Is this thing on?

Wow, guess it’s been a while. Kind of lost track of the last time I posted here until mom reminded me – I installed the WordPress app on my Thunderbolt (woot, 4G) and saw that the last post was Nov. 23, 2010. Shoot, over a year. I’m such a slacker.

Amazingly I still get a fair number page views for some reason. The most popular post for the last year has been my rant about Microsoft Visio crashing because of a bluetooth add-in. It actually used to rank above the official Microsoft KB article on the issue for several months in a row and still bounces to the top spot once in a while. The second most popular post now (used to be #1) is my Volvo Sunroof Repair post that details how to replace the selector gate in a sunroof. This one is probably popular due to the expensive nature of sunroof repairs and lack of warranty coverage. Most dealers won’t even give an estimate without $200 to investigate.

Educational Efficiency

I work for a fairly large technology partner, and I deal with quite a few government and educational entities. I understand that they need to go through extra steps to ensure they are spending public funds in the best possible way and maintain accountability. Most of the time it is just an annoyance, but once in a while I run across a shining gem of bureaucracy that makes me shake my head more than usual.

If you’re a publicly funded school (K-12, community college, etc), this is generally what you need to do in order to purchase equipment for network infrastructure:

1. Determine through some means that you need to buy/upgrade something
2. Approach vendor/partner to put together a high level design and determine equipment needed
3. Write an RFP with list of said equipment and post in a public place
4. Wait for minimum number of bidders to respond
5. Pick best price and order

Sounds pretty fair and logical, right? The whole process probably takes a minimum of 4-6 weeks, maybe longer for large or complex projects.

Now this is where it get’s stupid. In Texas there is something called the DIR contract. Every year, technology vendors from all fields apply for this contract, which involves pre-negotiated pricing and discounts on hardware and services. Once you get your contract number, you can sell approved equipment and services to nearly any state entity without the need for bidding. The customer knows they are getting the best price, and that the company they are buying from has already been vetting process. It takes months of paperwork to get this contract, but it is worth it for technology companies because it saves a LOT of time when dealing with state and local government and education.

So go back to the process in paragraph 2 and you’ll realize why I got so annoyed when I get an RFP on my desk with an exact list of part numbers required, and they just want a price per item then a total price. This list came out of a configuration tool, meaning that a partner or vendor already went through the trouble of building a configuration (with pricing included) and provided this list to the school. The school then copy/pasted this list into a Word document, stripped out the pricing, and sent it out for companies to bid on. You know what they’ll get? 5 responses, 3 of which will be from companies on the DIR contract, and 2 from random vendors that will be tossed out because they can’t come close on price. The 3 vendors will all have the same price, and the decision will come down to flipping a coin twice or pulling a name out of a hat.

Healthcare Fail

It amazes me that people still don’t “get it” when it comes to health care and why the system in the United States sucks so bad. It seems like the people who are whining about the government getting involved in healthcare are either wealthy enough that they can buy any insurance they want, they get insurance through their employer that is sufficient for their needs, or they simply never get sick. I can’t imagine any other reason which would make people so oblivious to what is going on around them.

I have a friend who just turned 21 and she suffers from a few “girl problems” – cysts, hormones, etc. She doesn’t live with her parents anymore and doesn’t have a job that provides health insurance, but she makes enough money that she doesn’t live in poverty. Unless of course you want to buy your own health insurance, and at $400/mo or more for decent coverage, that’s worse than a car payment. Also, until the new health care regulations go into place, she would probably be excluded due to preexisting conditions.

Since the surgery and other treatments are so expensive, her doctor pretty much told her “You’ll just have to put up with it for now, and if one of the cysts ruptures it’ll become a life and death situation then you can get the surgery for free”. Yeah, stuff like this happens every day – people can’t afford preventive medicine, so they have to wait until it’s so bad that an emergency room can’t turn them away. Not only does it make life miserable for them, it risks death, and by time that point comes then the cost to fix the problem is much higher.

If someone can’t afford $5,000 to fix a problem, they certainly can’t afford $10,000 after the emergency room visit, which will most likely result in temporary or permanent loss of wages. Are people so blind that they can’t see this happening? Or so selfish that they don’t care unless it happens to their family or friends? Personally I would rather pay a little more now than have to pay a lot later, which is the whole idea of insurance.

NOT having health insurance for every citizen is one of the many factors slowly dragging us into debt year by year. Hell, every state in the country requires car insurance, and they regulate said car insurance to make sure people aren’t being gouged. Why is it such a big deal to do this with health insurance?

Moto Droid gets Froyo

Around 5 am this morning my Droid popped up with a system update: 2.2 was finally here!  Of course I had to install it immediately and see what kind of new goodies were available.  I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it but here are some first impressions and highlights:

• More home screens -  five instead of three now, and a quick navigation bar at the bottom to get around.
• Quick button – instead of just the little app tab, there is a button at the bottom of the screen with quick access to Phone, Apps, and Browser. Long pressing the App button brings up a snapshot of all five home screens.
• Phone – there is now a Favorites tab with your most accessed contacts.
• USB tethering!
• Camera – load time is much faster, and the pullout menu to adjust flash, focus etc. has been replaced with small buttons on the main screen.  You can easily adjust flash, timer, white balance, zoom and GPS.
• Gallery – fixed an annoying bug where web album photos took forever to load.
• Multitasking – long pressing the home button now brings up eight apps instead of six.  Minor  improvement, but how long did the iPhone wait for task switching?
• Swype – still not available by default on the Droid, but I am on the beta program. I had to reinstall Swype because it detected the OS was different  and refused to work. The keyboard would show but tracing resulted in zero output.  After grabbing the installer again and reinstalling  it worked fine.
• Exchange Mail – typing an address in the To: field now searches the Global Address List (GAL), but you still cannot just do a GAL search. Yes, better than no GAL at all, but it would be nice to have full search capabilities so you can view other contact information (phone, fax, address, etc) and add the contact to your local contact list. Touchdown is still my app of choice for Exchange mail.

The responsiveness is as good  or better than 2.1, though there are some apps that seem to lag a bit at times (Touchdown, Dolphin Browser HD). This is probably just a result of some APIs that the developers need to update. Overall a good experience though!

Technology is Cool

I was driving through the middle of west Texas a couple nights ago (boring) and came upon a flat area with dozens of flashing red lights spread across the horizon.  The pattern was odd – off, flash-flash-flash, off – so I couldn’t figure out what it was.  Radio towers just flash on and off, plus it wouldn’t make sense to have  so many do close together.

So I take out the Droid, open Maps and zoom to  my location. Turn on the satellite layer, and look around – bam, three-bladed shadows. Wind turbines!  It turns out the flash-flash-flash was caused by the rotors moving in front of the lights while they were on, which I eventually saw a few miles down the road when they were close enough to spot in the moonlight. You can’t deny that is cool, and  it will only become more common.  Heck, in  five or ten years you might even be able to pull up live satellite images and see yourself   driving through.  It’s a good time to be alive.

Antenna Shenanigans

That’s it, I call shenanigans. Ask any electrical engineer about antenna physics and function, and they will tell you Apple is full of it. Two things are very important for antennas – length, and insulation. The length of the antenna is dictated by the wavelength of the signal that you are sending or receiving with that antenna. The antenna should be the 1/4, 1/2 or 5/8 (not common) of the full wavelength. Of course you can have a full wavelength antenna but this is typically too large to be practical. If you use the wrong antenna length, you can get current feedback or signal loss. An antenna that works great at 2.4Ghz will not work as well at 5.8Ghz.

Insulation is also very important. If your antenna is grounded or has a current leak, it results in signal loss and unpredictable behavior. If you connect an antenna to earth ground it becomes essentially useless. The same happens if you connect your antenna to any other part of your device, which is why most antennas on consumer devices have some sort of insulation around them. It’s not just for looks! A Faraday cage takes this to the extreme, grounding out all signals and prevent them from moving or out of the cage.

By touching the bare antenna elements on the iPhone, you are changing the length of the antenna AND causing a current leak between the antennas and the chassis of the phone. The human body is mostly water, so yes, you will attenuate the signal slightly on any phone by holding it. However, touching the elements directly causes a greater effect, and your arm becomes part of the antenna. Of course the effect will vary based on how conductive your body is, which varies by individual and whether your hands are sweaty, oily, etc. This is why some people report problems and some people have no issues. So, basic electrical theory pretty much says Apple is full of it.

Now, instead of trying to fix the problem, Steve Jobs is pulling out the “Hey, this happens to everyone card”. Like I said, any phone will experience *slight* attenuation when you hold it, but not to the degree that some people are experiencing with the iPhone. I have a Blackberry 8830 and Motorola Droid, but neither of them drop so much as a bar regardless of how I hold them. I have no idea how Apple is producing these videos of other cell phones dropping from 5 bars to 0 bars within minutes of holding the phone, but if the effect was that common and pronounced then no one would ever be able to make a phone call while holding their cell phone – and this is obviously not the case.

EIGRP Stub

OK, uber nerd post. There are two common practices I’ve seen quite often in the Cisco network world: 1) everyone thinks you need an IP services image for routing and 2) no one wants to pay for IP services images, so they just bootleg it. There is actually a 3rd one (“a routing switch is as good as a router”) but that’s a gripe for another day ..

Swype on the Droid

You may have seen the Samsung commercial for the new keyboard input method called Swype, with the claim to fame for being the fastest input method on a touchscreen. When I first checked it out the Android beta had been shut down due to popularity, but I signed up just in case. I’m glad I did because I got they beta invite email last night, and I must say I am impressed.

You won’t start flying through words at Guinness speeds right away. The hardest part is breaking the habit of lifting your finger and also trying to think of the actual path from one letter to the next. Fortunately the input is very forgiving and you don’t even have to hit the exact letter you were aiming for. The word prediction is very fast and accurate plus the correction method lets you go back and fix mistakes very quickly. There are numeric entry and telephone entry modes if you need calculator or phone number input functionality.

The most impressive feature actually had nothing to do with word input though. There is a document editing mode that lets you move around documents quickly, select and cut/copy/paste text. The directional arrows are much easier to use than trying to tap directly between two letters of you want to correct something or add a space.

Check out beta.swype.com to sign up for the iPhone or Android beta.

Sales Guy Quote of the Week

l was in a presales meeting this morning with a new customer to go over their requirements for a VoIP system upgrade and new voicemail installation. I always keep meeting notes in OneNote so I can refer back to them, because little details can make a big difference in pricing and the success of a project.

After the meeting we are walking out to the car and the account manager says to me “That’s so cool how you type your notes on your laptop, so it’s already in digital format.”

sigh

Visio 2007 and 2010 Crashing

A few weeks ago I decided to reinstall my laptop and upgrade to Windows 7. After getting everything installed (which took MUCH less time than XP), all was well. Windows 7 runs much better on my T60 than Windows XP did, and I could actually put it to sleep for several days without losing my wireless or getting horrible performance.

The ONLY issue I had was with Visio 2007 crashing constantly. I tried different compatibility mode settings, including run as administrator. I upgraded to Visio 2010 at the suggestion of our IT department, but that only seemed to make things worse. At first it only seemed to affect files that were created in previous versions of Visio, so I started recreating all my call flow diagrams but even those started crashing Visio when I tried to copy/paste objects. A repair or full reinstall fixed it temporarily.

I started looking at the crash logs and every one of them was crashing in a different DLL or StackHash. FINALLY I got a random warning as Visio was shutting down after a crash: the send to bluetooth add-in may be incompatible, would you like to disable it? YES! I removed the add-in and Visio is perfectly stable now. That explains why Visio worked fine in my VM with any file I could throw at it: no lame ThinkPad bluetooth to mess it up.