scott.hodson.blog

If you get a “bluetooth license check failed” error on your PC, especially if you have a Dell, an optional software update was published in Microsoft’s Windows Update for a new “Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module (Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR)” driver, which actually breaks the WIDCOMM drivers that were working. You can simply restore the earlier, working drivers by installing them again. You can download the working drivers from here. You can read more about the problem in Dell’s forums here.

And don’t download anymore drivers from Windows Update “Optional Software” area, particularly drivers. I’ve had too many problems downloading “updated” drivers from there. I sometimes see drivers in there for devices I don’t even have running on my machine! Scary…

If you are using a Dell E1505 like me, which comes with WIDCOMM drivers, you need to remove them and use the default Bluetooth drivers that come with Windows XP SP2 to enable your Blackberry to work with your PC via Bluetooth. As for Vista support, who knows, I wouldn’t chance it at this point. The original post is here. It is referenced in the Blackberry Desktop Manager help file as article “KB-04132″ but the URL in the help file is wrong.

So over a year ago I asked my Asian colleagues to send me a bundle of files. I expected to get them as a ZIP file. Instead the file I got attached to my email had a .RAR extension. .RAR? What? So I found out that a tool called WinRAR could extract these files. I told them to not do that again and to send ZIP files in the future. All I needed was another program installed in Windows cluttering up my registry! Yet, after spending some time with it and receiving more RAR files occasionally, I noticed that RAR files were noticeably smaller than standard ZIP files.

I wondered if the difference was attributed to the level of CPU time each tool uses. I noticed WinRAR, out of the box, takes longer to create and deflate compressed files. Now I remember way back when creating ZIP files I could specify how much compression I wanted to achieve. On a 200MHz Pentium II that could be a big deal, and it could mean starting to create your ZIP and then go to lunch. So at the time I would stick with the standard ZIP compression. However with the CPUs of today it’s not nearly as big of a deal. Yet as I use WinZIP 10.0 today I don’t see an option to change how deep of a compression to use so I’m stuck with WinZIP’s standard level of compression. Because of this WinRAR will always achieve higher compression than WinZIP, and without all of the annoying startup delays WinZIP’s demo version has today. After a hundred or so uses the WinZIP demo becomes almost unusable anyways. Yet another reason to dump WinZIP…or pay for it to make the annoyances go away.

I’ve done several tests and I don’t remember the results for all of them but here’s one test I did today with a 16.1 MB SQL Server database backup file.

WinRAR – 84% compression – (2.56 MB)
WinZIP – 79% compression – (3.46 MB)

Percentage-wise, the difference may not seem that dramatic, but in terms of bytes it’s almost an entire megabyte! That can make the difference between fitting in someone’s email inbox or not. And when you’re flinging files around the world sometimes to people that don’t have broadband it could mean increased productivity.

So, why aren’t you using WinRAR? Probably because the person you would send the file to would open their email and think “.RAR? What?”

I saw this on Digg, it really works, especially for broadband users. For Firefox users, just go to your about:config and set your network.http.pipelining to TRUE. You can also bump up your network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 if you want as well.

There are instructions for IE too, but you have to change some registry settings and I didn’t bother since I don’t usually use IE. But the speed increase is very noticeable, on both Windows and Mac versions of Firefox running on my Cox Cable Internet service.

Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox – video powered by Metacafe

Click Here for original page.

Maybe you’ve seen this commercial. I’ve seen it running on Cox Cable for a while now. What a bunch of hooey! This commercial is so deceiving and blatantly manipulative that it will probably backfire. This reminds me of lame negative campaign ads during election season that are of bad taste and do more harm than good for the candidate. People are too easily informed these days to fall for this mumbo jumbo!

They try to make you think that Google is going increase your internet bill! Sorry, you don’t pay Google, you pay your ISP, and if they charge you more than you’re more likely to shop around for another provider.

I’m not saying I’m totally for or totally against Net Neutrality as I think both sides have some valid arguments. But this commercial is in such bad taste I think it hurts to discredit those against Net Neutrality and especially the cable providers since they’ve been gleefully airing this commercial for some time now.

For some more info on the Net Neutrality issue see the Wikipedia article about it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality

I remember when I used to toil for hours creating MS Project plans for certain projects. These helped justify dates and cost estimates to the higher-ups. Then, mid-stream I would try to keep the task percent-complete numbers up to date and balance the availability of development resources, but sometimes it’s hard to know how far you are on a task while you’re still discovering unknown aspects of a software project. I would sometimes even decrease the percent complete of tasks because more unknowns were uncovered. Of course, to management unaware of the software development process, this seemed hard to believe so as to not let my credibility with them suffer I would just tick up the percentage completes by tiny amounts until some real progress was made. This is akin to stock analysts rating a stock “Underperform” which everybody knows means “SELL!” because the analyst doesn’t want to upset the company by actually recommending a sell-rating of a company that he’s covering, but I digress…

But the thing that bugs me most about systems like these are the emails that I would still get that such project management tools are supposed to prevent: “Where are we?” or “What still needs to be done?” or “What tasks do we still need to complete?” or “When will we be ready?” Even with newer, online tools I get the same problem. One company I work with imposes on me to keep my tasks up to date in their Basecamp account but just today I got a “What tasks need to be complete?” email from them. What use is it for me to do all of this electro-micro-management if nobody else reads it or follows it or tries to use it after I’ve dedicated so much time into trying to keep it up-to-date and accurate?

I think the illusion that tools are going to make our lives easier is only as powerful as the team’s commitment to using such tools for their intended purposes. If you don’t get buy-in from other stakeholders to the tool and it’s meaning to the team then the tool won’t do any good for you. If you can’t get any group buy-in then just use a GTD Tiddly Wiki for yourself. However, the people usually imposing upon you to justify and manage your project with Gantt charts do so just to give them a comfortable feeling that the project has been thoughtfully planned, but they don’t want to refer to the project chart to see where the project is, it’s easier for them to interrupt you while you’re editing your Gantt chart.