Innerdimension.net

I haven’t had a chance to upload a pic from Phil’s bachelor party from Labor Day (yeah yeah I know, it only takes a few minutes) but I finally got it off of the camera.

One round of heaven….


Mmmm Irish Car Bombs.

Man of the hour….

Verizon Wireless recently introduced their new Push to Talk technology, and I had the opportunity to evaluate the new service using their V60P phone made by Motorola. Those familiar with the V60 series of phones will appreciate the similarity in function and availability. The new feature (Push To Talk, aka PTT) makes the phone about twice as thick as well as adds a button on the left hand side of the phone for the PTT feature.

Phonebook:
The menu options also include phonebook listings for PTT Contacts on top of the normal phonebook entries. Adding and deleting entries and groups requires you to go to a special website to make any changes, which is unfortunate as you cannot add PTT contacts on the fly. Other than the large inconvenience of having to use the web to enter PTT contacts, the phonebook is easy to use.

PTT Use:
The Push To Talk use through testing I feel is barely functional. Upon first queue up of a contact connection time takes upwards of 15 seconds to connect, compared to Nextel’s 2-3 second delay. Subsequent PTTs take roughly 5 seconds or more whereas the Nextel is almost instantaneous. There are also issues with the way PTT works on Verizon’s 1x network. Their 1x network is not available everywhere you get a signal, and you could have a strong regular signal, and no 1x signal at all, which makes the PTT portion of the phone unusable. One positive about the PTT is that the sound through the speakerphone is clear and audible.

Regular Use:
The regular use of the phone is consistent in signal strength and clarity as the other phones in the V60 line, however I noticed that the battery drain was much faster than the other V60 phones possibly due to the PTT functions. Compared to some other phones in the Verizon lineup I had a much better signal strengh and fewer dropped calls which is a welcome sign of improvement.

Summary:
Although Verizon finally brings competition to Nextel in the PTT market, their technology is still in their infancy. The delays for PTT connections is unbearable as well as the split 1x / regular coverage which will be the short term letdown of this phone. If Verizon can work on the speed in which the radio functions work as well as their 1x tower network this solution could come of age, but will most likely not occur in the near future.

Recently I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of VMWare. VMWare Workstation allows you to run other operating systems as a “virtual machine” inside your host operating system. So far I’ve been able to get Mandrake and Gentoo Linux distributions running, although I’m having some sound issues with the onboard on my laptop. If only they would just ship these with solid name brand goods… Next I’m going to try and see if a VM of Windows 98 will work in upgrading some flaky equipment firmware that only upgrades via Win98.

The folks over at Blogchalking are utilizing the chalking concept and applying it to blogs, giving it an underground search engine if you will. I liked the concept, so I signed up! You can see my Blogchalking info on the right pane.

I just upgraded the site from MovableType 2.62 to 2.64. If there is anything that got lost in the upgrade that I haven’t found, let me know.

I’ve been working off and on on a SharePoint 2003 Prototype installation at work, and it seems to do what I want to accomplish: Give those who need documents from several departments based on their location all the documents they would ever want. However, to do it the best way to maintain I need to be able to search and filter by filename. Should be easy, right? I’m afraid not. In 2003 the search engine lets you search and filter on every attribute you could ever want, even by who their manager is, but you cannot search by the name of the file itself. And the reasoning behind this I have not been able to dig up anywhere. If anyone has any knowledge about the search engine in Sharepoint 2003 and why you can’t search by name (some wierd indexing key in the file database in sharepoint?) please post a comment. Thanks.

Look at this crazy setup for MS Flight Simulator using several monitors using Wideview software. The software lets you use multiple networked machines as one virtual flight simulator. Pretty amazing stuff, you can see 180 degrees around and 70 degrees plus vertical in front with that setup.

I was stumbling around and found an interesting blog focused on the world of Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi Networking News covers everything from new products, security, new technologies, and the social craze of Wi-Fi. Check it out!

An article on CNet News announced that the CERT Coordination center created a certification for incident handling regarding computer security. I think that this certification in concept seems like it will be a solid one to hold, due to its creation by one of if not the premier computer response agency in the world.

BlogPatrol seems to be back up and running, although they reset their user list. I recreated my user account so the counter is now back and functional. The next step is actually being able to go into my account and change the hit count back to where it should be.