Brennan’s Blog

Mobile phone plans really suck. Yesterday I saw a commercial for Sprint with their new CEO and he stated that he is going to change things up. Their offer seems to be $99 for unlimited everything. I can get unlimited web, GPS, txt and voice for a fixed monthly fee like I do with cable TV and internet. It is an obvious solution. More people have phones than any other electronic device. Every adult and nearly every high school and college student has one and are paying much more than a typical cable bill. Yet it is not uncommon to go over your minutes and get hit with more than $200 in over charges. I have seen it a few times over the last couple of years and I do not like it.

So I am wondering, is there such a thing as a consumer union where consumers combine together to collectively bargain with the mobile phone providers? If I wanted unlimited web, GPS, txt and voice for $60 and I had 1,000 people who are willing to sign up for a 2 year contract for that deal is it reasonably possible to make a deal with the big mobile phone companies?

I live in a condo and this past year we signed a contract with Time Warner to get a half off deal for basic plus movie and sports channels for 2 years. We have less than 200 people living here so if 200 people can make such a negotiation happen, it should be possible for a group of 1,000 to sign a contract to get an unlimited usage deal for a great price.

I just create my Twitter account. Twitter has come up in discussions at work and with several friends who are using it. Nobody really has a good sense of what it really is or how to use it. I think it is broadcast IM or micro blogging. I am not sure how I will find it useful, but I have avoided it because it is just another potential distraction from the work I should be doing. Here are the things I plan on twittering about...

• Links to good articles or blog entries
• Links to my new blog entries or articles
• The artist and title of a really good song I am listening to at the moment
• Random thoughts while I work at my computer, likely related to software development
• Questions on a problem I am currently trying to solve

And through these twitterings, or tweets as some call them, I hope to get some interactions going with people who are interested in and working on the same topics. My current primary interests are building dynamic web interfaces using ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery and extending Visual Studio 2008 to assist with creating those interfaces. In the work that I do we often do very quick projects (2 to 3 months) and doing the setup for a new web site to support the client-side functionality that I now do typically is a bit of work. My self-training on the topic of modern AJAX UI was done with the Kvetch Reborn project which actually has some features in common with Twitter. The source for it is available for download. I have used what I have learned for Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery to assemble that application which has rich client-side functionality with direct integration with the server-side on a single page. I have more to do in automating the setup work for creating such projects, including completing the baseline features for the JavaScript Browser.

Kevin over and ScribeSonic is cleaning up the vast collection of feeds taking up space in his blog reader. You might say he has a plethora of feeds.

He is using Google Reader, which I also use. An easy way to subscribe to a new feed is to use the little bookmarklet/favlet that you can find on the Settings tab. It is buried towards the bottom. As you come across a good blog entry via services like DotNetKicks.com or DZone you can click this link in your toolbar to send the feed to Google Reader to subscribe to it immediately. This link is copied below.

[ Subscribe... ]

Also keep in mind that RSS content can be more than just comments from some blithering blogger. One useful kind of feed is the latest activity on your source control system, such a project hosted in Subversion. I created a little RSS generator that uses the log and list commands from the Subversion command-line tool to generate an RSS feed for any URL you throw at it. There are a few query string parameters that you can use to customize the behavior. Just look at the sample links to see how they can be used. They are pretty self-explanatory. (url, title, username, password)

[ SvnTracker ]

It is a very tiny web application and the source for it is available via the link at the bottom of the page. It is a bit sluggish, but when it placed being an aggregator like Google Reader you should never notice the delay. If you want to use it, please host it on your own server as this is just a temporary location.

Years ago a friend of mine and I worked on an idea for remoting to work. We wanted to find a happy medium between the office versus home contrast. The stark difference between fighting traffic to get to the office downtown and walking from the kitchen to your home office is significant. And you have distractions at the office but at home you may have different distractions. Scott Hanselman writes that he can sometimes hear his wife playing with their son. Scott also writes that it can get lonely when he sits alone for hours without any face to face conversations with co-workers.

The concept for the happy medium addressed many shortcomings of a single massive office located in the center of the city. The following scenarios are what we wanted to make possible. I will use Scott's situation as an example. When Scott was interviewing for his position he could have been given the option to work at a remote office which happens to be a 10 minute drive from his home. He would be set up with a desk at this remote office where he can dock his computer and directly access the main company network with high speed access. His desk would be grouped in a room with a few others from Microsoft with other employees who also live near him. They could arrange to have lunch together and chat about company news during the day as they work.

Then a few months later Scott decides he wants to fly his family down to Florida in the middle of winter to enjoy the warm weather for a couple of weeks but he has a deadline at work. No problem. He will just request a temporary desk at a remote office at one of the franchise offices in Florida. He will be able to do his work in Florida with no major differences and still spend the rest of the day and weekend with his family in Florida.

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I have recently become a fan of the ability to make a section of a web page to scroll using the overflow rule in CSS. (overflow?) But the problem is that sometimes you need to have an item in the scroll area to be visible which means you must slide the scrollbar down to the item. Making this work was something that eluded me until one of my co-workers pointed me to a comment on Telerik.com. Their example is pretty complicated and I do not understand what all of the complex math is about when all you need to know is the two values, the current and destination positions, in order to move the scrollbar. I simplified it with the following example.

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It was a no brainer that Apple would progressively release new iPhone alternatives after the initial release of the $600 phone. A nano version of the phone should be coming out at the more reasonable price of $300. It makes me wonder how far they will go.

Imagine a iPhone Shuffle. It could have a "drunk dial" feature that would randomly call people after midnight. But seriously, could they create an iPhone that small without the number pad if it had decent voice command features? What if it could speak the names in your phone book to you as you scroll through them? That could get tedious so they may need a very minimal screen. I am going to bet on them creating something quite small that pushes the concept of what we think a phone has to be.

Every time I get a new computer or external drive it is always a pain to get the files in sync and keep them that way. In particular it is most difficult to keep my iTunes music files organized. I just discovered a utility called SyncToy. You can create multiple profiles and set the action to synchronize, echo, subscribe, contribute or combine and it takes care of keeping the files in sync. Previously I just had to copy and paste and overwrite files or carefully select the files which were not already copied. It was tedious.

Now whenever I purchase new music I can fire up SyncToy and make sure my new music is copied to the desktop which has a lot more storage than my laptop. I can use it as a backup system. It would be great if iTunes itself had such a feature, but unfortunately they have not created it yet. In fact, I wish I could sync up iTunes on my laptop from my home desktop system like I do my iPod. That would be a great feature.

A new computer from Dell is on that way that will easily run multiple virtual environments and finally allow my laptop to go portable again. The new computer is a Dimension C521 with an Athlon 64 processor. That is the one with a small form factor. But since it has a 64 bit processor I am not limited to 2GB of memory like my laptop so I bumped it up to 4GB. The new computer is also a dual processor which could be helpful with how I intend to use it. The best part is that I got it all for under $1000 which I did not think would be possible with that much memory.

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Florian Balmer has produced a 2.0 release for NotePad2. The zip download includes the executable but no installer so I have created an MSI installer (as I did before) which places the files in your Program Files folder and sets a registry setting which adds "Open with Notepad2" to the context menu in Windows Explorer as shown in the image on the right. You can run this installer without uninstalling the previous version. It will simply replace the existing version.

I place Notepad2 on every computer and server I use because it makes it so easy to edit configuration and source files.

[ Download Notepad2 2.0.15 Installer ]

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Due to my problems with copying large files over a USB 2.0 connection I created the SlowCopy Utility. (Offwhite.SlowCopy.zip) It is a command-line utility which takes a source and destination filename as well as an optional chunk size (MB) and wait time (seconds). I was able to copy that 2.6GB MSDN ISO file off my external drive successfully with this utility when a direct copy was failing after a few seconds. I did it with 100MB chunks with a 2 second wait. After 100MB it sleeps for 2 seconds which allows the buffer to clear before copying more data to the destination file.

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