Wireless AC

I recently bit the bullet and upgraded my home wireless router.  The old D-Link DIR-655 was a decent N based router but did have issues providing coverage to my whole house and it would slow down after heavy use (torrent or Skype) and require a reboot.

At work we did an upgrade to Cisco 3701 AC Access Points on our corporate wireless and implemented Guest WiFi across our campus.

Performance at work was great with excellent coverage and increased bandwidth. So I thought I would explore an upgrade at home as well to 802.11ac.  Looking at the various options I narrowed my search down to the 

Asus RT-AC87 AC 2400

The reviews all looked excellent but they didn’t really say it all.  I expected some benefit to my new devices but what I didn’t expect was that my 802.11n and even 802.11b devices are working flawlessly. I believe the difference is the AiRadar beam forming combined with much beefier cpu hardware and antennae.

This device pays for itself over and over again despite the high acquisition cost. No more router resets, no more wifi extenders to provide whole house coverage. Skype calls always go through with zero disconnects or dropped calls.

I haven’t even started with any of the advanced traffic shaping or profiling available on this router and I can say that right out of the box, this is the best router I’ve used at home ever.

10/10

Open Letter to Microsoft Technet

Sent to the Canadian Editor of TechNet Flash…

Hi Pierre,

Thanks for the latest article from Technet flash.  I notice now though when I go in to the Technet website under my Enterprise licensing, I no longer can download software for eval/ testing purposes.  Is this a recent change?  I don’t frequently use this as Microsoft is not the only technology we utilize but it is a benefit that I have grown used to in my many years in Enterprise IS management and technology roles.

 

If you have any input or can provide feedback to your team, you can let them know that I am disappointed in the loss of this important tool.  I guess I can always go back to signing up for evaluation software as required but I find the process extremely onerous and it in itself will be a detractor from my doing so.  Also having software that doesn’t timeout or expire in our test labs means that I can manage our projects to our own schedule rather than having a ticking timebomb waiting to expire while I struggle with supporting daily operations while looking at new technology.

 

I’m not sure of the logic behind the decision.  I wasn’t keen on the subscription model of a yearly cost from Microsoft and frequent “True-up” requests.  One of the saving graces was access to all Microsoft software for testing and evaluation.  Maybe I need to go back to buying my software and upgrading when budget cycles allow.  It may even be more fiscally responsible as reviewing competitive options with a proper business case rather than just standardizing on a single technology partner who no longer supports me is no longer viable.

Yours (past tense),

Mike Kirby

Manager, Information Systems

Yukon Hospital Corporation

New BlackBerry Z10!

I just upgraded to the new BlackBerry Z10. So far I am really happy. It is taking me some time to get used to it but the predictive keyboard is so good that I almost prefer typing using it to a real keyboard.
http://instagr.am/p/WnZ9yAB7DY/ 
I’m still waiting for some apps like Skype and VMware View but I was able to sideload Instagram and others fairly easily.

The hardware is great, fast and beautiful screen. My only issue in that area is the battery but perhaps I am just pushing it since it is so new. Right now I’m barely getting 10 hours.

I’ll post more of my experiences later. Fingers crossed as I have my first OS update to try this weekend.

Blog Migration

I had my Blog posted directly wordpress. Recently while updating My domain settings on GoDaddy I noticed that I had the option of free hosting Linux or windows server. The idea of being able to self manage my own system and use a background database was very intriguing. I immediately signed myself up!

The first choice was Windows or Linux. I am familiar with both, on the DB side, I am most familiar with MQ SQL and only Windows had this option. It took less than 20minutes to install. I then was offered a wizard for the rest of the setup. The wizard offered to let me setup a number of apps including WordPress, Dotnetnuke, etc. Seventh Heaven for a techie like me!

Unfortunately none of these tools worked. I tried a number but all said they were not compatible with my chosen service. Sigh!

I then tied using a free version of Visual Studio Express to manage my site with the server in asp.Net iis7 mode. I could only use ftp upload. The visual studio had a neat feature to download different web services. More options!

Again more failure. With only the option to download locally and no remote setup scripts, it seemed impossible to configure my site.

Going back to the drawing board, I was able to figure out the godaddy basic hosting didn’t allow for the autoscripting option. Instead I went to wordpress wiki and found the remote asp set instructions.

I swapped my db from MS SQL to myself and downloaded the code to my site, used the phpdb tool to configure mysql and finished the install the in no time.

I then downloaded my site as an xml, uploaded my template and custom css to my new godaddy site. Importing the xml was a problem until I created the upload directory and gave write permissions. Then it was simple and even pulled the media (pictures) from my original site.

 

 

The End of Napter Canada

Dear XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, Thank you for being a valued Napster customer. After seven years of service, Napster Canada will be shutting down all of its services on 12/16/2011. If you are a subscriber, you may continue to use the service as long as your subscription is active and until 12/16/2011. There is no need to cancel – you will not be charged for any subscription fees after our shutdown (and we won’t bill you for any renewal that may occur between now and the shutdown). Whether you are a subscriber or not, if you have purchased and retain any still-unused download credits, be sure to use your remaining download credits before 12/16/2011. After that date they will expire. Also, we strongly suggest that you back up all of your previously purchased and downloaded tracks because we will not be able to provide any customer support relating to them, including any further backup copies, after 12/16/2011. These downloads are DRM-encoded WMA files and can be backed up by burning them to audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy. If you do not back up your purchased Napster music downloads by burning them to CD and you later change or reinstall your computer’s operating system, have a system failure or experience DRM corruption, then the downloads will stop playing and you will permanently lose access to them. We really appreciate your business, and thank you again for listening. Sincerely, Your friends at Napster

Please do not reply to this email. If you have questions about or need assistance with your Napster membership, please log into your account and visit Customer Support. If you are unable to sign into your account, please visit www.napster.ca/support for help.

© 2003 – 2011 Napster, LLC.

Napster, Napster To Go, and the Napster logo are trademarks of Napster, LLC that may be registered in the US and/or other countries.

RIM Blackberry Playbook

Just got the announcement email for the new Blackberry Playbook. 

Looks fairly awesome.  Specs sound like a full PC/ Tablet.  OS is QNX??

 

Check out the video at the link.  Mostly marketing speak, little to do with the actual product.  I prefer the specs page.

Based on the specs, I predict pricing in the $600-$700 range.  Only time will tell though…

Pairing with a Blackberry phone is an interesting aspect of it.

http://bit.ly/dy3Rom

Windows Live Spaces Blog moved to WordPress

My old blog from Windows Live was moved today (actually merged) with my WordPress blog. This was done fairly automatically from Microsoft.

Seems strange as the old MS one wasn’t bad. WordPress themes are certainly better. Blogger should probably be worried….

RIP http://mikekirby.spaces.live.com/
Welcome https://michaelkirby.wordpress.com

Sharing HP Deskjet F4280 on a LAN

I’ve been doing some work for a small not for profit office locally while I continue to look for employment or contracts.  I’ve done an upgrade of all the workstations to a minimum of 4GB of RAM, Office 2007 SB and either Windows XP SP3 or Vista Home Premium (most of their equipment is donated).

 

During the upgrades we ended up replacing one of the machines and rolling it down to a lesser used area that was running Windows 2000 on very old hardware.  As soon as the machine was connected to the shared printer on the Windows XP machine beside it, both machines started crashing.  Strange as the old Windows 2000 machine printed to the same printer, hosted the same way with no issues.  My immediate reaction was it was likely related to the fact that it was a GDI/ host based printer and that perhaps the issue was due to drivers.

 

I went to HP’s site and there were quite recent drivers available.  I had the option of a Full or minimal driver set.  After some initial research on the issue, may people appeared to be having issues with drivers and sharing.  Most of the problems seemed to be related to registry errors and two services that the drivers installed (possibly related to the "all in one" features).  HP’s site also had driver "removal tools", communication error hotfixes and registry fixes.  I wasted at least a few hours going through some of the explained solutions I found online before I recommened to the client would do better to spend their money on a network based printer as some very good one’s with more capabilities are available for less than $200.

 

We ended up getting another HP (somewhat against my better judgement due to the issues that I had been having with HP drivers with the older printer) a Officejet 6500 wireless all-in-one.  Luckily it was somewhat of a cinche to install and configure and was even automaticially detected by my own Window 7 64 machine without loading a single driver.

 

As I was leaving, I asked the director if he would mind if I took the old printer to "play with" as I had read that hosting from Linux worked fine.  I have a Ubuntu 10.04 machine at home and was curious if I could make it work (on my own time without billing the client).  To my amazement, the printer was automatically detected and drivers installed for printing and scanning!  Not only that but my existing CUPS/ internet printing worked immediately as well.  Installing the "HP Deskjet F4200 Series" driver on Windows 7 was very painless.  On Vista the printer was not automatically showing a compatible driver though and I was EXTREMELY reluctant to install the HP drivers on my main computer at home.

 

I did some more research and found that many people had success using the HP Deskjet 990C driver provided with Windows Vista.  I setup my machine with this and the printer is working amazingly.

 

Bottomline.  I love HP hardware and technology but absolutely HATE their drivers.  When I was a network administrator I found that I needed to standardize on HP Laserjet 4 drivers across our network due to the horrible drivers that would crash our Citrix servers.  The latest, greatest drivers provided with all their printers would not only use huge amounts of RAM for each session but had memory leaks and crashes (nothing tests software better than putting 100+ sessions on one machine in real life use!!!)

 

Windows 7 Search

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged much here.  I’ve explored other technologies such as WordPress and Blogger, self hosting, Google Apps/ Sites and the like.  I decided to post this particular blog posting here as it is likely most related to the content here.

 

I recently purchased a new laptop for my consulting work.  It is a Dell Studio XPS that is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit.  I added Microsoft Office Professional 2010 for good measure and then downloaded all my files from other computers and DVD backup of my old laptop that died.

 

My problems started when most of my files did not show up in search.  Emails all seemed to be indexing fine.  The biggest issues were the files that I copied.  The index status showed a very low number of completed files and a status of "Indexing Complete"!!

 

I tried the Search Index troubleshooter, rebuilding my index, searching the Microsoft knowledge base and online communities but I could find my solution anywhere.

 

I also added the Desktop Search Indexer Status sidebar gadget to watch my progress and speed restarting of the Windows Search service.

 

I finally stumbled upon an obsure posting about how someone with a similar issue was able to get things working by individually changing the archive bit on the files he wanted.  He wasn’t able to fix the files by selecting all of them and changing the archive bit but if he did it on each file it would work.

 

Being an old techie at heart, I of course jumped to my command prompt and used good old "attrib.exe"  As soon as I did an "attrib -A myfile.txt", the sidebar gadget showed "Indexing … [1]" and then added the file to the total files.

 

 

 

To fix my issue (MP3s and documents not being indexed), I issued a "cd documents" command, followed by "attrib -A *.* /S"

 

 

I issued similar commands in my "pictures" and "music" directories and my indexer is now busy adding over 40K files to my index!

 

Why Microsoft never mentions in any of their documentation the requirement of the archive bit being removed to index a file is beyond me but I am greatful for all those years of batch file programming and MS-DOS command line work that I thought that I would never need again!

Ultimate Web Browsing on Windows Mobile

I have found it!
It being the wholly grail of web browsing on my windows mobile device. Since getting a blackberry I’ve been using the wireless connection on my HTC P4000 to browse when at home without hauling out a laptop. Using mobile IE sucks. For a while I had been using Iris, which was a real improvement but it failed to render many of the sites I frequent.
The answer I must say has been found! Skyfire rocks. Rendering and compatibility is even better than Firefox on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.
It does what I imagine the browser on an Iphone does for that device. Smooth flow and zoom, maximum compatibility (even youtube, imeem, live.com, facebook, blogger, google apps/ sites) and an excellent interface that utilizes my touch screen, keyboard and tiny display.
Some lockups but overall very polished.