rebelpeon.com

Blog

  • Kindle 3 Reboots

    Every since getting my Kindle 3 for Christmas I have mysterious lockups, restarts, etc.  It has been driving me bonkers, especially since it kept losing my page in the book.  It seemed to be reverting to a previous state all the time, and I couldn’t figure out why.

    So I emailed Amazon support.  Their response was that I should be hitting the “Home” button every time I wanted to stop reading.  Talk about an awful answer, so I emailed them again and said that was an unacceptable answer and that it needed to be fixed.

    I received a similar response back.

    Then the day after sending those emails my Kindle was completely locked.  I couldn’t get it out of sleep (no green light when you slide the power button).  I tried to hold down the power button, but apparently not long enough.  I called Amazon and they basically had me hold it down longer.  At least I was able to use it then.

    I also noticed that it happened more in the cold.  For example, when it just sat around my house I never had a problem, but whenever I went into work with it (barring it to the colder outside) it would always lose my spot and restart.

    Well, it turns out that they symptoms were correct, but my correlation to why it was happening was not.  Turns out it wasn’t because it was cold out, it was because it was getting jostled around more when I was carrying it than when it sat at home.  I am not the only one that is having this issue.  It is all because of the Kindle Cover – Without A Light.

    One of the new things they’ve done is created a cover that draws power from your kindle (lighted cover).  It is pretty slick because the hinge is metal, which plugs into the Kindle, makes contact with a electrical pad, and powers the light.  However, the cover without a light also has a metallic binding, but there is no where for the charge to go and so it just shorts out causing the Kindle to do all sorts of strange things.

    It looks as though Amazon is now aware of the issue as all Amazon branded non-light covers are now not being sold.  However, any other non-light cover that has the Amazon binding seems to be having the same issue (the Kate Spade and Timbuktu covers too).  It should be an easy fix for them, just make the binding some sort of ABS plastic, but talk about a huge oversight.  I mean, common sense.

    Back to my story, I’ve since put packaging tape (thinest tape I could find) over the bottom hook of my binding, and today I haven’t had a restart.  I’ll probably update this story in a few weeks one way or the other.

    Update:

    After using the cover with the fix for 3 weeks, I can attest that the tape fixed the issue.  No more reboots means lots of carefree reading!

    Update #2:

    Over two months later, and still no reboots.  Consider it fixed!

  • Dreamhost Increase PHP Upload Size

    Needed to upload some videos into my SlideShow Pro Director install.  However, my PHP upload size was set to 20MB and the videos were both 23MB.  After some Googling, I found a painless way to fix it.

    1. Ensure your domain is running FastCGI for PHP5
    2. Download DreamHost Custom PHP.ini from DeamHost Scripts and Tips
    3. Put the dh-phpini.php file at the root of your website
    4. Access http://<website>/dh-phpini.php
    5. Click to install and it will create the necessary files and folder
    6. Edit the php.ini in the newly created /cgi-bin/ folder in the following two places: post_max_size, and upload_max_filesize
    7. SSH into your website and run the following command for it to take affect (kills FastCGI): killall -9 php5.cgi

    All this good info was found at BlueSunray, so thanks for that!

  • Kindle for WP7

    And it is out.  Go and grab it!

    AppsFuze Description

  • Kindle Book Lending

    Well, it finally arrived.  Similar to the Nook, you can now lend Kindle books to others.  There are some caveats though.

    • Not all books are lendable, it depends on the publisher.  Looking around, very few actually are.
    • The lend is for 14 days, and the user has 7 days to accept the lend.
    • You cannot read the book while it is on load.  If you haven’t connected to the network with your kindle, you can still read it (we tested it).
    • You can return the book prior to the 14 days.
    • It can only be initiated from a US customer.

    Check out all information in Amazon’s help section.

  • Work Item Migration from TFS 2008 to 2010

    During a migration from TFS2008 to TFS2010 I am currently working on, one of the things we needed to migrate is Work Items.  We have three customized work items, which we need to migrate from one server to another.

    The downside, is that when I am running witadmin.exe, I get the error:

    TF212018: Work item tracking schema validation error: TF26177: The field System.RelatedLinkCount cannot be renamed from ‘Related Link Count’ to ‘RelatedLinkCount’.

    This is happening because the xml has changed between TFS2008 and TFS2010.  Talk about a pain.  However, the fix is fairly painless.  All you need to do is rename RelatedLinkCount in your xml that you’re trying to import to “Related Link Count”.

    More than likely you will receive multiple errors that are similar.  Simply rename them all, and it should import.  The ones I constantly ran into:

    • RelatedLinkCount – Related Link Count
    • IterationID – Iteration ID
    • ExternalLinkCount – External Link Count
    • HyperLinkCount – Hyperlink Count
    • AttachedFileCount – Attached File Count
    • AreaID – Area ID

    As an aside, always test with the /v, validate, switch to ensure everything in the xml is valid.

  • Iteration and Path Import/Export

    There is a great little utility I found for importing and exporting Iteration and Path. It also makes it way easier to bulk edit items via notepad and then import. Works with TFS 2005, 2008, and 2010. Yay!

  • Process to Named Instance

    When working with programs that spawn multiple processes (i.e. BizTalk, svchost, etc), sometimes you just need to know which one of the processes is actually spinning at 100% CPU or eating all your memory.  Unfortunately, task manager doesn’t really give you and details about which process it is.

    In order to get the details, you need to run the following (example is for svchost)

    tasklist /SVC /fi “imagename eq svchost.exe”

    Just remember to open the command prompt as administrator for elevated processes.

     

  • Windows Phone 7

    Well, it’s been a few years, and I finally bought a new phone.  I used to have the Touch Pro 2, and while I enjoyed the keyboard, there was a lot not to love to.  Let me count thy ways:

    1. Windows Mobile 6.5 (even with all the hacked ROMs that I used)
    2. Thickness.  Man was that thing a pocket sore
    3. Windows Mobile 6.5

    Pretty much everyone I work with either has an Android powered phone or an iPhone.  While I’m sure either would’ve worked just fine, I was holding out for the new Windows Phone 7.  I loved playing with a friend’s Zune HD.  The interface is just so much more fresh and, I’m not all that into apps, which is what both Android and iPhone seem to be centered around.

    I waited, and I waited (and I was in Singapore for a few months), but I finally received my phone a week before Christmas.  All-in-all, I’m very fond of it, and getting around is so much better.  I ended up with the HD7, since I’m on T-Mobile through work, but I’ve also played with the Focus as that is what all the AT&T guys have.

    There are a few issues which I’ll get to, but talk about a completely awesome overhaul.  The touchscreen is smooth and responsive, the icons are finger friendly, and most of all the integration is very intuitive.  The one thing I was really worried about was moving away from a keyboard.  On all my smartphones I’ve had a physical keyboard of some sort.  However, with the Windows Phone 7 keyboard, I’m able to type just about as fast and accurately.  Also, I never used to use my phone for music, but now I’m using it quite a bit.  The Zune integration is nice, and my (overly expensive) headphones sound excellent on them with no static/electric background noise.

    Overall I am very happy, and I know with all the money that Microsoft has banked on it, it will at least try to become a large player and continually grow.  However, as mentioned there are a few annoyances that I have (there are more comprehensive lists elsewhere):

    • Dialer does not auto-complete names and numbers.  This is something that was great with WinMo 6.5.  In fact WP7 does it for text messages, just not for the dialer.  Boo.
    • No gapless playback with MP3s
    • I’m sure there are other things, but nothing that actively bothers me…

    Microsoft has said that there is an update coming out in January/February timeframe to fix some of the other issues (copy/paste, etc), and I’m sure there will be many other updates to come to fix other issues.  However, right now, I’m glad I jumped on board.

    If you’re interested, here are all the WP7 phones available now.

  • Offline SharePoint

    I’m sure a lot of you have heard about Colligo for offline SharePoint.  Unfortunately, the SharePoint sites that I continually access where for my company have some interesting security setup and therefore I’ve never been able to get Colligo to work.  Since I had originally tried, I never really bothered to figure it out as we were told it simply wouldn’t work.

    However, when I installed Office 2010 I noticed that there was a SharePoint Workspace 2010 which does offline SharePoint too.  Since we only use MS products for security I was very optimistic about getting Offline SharePoint finally working (incredibly useful for working on flights).  Well, I attempted to use it and quickly realized it will only do offline SharePoint for SharePoint 2010.  Unfortunately we were still on 2007.

    Fast forward through a bit of searching, and I ran across a nice KB article that explains how to sync a SharePoint 2007 site with SharePoint Workspace 2010 using groove.  I don’t really care how it works, as long as I can have offline editing and syncing.  Yay!

  • Moved from EE

    My Dreamhost server was upgraded awhile ago, and ever since then I have had nothing but issues with my installation of EE.  A lot of other things had issues too, but I was easily able to reinstall and everything worked.  Sadly, that was not an option for EE as my yearly download had expired.  No way was I going to pay just to get things back to where they were.

    Needless to say I have been wanting to migrate over, and just never really had the time to do it.

    Well, I did it today because I’ve been wanting to post a few things.  I think everything migrated over fairly well, but there are definitely a few issues.  I really wanted to use some rewrite logic to keep all the inbound links working, but I’m afraid that just isn’t going to happen.

    Without further ado, hopefully there were be some fun tech updates soon!