I picked up a ngage qd off ebay last week and the only way to get it to sync is through bluetooth which is fine because I've got it on my laptop. It turns out that bluetooth on the pc is completely broken because microsoft didn't start supporting it in windows until SP2 and even then they only support a couple profiles so if want to actually use bluetooth for more than a mouse and keyboard you can't use the microsoft bluetooth stack. This is just completely unacceptable, I heard some people meantioning that it was because microsoft is trying to decide what to do in the telephony space but that's just completely rediculess. Basically they did the bare minimum to support their own devices and no more.

What actually happens is that people go and buy bluetooth dongles that work out of the box because they're using the widcomm drivers and not the microsoft drivers. The thing with widcomm is that companies have to license it so you'll see it online in a few places but you can't actually download it for my toshiba m200. I ended up downloading the hp drivers and uncompressing the install archive and cancelling the setup and manually adding it and renaming files in the windows inf directory so that the microsoft stack would actually work. After all that it didn't even work.

The end solution I came out with is that I used an propriotary stack from toshiba which worked with the nokia pc manager software. The problem with that even is that if you setup a comm port and try and connect later on it won't work but it will work when you don't connect just after adding the device because you've just gone through the pairing process.

To me that solution is good enuff because I don't need to waste anymore time getting this immature technology running. Bluetooth was released in July 1998 (7 years ago) and it's still crap. I hate to think how the average consumer is expected to actually get this running. Bluetooth does work well for headsets but I found static even after a few feet sometimes which was weird. I'll post some reviews later on for the ngage qd and the bluespoon ax that I picked up.

I saw an article over at LifeHacker about the Muji Cardboard Desktop Speakers. It's a cool idea, there's been inflatable ones before but cardboard sounded flat, it sounded cool. I could have ordered them online from the uk store but I figured I'd save the shipping cost and walk the 10min down to bayswater to see if the muji store had any in stock.

I walked down there today and got the last one, at £19.95 its not cheap but for such a superior design I figured it was worth it. The first round of testing I used the headphone jack from my computer and could barely here anything out of them and actually heard more out of the backs of the speakers then the front. Next I tried a friends iPod since Muji says to use only portable devices and it was the same result it was so quiet that you couldn't talk or you wouldn't hear anything. To get these to really work you'll need a pocket amp to power these speakers which are are 8 ohm and 2W.

Construction

Building the speakers was a bit of a task and I couldn't see these lasting for more than a dozen times without fatiguing the cardboard. So the ability for these speakers to actually travel are slim to none. I'm planning to test out their ability to travel tomorrow as I bring them back to the store.

Cons

• not powered
• cardboard won't stand up to extended folding
• audio quality of speakers were unable to be tested

ok so you know how I was drooling over the XDA IIi before it came out, well it came out and it wasn't as cool as the tech specs lead me to believe. ok so the MDA IV came along and it looks amazing it also goes by the name of the HTC Universal. Basically it's a 3G phone with windows mobile in a tablet form factor and it's not that big either. The usual stuff from HTC too, 2 cameras, BT, Wifi, SD memory support and a VGA screen too. basically it's a solid catch all device that will tide me over a couple years until flexible displays become prevelant.

Ok now it's delayed til Fall. It's like the p50 all over again. I'll still wait for something to come out but it might not be the universal by the time it gets to market.

I think I finally beat comment spam. The trick is you just rename your comment submission page to something else and no more spam. I found that most of the spam showed up on the posts with external links. It has also seemed to have boosted the site to the top of Googles list when you search for penum.

on a side note I've got food poisoning or something wicked cause it's like my stomach is trying to go for a walk and not inviting me. Time to run to the chemist and get some pepto. It was either the milk or the humous.... Damn chick peas.

So those boys over at truenuff are back in business and actually releasing strips again. I added some functionality to their back end like searching and properly interfacing the app with the database instead of the original requirement of no database. I started filling in some of the scripts so that they'll be searchable but there's still 426 to go so it might take awhile. It's using an xml-esk notation for inputting the scripts so it should be fairly quick to add new ones. I also really need to make the site back end more portable cause it's gone through so many changes that like any developer I want to just start from scratch. Of course since it's in PHP every time I start work on it again I have to remember stupid things like string functions that I haven't used for a year.

After getting my tablet PC I figured I might bring some suckage to the online comic market but haven't done anything with it.... too much world of warcraft and etc most likely is keeping me back. Well that's not going to be changing anytime soon

I've been using these Sony MDR EX51 earbuds since may now and I'm really liking it. They basically act as ear plugs too so I use them on the airplane instead those foam ear plugs which I find impossible to actually put in my ear. The sound quality is a lot better than I expected and for some weird reason every software developer that I know has them on his desk. The one people are buying is actually the EX71 which is the same pair but with an inline connector so that you can plug it into an ipods remote and it's got a little chrome on it. The price is about double for the 71's over the 51's so it's kinda funny that 71's are more popular. The headphones actually seal into your ear like an ear plug and use that seal to produce bass for that smaller cavity. The cool thing is that when I pulled them out at the end of the day and left them on my desk, one fell into a cup of tea and was left there overnight and it worked fine when I got back from the weekend. Some sony divisions actually seem to get it while others are just coming around, maybe.

I meantioned the other day how O2 still hasn't released their XDA IIi. Well big news today I called up O2 and asked them about it and it's out for £75. £75 I asked, oh that's for the XDAII. In fact the O2 operator in manchester hadn't heard about the phone that is aspose to be out "Early 2005". The good news is that one of my cooworkers might let me borrow his spare XDAIIs but unless he gets O2 to unlock it I won't be using it with my sim card.

I've been thinking that despite the CES bluescreens from Microsoft they sure have the market setup to be dominated by playsforsure devices. That will extend to Windows Mobile devices shortly too and that means a lot more development work will be available. I really need to get some .NET for smart devices experience. But first I need the phone to play with (yes I know there's emulators).

So come on O2 release that phone already.

Holy crap World of Warcraft is really fun. I feel like I'm running at full speed towards a wall though cause I'm almost at lvl20 with my human warrior but the max level is 60. They really need an expansion pack fast because as it is the game only amounts to about 5 weeks of play time per character. That and there's no plot to it. Basically there's good guys and bad guys and sometimes there's some story like the Defias Brotherhood but you mainly just get a feel that everywhere is overrun by badies and you do a bunch of quests to help them out of it and they thank you for changing the tide and swaying the battle but everything stays the same and very static. With city of heroes they did things like on hallowe'en they had an invasion of zombies or something. That would be cool if all of a sudden the area you were in had a raid of orcs and there was a human scout ahead of them warning you to get off the road quick and then all the town guards go and fight them off and you can join in if you want too. Now there's something that's different. Now you just level endlessly in hopes of getting that next thing like a horse or something. Still fun but it doesn't have much replay ability. I'd still like to see a treasury run where you help a cart get from one spot to another with players able to attack you or even npc's

There's been talk about admin abuse and server downtime. Well the server downtime was huge last thursday it was offline for 16hours and they've scheduled 30min downtimes weekly. I've experienced a server crash and it's weird, things just start acting funny until they reboot it and you loose your last bit of progress which sucks. It actually happened the second time I tried the VC quest. We had died attacking VC and tried to reenter the instance and it wouldn't let us. Oh well still a huge leap over Meridian 59

lets recap, though I took a post vacation I think my life went on so here's a recap.

• Went to cuba for my cousins wedding. Cuba is a beautiful country that is full of mouchers and everything is expensive and the drinks are watered down. So really just stick to the resorts
• Home to vancouver for christmas. Built the new server together had problems getting gentoo to build so I installed fedora instead and left it for tgs to mop up. Spent some time surfing and snowboarding.

I'll post up a tuning guide for snowboarding, I wish I had a 220V iron to use over here. I'm going to wait a little bit to do the alps it's still raining in some areas. I'm going to put in my passport for a new work visa so I won't be doing much travelling in the next 3 months unless they get it back to me soon.

come on O2 and release that XDA IIi phone

I finally dove in and picked up the file server I've been talking about for ages and ages. Of course so far it's just the chassis but here's the specs I've put together for the system

Chenbro RM414 4U with SATA Backplane
4U Rackmount, 19 bays - SATA Hot Swap bays x 16, 5 fans, 650 watts up to 12" x 13" MB
3ware escalade 8506-8 SATA RAID Controller
1024MB PC3200 ECC memory
AMD® Athlon™ 64 2800+ w/800Mhz FSB 512K Box Socket 754

I'm going 64bit with the processor just so I can get some 64bit unix experience under my belt. I'll be ordering the RAID controller next as I can pick up the rest of the parts in vancouver when I'm back for christmas.

blame Yglesias

Incase you've been living under a rock and don't have a Gmail account I've got 6 invites up for grabs.

Even though gmailfs isn't compatible with with GMail right now. It sucks cause I have some stuff in my account that I should pull out, but not anything that important.

If you're bored check out Listen To A Movie, it'll be up for the next 10 minutes probably. It's got low quality audio tracks for movies and tv shows, I'm listening to the Family Guy right now.

You Americans are so funny. If you think things were bad in the last four years, just remind yourselves that that was when he actually needed public opinion to be reelected. The man is brillant he can be incredibly evil and no one will want to take him out cause his replacement is 10x more evil and doesn't care if people know. Gee Wizz people don't come knocking on my door when you want to borrow the 1 trillion dollars in debt in 4 years time.

Things to look forward to in the next four years

• Draft
• Bin laden starts a sit com and they still can't find him
• North Korea triples its nuclear arsenal
• A few more countries get occupied, until the US gets bored and moves on
• Deployment of missle defence system goes forward even though it doesn't work
• More Terrorist concentration camps

Go Nader Go ?!?!!

Podcasting is the latest meme thats flooding the blogsphere in the last week. So far I haven't seen anything cool with it that's above having a link on your site to your audio file. It's basically having a enclosure in your RSS feed that's an audio file so that your aggregator can sync it with your mobile device.

There's some cool ideas associated with it, but the cool factor is that it's essentially the killer app for RSS. If you explain RSS aggregators to someone they Don't get it.

"So basically you can use this program to view news items from web pages"

"Isn't that called a web browser"

Chris Pirillo has a podcast up with clips of different people and there opinions on it. It flushes out some good uses.

I think the main uses are going to be with existing radio and net radio shows that have their episodes online. All they need to do is to add an RSS feed to their site and people will be able to seemlessly keep up to date with radio shows.

With music you could download new releases without doing anything but setting your filtering rules to select what artists or style of music you want. Labels should release samples on their sites to advertise new music from their artists. This is more applicable to DJs who have to keep up with the latest tracks that are being released and spending a lot of time digesting new music.

One issue that's coming up is the ammount of traffic that some of the more popular casts are requiring. That's where Bittorrent comes in. Shared downloading tool that distributes the traffic that people need in downloading.

nucleus is a tool that looks through RSS feeds for torrents matching your criteria and sends them to your BT app.

What needs to be done next is to integrate RSS - BT - Sync software and the market will just explode. Of course thats just the best case since it allows smaller shows to reach a larger audience.

The Daily Show did a sweet recap on the Presidential debates. I've been torrenting caps of them off and on lately. There's a real benefit to watching prerecoded tv and not having to watch commercials. I'm in this hyper productive mode lately.. umm ya that does include tv.

I got my voip line working finally. I had figured that there was a line voltage difference between the vonage line (north american) and the BT UK phone I was using with it. So I talked to some people at the london 2600 meet and they said that the voltages were the same. That got me thinking that the phone was probably over engineered to check for the frequencies in a UK dial tone. So I went and bought the cheapest phone that I could find and it worked. Now I've just got to port my old number over to this line and I'll be back to normal.

My 512k DSL isn't offerring the best phone quality when the bandwidth is saturated. I find that as long as I cap my downloads at 15k it works fine. I shudder when I think about how suseptable the upstream is.

I went to the microsoft security conference in wembely on monday and really enjoyed it. Ballmer was speaking but he didn't break into a bit on monkey developers. The real highlight for me was the developer track. We went through one of those basic hacking 101 sessions but the highlight was going into developing for least priveleges and the WSE2 implementation of the UK eGovernment web services.

Just a few links that you’ll find interesting

Business

Software Practitioner Triad
Confessions of a Software developer
Russell Beattie's Thoughts on product creation
Mark Cuban: Rules of Success. #1: Sweat Equity is the best equity!
Joel Spolsky: Fixing Venture Capital
Tim Bray: Bouncing Termsheets
News headline listing

Development

Throwing Tables out the window (CSS)
Managed DirectX Tutorial
Subversion Review
Using Mock Objects in Tests
Seven Pillars of .NET Testing Wisdom
Dynamic Images in ASP.NET
RegEx cheat sheet .net

Fun

Mechanical Pong
Petals Around the Rose
Transformers a history
HOW-TO: Take digital photos from a kite—Part 1, the camera
HOW-TO: Take digital photos from a kite—Part 2, the kite and the pictures
Dans Data PC Hardware Reviews
USB2 to ATA bridge for 32USD
Energy Efficient and Cheap Servers for Home Use?

Wow my computer is back up and running That took me a whole week to fix. After the motherboad I still needed to pickup a power supply so I bused over to PC World and bought one on sunday. Dang its expensive to buy parts over here.

I also made it down to brighton on saturday. It's an old beach english beach community and they had a big iron skelton of the old pier in the middle of the ocean. Apparently it had caught on fire and so they built a second pier and intended to rebuild the first. Then the first caught fire again and they just left it there. They say it's haughted, but that reeks of tourist fador. Long story short theres a big huge of beams and crap in the ocean.

Dang, courier came by on tuesday with my parts but nobody was around so they said they were going to deliver it again yesterday. So I went through all this hassle getting the address switched to my work address so that I could actually get it. So I waited all day and nothing showed up. When I got home bam, there it was they had delivered it at 9am and never bothered to update their tracking page. The other cool thing is that my Vonage VOIP modem.

So I rushed upstairs installed the modem and realized that I didn't have a RJ11 phone cable.

Next I went and installed the cpu to get my computer back up and running. Turned it on and nothing, great.

So I ordered a new motherboard and phone cable and fell asleep with the lights on.

Yesterday was probably my best worst day in a long while. I burnt out my XP2000+ cpu (at least I think that's what the problem is) after it acting funny all day. I had been underclocking it on 100 MHz FSB instead of the 133 MHz it was aspose to be running at. So I clocked it back up and Doom 3 actually ran better for the first ten seconds and then freeze. That wasn't so bad, I just wouldn't play doom. I was putting off playing it anyways until I get a better video card. So I was getting some weird crashes on sunday like while I was playing Rise of Nations it just all of a sudden started blurting out noise on my sound card and froze. I new it was because of the FSB increase. I really hope it wasn't the expansion cards cause I ordered an XP 2400+ and some more RAM incase that was the problem.

So after all that, I tried to log into my laptop and I noticed that the power cord was bent and had exposed wires on the connector to the laptop. Great so I try and log in and most of the keys in the top row of letters on my keyboard were just dead. That was awesome cause now it's just a brick that will only work if I plug a keyboard into it. Then once I logged in the mouse stopped working too.

I need to pickup some screw drivers before those parts arrive cause this sucks.

On the plus side my little sister got engaged so that made me happy

So I finally repaved my laptop with Fedora Core 2 on my Dell Inspiron 4000. It's working great expect for the wireless, I need to get monitor mode running in order to run kismet. I'm using a Truemobile 1150 which was my first wifi card 3+ years ago. I've been using oronico drivers on windows but it only seems to work with yentoo on linux. All of the docs for running in monitor mode seem to be for the oronico and the prism2 drivers but I'll work something out with enuff time.

I'm going to get serious about doing my MCSD certs, cause I've been putting them off for so long. So why do them, cause it might fill in any holes in my microsoft knowledge. It'll also give me an opportunity to build more winforms apps