Categories
Geeky/Programming

T-Mobile Dash Smartphone Mini-Review

I have been using my new T-Mobile Dash Smartphone this week instead of my Sprint Pocket PC 6700. First off, the biggest difference is the size of the phones. The Dash is small, lightweight, thin, and fits in your pocket (weird, you would think “pocket pc” would fit in your pocket). The Dash is running Windows Mobile 5.0 with the messaging updates, so that is cool. It also is expected to get the upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.0.

The Dash has built in wi-fi, Bluetooth, just like the PPC. Mobile IE, and applications to open up word docs and other office docs. There is a built in IM application that I just can’t seem to get working. The IM app has ICQ, Yahoo, and AIM.

One of the best parts of the Dash is the camera. The resolution is very good, and the pictures are the best I have seen from a cell phone. I haven’t tried video yet, but will soon.

With T-Mobile, there is an obvious difference, and its the myFaves feature. You can add up to 5 people from any carrier, and you get unlimited calls to them. This is a pretty sweet feature.

As well as all the previous features, there is Activesync with Exchange, the normal Windows Mobile stuff. The keyboard is a QWERTY keyboard, the keys are a little small, but I have bigger hands so maybe that’s why. With my T-Mobile plan I have tethering, but I haven’t tried it out yet. I have tried it on my Pocket PC in the past, and it worked, but was kind of a pain to get set up, Once I get going on the T-Mobile I will probably blog about that

All in all the T-Mobile wins out in my opinion. I like the Pocket PC but it is just too bulky. It seems that the Sprint device also is chatty on the network, where the T-Mobile device only connects when it needs to. The battery life seems better on the T-Mobile.

This post is kind of all over the place, I’m not a professional reviewer, but I guess you get the picture 🙂

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Categories
Life

Bird's Eye on Me

Check out my apt from a “bird’s eye” point of view

Online mapping has come a long way in a short time. Google Maps was taking the cake for a while, then it was ask.com maps (at least for the Central MN area), well now, Live Virtual Earth is really #1 at this point. With Bird’s Eye and also the 3D option you can install, its almost like Google Earth’s desktop client.

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Categories
Random

Classic Technical Difficulties Image

Stumbled upon this, man, I actually laughed out loud. I might have to just break my site so I can put this up.

 

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Categories
Geeky/Programming

Blackberry Tethering: Error 718

Tonight I was helping out a friend with her T-Mobile Blackberry, trying to get it to tether to her laptop so she could use it for Internet.

Weird thing is, it worked 2 days ago. All of a sudden, stopped working. I tried everything, followed the forums and advice, turned off settings, removed all software, re-added modem, etc etc. Still got Error 718 (it’s a dial up networking error, and since I haven’t been on a modem in like, 10 years, I was cringing). The one thing that most places say is to add DNS entries instead of having DHCP set up for the dial up networking TCP/IP

Anyways, here is the stupid fix.

REBOOT THE PHONE!

Argh! What a waste of like 2 hours “F’n the D” with settings.

Or, on the other hand, just don’t get a Blackberry to begin with 🙂

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Categories
Life

T-Mobile Dash

I finally got my T-Mobile Dash today, I am busy playing with it. After a while I will post up my thoughts 🙂

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Life

If you are going to clean in the 21st century…

Then you better use the technology. This weekend I cleaned the apt, spring cleaning if you will.

Bagless Vacuum (or even better, a robotic vacuum)

   

Automatic Shower Cleaner

Disposable Toilet Cleaners

Swiffer

Bleach Tablets

Crazy Dishwasher Tablets

Windex (not the plain ol Windex, scented of course)

Rosie

Well, kidding on the Rosie part, but I wish! Thing is, with all the cool stuff out there you can clean your pad easily, half the time you just set stuff up and go, no cleaning really involved. Still waiting for the home of the future from back in the 50’s though… 🙂

 

 

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Life

Bobblehead


 

Bobblehead

Originally uploaded by ScaleOvenStove.

This year at our holiday party, we all got bobbleheads. Here is mine. Allen also put his up. Yeah, I thought these would be lame when I heard about them, but they turned out cool. The thing is, where do you put it? I need to mount it on someone’s dashboard 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Bluetooth on Lenovo/IBM T60

If you reload your laptop, and you can’t figure out how to get your Bluetooth working. You need to hit fn+f5 (function key and f5) and the wireless manager comes up. You need to turn on the Bluetooth radio. Kind of hidden if you ask me 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Visual Studio 2005 – C++ Unit Testing – Not so good

So, as of late, I have been programming more in C++ than in C#/.NET. The first order of business was getting everything to Visual Studio 2005, which has been accomplished. In .NET, there is built in Unit Testing, Code Coverage, Refactoring, etc. In Visual Studio C++ unmanaged/native C++, you don’t get any of that. (Thanks Microsoft!) Now, if you code in managed C++, you get all the nice features (I’m pretty sure you get all of them).

What you can do, and there are some articles/blogs on the net, is set up a Unit Testing project in managed C++ and then link in your managed C++ projects. This works. Sometimes. It looks better on paper than when you actually try to implement it, depending on your environment and how you have things laid out.

We are making static MFC (probably the first problem – MFC :)) libs for a Core library, and we had to tweak a bunch of settings (ie: make a new build configuration), just so we could link into the managed C++ projects. There were numerous issue, just too many to list here. Things just don’t work nice together.

When we managed to get things to actually compile, and run, then the code coverage would show all the Microsoft API’s as not covered, since the libs were statically linked in to the test project.

Overall, my experience with Visual Studio 2005 and unit testing has been a good one. As long as you are using VB.NET or C# 🙂 

It is so nice since it is integrated into the IDE, and it can make unit tests for you from existing code. This all would be a god send for C++, yet, there isn’t anything there.

And as long as I am griping about it, intellisense in C++ really isn’t that good. I did some research and found Visual AssistX, and we purchased it. Really is worth the money. Adds refactoring and intellisense on crack compared to the built in intellisense.

Anyways, I will follow up with a few more posts with my experiences on C++ unit testing. I tried a few other frameworks, and actually got CppUnit to work well, so I will blog on the steps I took to make it work.

Just because you develop in C++ doesn’t mean you can’t develop with an Agile mindset, it is just a little bit harder to get started. Unit Testing, Refactoring, Code Coverage, and then Continuous Integration. Hopefully over time I will get some more posts up about these things and how as a C++ developer using Visual Studio 2005 you can accomplish them (or at least the way I did it) 🙂

By no means am I saying I know the best way, but it seems that there isn’t much out there talking about this stuff for a native/unmanaged C++ dev using Microsoft technologies, or maybe I just can’t find it.

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Categories
Blogging

More Blog and Site Cleanup

Wow, when I get started, I get going.

Cleaned up old posts that were linking to images on my www.stevienova.com site, and uploaded the pictures to the posts themselves.

Created sub pages on my blog to match the pages I had on www.stevienova.com

Right now, all I have on stevienova is my music that I recorded, and some images that I use for other places I have stuff (myspace backgrounds, etc)

I think I am just going to use stevienova.com for any ASP.NET web applications that I write or want to prototype, etc.

Back when I converted to ASP.NET (Nov 2005), There wasn’t a Web Application option, just Web Site, so my site was all jacked with precompiled assemblies and what not. Just decided to blow it away and clean it up.

And another thing, I had the style sheet from my old blog on those pages. By making sub pages under my blog, they just inherit my current blog theme – talk about easy.

Now, I just need to redirect 404’s to my blog, but my control panel is being a pain, so that is the next thing.

Last night I played around with a blog widget to actually play My Music as a radio station on the blog sidebar, but I wasn’t liking it, so I decided not to put that up.

And now that I have everything “configured” how I like it, what did I do? A backup of course, using the method I blogged about a couple days ago. 🙂

 

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