Month: April 2009

In and Out of Bluetooth Hell

This all started out when I noticed that I had left my Blackberry USB cable at work. Since the Blackberry USB is pretty unique I would have to go find my Blackberry charger to charge my phone. That got me to thinking that this might be a good time to setup my WiFi and Bluetooth connections. Setting up the WiFi connection was simple and uneventful. Now I have faster web browsing on my phone while I am in my house. Setting up the Bluetooth connection was not that easy.

Shortly after I purchased my laptop three years ago I decided to add a bluetooth card. My thought at the time was to use a bluetooth headset for VoIP phone calls. The VoIP project did not work out so I turned off  the bluetooth card. What I remember of that work was that I had to install the Toshiba bluetooth stack to make the bluetooth connection work. I do not remember ever getting the Microsoft bluetooth software to pair up with the bluetooth device.

So I go into the Toshiba software and turn on the bluetooth card. Within about five minutes I have my Blackberry 8900 paired up with my laptop. Everything looks so slick! I have visions of a tethered laptop. One last test remains. I cranked up the Desktop Manager and started the bluetooth configuration. Lo and behold, the Desktop manager cannot find a bluetooth device! I’ve got a paired device. What do you mean you cannot see it?

After some research I find out that those fine folks at RIM only work with the Microsoft bluetooth stack. Well that sucks! So I removed the Toshiba stack and rebooted. After it finishes rebooting, I try to pair up. The Microsoft software cannot find any bluetooth device. I seem to remember being in this position once before.

After a little more research I find this post, BostonPocketPC – Remove Toshiba Bluetooth Drivers and Install Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. Although I do not use the Vista operating system, the author implied that there were new bluetooth drivers from Microsoft and the easiest way to install them was to install a recent version of Intellipoint. I installed Intellipoint and nothing changed. The drivers still had a 2-001 date. It looks like I am still using the old drivers. So I deleted the existing bluetooth device configuration in the Device Manager, turned off my WiFi and bluetooth(Fn F2), and rebooted. When XP rebooted it found the bluetooth card and installed the new drivers. Although my phone could not be found using the normal bluetooth(PAN) search, it was found using the control panel version. My Blackberry 8900 is evidently an “other” bluetooth device. Within a few minutes I was paired up and synchronizing my contacts. I am still a little miffed that I cannot manage my media files but it works for basic synchronization. I suspect that is on the ToDo list for the developers at RIM. Wow, that took a lot longer than I expected!

Correction 4/26/09

This morning I checked the bluetooth synchronization again and the Microsoft stack does not pair up. I guess I am going back to the Toshiba stack. At least it works as a modem!

Picks and Pans

PrtScr

PrtScr about - Windows Internet ExplorerI was just about to pan PrtScr until shortly after I installed it I wanted to add a copy of an embedded Flash animated graphic. Foolish me! My first choice was to make a PDF of the web page. It turned out to be a terrible choice.  The original chart had subtle shades of red. The PDF had one big blob of red. Score one for PrtScr. Selecting a rectangular area was a bit of a challenge on my laptop. I had to press on the Ctrl Key and the left mouse button while marking the area. I wish I could remap the PrtScr keys. Snag_It appears to be the favorite but it costs money.

Quotepad

quotepad I thought I would have an immediate use for Quotepad. It looks promsing. I use Cut-and-Paste often at work but I have not used QuotePad yet beyond the initial trial. Keeping Clipboard history is a favorite requested feature for a lot of users and there are a lot of competitors in this area.

uSbuntu

I found uSbuntu on HowtoForge and it looked promising, too. A bootable Ubuntu that could also work under Windows. Too bad I was not able to get it to boot under Windows. It kept complaining about memory problems. Portable VirtualBox looked promising at first because it is so slim compared to VMServer. Too bad I never got it to boot completely.

 

Portable Ubuntu

I found Portable Ubuntu on Lifehacker. Portable Ubuntu installed with a minimum of problems. It was easy to install and in my limited testing, it worked without a fuss. My biggest problem is that I really don’t have a real use for Ubuntu. One of the areas Linux excels in is network testing. Backtrack3 is my favorite in this area but I have to reboot. So as an extra test I decided to install a Nmap variant called knamp. It installed and it worked. Not bad!

Top free tools for Windows server administration

Every so often you find a tool you have never heard of.  This week the tool that caught my attention was  Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL). It was recommended by Bruce Mackenzie-Low in a newsletter from SearchWindowsServer.com and it looks it will be helpful with the “art” of performance analysis. I played with it a little bit using the IIS and SQL templates. It seemed to provide some helpful insight into potential performance issues. My aim is to analyze our web server for IIS and database bottlenecks.

pfSense 1.2.2 Upgrade

Last year I finally got around to installing pfSense 1.2 and some packages. Last week I decided to upgrade to the latest release. I chose to use the command line version of the upgrade process and it worked great at updating the base package. The upgrade documentation is a little fuzzy about updating the packages. When I logged into the administrative panel the firewall started to upgrade the packages. That kind of worked but most of the packages I checked were not working after the upgrade. I tried to manually update or uninstall SNORT but it ignored me. So I rebooted the firewall.

As the firewall came up the second time, it upgraded SNORT. After logging into the administrative panel again, I saw that NMAP worked. Okay, that’s a step forward. Next I tried NTOP but the screen would not come up. Thinking it might have forgotten the configuration settings, I configured NTOP. It worked. Next I installed Open-VM-Tools since I run my firewall as virtual machine. Finally I tried SNORT. I could configure it but it still had problems downloading rules. This was the problem I had previously under 1.2 so I uninstalled SNORT. Everything seems to be working so it is probably safe to forget it for a couple more months.

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows [Downloads]

I gave the Portable Ubuntu program a run today. I manually extracted the files using 7Zip since the executable had an error when it extracted the files. Then it took about three runs before my firewall, Comodo, and I agreed on the executables to unblock. I did get Portable Ubuntu to burp and stick my PC with a task using 50% of the CPU. Restarting Portable Ubuntu fixed that problem. Other than the burp, the performance was adequate. The biggest problem is I am not sure what I would use it for. A Portable BackTrack 3 might be more interesting since it has Linux applications I am interested in using occasionally.

Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your…

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows [Downloads]
Kevin Purdy
Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

IE8 Compatibility Problem Solved!

I fixed the IE8 Compatibility Problem I talked about previously. The login screen was missing some of the most basic HTML tags. I have seen several early ASP files that ignored the basic HTML tags and page structure. Since the page worked with the current browsers there was no need to fix it even though it had HTML validation errors. I am not sure which missing tag caused the problem but adding the <html>, <head>, and <body> tags fixed the problem.  😉

Script all data of a table – SQLServerCentral

I made a couple of minor changes to the provided script and I got Script all data of a table – SQLServerCentral to work with SQL 2000. I like the idea of creating scripts to transfer/update/re-create tables. I have been using Excel to create scripts to update shipping costs for some time. Nice work Florian!