IBM ThinkPad T40p

I recently upgraded the networking software on my IBM ThinkPad T40p laptop to fix an issue where Windows XP would crash when switching from wired to wireless connections. Plus, I wanted to take advantage of the new Access Connection software that manages my wired and wireless network connections.

To start, I visited the software support pages for IBM ThinkPads and then selected my model. From there I grabbed the following downloads and installed them in the order listed here:

1. Intel PRO 10/100/1000 LAN Adapter (2005-04-22, Build 94590)
2. IBM dual band WiFi wireless mini PCI adapter (4.1.102.133)
3. ThinkVantage Access Connections

After rebooting the machine each time I installed a new piece of software, I finally had an upgraded machine with no glitches:

Programmer Wisdom

A few things to keep in mind or just a good reminder of what one should be doing:

• Top Ten Tips - This is a quick read.
• How to be a better programmer - This is a long and more verbose read.

Rechargeable Batteries

Here are a few useful articles on what is good and bad in the world of rechargeable batteries:

• Steve’s Digicams
• Imaging Resource - The Great Battery Shootout!
• Digital Photography Review

…and a good source for buying supplies:

• Thomas Distributing

Sony VPL-VW100 Projector

Back in 2000 the Sony VPL-VW10HT projector was herald as the best of its class at the time and reviewed by The Perfect Vision, Issue 30, with great enthusiasm.

Fast forward to the present. The video landscape has changed to support HDMI and DVI (all digital formats). Gone are the days of analog video. TVs and projectors have made huge advancements in technology and now, finally, after years of hype, displays are arriving that can finally show true 1080p HD resolution (1920×1080 progressive pixel resolution). Here is where Sony outdoes itself again by creating the VPL-VW100 projector. Again, The Perfect Vision reviews this project in Issue 66 and receives the venerable Product of the Year award to boot!

This is great news for home theater enthusiasts, like me, who are searching for the answer in improving the home theater experience and stepping into the new age of high definition video.

Additional Reviews

• Ultimate AV
• CNET Equipment Review
• CNET Editor’s Review
• HD Blog

Suggestions

• One might think about paring this projector with the Stewart Greyhawk 16:9 screen.

Fax Services

In need of fax capabilities for the home office? This is what I found (listed in no particular order):

• FaxZero - Free as long as you only send two three-page faxes a day and stay under 10MB attachments for each. Supports Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF files. An advertisement is included on the cover page.
• eFax - $12.95/month.
• BroadFax - $10.95/month with a one time $10.95 setup fee.
• Send2Fax - $1.95/month with a $24.95 prepaid balance ($4.95 of it is a setup fee).
• MyFax - $10/month. No additional fees.
• FaxIt Nice - Can be as low as $0.15/page. You can also buy credit that does not expire and pay per page or just pay for a one time usage. Only supports outgoing faxes with no support for incoming faxes (although it might be available soon).
• RapidFAX - $9.95/month. No additional fees.

All of the above are web based solutions that only require one to have an internet connection, web browser, and e-mail account. For additional information, take at look at this F.A.Q.

Digital Sticky Notes

I recently researched the kind of software that existed as digital sticky notes and scratch pads programs. My main goal was to find software that would dock to the side of my desktop and pop out from the side, top, or bottom when my mouse hovered over it. The best I found was: Dema Virtual Notes 2005. With Dema Virtual Notes, you can force it to stay on top of all applications or just on the desktop only. You can capture hyperlinks, and images. You can even export to Rich Text Format. All notes auto save and you can customize the title and body background and font colors any way you like. Best of all, it’s free.

Recommendation: Check out SnagIt Notes which, at the time of this original post did not exist but now does. It is my personal favorite and I have written about it here.

Other candidates that I thought were noteworthy but not exactly what I was looking for was:

• Stickies
• Magic Notes
• Quick Notes Plus
• 3M Post-it
• Hot Notes

Verizon Options

The following are some handy numbers to keep loaded in your contact list for quick access (valid only on phones using Verizon):

• #BAL + Send - Check balance.
• #MIN + Send - Check minutes used.
• #PMT + Send - Make a payment.
• #DATA + Send - Check the number of text messages and kilobyte usage.
• *611 + Send - Contact customer service.

Using any of these options is free and does not eat up any minutes or text message usage. In addition, when calling these numbers you get both an automated voice message as well as a text message sent to your phone.

Why Blog?

The following video by Commoncraft provides an excellent introduction as to what blogs are and why they are important:

Here are a few additional reasons (listed in no particular order):

• In a digitalized but fragmented world it is not always possible to speak face-to-face with friends and family but we have the technology that enables us to easily communicate by other means and this is one way of staying connected.
• Blogs provide a fast and convenient way to share personal experiences such as things learned and discovered, provide an outlet for self-expression, etc. as entries to a blog. An entry, once captured, can be expanded upon by others who might provide comments or feedback to the original idea. In the end, blog entries could be collected and organized into a more formal representation like a web page, document, book, etc. allowing the original blog entry to germinate into something much greater.
• Blogs support syndicated feeds which allows a users, once equiped with a feed reader, to stay abreast on what is happening automatically. It is worth it as the alternative is to bookmark the blog in your web browser and visit it when you can remember. For more information, read the following articles:
• Why Blog? - Another reason for consideration.
• Benefits of Blogging.
• Understanding Syndicated Feeds (RSS).
• How To Start Blogging.

You can choose to tune in or not. The choice is yours but hopefully it’s not just additional noise on top of your regular daily activities. Hopefully, it helps enriches your experiences and educate you more (optimistically speaking).

Adobe Distiller - Batch Automation

INTRODUCTION

Experimented briefly with Adobe Distiller. The goal was to get it running as part of a batch process so that it could generate Microsoft Word documents (.doc) into .pdf files. Turns out that what seems simple is not so simple. Here are the results of my trials:

GETTING STARTED

1. Installed Adobe Acrobat 6.0 (standard).
2. Created a .joboptions file (basically used the Standard.joboptions provided in the \Distillr\Settings directory).
3. Created a Windows batch file (see below) to launch Distiller.

RESOURCES USED

Below is the batch file using Adobe Distiller command line options:

========== BEGIN BATCH FILE ==========
: Acrobat Distiller Batch File

: Set the environment
SET ACROBAT_HOME=C:\apps\adobe\acrobat
SET PATH=%PATH%;%ACROBAT_HOME%/Distillr

: Run Acrobat Distiller
acrodist.exe /J “c:/misc/standard.joboptions” /N /O “c:/misc/test.pdf” /Q “c:/misc/test.doc”
========== END BATCH FILE ===========

CONCLUSION

Decided not to get involved with attempting to debug postscript errors when generating PDF files. Hard to debug. Plus, it looks like one would need to configure a new printer configuration for PDF files only. So it wouldn’t be easy to simply have a copy of Adobe Distiller installed on each machine that you want to generate PDF files for. You would also have to configure the printer and possibly other settings. Anyway, getting back to the debugging issue, using the batch file (shown above) yields this kind of log file:

========== BEGIN LOG FILE ==========
%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: ?]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
========== END LOG FILE ==========

Yeah, that’s really helpful. Will have to revisit this latter but for now it is easy enough to manually click the Convert to Adobe PDF button within Word to create the desired PDF file.

Linksys ProConnect KVM

Went searching for a Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) switch so that I can switch between my Windows desktop, laptop, and Linux server machines.  Found the following possible potential candidates (narrowed down):

• IOGEAR MiniView™ SE GCS84B KVM Switch Kit
• Linksys ProConnect SVIEW04 4-Port CPU Switch
• Belkin F1DJ104P-B  4-Port KVM Switch with cables

Ended up with the Linksys ProConnect.  Mainly because it supports manual push buttons for switching between computers in addition to the hotkey commands.  It’s unfortunate that you can’t turn off the hotkey commands but I wasn’t able to find many (if not any) that would support that capability.