I just upgrade to 3.1 RC and it is awesome, everything is quicker and I haven’t seen any Unity artifacts. Looking very good.
Go get it – http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/fusion
Playing Magic the Gathering (MTG) with OCTGN
May 1st, 2010 by admin No comments »I recently started playing Magic: The Gathering after discovering a wonderful little coffee and game shop in the area. The only problem is that I can only play once a week (Friday Night Magic) which doesn’t leave me a lot of time to practice and get better at it. I was very excited to find out that Wizards of the Coast also makes a Magic: The Gathering online game. What killed my excitement was that you actually have to buy virtual cards to play with. I couldn’t believe it, not only does it cost $10 to get started, there is no discount for the virtual cards compared to their real versions. I call foul on this. I went on a search to find a better way. » Read more: Playing Magic the Gathering (MTG) with OCTGN
Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7 (CUCM7) on VMWare Fusion 3.0 for Mac
March 7th, 2010 by admin 1 comment »I know, catchy title isn’t it. Last week I finished Administering Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7 & Unity Connection class in order to help with my overall understanding of our telecom infrastructure at the school district. It was a great class and really filled in the fundamentals I was missing. More importantly, on one of the labs, I noticed a message that CUCM was running under VM. I did some more research and Cisco actually allows this!
When I got home on Friday evening, freshly excited about the class, I grabbed the CUCM 7 media and fired up a new fusion VM. Settings are as follows: » Read more: Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7 (CUCM7) on VMWare Fusion 3.0 for Mac
MythTV Lives On
February 14th, 2010 by admin No comments »About a week ago I took the plunge to upgrade my MythTV system to .22 using Mythbuntu. My original backed and bedroom front end were getting on in years and it was time to take advantage of the new package. In order to preserve as much as possible and provide quick back out in-case things went south, I purchased a new 500GB HD to put the OS on. It’s overkill but space is cheap and I got a great deal on it.
The other big feature of MythTV .22 is support for hardware acceleration on certain NVidia cards. I looked up VDPAU and selected the least expensive card that supported all of the features. I found a great deal on a PNY VCG8600GXXB GeForce 8600 GT on NewEgg for a mere $25 after MIR.
When everything arrived, I set aside a full day for the upgrade. I moved the whole MythBuntu install onto a USB flash disk using Unetbootin, backed up the old database and the etc folder, disconnected the old HD and installed the new HD. Booting from the flash disk worked fine and I was quickly into the setup. Installation was a snap and recognized all of the hardware immediately, a task that has taken many weeks before. I followed the steps from MythPVR.com to migrate existing recordings to a new server. There is a comment at the end of the article that if the database is different enough, you should add a -f option to the import which did the trick for me.
I pointed the storage groups for videos at my already installed media drive (640GB) and then hot plugged in the old 500GB HD (love SATA), mounted it and then copied the recordings to the new recordings path. I launched the frontend and recordings were up and running. I was a little bummed that the video metadata didn’t come through but instead of going back to the original database, I used the included jamu script to gather metadata for all of my movies. It looked a lot nicer and the information was much more accurate and detailed than before.
I went into the Playback settings and set it for VDPAU+. The difference is amazing between the old video card and this one. It’s not just the VDPAU but having a dedicated card that seems to make the difference. The one major problem I did run into was pixelation of anything that was in MPEG2 format (recordings). I finally tracked down a thread that this is a known bug on certain motherboards and they are working on a fix. In the mean-time I have reverted to CPU Slim.
Overall I am very pleased with the new software and distribution.
Easier Dialing to Webex/GoToMeeting Conferences from iPhone
January 6th, 2010 by admin No comments »There are few things in this world I detest more than having to write something down from an electronic device just to have to type it back to same said device. After several miserable incidents of trying to copy the access number down for a conference (or even worse, memorize it!) I decided to go hunting for a better way. What I really wanted was a way to copy and paste the conference code into the dialer, what I found was better.
Thanks to a wonderful poster going by the name of droptopMBP in the Apple forums, dialing those pesky numbers is now easy with a small amount of up front work. In the notes field for your conference call event in your calendar, simply add a tel URL in the following format:
tel://+15551212p123456789
Note the p for a pause. The only shortcoming of this little shortcut is the inability to add a # at the end, but hey, one button instead of memorizing 9, I like it. The only problem I had is the need to wait a few seconds (like 5-10) for it to finish dialing the access code before I hit the # key. If you listen very carefully, you can hear it mashing the DTMF tones long and slow.
Here is a copy of the exact post with links to details on formatting the string properly:
1) Place the phone string in the “Notes” field (doesn’t work in event title or location fields)
2) Prepend the phonestring with the HTML telephone URL “tel://” (ref: https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/featuredarticles/iPhoneURLScheme_Reference/Articles/PhoneLinks.html )
3) Follow the remaining rules for embedding telephone URLS which you can read here: ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2806.txt )
4) Use “p” in place of “,” for Pause
5) Don’t include “#” (haven’t identified a substitute yetExample: The following works to dial the number 555-555-6543, pause 1 second, then dial the passcode string 123456. You would need to press # on your phone keypad to end the passcode unless the conference service you’re using automatically accepts the code after a timeout…
tel://+1-555-555-6543p12345
Now, go forth and conference without driving off the road.
Visual Studio Crashes on Async Callback to User Control
November 7th, 2009 by admin No comments »I am working on some code for a client that involves a tabbed interface containing a User Control in each tab. This nicely separates out all of the UI logic for each of the tabs so you don’t end up with one monster file with every control from every tab. Trying to be a considerate UI citizen, I am trying to populate the ListBox controls asynchronously using a BackgroundWorker. » Read more: Visual Studio Crashes on Async Callback to User Control
Mac Me Baby! Day 7
October 14th, 2009 by admin No comments »I am officially up and running on this (hopefully) long and fruitful journey with my Mac. I am currently installing the Codex application developer tools on my system so I can use make. I needed it today to compile dhcpd and couldn’t believe it wasn’t already there. A little search through my original box and there was the original install disc.
I have had some minor problems with Virtual Box. The newest one is that I can’t save new documents to the shared directory between my mac and Win7 image. It seems to be common and I will look into it later.
I had to take a screenshot. Shift-Command-3 takes a full screenshot and puts it on your desktop, Shift-Command-4 lets you select a region and does the same. I miss putting it in clipboard a bit but it’s a minor issue.
If you are contemplating making the switch, go for it. I can say the water is safe and you won’t be stranded. If you have made the switch. I hope that last 7-days of my experience helped you. Please feel free to comment and post feedback and I will grow these articles to hopefully be a resource for others.
Happy Mac-ing!
Mac Me Baby! Day 5
October 13th, 2009 by admin No comments »Monday was the first day back at work with the MacBook Pro after a weekend of installing software. This is trial by fire for me since there isn’t much time to fix anything that has gone wrong. I moved my Dell into another bag and left it in the car for the day. Far enough away that I wouldn’t chicken out and grab it at the first sign of difficulty but close enough that I could get to it in an emergency. I ran into some minor missing software, things that OpenOffice didn’t handle like Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio files I needed to reference. I was lucky that some of them were in PDF format so I could at least reference them, if not edit them. » Read more: Mac Me Baby! Day 5
Mac Me Baby! Day 2
October 9th, 2009 by admin No comments »Man have I been busy with this new Mac. I figured out how to turn on tap to click and the trackpad is now my best friend. I adapted to it’s functions so quickly that the trackpad on my Dell is now a joke as far as functionality.
I ended up installing Sun Virtual Box, installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and got Microsoft Outlook up and running. That has always been my crutch and deal-breaker, I am an Outlook addict and it drives all of my daily activities. I have OpenOffice installed on the Mac side of things though and will do my best to stick with it for my daily office-esqe stuff. » Read more: Mac Me Baby! Day 2
Working for a start-up finally pays off
March 24th, 2010 by admin 2 comments »After years of dedicated hard work for Rhythms Netconnections and the more than $10,000 of hard-earned money invested in the company, it finally paid off. I got my check today in the mail!
2 comments »
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