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Alex Parker

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  • iPhone - Custom Application Upgrade = Data Loss?

    I don’t know if many people have reported this but upgrading your applications on the iPhone is a hit or miss procedure.  Sure it is easy from an iTunes or a AppStore icon on the device.  This isn’t the first time it has happened as some of the applications in question have had multiple updates.  The main problem(s) I have seen are as follows:   Loss of login information (FaceBook, NetNewsWire, Todo, WordPress) Loss of Data (Todo – I spent 30 minutes entering data and then noticed that an upgrade was available.  You get the picture…)   Now the one thing I would like to see out of Apple is a way of backing up each individual application’s data independently so I don’t lose all my data again.  At least with ToDo they sync with Toodledo so I can at least sync online so I was able to go back to a previous days entries. Anyone else seeing similar issues?
    Published 08-06-2008 10:00 AM by alex
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  • iPhone 3G

    Well it isn’t launch day but I have done it.  I have two black iPhone 3G 16GB phones in hand. Unlike last year, the lines were shorter, with good reason, the wait was much longer.  I would say there were about 100 people in front of me and it took an estimated 4 hours to finally walk out of the store with the phone in hand.  Last year I think there was at least 200-300 people in front of me and the wait was an hour less.  But with that aside, once I got to the store the process was pretty straight forward.  I was able to walk out of the store with a newly activated iPhone, and two unactivated iPhone 1.0s, unlike the ordeal I went through last year.  ;) One thing I though was pretty interesting was the psychology of people, me included, while waiting in line for something you really don’t know if you are going to get.  First we started in the line and an Apple employee came out and said, no more Black 16GB phones.  Then everyone around me in the line...
    Published 07-13-2008 6:05 AM by alex
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  • Windows Services 2008 Terminal Services Gateway

    For the last year or so, I have been using my Laptop to allow me to connect to my server hosted in VM at my home. I had to use port forwarding to forward 3389 to my machine but I was reasonably happy (not thrilled) with the performance over Verizon’s EVDO rev A broadband network. I have been in a constant struggle of wanting a powerful laptop to host the 4-5 virtual machines on the road and portability.  I could go out and get a T61P and load it up with 8GB of RAM.  But, lately I have been thinking that I don’t want to carry my laptop around, I actually am thinking of something like the MSI Wind netbook to satisfy my need for always connected.  The other issue is that I now have an Amazon Kindle and I don’t want to carry anything big around anymore.  The Kindle is a topic for another post. So, enter RDP over HTTPS, sound familiar?  Well it basically uses the RPC over HTTPS that Outlook 2007 uses and tunnels your Terminal Services connection.  Cool right? ...
    Published 07-02-2008 6:41 PM by alex

  • A Day of Disney/Pixar but no Apple

    Well it wasn’t meant to be.  But anyway I went and saw Wall-e.  Definitely another great movie from Pixar.  The movie had a wonderful message and did a great job (without any dialog) of getting you to feel for Wall-e and Eve. Unfortunately for a lot of people you either loved it or thought it ranked on the bottom of Pixar’s previous works. Keep up the great work Pixar. Now unfortunately the second part of the day wasn’t meant to be.  No iPhone until July 11th.  Lucky for us AT&T will allow us to get in on some iPhone 3G action at the subsidized price.  However, next year I don’t think that they will be so generous when iPhone 4G comes out. But by then we may have Google’s Android OS on some other smartphone and we will have forgotten how cool Google maps was on the iPhone. Or maybe, a blackberry will port their software to Android and smartphones as we know it will never be the same… Enough wishful thinking…
    Published 07-02-2008 1:37 PM by alex
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  • A Day of Disney/Pixar and Apple - Take II - June 27 ???

    Well everyone is guessing when Apple will release the new iPhone. Well let me just take a guess. The date will be June 27. Last year Pixar released Ratatoullie on the same day as the iPhone, as mentioned in my blog post . The new Pixar movie, Wall-E is being release on June 27, so why should it be different this time. I hope Mr. Jobs sticks to the plan so I can watch a good movie and pickup an iPhone 3G !
    Published 05-19-2008 11:20 AM by alex
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  • Notebook overheating issue resolved, Again!

    Well it amazed me that this is a typical issue.  My Toshiba M400 the other day was running really warm during normal use, 60° C-70° C.  So of course I had to take the whole thing apart and inspect.  The first thing I did was to clean out the FAN, again a big yuck!  Then I took off the CPU fan and heat sink and removed all the old CPU paste.  I then cleaned the surfaces with Isopropyl alcohol, re-applied some new thermal paste, making sure that it is evenly coating the CPU and then re-assembled the notebook. So now my idle temperatures are more inline with when I got the notebook, 35° C-45° C. Here is a good article I found on the topic .
    Published 03-26-2008 10:29 AM by alex
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  • Vista file copy performance finally solved!!!

    Well it has been over a year since Vista has been released and I have been struggling with poor file copy performance between my Vista machines on a GB switch, since about December.   Poor Network Performance with Windows Vista (RTM) Poor GB Network Performance on Vista back! =( Poor Network Performance on Vista resolved?   I don't know how I missed the article about MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) but after reading into it, it seemed to fit my performance issue...my stability issues were due to old network drivers.  If you have a Broadcom onboard nic, you should definitely upgrade the drivers. Mark Russinovich uncovered that MMMCSS is hardcoded to throttle your network performance to 10,000 frames per second or about 15Mb/sec on standard ethernet with 1500 byte frames. Here is the solution .  I have disabled the MMCSS service, updated the registry to remove the Windows Audio dependency and network performance is back to where it should be!  CPU utilization...
    Published 03-24-2008 5:27 AM by alex
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  • Case of the bad CPU paste

    The other day I ran into an interesting problem with my ThinkPad T60.  For some reason the machine would shut down after about 10-30 minutes.  There were no indications to the cause from the error in the event logs in Vista, nor were there any obvious hardware sounds. Lucky for me I had another laptop at my disposal where I could swap the hard disk out to rule out some Vista related bug. By chance I noticed that the base of the machine was running very hot, the internal heat sink was running about 90° C (using my Fluke infra-red temperature sensor) around when the machine shutdown unexpectedly.  So I suspected that the machine was going into thermal shutdown.  The Core Duo CPU is rated at about 100° C, but other components on the system board may not be stable at such high temperatures. So the first thing I did was clean all that dust out of the heat sink and fan, yuk...  Then I fired up the laptop again.  This time it took the machine significantly...
    Published 03-20-2008 8:45 PM by alex
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  • $100 oil = $40-$60 speculation

    I was always wondering how the Market hype actually affects the price at the pump.  Here is what I was able to find out. One barrel of crude oil makes about 19½ gallons of gasoline, 9 gallons of fuel oil, 4 gallons of jet fuel, and 11 gallons of other products, including lubricants, kerosene, asphalt, and petrochemical feedstocks to make plastics. The current price at the pump is about $3… At $3 per gallon * 19.5 gallons in one barrel = $58.50 per barrel.  $100 per barrel - $60 actual cost or about $40 in market speculation… In actuality the price per barrel is much lower considering the actual cost breakdown… At $3 per gallon the raw cost is about $1.98 per gallon… ($3 * 66% = $1.98 per gallon (Actual cost of crude, 40% plus refining costs 13%, plus distribution 13%, excluding taxes) The total cost is 19.5 * $1.98 = $38.61 per barrel raw costs. Source: http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html
    Published 03-11-2008 11:22 AM by alex
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  • Why I won't buy an ultra-portable notebook (Yet)

    Well that is not entirely true, I will by an ultra-portable notebook computer (< 4lbs) if it has the following characteristics (Yes I may be dreaming but by the EOY I think we might see such a beast): Core 2 Duo Processor (What is the deal with the LV and the ULV, they don't save that much power) 4 GB RAM (Do you really think 2GB is enough?) 1.8" SSD (>50MB/sec performance) or 2.5" 7200 rpm drive 64bit support (Must have support for x64 OS) LED backlit display Tablets should have dual touch screens The power adapter shouldn't weigh more that the notebook ;-) DVI/HDMI port 2-3x USB2 ports Express Card Slot Discrete graphics Price < $2000 All new notebooks are more than capable of running modern applications but the piece of technology that really needs to be left behind are the slow 1.8" 4200 rpm hard disks. I think we are at a point where the performance of ultra-portable notebooks doesn't have to suffer because of the small form factor. I think manufacturers...
    Published 03-10-2008 11:55 PM by alex
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