My Insights

And In case you missed it, this is a Satellite interview from earlier on in the race-

Cool Cousin is here

On Maryland Day this year, Shuttle UM conducted a ‘roadeo’. My brother drove an obstacle course with a shuttle bus. Here is the video-

Video: ShuttleUM Roadeo

I found myself in a jam when I needed to print a source I had cited for a paper and the publishers of the PDF (source) were overzealous in protecting the file.

As you can see, I could neither copy the text over to a word document and neither could I ‘print’ it to a different format. I tried a few approaches and I’ll list the failures and the successes:

1) FAILURE: Email it to yourself using Gmail and try to print the HTML conversion- this doesn’t work because gmail refuses to convert this file to HTML

2) FAILURE: Use Foxit reader to print the file - Foxit is smart enough to detect the PDF protections and refuses to send the print job to the printer

3) SUCCESS: Use Sumatra PDF reader - This client is light enough to ignore security provisions and seamlessly just agrees to send the print job.

I struggled today to get Windows Live Writer to work with my blog. I am running Movable Type and I kept getting a 406 - Not Acceptable error. I even tried BlogDesk and when BlogDesk gave me the same error,  I started to think that the error was on my server’s end.

It turns out that the server admins had implemented a fairly aggressive security policy that was preventing remote procedure calls to movable type. To correct the problem, I added a file called .htaccess to my cgi-bin directory with the following content-

<FilesMatch “(mt-xmlrpc.cgi)”>
SecFilterEngine Off
</FilesMatch>

That fixed it!

*NOTE: For some reason, MovableType would not let me “xmlrpc” as a string and I had to use the 7-Bit ASCII equivalent of one of the letters to do it. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp for all the 7-Bit ASCII codes.

I own a Palm TX (OS5) and a Motorola L6. Both devices are Bluetooth devices. One day I was fidgeting with my buddy’s Pocket PC which is also Bluetooth enabled. His Pocket PC had an application called “Bluetooth File Explorer” or something like that. I was able to connect to my Motorola phone using his Pocket PC and was able to browse the contents of my phone such as wallpapers and ringtones.

I got jealous and wanted to be able to do that with my Palm - after all it’s just another OS right? It turns out that after hours of searching the internet, I came up with nothing. The closest thing I found was Softick’s Bluetooth commander. But since I didn’t want to spend any money, I kept looking.

In the end, my make-shift solution is to send each individual picture / ringtone to my Palm Device using Bluetooth and then using a freeware called FileZ, send it to another phone if needed. This sux but at least I can accomplish what I want - exchange cool ringtones with friends.

If anyone else has run into a similar problem, please let me know if you have a better solution for exchanging ringtones / images / videos with friends using Bluetooth enabled handheld devices only (Palm & Phones)