Author: corey

My dad just bought the (Audiovox?) 6700 from Sprint. It is a Windows Mobile 5 device with all the fixin’s. There is a large, comfortable slide out keyboard as well as a stylus hidden in the antenna part. It can use Sprint’s high speed cell network and Wi-Fi. On and on, a high powered device.

Since I host his email domain, I wanted to get it up and running with Exchange integration. This turned out to be quite a challenge.

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My phone, the Audiovox SMT5600 could be set to skip strict checking of certificates on my self-created Exchange cert using a little tool from Microsoft. I tried the same method on the 6700 and it doesn’t work. I followed some instructions I found to try and edit the registry to the same effect, but I still came up short.

I then attempted to get a free third party certificate from StartCom, which I was able to do and install, but the phone didn’t accept the root certificate authority. If I was doing this again, I would have then installed it on the phone at this stage. But I didn’t know that at the time and managed to spend $30 and another six hours buying a certificate from the cheapest SSL provider I could find. This one had a root certificate authority ready to go in Windows XP, but not apparently on Windows Mobile. After some serious yak shaving, I managed to export the root authority to a file and onto the device where after a very long time of struggling it finally worked.

The shortcut answer to the solution (man I wish someone had said this to me) is you should use the pocket PC browser to point to your exchange server (https://yourdomain.com/exchange) and keep trying until you get no popup message with the yellow triangle warnings that something is wrong. Unfortunately the ActiveSync diagnostics are just totally incomplete and the browser is the best troubleshooting method.

</tech section>

Okay, so on to the next step. In order to really take advantage of Exchange Integration, you want to have your calendar, contacts, tasks as well as email all up on the server. He had been running locally and using POP3 to download email from Exchange. But in order to run Outlook in Exchange integrated mode, I either needed to turn on RPC over HTTP, which seems like a whole lot of work or set up some kind of VPN.

Fortunately I had just seen a plug for hamachi on Download Squad. It is a new VPN app that enables really quick and easy VPN setups. It even does NAT to NAT transversals, which covers most configurations now a days. I had set up quite a few VPNs in my day and this was by FAR the easiest ever.

Oh my, that is sexy. The color scheme is only temporary.

Still my biggest interest/concern for the upcoming season is the sound of the new smaller V8 motor. Man I hope I don’t turn into one of those old timers that sits around going “Boy, you should have heard those V10s, now *that* is an engine.” Sigh…

One of my favorite books is NonZero: The logic of human destiny by Robert Wright. I catch his editorials whenever I can and a few weeks into it I stumbled on BloggingHeads.TV. Robert does a splitscreen video with Mickey Kaus and they discuss the issues of the day. They strike a good balance of being on different sides of particular issues, but since they are friends and have to do this over and over, are mutually respectful and try debate with genuine (intellectual) authenticity.

They do these in about 30 minutes, but if you select the Podcast/Download link on the bottom left that looks like this: Video: bhTV01036BM-300.wmv (72.09 MB) and let the video download completely (the progress bar will creep along ahead of the play indicater thing) you can use Windows Media Player to speed up the video — it does it intelligently and lowers the pitch, so it sounds like normal speech and not chipmonk-like. I find that I can listen very comfortably at 1.4 X speed.

Check me.

One of my neices or newphews got a spinning plates set from Santa. I set to work mastering some moves. That show-boatin’ uncle Corey at it again.

The “plates” are specifically designed for this purpose and have a cone in the middle and the sticks are pointed at one end, so the spinning surface area is really small, low friction and once you get it going the “plate” spins and spins for a long time.

More or less fun than a yo-yo? Less.

Image removed because the Narwal image police came after me.

The New York Times had a really interesting article about the narwhal whale last week. For those too lazy to read the whole thing, there are these whales with long straight tusks that nobody had a clue what they were used for. And the new discovery part is that it is a type of sensory organ that can do neat stuff like sense the salinity of the ocean to determine whether it might be prone to freezing on them.

Props to Elf for including a narwhal, with a speaking part no less. (Audio clip from the movie here .WAV)

They are my new favorite whale.

It has long been noted that Canada has a disproportionate number of successful musicians and comedians. If you haven’t heard, loads of your favorite entertainers are from there and the country only has 32 million people (less than Myanmar!).

If you don’t believe me, check out CanadianCelebs.com.

I had a moment while listening to the new Broken Social Scene (Canadian super-indie-group) album where I pondered, wow, it must be a nice feeling to be a Canadian musician. “Free to work on whatever material I want, take chances and know that no matter how risky the artistic endeavor I’ll still have health care. Plus we live in the second largest country in the world by land mass so there’s lots of space and housing prices ought to be reasonable.”

Universal healthcare in the US would have a huge range of implications: good, bad, frustrating, unexpected other. But I would propose that it would be a boon the arts and artists. I could even bore you with some reasons why it wouldn’t even cost everyone else more.

I mentioned these burgers once before here (http://www.coreyh.com/blog/archive/2004/06/03/436.aspx), but they are worth mentioning again.

Fairway Cafe on the upper west side, the restaurant above the Fairway supermarket. I don’t really need to talk about them because, well, just look at that picture.

Oh yeah, my birthday was yesterday (Dec 26) and I am now 30 years old.

Kashi Heart to Heart = Cheerios for adults.

I purchased my Tivo in 1999. The 30 hr Sony model has served me well — reliably, if not excitingly. It doesn’t play streams off the internet, I can’t even get it do to a photo slide show, but when you go away for a two week business trip, you want it to capture every Mythbusters and What Not to Wear, no matter what. And that’s what this box did.

Spinning constantly for 6+ years, the hard drive finally gave out. Which left me with choices

1. Buy a shiny new Windows Media Center PC
2. Buy a new series 2 Tivo
3. Get a “DVR” from Time Warner Cable
4. Get a replacement harddrive for the existing machine

This turned out to be a not-so-difficult decision. I felt that it didn’t make sense to go with a Media Center PC when I don’t have HDTV. And damn no matter how you slice it they are expensive. Likewise a series 2 Tivo made no sense because I bought “lifetime” service with the original box and while it sounds like it might mean my lifetime, it means lifetime for the box itself. So if I bought a new Tivo I’d have to get a new service plan and well F that. For #3, I already pay $125 a month for cable and I just can’t stomach paying yet more money every single month to Time Warner Cable.

So I went for the smallest drive available, a $120 replacement drive from WeaKnees. You can’t just go buy a blank drive from CompUSA because the whole Tivo software and operating system (a PPC linux btw) lives on it and the process to build it is tricky enough that you want someone else to do it for you. So WeaKnees sells them all ready to go, their name comes from the idea that it is too scary to do yourself. I don’t actually know how big the drive is in GB, but it is listed as a 90 hours. Not bad. And I figure this setup will get me through the last of the non-HDTV years or months.

SNL had a fantastic “digital short” this weekend.  

Here is the full video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zLElfJ9YCh0

Gothamist thinks it is “the funniest thing SNL has put up in about five years”

 

 

 

 

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