Dell E4300 improvements

After all of the frustration I have had with the WiFi and wireless broadband I have had with my E4300, things are a little better.  The really odd things I am not really sure why.  Dell was supposed to have a BIOS update on January 19th but as of the 29th, it has yet to ship.  I have been checking their web site daily.

I had taken the SIMM card out of my laptop to use in a Sony-Ericsson Z750 UMTS phone that I have and when I put it back in my laptop, I noticed that I didn’t have a BroadBand device listed with the Dell Connection Manager.  Very odd.  I cannot explain why it went away.  After dinking with it off and on for a couple days, I decided to reinstall the Dell Connection Manager software.

After doing so, my BroadBand card was recognized AND both my WiFi and BroadBand connections have been more stable.  I worked for almost two hours Saturday night via BroadBand without any problems.  Last night I used my home WiFi connection for several hours also without any problems.  I had also noticed that there was a newer version of the Dell Connection Manager (A11 vs A10) than I had installed so I have installed it as well and all seems to be well for now.

I will continue to monitor this and I am sure that now I have committed it to a blog post, it probably won’t work worth a crap tonight when I need it!

Audio Books and iTunes

Off and on I have tried to get Audio Books which have been ripped from CD to work correctly in iTunes and on my iPod.  The best source I have found so is Aldo on Audiobooks which has been very helpful but I have yet to be successful.

I need to try the Audio Book Builder and see if that helps – right now I am to the point where the books show up correctly in iTunes, under Audiobooks and each one separate, but on my iPod, all of the tracks are all mixed together under the Audiobooks menu.  Bleh.  Makes it really hard to listen to more than one book when the tracks are all jumbled up.

There has to be a good solution to this dilemma.

I want an HTC S743!

Why is it all of the phones I am interested aren’t carrier subsidized?  HTC unveiled the S743 at CES.  This phone is pretty much everything I want in a phone:

  • Windows Mobile Standard
  • Slide out QWERTY keyboard
  • WiFi and GPS
  • Numeric Keypad

It’s a phone first, PDA / email device second which is exactly what I want.  I really wish AT&T would pick this device up.  Looks like it will be north of $600 unsubsidized at Best Buy, CDW, etc.  Bleh.  I like this phone better than the Xperia X1 I have had my eyes on for a while.

phpHtmlLib as SVN external?

I have noodled on how to handle wp-SwimTeam’s dependency on phpHtmlLib on several occasions.  Today I was at the gym with my mind wandering while I was on the elliptical machine, I started thinking about it again.

I am considering pulling it into the plugin as SVN external.  This would allow me to ensure it is always installed.  Doing this will greatly simplify the download and installation process for the end user as well which ultimately will make it easier to support users of the plugin.  The more I think about it, the better idea I think this is.  I need to read up on SVN externals!

My E4300 is driving me nuts

I really like my new Dell E4300 laptop but it has an odd behavior which is driving me nuts.  When connected with either WiFi or BroadBand (I have the AT&T card) it will lose network connectivity after some period of time.  Sometime is takes an hour or more, sometimes it happens very quickly.  Once it  happens, I am usually hosed and need to reboot.  But not always.  It only affects WiFi and BroadBand.  It has no affect on the wired Ethernet connection.  As long as I am in the office or at home I am ok.

I have been round and round with our internal IT people as well as Dell on this issue and haven’t found any resolution yet.  A new BIOS update (A05) actually made the problem worse.  With the A03 BIOS when it happened I could still ping other computers and eventually full connectivity would come back.  But not now.

Reportedly Dell has a production stop on the E4300 to resolve a bunch of issues and a BIOS update is supposed to be available on January 19th.  I hope so – I am about to spend a bunch of time on the road for work and having an unreliable network connection is not ok.

If you are considering an E4300 I’d hold off for now and see if reports improve over the next couple weeks.  That is of course assuming that Dell actually delivers a new BIOS update and doesn’t delay it again!

Demonstration for TSA

I have been asked to demonstrate the MacDolphins‘ web based Swim Team registration system (which is wp-SwimTeam) to the Tarheel Swimming Association at one of their upcoming board meetings.

I will we out of town for work for their February meeting so it looks like it will be in March which should give me sufficient time and motivation to finish up a lot of the unfinished work.  I really need to get to work on a sample theme too – the theme I am currently using on the MacDolphins site is not widget ready which is a big limitation.

Back in the saddle

Last night I got my wp-SwimTeam development environment back up and running.  Since I last worked on the plugin I have gotten a new computer (Dell E4300) and changed how I was using VMware Workstation to manage the various things I am working on.

Because my computer actually belongs to my employer, I keep my hobby projects running under virtual machines (which I also use for a number of things at work which is why I have VMware).  I used to have a separate VM for each project but they tend to consume a lot of disk space so I have moved to using SnapShots (see page 189 of the VMware Workstation Users Guide) and they are really working well.

I had migrated all of my projects over to my new VM with various SnapShot configurations (PHP4, MySQL 4, PHP5, MySQL 5, etc.) with the exception of two – my wp-SwimTeam development and the MacDolphins web site development (which I still need to do).

Once I got it all moved I needed to figure out where I left off.  I still had a few files uncommitted so I simply committed them and started running the plugin through its paces.  I found a few issues right away (e.g. I removed the ability to add a new swimmer – oops) but that was quickly fixed.  Starting with an empty database turned out to a good idea as it exposed a couple mistakes, one of which I am still chasing – the roster isn’t showing everything it should and I am not sure why.

I fixed a few other odds and ends and now that WordPress 2.7 is released, I know for sure how the plugin behaves with the new Dashboard.  It isn’t too bad but I definitely will create a new top level menu with an icon.  This will almost certainly mean that 2.7 will be required to use the plugin.  The 2.7 Dashboard also changes the background on the #wrap DIV from white (#ffffff) to a very light grey (#f9f9f9).  To integrated the ActiveTab widget properly, this color change needs to be accounted for so I am opting to do it in the 2.7 color.

Swim Team season is just around the corner!

Before I know it swim team season will be here again and it has been a while since I worked on the plugin.  Uh-oh.  This fall has been busy, busy, busy with other stuff and I put the plugin development on the back burner for a while.

Since I last worked on the plugin, WordPress 2.7 has been released.  WordPress 2.7 is so much better than any of the prior releases, going forward I expect it will be a requirement to continue to use the plugin.  The Dashboard integration will be much more elegant if I require 2.7.

Look for some new updates in the very near future.