Category: Techspeak

That’s what my Nokia said to me today. “Phone startup failed. Contact Retailer.” Swell. I tried several suggestions that I found on the Internet, mostly “reset the phone,” (which I could not do, since I couldn’t even boot it) and “press 3, #, and the green button while powering it on” (no effect) or “press 3, *, and the green button (SEND/ANSWER) while powering it on (also no effect). I also tried booting it with and without the SIM card (no change).
Finally, I removed not only the SIM card but also the memory card, and powered it back on normally. It gave me the brand new startup configuration screen, and the phone’s alive again. Reinserting the memory card makes the phone not start up, and removing it allows it to start normally. So… bad memory card? I guess so. I’ll try formatting it again and seeing if that helps. For now, I need to remove the memory card in order for my phone to start up. Annoying, but I can work around it.

On Saturday night I lost my iPhone. Fortunately it was found (yay!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work anymore. After months of terrible battery life, now it won’t power up at all, despite my best efforts and those of Apple tech support. To add insult to injury, my Nokia e71, which was working fine, now won’t start up either, and tells me to “Contact retailer.” Wonderful.
Fortunately Apple is sending an advance exchange replacement iPhone, thanks to my buying AppleCare.
In short, don’t try calling me on my cell any time in the next few days.

Today, I had a client’s T1 line go down. Unfortunately, FairPoint Communications has had a mixed track record when it comes to telling us that they have (or more often, have not) fixed the issues.
So I wrote a simple bash script to ping the IP address of the router on the down T1 line, and email me when it came back up. Think of this as the ultra-poor man’s Nagios. Continue reading “A Quick and Dirty "It's Back Up" Bash Script”

Ever since I got my Asus eeePC 1000HA, it’s had one very annoying quality. The keyboard, under Windows and Linux, would repeat keystrokes, so if I typed “Peter” I would frequently get “Peeter” or “Petter” or something else with extra characters. Very annoying. Continue reading “Fixing Annoying Keyboard Repeating on an Asus eeePC 1000HA”

I bought this book, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes, years ago, and read it back then after not being able to completely digest O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions (a much larger book). While the O’Reilly book has a lot more content, more examples, and covers several different languages’ regexp parsers, I found the SAMS book a lot easier to process. As the name implies, each chapter is designed to be covered in about 10 minutes, so if you have a couple of hours to kill, you can easily plow through the whole book and try out its examples to get a decent working knowledge of regexps. Continue reading “Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes”

Ensure that the third party who has developed your key software will continue to support that software, provide updates in a timely manner, and can provide you with source code in the event that the third party can no longer support the application.

Source: Recommendations from the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool. ?Okay Microsoft, I’ll take that source code for Windows NT and Office 2000 now, thanks.

Last year, Ubuntu added Likewise to their repositories. Likewise is a set of programs which allow you to leverage Active Directory on your Linux desktops. I experimented with Likewise when it first appeared in Ubuntu, but was never able to get it to work. Today, I did. Continue reading “Login to Active Directory From Ubuntu with Likewise”