (read below). Here’s hoping that there’s an Israeli guy working the counter tomorrow…

UPDATE: I went to the Cingular store and they dialed the support phone number for me. I explained my situation to the Customer Service person on the phone line. Fortunately I came in 4 days under my warranty expiration on my treo and they shipped me a new one. The call to them was 15min and pleasant, I had the phone on my doorstep 16hrs later with $7 expedited shipping fee. I popped the battery, simcard and sylus into the new one and I’m back in business. fyi: i’ve been relying on skype for phone service the last few days and skype 2.0 is amazing for call quality- zero detectable latency, they really got it right. The only real bummer was reinstalling all the apps back to the Treo from scratch. Here’s a quick list of URL’s for anyone who needs to do the same:

The only caveat is I had to reinstall palm desktop to get my outlook conduits working again. It required a reboot before it successfully synced but now all is as it was before the firmware upgrade. I just saw Forta reporting a nasty CS experience w/ Cingular. I guess it’s all relative – I have found them insanely more helpful than Sprint (but then i’ve had oral surgery that was less painful than sprint csr calls).

So just to reiterate:
I love the Treo 650.
I love Cingular.
I hate this firmware update.

Avoid the upgrade if you possibly can unless your phone is running the old firmware and is still under warranty in which case you are better served taking a shot at the upgrade while they will still replace your phone in the event that you brick it.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Feb 20

What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever had to do?

Uncategorized 12 Comments »

Was hoping someone could beat mine from last night… I won’t even describe the scene as our upstairs toilet overflowed with the –ahem– “contents” of the bowl spilling over, well, yea- not good. And the water valves were rusted permanently in the on position. Oh and did I mention I was wearing flip flops? The funny thing is, as bad as it sounds, it’s still a distant second to a Mexico experience I had a few years ago. I’ll refrain from posting that one out of decency (and fear of creating the internet-wide version of the “ultimate barf-o-rama” in Stand By Me). Can anyone beat this one though? What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever had to do?

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Feb 16

Code for streaming inline audio and video via flash

Nerd No Comments »

I try to enhance my posts with audio or video whenever possible and I just realized that the simple media component I threw together to do this might be useful for other people using BlogCFC or BlogFusion so I figured I’d bubble it back up into the community. I did separate files for audio and video but with a little more thought the media type could be abstracted and you could just use one file. Here’s how I do it:

  1. create a separate directory for video and audio, encode the clips in .flv and .mp3 format and place them in their respective directories
  2. put the .swf for each type of media in its respective directory. The audio player is an example of calling inline and therefore only uses the swf, the video player is a separate external .cfm file that demonstrates playback in a new window. This just shows two ways of doing it and either component could be switched to inline or external.
  3. use the following code in your post to call the media files:
<!— inline Audio Player Code —>
<object classid=“clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000” codebase=“
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/
shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0“ width=“330” height=“230” id=“playback” align=“middle”>
<param name=“allowScriptAccess” value=“sameDomain” />
<param name=“movie” value=“/downloads/audio/inlineAudioplayer.swf” />
<param name=“quality” value=“high” />
<param name=“bgcolor” value=“#ffffff” />
<embed xsrc=“/downloads/audio/inlineAudioplayer.swf
?audioFile=http://www.Your_Domain_Goes_Here.com/audio/test.mp3“ quality=“high” bgcolor=“#ffffff” width=“330” height=“230” name=“playback” align=“middle” allowScriptAccess=“sameDomain” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=“http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer“ />
</object><!— calling the external video player —>
<a xhref=“
/video/VideoPlayer.cfm?theFile=test.flv“>
Launch Video</a>

I’ve zipped up the test files and put them here. I also included the .fla files so you can see how the .swf’s were built and re-skin them if you like. The real key to this technique is a small bit of actionscript in the swf that treats the file name as a variable so you can pass it in dynamically. Until we find a service that does protected podcasts, we’re using this audio component in conjunction with my iTalk within the Grid7 pilot right now internally to capture the audio from our meetings and make it available via streaming flash audio. It’s useful for anyone who missed, any participants that were there but need clarification (or inspiration) and most importantly, so future members can hear the conversations that have taken place before they arrived and so they can come up to speed quickly and get an idea of the culture of Grid7 before their first participation. Hit me here with any questions if you need help on setting it up. I use Quicktime to export as .flv for the video (I know Sorenesen Squeeze is supposed to be good too). I know someone in our CFUG had been working on a server-side way of encoding the .flv’s so you could just upload the .avi and not worry about that piece. Would be slick to see a total solution integrated with BlogCFC. Hopefully this trick reduces the friction for people adding media to posts and more people start doing it.

On an entirely different topic, we had a bit of a snafu with the Grid7 domain on our first day out of the gate and have chose to change domains and rebrand while we’re still a newborn. If you’re interested, this is the detail of what happened. The new domain is Grid7Labs.com– anyone who subscribed to the RSS feeds since Tuesday will need to update their feeds to reflect the new URL.

sean

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Feb 14

Grid7 Launches (and keeps it real as a mofo)

JumpBox 7 Comments »

It’s a bright morning in AZ- I am happy to announce that the Grid7 site is live! This project has been a labor of love for the past few months and I imagine this is about how a parent must feel when watching a child graduate and enter a new phase of life. Visualize for a second this scenario: you’re working with brilliant people who contribute their skills to help you execute an idea you have for a side project – one that has been on a backburner and you wouldn’t have done on your own otherwise, but given the “perfect storm of contributors,” it’s something that ends up coming together painlessly and now runs in the background generating passive monthly income. In exchange for the help you receive, you contribute your unique skills to bring their ideas to life and all the while using free hosting, specialized collaborative tools and access to a pool of contacts to make things happen at 5x normal speed. The osmosis effect alone of surrounding yourself with all these experts in their respective complimentary fields is that you absorb huge amounts of knowledge of relevant, peripheral skills which you can then apply towards your day job. But your day job gradually loses whatever appeal it might have had because you’re now waking up in the middle of the night with eureka-type moments centered around these project ideas…

Well we’re one week into the pilot program for Grid7 with a team of project assasins hand-picked to be our charter members and so far this comment from Matt (one of the pilot members) sums it up best -> “this FAWKING rawks.”

We will be working closely together over the next few months to implement a handful of the proposed projects in order to prove the cooperative model. Rather than explain the whole Grid7 concept here, I would instead invite you to cruise around the new site and discover for yourself what type of idea could possibly generate enough thought and dialogue to make an 8′ whiteboard look like this.

I’ll be sharing what I learn from our pilot program over the next few months on this dedicated Grid7 feed here . I _can_ say that countless hours of thought have gone into this effort and that at the very core of this whole thing is the noblest of intentions to bring people together to build cool stuff and to ensure that toxic work environments like this one go the way of the dinosaur giving way to ultra-efficient, ad hoc teams of specialists working together cooperatively to realize their dreams. There’s little chance you could have the level of excitement that we in the pilot do right now but if you have something to say about any of this, let us and the rest of the world know. And if this idea we’re proposing resonates with you and you want to be considered for membership to the Grid, fill out an application on the site and help us all… Build Something. BIGGER.

-sean

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Feb 04

Converting a linux box to windows

Nerd 2 Comments »

I know I know, “why would you want to go and do this?” Assuming you have your reasons though, it’s not as straightforward as it might seem. I don’t fully understand the details but the crux of the problem has to do with the fact that linux blows away the master boot record. There are other sites that can explain the details but this one had the winning solution which finally worked. And here is the key set of instructions:

Boot with a DOS floppy that has “debug” on it; run “debug”. At the ‘-‘ prompt, “block-fill” a 512-byte chunk of memory with zeroes:

f 9000:0 200 0

Start assembly mode with the ‘a’ command, and enter the following code:

mov dx,9000
mov es,dx
xor bx,bx
mov cx,0001
mov dx,0080
mov ax,0301
int 13
int 20

Press <Enter> to exit assembly mode, take a deep breath – and press “g” to execute, then “q” to quit “debug”. Your HD is now in a virgin state, and ready for partitioning and installation.

Kudos to this person whoever it was for figuring this out. Assembly language is no joke. We found a dos boot disk with debug.exe here. File this under "priceless gems" if you ever need to convert a linux box back to windows someday.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Feb 04

lifehack: whiteboard dot-size priority trick

Lifehacks, Productivity 3 Comments »

So the challenge is this: given the design constraints of a whiteboard (where the ink can’t be moved but can be erased), what is the best way to show priority of items on a todo list?

The idea of reordering the items isn’t very practical because it involves completely erasing everything when priorities change and rewriting the list every time. Likewise, using numbering doesn’t work well either because let’s say you have:

  1. Fix plumbing problem on sink
  2. Buy wedding gift for best friend
  3. Mow the lawn
  4. Return DVD rental

…and for whatever reason your friend decides to call it off last minute, you now have either a list that says, "1 3 4" or you have to erase and rewrite all the numbers for each item (not to mention it’s impossible to glance across the room at a long list and see the highest priority items without discerning all the numbers).

The solution is simple: make a dot next to each item of a size that is proportionate to it’s priority (larger meaning higher priority). This way you can enlarge a dot when it grows in importance and shave off a bit if its priority drops. Erase the items as you complete them and add new ones in their place as necessary. I’ve used this method for about a year now and while it may be old hat to some, it could be new hat (?) to others. My friend David just showed me a screenshot of a 37 Signal’s Writeboard that has started using the dot size of items to represent priority so it seems there is some validation to this method and that others are thinking along these same lines too. Try it out for yourself.
(and if you find it useful Digg it!)

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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