December 2003

Ericsson T610 Phone Review

Here’s a quick take on my new T610 phone: it’s fine so far and it has some nice qualities. I was looking for something that was:

- Small
- Bluetooth
- Decent user interface
- Synch with Outlook contacts

I got all that, and with the rebate I get back $20 on top of the price of the phone, with a plan from T-Mobile here in NYC. Read on for a brief review of the phone.


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Studies & Reviews

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Peppered with Spam Comments

I am debating turning off all comments on this blog because of the nightly barrage of bogus comments left by spammers. The comments invariably have some kind of banal “keep up the good work!” text but the URL is for something commercial and slimy. Often, there are several different comments from Pete and Mary and someone else all with the same commercial URL.

Pretty sad way to go. Maybe MT can just turn off the URL thing, but they haven’t been very active in supporting this ware.

Observation

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Supported Tech

After upgrading to Outlook 2003, I still couldn’t get it to remember my passwords or connect reliably. So I was determined to get some satisfaction and went through what seems to be the sole remaining avenue for tech support on registered products at Microsoft without paying extra: the web support form. My expectations were low, but I was surprised and humbled.


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Observation

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Silly Putty + Black Velvet

If your wife’s black velvet dress got into the wash at the same time that your son’s silly putty was left in a pants pocket, and somehow the two came together in an apparently permanent attraction, and you were wondering if there was any way to get it off…it turns out the answer is WD-40.
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Tech Note

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Next Generation Web Apps

I’ve begun thinking again about the next generation of Internet apps and what they’re going to be built on. The model we’ve used since 1995 remains fundamentally broken: interleaved client and server code in files on the server…just painful. I’m amazed we’ve gone as long and as far as we have, but for a number of reasons I think we’re ready to begin moving on. The bulk of web apps will continue to be built in JSP and PHP and ASP for awhile, but within a handful of years I think they will no longer live in a browser and they won’t be in HTML either.

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Observation

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Digging Into Flash

I’m beginning to form some opinions of my own as I get to the point of applying it (Flash MX 2004) for real tasks. After a steady diet of books (I recommend Kerman, Moock, and Underdahl’s titles for MX and MX 2004) I have struggled to let go of a Java orientation long enough to get inside a Flash mindset and see what it feels like.

Hard to tell if the headache is from struggling too hard or succeeding.


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Tech Note

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PHP4 with Apache2 on Gentoo

For some reason, this info wasn’t available in one neat place. Assuming you’ve already got Gentoo running and need an Apache + PHP setup, here are the steps to follow.


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Tech Note

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Getting Mailing Labels out of Outlook 2002

I was shocked (!?) to discover that Outlook 2002 will not mail merge to a version of Word earlier than itself. A small dialog box pops up, essentially saying “pay for an upgrade now or forget it.” I did neither, and got nice labels after figuring out a way around it. But you need Access.
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Tech Note

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Hush the magic Mini-ITX

I am in love with my new Hush Technologies mini-ITX system. It’s pretty much silent (fanless) and very attractive in a small, solid design. I ordered mine from LogicSupply and have had great service from them as well. I wanted a near-silent machine for 24×7 family server duty, holding music, images, and shared files.


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Studies & Reviews

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Improving Thunderbird Stability

One of my few complaints about Thunderbird is that it can sometimes hang up opening new IMAP folders after being in use for awhile. After poking around awhile, I became convinced that this had to do with the caching of connections, which defaults to 5. Setting it down to 1 seemed to help the problem…but the settings you make in the account settings dialog don’t hold across program restarts.

I think I found the way around this.
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