The Downward Spiral

the “playstation network” is “down” for users of the older PS3’s

this isn’t exactly true… the PSN is UP, it’s just that older Ps3’s can’t connect to it.  The date was reset to 12/31/99, which is outside the settable times.  Any game that stores trophies online won’t load, saying quit and reload to try and connect.

I think Ps3s that were turned on yesterday connected and then disconnected and then some flag was thrown south and now we can’t reconnect.  With the trophies thing, I can’t believe they wouldn’t know that PS3s wouldn’t be connected all the time, and so I’d think they’d cache the trophies locally… I think they had to… so that leads me to believe “something happened” upon connecting to kill the trophy cache, and now we can’t reconnect.  So, two problems.

Either that or there is another timer inside the PS3 besides the clock.. my “black box sense” is telling me it’s one of those two things.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of speculation about trophies… we HAVE NOT lost them… even though they aren’t listed on your PS3.  If anyone is worried, login to the PSN website and you’ll see that they are still there.  No big deal.

if you have a barcode like 047995855086, then the leading 0 is important to have there

unfortunately, excel, in it’s infinite wisdom, will not keep that leading 0 there unless the format of the cell is Text…

so, that should be easy right?  If you have a spreadsheet with 047995855086 in there, and copy it to a cell formatted as Text, it will STILL drop the leading 0.

The magic is you have to paste it from a “text source” (I’m calling it) like Notepad.

so let’s say you have a huge column of 12 digit barcodes (with no spaces or dashes or anything).. all the leading 0’s are dropped.

First apply a Custom Formatting to all the cells and put in 12 0’s … wowzors… now we have leading 0’s.. well, you can SEE leading zeros.. but if you were to copy a cell or reference it or whatever, guess what? … leading 0’s dropped

soooo .. now copy that column… and paste in to NOTEPAD… ah ha.. magic sauce is brewing!

now, back in the Excel, change that column’s format to Text … leading zero’s are dropped, but the stage is set

back in notepad, copy everything and paste back in to excel… leading zeros really there (for real) and the cell has a little green triangle in the corner.. you may even get a warning cuz OMFG you have LEADING ZEROS!!!

but.. that’s what you want… you win! do a happy dance!

I so upgraded my phone to the Blackberry Tour on Sprint.  It has EVDO Rev A and a pretty quick processor… it’s a pretty viable computer in the palm of your hand, but still a really great phone.. even clearer that my Pearl was.. which is usually a trade off with other such devices I’ve had.

Connection speed is about 500-600Kbps .. not 1-3Mbps like EVDO Rev A is supposed to give ya, so it’s really the processor in the thing slowing it down.  This is about 10 times faster, in both directions, though than the Pearl.  I ran the speed tests using Xtreme Labs speedtest.

With the faster stuff and the full keyboard and a speaker that can play LOUD ring tones (I have the volume at half right now, cuz damn), that fixes all the problems I had with the Pearl.

The only problem I’ve had so far is Google Maps not being able to find the GPS.. I guess they are working on that.  I got another app called Poynt that I’ll use unti it gets fixed.

I’ve also found an SSH client for the Blackberry which uses MIDP Java stuff found here: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/  … works pretty damn well… you gotta be sure to put the connection type on TCP/IP .. Default will not work and give a connection string error .. now I can reset shit over ssh from my phone… it’s the holy grail I’ve been looking for since the dawn of time

I can’t believe I’ve been messing with it for so long.. Microsoft Live Writer is SOOO SLOW.

I’ve switched to ScribeFire… an extension for FireFox.. it is so much better… I guess not as “fancy looking” but it works a whole hell of a lot better… doesn’t take a minute to turn it on and another minute to start typing and 5 minutes to publish.. it does all that really really fast.

I decided to reinvent the wheel and make my own contact syncing for egroupware on the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform.. so C# talking to PHP

the reason is all the others I’ve tried don’t work.. all of them end up in contacts being duplicated.  Also my contact store backend is LDAP and uses LDAP address books like egroupware suggests… still.. doesn’t work with their syncing stuff.

I have both sending contacts and getting contacts working now.. and you can currently delete all contacts on the device before you read them from the server… deleting the other way will work eventually too

so nothing ever deletes unless you pick “delete all before import/export” .. then it wipes out everything (right now only local deletes work) and sends all changes over

it also never overwrites a contacts filled in attribute with nothing … there’s always gotta be “something” to overwrite

… so this isn’t syncing.. so much as writing one way or the other and filling in what’s missing, if anything

if anyone out there in the world wants a copy, email me.. I’ll put up a link somewhere later.. I was thinking about making this a sourceforge thing, but really it’s for internal use and I don’t want to “support” it for other people

Well, Microsoft would have you think so.

The more I work in MS stuff, the more I realize everything is really just dressed up VB… C#, .NET, etc … they just changed the words to make you think you aren’t writing in BASIC… feel good… “u r totally awsum there guy!”

nice one MS.. nice one

Samsung NC10-14GW … so far pretty nice.  What did Jon say.. a media consumer and not a media creator.. well.. I’m blogging from it

I went on an uninstalling rampage like I always do.. well.. don’t uninstall the Easy Display manager.. you need that or you FN keys don’t work

I just deleted the funambol plugin from my Blackberry for the last time (I think) until a new version comes out.  So syncing with the Blackberry desktop application to Outlook via USB cable transfers everything perfectly including pictures and PINs and all that stuff.  Funambol doesn’t.  Additionally sync’ing with Funambol and then syncing Outlook with Funambol makes the Blackberry and Outlook not sync correctly.

So.. ya.. don’t mix sync’s.. it just won’t work.. it’s either sync everything with 1 source or don’t sync them… so.. goodbye Funambol.. again.. for now.

Everyone I work for/with likes their mobile phones so I decided to check out Funambol again.  Also there’s been renewed interest in doing stuff without Exchange servers, so.. here we go again.

Since I have a Blackberry now, I figured that it would be more supported and more used.  Funambol is also on version 7 and the last time I checked this stuff out was in version 3.5… that’s also when I got an "Opensource Rocks" or something like that T-Shirt from them… oh ya.. I’m big time

So I got PIM sync’ing for the Blackberry and for Thunderbird and for Outlook.  Long story short, what works is if I send contacts to the Funambol server with the Blackberry and then grab those contacts with Outlook and Thunderbird.

If nothing else, this is pretty cool to get contacts from the Blackberry to Thunderbird.. no need to have Outlook in the middle there anymore.  However, since the Blackberry syncs over the cable connection better, and then only with Outlook, it makes this a hard sell to the non-geek community… but, for the most part, this would work.. and that’s pretty nice.

What didn’t work is when I changed anything in Outlook or Thunderbird and told the Blackberry to sync up again.. the Blackberry sync client would error out and that was the end of that.

I didn’t try the Funambol email push client.  BIS works as well as I think it should without needing another app.  Funambol’s email client might work better (and then again might not), but I don’t see much of a reason to switch it.  I WOULD just try it, but I can’t "just do it"… you need to convert some kinda java thing A to java thing B .. or something.. anyway.. I don’t want to mess with that to try something I don’t really want to try.

Anyway.. that’s round 1 of testing.. I’ve deleted the app off the Blackberry many times now, but I put it back on again to get all my contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird.. and that’s really the only thing I’m gonna do with that for right now… local BB to Outlook sync with a cable, push that to Funambol and then pull it down with Thunderbird.

… the rest… maybe more later… but really this has to work flawlessly before I bring it before the bosses.

I have quite a few email addresses at different hosts.. I’m a firm believer in all my email in one place.  So, of course, I’ve been forwarding email.  I’ve stopped that now after reading this article.

All my mail is filtered in to a google for domains (initiated.com) account.  Then I pull that mail down to my local server.  If my local server goes down, then I still have google, which doesn’t go down.. ever.

And actually I’m thinking about not archiving my stuff locally.. but I think I’d still want room to play again at some point.. even though I’m in “solid solution” mode now.

Anyway.. now.. instead of forwarding.. I take advantage of google’s ability to grab your email from other places via their pop3 service.  All 3 of my other addresses have pop3 ability (mostly because I’m in charge of that ) and then I resuck that email (via pop3s) from google to me.  So I “fetchmail” via google and then actually really fetchmail… I could skip the middle man and fetchmail directly, but google’s spam filter is totally awesome… and I haven’t taken it head to head with spamassassin yet.. only using it sentimentally.. so.. yar.. that’s what I got yo.

I’ve also implemented SPF for work(s)… I gotta see how I can do that for home too… maybe… if I care after today