I have an OG Droid that I love to use, but I constantly push it to the limit, both in multi-tasking and in amount of data it needs to store, 256MB just isn’t enough. I have had to have my power button repaired twice in the last two months, thankfully a local cellular place can fix it for $30 (second time was in their warranty period). I really want a Droid 3, I’m addicted to QWERTY. Once upon a time I had a Palm Tungsten C and a Palm Centro, so I like it and am used to it, and right now, the D3 is really the only high-end QWERTY android that is on Verizon. I haven’t committed because I want the freedom of choice in just what I run on my Droid, just like being able to choose what I install on my PC, which my ISP gets no say in.
A couple of months ago Motorola said they’d be unlocking in Q3/Q4 of 2011 if the carrier let them, but has yet to state specifics on what devices they will release patches for. HTC came out and said they would unlock them ASAP, and didn’t qualify the statement with the carrier allowing it. Motorola just won’t tell us anything definitive about devices that may or may not be unlocked in a couple of months, HTC is giving firm timelines for several devices already, though not yet identifying any Verizon units. Verizon has said unlocked devices can be activated on their network, so unless they have decided to grant a most favored nation status to HTC, Motorola is looking for a dodge, IMHO.
Below are several quotes that you can use to make your own judgment on who is teasing folks along and who is walking the walk.
HTC from facebook:
We’re thrilled to announce today that software updates to support bootloader unlocking will begin rolling out in August for the global HTC Sensation, followed by the HTC Sensation 4G on T-Mobile USA and the HTC EVO 3D on Sprint. We’re in the testing phase for the unlocking capability now, and we expect it to be fully operational by early September for devices that have received the software updates. We’ll continue rolling out the unlocking capability over time to other devices as part of maintenance releases and new shipments.
HTC continues its commitment to unlocking bootloaders and supporting the developer community. Because of the importance of this community to us, please expect an update on this about every few weeks as we make progress toward launch. Thank you for your patience and continued support!
Motorola AusDroid and Moto dev forum:
“In terms of your question – we completely understand the operator requirement for security to the end user, and as well, want to support the developer communities desire to use these products as a development platform. It is our intention to enable the unlockable/relockable bootloader currently found on Motorola XOOM across our portfolio of devices starting in late 2011, where carriers and operators will allow it.”
Verizon support and quoted:
Correction>> You CAN activate your HTC device with an unlocked bootloader on our network, we apologize for the confusion.
So for the last year I’ve been building a lot of plugin user controls (ASCX) to integrate within Sitefinity 3.7. It’s a relatively nice product, pretty much everything you can think of for a major website all built in, plus some nice AJAX controls that you can use to make a rich user experience. So after releasing 4.0 a few months ago, 3.7 got fast tracked to end-of-life. While you can still get support, you can’t buy new licenses. This does not compute! I could understand if 4.X has been out 2-3 years, they wouldn’t sell new 3.7 licenses, but less than 6 months????
Going from 3.7 to 4.X isn’t a minor update, it is very major. You go from a dot net 3.5 to 4.0 base and a very different project layout and user access. You can now integrate Silverlight if you so choose, which is fine.
You can no longer have more than one person with a single account logged in at the same time. In a dev environment you might have a developer making specialized content/forms/application widgets, and a designer creating the content. It used to be that both could use the same account, and neither have to wait on the other party to get to a stopping point. Now, person A has to stop before person B can logon, so no longer can you do parallel development, you must do serial, if person B logs on, person A gets bounced out. You can buy a higher license, to the tune of $5-$10k, and get more user accounts, but you also get a lot of extra stuff that is well beyond the needs of the staff or the design client (as well as being out of budget).
You used to add the user control to the toolbox by putting a tick in the web.confg, now that is in the toolbox config, that makes sense. Now instead of putting master pages in the ~/App_Master/ folder, you have to drill down into a path of your creation (you have to find the section in the quick start guide that isn’t very quick) under the ~/App_Data/ Sitefinity/WebsiteTemplates/<TemplateSetName>/App_Master/*.master – only the ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/ part exists, you have to create /WebsiteTemplates/ on down. You have to create the masterpages elsewhere in your sitemap and copy/move… if you make edits to a template, you have to cycle the app or implement a hidden page that will cycle the application cache else any changes you make will not be evident. This same caching issue also applies to edits to the ASCX part (meaning the UI side of things) of your user controls. If you make a textural change, such as fix a typo or move a field label, you have to clear the Sitefinity cache. If you create a grouping page (basically a navigational grouping for similar pages, but no content of its own) you will have to go into the database and update some values to the empty guid, else you will have the manage templates page crash on you (endless looping of javascript alert boxes about object not set to a reference).
It used to be that all master pages were picked up and at time of creating a page (since they lived in the main master page folder ~/App_Master/), you could pick from a very convenient list and apply a layout. Now you have to go to a template screen, say, no, I have my own, and then browse to your template, too many clicks and unable to make your own templates more prominent, it seems to me that most pages in my site will use a page I designed…
The designer I was working with felt that it took him twice as long as a 3.7 because he had to keep going to the “cache releaser button page” I made, per advice from a Telerik forum, in order to see changes. Not fun if you are implementing a very bells ‘n whistles DHTML site. He also had to brute force disable some scripts and other elements that Sitefinity insisted on inserting that was just getting in the way and also messing with page load lifecycle (regarding client side scripts).
If you build a user control and deign not to use radcombobox instead of a dropdownlist, you will have to use Request.Form[ddlName.UniqueID].toString() to get the selected value, the page lifecycle is broken so the selected index/item isn’t available. Ditto for radiobuttonlist. One reason to use dropdownlist rather than radcombobox is that it integrates a lot easier with the required field validators, there isn’t a particularly good substitute for radiobuttonlist in the radcontrols suite.
This next bit is not so much Telerik/Sitefinity (well maybe it is, since the app requires things that shared hosting might disallow), but some very popular hosting providers. It is dot net 4, Sitefinity 3.7 hosts just fine on RackSpaceCloud sites (minus a few options that only work in full trust environments, RSC sites restrict sites to medium trust). Found out at 11th hour that yes, we could have a site provisioned as dot net 4.0, but Sitefinity 4 will not host as a cloud site, must get a cloud server as there are some things that SF 4 requires that they have no plans to install, please get a cloud server, we were told point blank from their tech support.
There was a time years ago when if you said you were a Microsoft that meant you fit into 3 silos, C++, VB, and ASP. Then came Dot Net, there was still C++, VB mutated, and something new called C# came along. So, putting C++ aside, you could have 4 types of developers WebForms or WinForms in either C# or VB. WebForms and WinForms were very similar to each other, but they had their own quirks, one was web and the other was desktop. Now, we have MVC in the mix as yet another web presentation method, and WPF (desktop) and Silverlight (web) which are very similar to each other, yet each has their own platform quirks. Granted there are lots of tools now in the Microsoft toolbox, but it is getting cluttered, how do you decide if you do WebForms or MVC or Silverlight? Do you let folks choose something because it is new and shiny, do you let them make a choice just because, do you force folks to analyze the best tool for the project?
In the last year I have been on more than one project that had been done by a contractor who decided that that project would be a great project to learn MVC on, application complexity notwithstanding. This decision had made adding simple changes to the workflow very painful and time consuming, and irritation to the client that it will take at least 10 hours to add a simple extra validation step or drop down option to a screen. This particular app would have been much better suited to WebForms, but now we are stuck with it. We have had some other very simple websites come through which do work well as MVC, but those are a rarity.
Well, the media center I use in the bedroom was built out with 2GB RAM, and because of some occasional freezing of the system, I got some more RAM. Guess what, replacing the system disk a month ago didn’t cause any issues – no reactivation and the additional RAM didn’t trigger re-activation of windows 7, but it did completely hose PlayReady. This is a required component to record using a cableCard tuner, like the Ceton InfiniTV4 card which I use. This is ridiculous! It is way simpler to upgrade RAM than swap out a hard disk (I use Acronis to image the new disk when replacing a disk), yet changing RAM triggers a voiding of the DRM key. This is probably one of the most common and simple upgrades that the average computer hobbyist would be doing, and this breaks DRM/PlayReady.
At first I didn’t realize anything was wrong, but about an hour later, I started getting warnings that the update for PlayReady was incomplete, uh-oh, and then could not record or watch any live TV. I was able to locate some instructions on the internet to get it to finally update, but I lost 4 movies I had recorded last week and had not yet been able to watch as they were tagged with the copy protection that was encrypted using the old DRM key. I also had to completely reconstruct my scheduled recordings as getting PlayReady to work again requires completely removing several configuration files from Media Center, and as I have Remote Potato installed, that service also had to be disabled to delete some of these files.
Below are the steps I followed, cobbled together from two posts, as the one larger post was not able to get me up and running on its own.
a. Uninstall PlayReady from the ‘Programs and Features’ control panel.
b. Turn off Windows Media Center in Control Panel/Programs and Features/Turn Windows features on or off. Remove the check mark for Windows Media Center in the “Media Features” section. Ok your way out and reboot when prompted.
c. Enable Windows Explorer to show hidden files and folders in the Folder Options Control Panel.
d. Go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\ and delete eHome and PlayReady folders.
e. Go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM and delete all files and folders underneath (don’t delete the DRM directory itself)
f. Open the registry with elevated privileges. To do so, click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt and then point to “Run as administrator”. In the command prompt that opens, type regedit.exe.
g. Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft and delete the DRM key. (You may have to change Permissions in order to delete the key.)
h. Restart the computer.
i. Reinstall Windows Media Center from “Programs and Features: Turn Windows features on or off.” This should also regenerate the DRM keys for your machine. Reboot.
j. Run Windows Media Center setup.
k. Run the PlayReady install from inside Media Center.
1. reboot in safe mode (you can probably just stop the service)
2. navigate to: C:ProgramDataMicrosofteHome3. create a folder named old
4. move ALL of the contents in the folder on step 2 to the old folder
5. reboot
6. run windows media center setup
One of the first things I do when I get a new windows 7 system going is disable UAC so performing “run as administrator” was not necessary. I did have to add the Administrator group to rights on the DRM registry key in order to delete it, but that is a common enough thing when mucking in the registry. I followed the second set of instructions after the first reboot after deactivating the features (perform steps 1-6 somewhere around steps c and d). These became yet another block of deletions in addition to the deletions included in the first set. This second set was the part that required stopping the Remote Potato service as the files were being read by the service to feed the application.
Finally, after nearly 20 years this series has an authorized release of the series. I loved this show back when I was in high school, often making a run to the TV as soon as I got home from band rehearsal. It was killed far too soon, perportedly because of the Antonio Banderas version of Zorro that was on the horizon. The only thing I would say is that they should have chosen a one hour instead of half hour format.
Well, after several weeks, Microsoft finally got around to resolving the name on my account.
Thank you for your patience in this matter. We are contacting you to inform you that our support team has made some adjustment on the Microsoft Volume Licensing website for case ID: 777XXX. We would like for you to access the Volume Licensing website and verify if the adjustments have resolved the issue.
If we do not receieve a response in 72 hours we will consider the issue resolved.
Thank you,
Microsoft Volume Licensing Services (VLS) Escalations
vlscesc@msdirectservices.com
So CDW ultimately had to return and exchange my purchase to correct the information in the agreement that was including the purchasing agent. HOWEVER, the user management tool still reflects the other person’s name, CDW says Microsoft must have associated that person’s name with my email, and Microsoft says CDW has to fix it. CDW has reached out to Microsoft, and I have gotten a ticket into Microsoft, they said that I would be contacted by email as to the status within 2 days and within 6 days it would be resolved. A week later I got the email confirming that the ticket was lodged, but never got a resolution.
Right about the time CDW processed the exchange, Microsoft wrote to say that my issue behind why where I could not manage benifets because of errors was intermittent and that I should try again. I had tried morning, noon, night, weekdays and weekends, from multiple network locations and computers and always got the same error when clicking to manage the benefits. From the details below, I believe this is programmer speak for “this is a bug in the system that we just fixed and it was only affecting less than 10% of customers and we just released a patch to resolve the issue”. Spelling errors below are reproduced exactly from the email.
We are contacting you to verify the resolution of Case ID 771XXXX regarding MSDN administration. Our Technical Support Team investigated your issue and informed us that the error which you are getting is an intermitent issue. Please try to access the page after some time. If the problem still persists, please clear your browser cache,cookies, temporary internet files, restart your computer, and then try once again.
If you face any further issues or have any questions, please reply to vlscesc@msdirectservices.com. You may also contact our customer service center at (866) 230-0560. Our office hours are Monday-Friday from 5:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.
Thankfully, the new CDW issued agreement numbers did let me in to benefits management and I was subsequently able to get in and allocate myself as the MSDN downloads member.
Well, in years past I had an MSDN subscription that was invaluably useful. Having parted way with the former employers who had provided a subscription as part of the normal developer suite, I found I was missing it. So I talked to the account manager at work and she got a quote for me with CDW using the company discount, same as they would do for one of the companies we do IT support for, just no pricing markup. So I forked over my Visa card, and a couple of hours later I got a welcome to Open License program email. So I went out to the Volume Licensing Service Center as per instructions and tie my windows live ID to the email address associated with the agreement #.
I kept going in circles. I’d be sitting on the MSDN license details and click the Manage MSDN Subscriptions link. The first two days I kept being taken back to the main summary screen. I figured that something must have to process through the system so I gave it a few days. I got back into the office a few days later and kept trying from my work system. I finally started getting taken to a windows live redirect and ultimately got dropped on the manage benefits screen – but was greeted by “An internal error has occurred. Please contact system administrator”.
So I got on the phone with CDW, not knowing if this was because something wasn’t entered into my profile correctly or what. In the meanwhile, I also discovered that because of the invoice layout and their “screen scraping” for data entry, my name got put into the middle of the street address for my contact info and our account manager’s name got put into the account as the contact person and account owner, but listed my email. CDW told me it all had to go to Microsoft and they gave me a phone number.
I got hold of Microsoft. They took down my information and told me to send them screen prints and that CDW would have to update the account holder info since they entered it. They gave me an incident number and that was that. I took some screenshots and emailed them in with the incident number I had been given. They emailed back the next day and gave me a new incident number.
Another day went by and I got an email back:
We are contacting you to verify the resolution of Case ID 771XXXX regarding your MSDN issue. Our Technical Support Team investigated your issue and informed us that your account is showing no errors in the system and you may be experiencing the issue due to your internet browser or network settings. Please ensure you are using Internet Explorer 8, clear your cache and cookies, and try again.
If your issue still persists, please try to access your MSDN benefit on another network (such as your home network).
So I wrote them back, I had tried from four different Windows 7 systems from three different locations and always got the same results. I also called in to follow up. They gave me a song and dance about how there was no issue in my account and that I should try another system. I referred them to the original ticket number and said that these steps had been done already and had not resolved the issue. Guess what, they had already closed both tickets, rather than at least waiting a day or two to see if I got back with them. They then said they would escalate the issue to the next level support and that they would have the next level support call me.
Three days later (and nearly two weeks since I got the welcome message), they still haven’t called me and I still can’t get into my MSDN Premium subscription that I paid quite a bit of money for. CDW also has not gotten the profile updated, and I’ve been working with the account manager our company uses for most all CDW purchases, and he is befuddled by this – he says they sell these Open License editions of MSDN all the time.
So right now I’m left with an Open License Premium MSDN that I can’t get into and that has an agreement owner that has my email address and my name appears as the street address, but the name of the person who actually placed the order for me as the name of the Open License owner…
GRRRR!!!!
So I was listening to the 99.7 FM the last few mornings and instead of the Michael and Gwen show, they’ve been pumping in some other guy. While this show is on breaks, he’s been advertising a US based computer manufacturer (Vision Computers) with the big selling point being a 15 second wait time for tech support, and gushing about this computer’s specs. The system specs are ridiculous (the bad kind) for the price. Unless you are getting a netbook or want ultra tiny do not get anything with an Atom processor.
Atom 2306 New Radio Special
- 17″ LCD 1280 x 1024
- Atom 410 / 1.6 GHz
- 1GB DDR2 800MHz Ram
- 160GB SATA Hard Drive
- 16×40 DVD-ROM Drive
- Windows 7 Starter Edition
So how much will this cost you? A mere $499.00 !!!! I’m willing to bet that the 15 second wait time for tech support is because they hardly have any distribution because of crummy spec’d systems.
If you really want an Atom processor, get a Sony W netbook. You can get them with a 250GB disk inside, and if you are willing to pop a few screws and pop out the keyboard, you can upgrade it to 2GB RAM. I have two different Sony W netbooks (a white W111XX and a brown W121AX) and they each have been upgraded to 2GB RAM and both run Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit). You will need an external DVD or Blu-Ray, but that can be gotten starting less than $50. The screen resolution is also 1377×768 which is a 16×9 aspect ratio, instead of the 4×3 (square) screen spec’d above. You can plug in external keyboard, mouse, and monitor if you really want.
Sony VAIO VPC-W121AX
- 1.66GHz Intel N280 Atom Processor
- 1GB DDR2 533MHz Memory
- 250GB Serial ATA 5400RPM Hard Drive
- IEEE 802.11b , IEEE 802.11g , Bluetooth
- Memory Stick , SD Memory Card , Memory Stick Duo
- 10.1 (1366 x 768) LED-backlit LCD Display
- Mobile Intel 945GSE Express
- Windows 7 Starter
- Up to 7 Hours of Battery Life
What will this cost you, somewhere between $320-$400 – and you can take it with you! You could easily get a keyboard, mouse, and monitor for less than $150 total, and you would have portability of a netbook, more RAM, and a bigger disk. All for about the around the same cost.
If you just want a small and affordable desktop system, head over to Best Buy or Wal-Mart. You can get a desktop like this one for less than $500 and you have way more disk, RAM, and CPU.
- AMD Athlon II X2 or Intel core2duo
- 18″ – 20″ widescreen LCD
- 3GB-4GB RAM
- 500GB-640GB Hard Drive
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Double-layer DVD±RW drive
Well I got my card just in time for Christmas! Unfortunately, the cableCard I got a few months ago to keep on hand wouldn’t work. The diagnostics utility showed the cableCard as inserted but malfunctioning and recommended replacement. I opened a ticket with Ceton to verify whether this message could merely indicate that the card had not paired, rather than a genuine issue with the card, also sent a copy of the debug info from the diagnostics utility. They wrote back and said my tuner card might not be installed right and that I should take the back plate off and install the latest drivers – which I had downloaded the day I inserted the card. I have a feeling they did not read the report nor review the debug info, that they just did a keyword match.
Anyway, managed to get the cableCard swapped out this afternoon. With the new card, I was able to go to the activate cableCard step in Media Center and actually get to the screen with all the serial number like data rather than just getting dumped back on the main menu. After getting the new cableCard phoned in to Comcast, I just had to wait a couple of hours for the signal to go through since the call center had to log a ticket and escalate the issue to next tier support. So now I’m watching all these nice HD channels I previously had not been able to watch because I just had the digital tuning adapter and QAM with the Hauppauge card. Now I just have to wait for my second card for the other room and I’m all set!
One thing I am currently annoyed with, my Intel DG41KR microATX board has one PCIx-16x and one PCIx-1x slot and the 16x won’t let me install anything other than a video card in it (and be useful). I already had a Hauppauge HVR-2250 in the PCIx-1x slot. After rebooting with both the InfiniTV4 (in the PCIx-16x) and the HVR-2250 installed and not getting anything on the TV, I realized that the BIOS had disabled the on-board HDMI port. I had to remove the the HVR-2250 in order to install the InfiniTV4 card, else the computer video blanked out – only accessible if I WinVNC to the computer. I did try going into the BIOS and set to always use the on-board video, however, that did not help. I have subsequently found the owner’s manual and it states “When a non-video PCI Express add-in card is installed in the PCI Express x16 connector on the Desktop Board, the HDMI port is disabled.” so, it just ain’t happening, or at least with the current version of the BIOS.
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