Geek Food?

geekfood.jpg You know your wife is a geek when she mentions that there are 10 kinds of geek food, French fries and Onion rings 🙂 Photo quickly mashed up from Judy Baxter after a search on flickr
This was after a discussion on the geek dinner that I hope to go to in August as part of the In The Trenches. However I’m not sure how long it would take to get to Cleveland – 2.5 hours according to google.

Voicemail working again.

If you’ve been trying to get hold of us, our incoming phone is now working properly again. I think my voice over ip number was finally cut off and as Vonage was simul-ringing that number, everyone was getting the busy signal. Not any more. I’ve also got the vtech phone (with answerphone) on beta test at the moment and it seems to work pretty well so far.

Emulator

I managed to get the pocket pc image to work properly over the emulator although the first time I set up the activesync on the client it worked ok but it didn’t seem to work immediately, data would only get transferred when I hit sync. However after rebooting the pocketpc it started to sync immediately – it really was pretty cool to see it in action. It doesn’t seem to synchronise sent or deleted items immediately though – thats pretty strange.
Unfortunately for some weird reason Microsoft have disabled the print screen button from working when the emulator is running so I can’t show you any screen shots of it whilst running.

I can’t get the smart phone working as for some reason it decides to bind the network card to my vpn connection (which isn’t going anywhere) rather than my wifi card that is in the laptop. Using a parameter of /p 000102040d23 (substituting the mac address of the network card) should give you network connectivity but not on the smartphone. Instead I get a very annoying “Your Internet connection is not configured properly. Please verify your settings in Data Connections.” This even occurs with using internet explorer so I know it’s not an activesync issue.

PocketPC Emulator

Microsoft have released a Windows Mobile 5 emulator that you can run on your pc, normally for developing software for the windows mobile. However, you can also use this to test and debug the setup of Direct Push with Microsoft Exchange 2003 service pack2. This is great to try before you blow up a users phone as you test stuff out. Seeing as though Direct Push has only just started being available on the phones, it is unrealistic to know how to get it working out of the box.

Albert’s scripting telnet tool

Ages ago, back in Sept 2003 I was looking for a scripting telnet program, something along the lines of expect. I was able to find some software from WorldsEnd, but at the time the one that kept coming up in google was by Albert Yale but his software wasn’t actually available anywhere. However, yesterday I got a tipoff that you can download Albert’s software from Gerald Bonne and this software was also mentioned in the latest In The Trenches – whilst listening I thought to myself – I’ve covered that before. I didn’t realise how long ago it was.
On another ITT know – Microsoft have purchased Wininternals – the company that produces the excellent sysinternals “free” software and the no-so-free administrators pak.

Zooomr is back

Well Zooomr is back at last – It’s been out of action since last Thursday as they prepared their upgrade and then got hit by a DOS attack. I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by flickr so that anyone who was thinking of defecting would stay with flickr 😉 (thats a joke Mr Lawyer man). Anyway, they are now back online but the site must still be under stress as it is really really slow – must have taken about 45 seconds to load the front page for me.

Nmap scripting.

I’ve toyed with nmap tonight to try and speed up some scripting across the lan scripts – currently I have a script that copies files across the lan, by checking each ip in turn to see if the machine is there and then copies it across – it’s very laborious and slow – I started it at 6pm tonight and it’s still running now at 10.24pm (It copies 3*100mb files across the lan).
I think by using nmap to ping sweep the lan and feed the results to a loop batch file it’ll be much quicker.
The nmap and dos script is this :-

nmap -sP 192.168.98.0/24 -oG pclist.txt
for /F “skip=2 tokens=2” %%i in (‘find “Status: Up” pclist.txt’) do echo %%i is alive!

Just replace the echo bit with the command you want to run.

Angel Food Cake

I had my first ever portion of Angel Food Cake tonight – VERY nice. Unfortunately Kristen took some for herself and then left the cake bowl on the table next to me…it’s now empty – how was I supposed to know that you are not meant to eat that much when it is so nice and very light that it doesn’t feel like you’ve eaten too much?

Garmin find functions in City Select

Garmin really ought to put some more work into their search functions within City Select/Navigator. In order to find the address 123 N Main St, Marysville, Ohio you actually need to search for “Main” and then scroll down through the many choices until you get to N Main St. At that point it will then be able to find this particular address. However, if you try to search for N Main Street it will not find any results for 123 N Main St. How weird is that? The GPS works in a similar way but you can also include the city to search for if you use the menu option to include city filtering (well worth switching on as I later found out!)
Incidentally the address I just gave is not where I needed to be which is a music shop.
However, I do like the City Select better than the City Navigator as you have much smaller map segments – which now means I have loaded all the surrounding area of Columbus onto the 24mb memory instead of being limited to 25% of ohio, most of which I’d never go to.