Archive for April, 2005

Catastrophic Error and Error 365

Apr 30th, 05 / Comments Off

Tong Family Blog: Prefetch Exception and Abort Exception. I’m developing a negative attitude towards blackberrys :-(

Since we last chatted about it, I’ve had more problems with the Blackberry 7230. First, I started to get Java Exception Errors when dialing and the phone application would crash.

Scott then tried to reload the software and the contacts. We pretty clearly have corruption in our contact database here, but worked to try to clean that (we don’t run any cleaning on our public folders, Scott is smart not to run diagnostics unless there is a problem).

Post the reload things really got bad, first I got a Catastrophic Error and now I’ve got a Error 365 press reset and the thing loops.

This was the same error that forced a replacement of this Blackberry last time. Right now, by my count, I bought the original 7230, it died and had it replaced.

A year later, that 2nd one died, then the next one was DOA. This one has lasted two months and now need to be replaced, so we are on our fifth replacement. I swear, I don’t do anything bad. Personally, I suspect the Blackberry 4.0 software has wedged the firmware, but who knows.

Blackberry

Scion xB Upgrades

Apr 28th, 05 / Comments Off

When I actually drove the Scion xB, it was cheap and great, but it had a couple of pretty big drawbacks. Fortunately, the thing is so customizable, that a quick visit to various enthusiast sites got me to the fixes for in order:

# Low Power. It is only 108 hp so it is sloooowww getting up to speed.
# Noisy. Wow, it is back to the old days particularly at highway speeds.
# Gadgets. Heck, what would a modern car be without a DVD and a navigation system.
# Leather. I know, who wants leather seats in a cheap car. Well, have some kids and then come back and comment.
# Rack. They have a clip on rack, but it would be nice to get nice rails.
# Sunroof. I know I shouldn’t need one, but I’ve gotten used to it.

Now, it turns out that Scion dealerships have many fixes for these that turn a $14K car into a $20K one. I know, I priced it at Michael’s Toyota. Let’s see if the web can’t help me do it cheaper. And hopefully help me find a local accessory place to do the work. The cool thing about such a cheap simple car is that I feel like you can just modify it easily.

* !Scion Life :: View topic – xB/xA Intake Buyer’s Guide *updated 4/28 Weapon-R*. The easiest way to get more power is first of all to get a cold air intake. That’s about 10% more power. The “Injen”:http://injen.com IS2100 at $137 street is way cheaper than the factory intake and seems to work better. Main issue is that it has an additional air filter that you’ll have to change. Actual “dyno”:http://www.scionlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4168 testing shows that 92.7HP and 95.8 lb/ft at the wheels fro the stock intake, while the Injen added +4 HP and +4.77 lb/ft. Not bad.
* “TRD Muffler”:http://www.scionlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=59143. You can get a $299 muffler that is bigger. Supposed to add 2 hp and a little better fuel economy. The big concern is of course how loud the thing gets. Other choices include “Strups”:http://www.scionlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58868
* “Read Sway Bar”:http://www.scionlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21922. Counter intuitive, but the best way to improve cornering is to leave the stock anti-sway bar in the front and add one in the rear to get balanced handling and prevent massive oversteer. Progress from “partshippers.com”:http://www.partshippers.com/ makes a nice rear bar that’s pretty easy to “install”:http://www.scionlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=59159. For newbies, the front bar prevents the car from tipping over (hence the term anti-sway), but makes the car fight you in the turn.
* “Sound deadening”. To bring down other road noise in the cabin, I sound deadened the wheel wells, cargo floor, and rear doors according to Karl Hunges on scionlife.com.

Cars

Transport Recommendations

Apr 28th, 05 / Comments Off

Had a chance to drive the Prius and the Scion, the Scion is a pretty cool car. In depth in 2005, here’s my recommendations for cars.

The main criteria are a) reliable, b) fuel efficient (30 mpg or more), c) seats 5, d) can carry a bike easily, e) can get me and the kids up to a ski slope, f) not too expensive and g) isn’t too big to get around the cities for the daily commute.

After studying Consumer Reports et al, here are my recommendations. These are all Japanese cars because of the realiability. Obviously, these are personal POVs, but folks keep asking and amazing thing is everyone of these is a Toyota product, not by intension, but interesting:

# Scion xB. You have to get over the ugly looks and the fact that it is slow and noisy (these are fixable, see the next post). But it is just $14K and it has as much room as an Explorer and incredible reliability. This is a big box and super practical.
# Toyota Highlander Hybrid. I have not had a chance to drive it, but it is a seven passenger SUV that is close to the Lexus RX400H but is much cheaper. Don’t know its gas mileage yet, but if we didn’t have an Acura MDX (love that car), this is the one I’d vote for for Connie. Obviously less cuteness factor than an MDX though, but it is supposed to get 30mpg which is pretty amazing since our MDX gets about 17mpg in practice.
# Toyota Prius. I really wanted to like this car, but it is just so small. Very high tech, but small. Gets a real 44+ mpg, but since it is a hatchback, the headroom is just so short. When the Camry hybrid comes out, I’d recommend that instead of this one.
# Toyota Sienna. This is the dream minivan, but mainly I like it because it has all-wheel drive so it is great on snow. Competes with the Honda Odyssey for most practical car. It loses on size and getting only 20mpg.
# Lexus RX400H. This is a luxury SUV that is a hybrid also. Main ding is that it costs over $44K, but it is ultra reliable.

Cars

Using Bit Torrent

Apr 27th, 05 / Comments Off

!

# XviD Codec. Download the XVID codec so that you can play the movies. Run this after it downloads
# “Bit Comet”:http://www.bitcomet.com/. The current favorite for actually doing the download. Download the client and install it.
# “BS Player”:http://www.bsplayer.org/. I like this player better than the Windows Media, but that’s a personal choice.
# “ISO Hunt”:http://isohunt.com/. The search engine. When you type in a name of the show you want. This will get you to a download of a .torrent file. When it loads, Bit Comet should start up and look at the .torrent file, click OK a few times
# Wait for Bit Comet to load the .torrent file. It will take a couple of hours usually for a download to complete
# When it is download then run windows media player. this will use xvid to play the movie.

Internet

Blackberry 4.0 Problems

Apr 26th, 05 / Comments Off

We just upgraded to Blackberry 4.0 clients at “Ignition”:http://ignitionpartners.com. Works for everyone but me. Here are my problems:

* I can’t keep more than 50 or so emails. They just scroll off the bottom. I have never expires set, but it keeps happening. I’ve also noticed that I have only 100KB or so of free memory on the Blackberry whereas with Blackberry 3.8, I always had a couple of megabytes free. I turned off Automore and turned on compression, but this doesn’t seem to help much. I’m guessing this is because the 4.0 client is bigger (it won’t run at all in 8MB Blackberry’s and mine is a 16MB 7230).
* Sync Issues/Local Conflicts explosion. I don’t know what happened, but we are getting a zillion sync issues right now and things just disappear. Also, on the Blackberry, I am now syncing all of our spam folders which isn’t real helpful when I can’t keep enough messages as it is.
* Contacts are broken. Right now we can’t used shared contacts, there is no longer a way to set which folders you use for Contacts that we can find. A big problem for us because we can’t really share contacts anymore. Also, now when I choose new contact in Outlook on my PC, I get a cryptic, can’t find form message, so something else has changed as well.
* Calendar entries created from the blackberry get double created on the Outlook calendar. This actually happened in version 3.7 as well and we’ve never found a fix.

On the plus side, “Blackberry Forum”:http://www.blackberryforum.com and “PDA Street”:http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fd310be1724c41ecba0e85356e147af1&forumid=7 seems to have finally arrived as a public resource to help. Given that Blackberry technical support is charge for and the server itself is so opaque, maybe they can help:

* “Getting More Memory”:”Blackberry Forums”:http://www.blackberryforums.com/showthread.php?t=5440&highlight=4.0+memory folks have the same problem and there is not enough memory in a 16MB device since 4.0 is fatter and email gets whacked as described by “Blackberrycool.com”:http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/03/18/00288/. You need to have at least 50-100KB free otherwise, start deleting applications, everything you can.
* “4.0 Only for 32MB Blackberry’s”:http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56226&highlight=slow+handheld Remember 4.0 is a bit more memory intensive so be wary of installing them on 16MB series models of the BB. It will work very slow if you have a lot of emails, phone logs, contacts and calendar data. The 7290 and other 32mb BB?s are best suited for v4.0. 7290 runs (4.0.274) As usual you can choose what applications are installed saving more memory. Sigh, the T-mobile 7290 isn’t here yet, so I’ll have to wait.
* “Or, Downgrading”:http://www.blackberryforums.com/showthread.php?t=1871. Now if you wish to downgrade your device to a previous version, many of the above steps will apply. First, you will have to remove the newer OS from your PC. Do this by going to add/remove programs in the control panel and removing the software for the new BB OS. Make sure desktop manager is not running when you do this. After complete, restart the Desktop Manager. When you plug in your device, if everything went well, the Desktop Manager should tell you that your PC has an older version of desktop tools than is installed on the device. It will give you an option to keep the version on your BlackBerry or downgrade to the version on your PC. You will want to select downgrade and let apploader do the work. The trick now is finding an older version of Handheld 3.7.

Here are some other tips.

* BlackBerryForums.com : Your Number One BlackBerry Community – BlackBerry Internet – MSN/chat/web/telnet/TCPIP – No BES!. This post is all about how applications can now directly access the Internet, so a bunch of third party applications like a real web browser vs. a wap crap one can get used. You essentially have to go to Options/TCP and type in a valid apn (e.g., a proxy server) and a magic username and password that is carrier dependent. T-mobile is wap.voicestream.com and the username and password are what you use to logon to tmobile.com
* “Shortcuts”:http://www.blackberryforums.com/showthread.php?t=19. ALT – Cancel (or back button, whatever it’s called – the one under the scroll wheel). This is the same as ALT – TAB on your computer. It let’s you navigate between open windows which is pretty cool and very hard to find. Means that you can in one command jump from the phone to look at your email and contacts.
* Rearrange the ribbon: In the Home screen (ribbon), hold the ALT key and click the thumb-wheel to bring up a menu. You can then select Move Icon, Hide Icon, or Show All. If you hide an icon, to show it again click Show all and it will appear with an X over it, bring up the menu on it and uncheck hide icon.
* While in a message, ‘r’ replies and ‘f’ forwards a message.
* All you need is to copy C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\USB Drivers locally to get a 7230 to charge from a laptop via USB. Just copy it to your flash keyfob and you are set.
* This use to be known as BB Demo Portal. check it out http://mobile.blackberry.com/ it has some nice content on it.

Blackberry

ATI 800XL

Apr 25th, 05 / Comments Off

AnandTech: Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards

bq. Considering the fact that we were recommending X800XL video cards over GeForce 6800GTs a month ago, and the Radeons took a nose dive in price, we would be ridiculous to not call the X800XL cards our top graphics card pick this month. We do commend NVIDIA for ramping up shipments of their retail 6800GT and 6800 Ultra PCIe cards. Although, until vendors decide to drop the MSRP on these cards, we are quite sure that ATI will continue to dominate the $200-$300 video card market.

Games

Opera swim

Apr 25th, 05 / Comments Off

THE 1 !>http://www.opera.com/img/swim.jpg! MILLION DOWNLOAD CHALLENGE – Opera Web Browser. _Wow, 1M downloads in 4 days and now he swims to the USA. I have to say one of the best get close to the customer on the web pushes that I’ve seen._

Before the weekend, Opera’s CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner boldy proclaimed at a company meeting that if download numbers of Opera 8 reached 1 million within four days he would swim from Norway to the USA [press release]. Opera’s communications department could not resist the temptation, and made his statement public. As any respectable CEO and gentlemen, Mr. Tetzchner stands by his word.
DOWNLOADS: 1,050,000: Target reached by April 23 0900 CET!

Internet

Windows 64 Bit Upgrade

Apr 25th, 05 / Comments Off

!The Tech Report – techreport.com. Well the 64-bit Windows is now here. You can get an upgrade if you fit these conditions. The most hard core thing is that once you upgrade you can’t go back to the old 32-bit version. I’m actually unsure why this is so, seems like there has to be some sort fo compatibility. It does make it sound like the on-disk file formats are changing. That would be sad if true (e.g., you have to reformat the entire hard drive to use this. Ugh.)

# In order to be eligible to receive Windows? XP Professional x64 Edition, your computer must have been ordered between March 31, 2003 and July 31, 2005 with Microsoft Windows? XP Pro (32 Bit) preinstalled.
# By participating in this program, your 32-bit version of Windows® XP Professional will no longer be licensed.
# The installation of Windows® XP Professional x64 Edition requires you to format your hard drive. You must back up your files and settings prior to the installation or they will be erased. Microsoft is not liable for any loss of data as a result of this installation.
# Windows® XP Professional x64 Edition requires 64-bit hardware drivers (32-bit drivers are not supported). Drivers for 64-bit Windows are created at the discretion of hardware manufacturers and may not be available for some of your hardware components.
# For the purposes of the End User License Agreement for your existing Windows® XP Pro (32 Bit) software, your installation of this software will be an “Upgrade.”
# The installation of Windows® XP Professional x64 Editions will void any support with your PC manufacturer. One free support call will be provided by Microsoft for any installation-related issues. Additional calls to Microsoft support will be available on a pay-per-incident basis.
# Cost for shipping and handling of upgrade is $12.00 USD for domestic shipments and $22.00 USD for International shipments plus any applicable taxes.

PCs

Pentium D vs. Athlon X2

Apr 25th, 05 / 1 Comment

AnandTech: AMD’s dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 – Server/Desktop Performance Preview. _A very interesting set of comparisons. The D’s are so inexpensive and if only we could invent some software at “Ignition”:http://ignitionpartners.com that would exploit dual core, now that would be cool_

!

Because Intel is only shipping lower clocked dual core CPUs, Intel’s chip prices are much lower – not to mention that Intel’s manufacturing abilities far exceed those of AMD. Percentage-wise, the Pentium D 3.2 commands a high premium for that second core, but the prices are overall quite reasonable. The fastest Pentium D is still cheaper than the slowest Athlon 64 X2 4200+, and the slowest Pentium D is ridiculously cheap compared to AMD’s dual core offerings.

AMD’s answer to Intel’s aggressive pricing is two-fold. Eventually, all of AMD’s CPUs will be dual core, and thus, prices will be driven back down to single core levels. But for now, AMD feels confident enough that their single core CPUs are fast enough to compete with Intel’s low clocked Pentium Ds. We put that exact thinking to the test in Part II of our Intel dual core preview and concluded that it really depends on what type of a user you are. If you tend to multitask a lot or run a lot of multithreaded applications, then a slower Intel dual core is what you need; otherwise, a faster single core AMD is your best bet.

PCs

State Tournament Results

Apr 24th, 05 / Comments Off

!>http://www.tongfamily.com/chess/chess2005-2a.jpg!:http://www.tongfamily.com/chess/chess2005-2.jpg It was a great tournament. A brilliant cloudless day with a terrific view of Mount Baker. The team up at Whatcom County did a great job at Lynden. Kudos to you all.

The results are alread up Rating report for State Tournament. Some really impressive players. Congrats to all!

Kudos to all the UCDS folks who participated too!

Uncategorized