I just want to wish everyone a happy new year and all the best for 2009. 

Now is the perfect time to set your new years resolutions and start something new for the new year.

A few of my new year resolutions have been made for the last few months and are already in execution.  So basically it will come down to maintaining them.

Good luck to all.

Labels: life, Miscellaneous, rambling

My girlfriend just discovered what a blog was and how its used.  So naturally the first question from her was “How come you don’t talk about me in your blog?”.  Well here you go.  Now back to work.

Labels: Miscellaneous, rambling

SMS is currently heavily used by almost everybody that owns a cell phone these days.  Its a quick easy and somewhat cheap method to communicate with others.  However Bell and Telus are going to start charging for incoming SMS’s at a rate of 15 cents per message. 

I honestly can’t believe they will do this.  It is a dirty little trick to get a quick cash grab.  If they allow you to include those in your monthly SMS limits then your limits are basically cut in half.

The one thing I hate about this is that you never know who is sending you or where it is coming from.  I can start sending random messages to people I don’t like and run up their bills quickly.

On my Windows Mobile phone I was able to download a program that would block SMS messages from people I didn’t know.  However the problem with this is that it is handled at the phone level so the message still would go through.  I hope the service providers allow you to set something up on their servers to block them.

I really really hope Rogers doesn’t follow them as well. 

I will start utilizing my data plan more and using things like MSN mobile and blackberry messenger since I am already paying for my data.

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Labels: mobile, rambling

A lot of rumors have been flying around the net about the new iPhone being released by Rogers this Friday.

After seeing the data plans offered by Rogers for the new iPhone a lot of people are upset and some have even taken the fight into their own hands with hope that Rogers will lower the prices.

The latest rumor is that Apple is actually upset with Rogers and the bad publicity they are getting from this.  They may even go as far as reducing the number of units that will be in each Rogers store to about 20-30.  If this is the case the next set of headlines will be about how many people have gotten hurt (or even killed) in a stampede over the new iPhone's.  I hope they have security out at every store, its going to be a mess.

My views on the subject….

People are going to pay whatever they charge for it.  The demand for the iPhone is so strong that Rogers could charge $100 and still sell them.

Rogers has done their research.  They have obviously carefully selected this price point to maximize profits.  In the end its all about money.  If you are making billions but unhappy people are still paying for it, then keep it up.  Its working for gas prices.

If people only spent the same kind of energy on more important issues this world would be a better place.

Get a different phone.  Why must you have an iPhone?  The competition is stepping up its game.  I decided to skip the iPhone and get a Blackberry Curve.  I LOVE IT!!!! I'm happy I made that choice.  I don't think I can go back to the touch screen keyboard ever again.  My data plan currently is 300MB for 30$ and I am having a problem even reaching that right now.  I'm using 1MB a day doing everything I want with full email, all my RSS feeds and whatever surfing I am doing.  I don't think I will even touch the 300MB limit.  Why do you have to watch online videos on your phone.

I could go on and on but the only person in the end that will win is Rogers.  They could lower the prices and lock you in for 5 years.  But next year when the next generation iPhone comes out you will be screwed again as everyone will fight to get that one.  Take a look at the touch screen Blackberry that is rumored to come out later this year.  Serious competition.

Labels: iphone, mobile, rambling

Rogers finally officially announced their mobile plans for the iPhone that is being released next month and even though this link isn’t hosted on the Rogers site it is linked to from the site in the announcement section.  Its official.

To sum it up

Price	Daytime Minutes (Unlimited E&W)	Data	Outgoing TXT
$60	150	400 MB	75
$75	300	750 MB	100
$100	600	1 GB	200
$115	800	2 GB	300

 

Note… from my understanding these prices don’t include such features as voicemail, caller ID etc.. so all that is extra.  You also must sign on for a 3 year contract.

This is very disappointing.  For some reason I actually thought they would come up with a plan that would give unlimited everything.  But I guess it was just a dream.

If I take the cheapest plan, I am heavily restricted.  If you were only doing email then 400MB is a lot of email.  But once you start going into the Internet hungry applications you can easily go over 400 MB.  Forget about such things as YouTube.  And don’t download all those attachments that you get forwarded to your email.  You will quickly find yourself over the limit while trying to use your iPhone for what it was made for.  Just wait until all of those fancy applications start to get released and they require data as well.  Who will be first to blog about their $800 Rogers bill.

The text messaging numbers are a joke.  The iPhone will be used heavily for this.  Most people can pass the 75 in a week.  I have a plan that allows 125 and I don’t really text a lot and I still find myself getting really close to that number.  Last month I did 123. 

Get into the more expensive plans and you will be a bit more safe but who wants to pay those prices.

Now.. if you take the 60$ plan.  Add on the system access fee, the taxes, add on a few long distance calls/texts and viola!!! Your now close to $100 on your bill.  Who wants to pay $100 a month for the next 3 years?

I have a strong feeling a lot of people may not jump at it right away.  However I still think they are going to do good sales. 

I don’t know if at this point they will even offer these plans for those of us that went and got the original iPhone from the states.  Rumor has it they won’t.

I’m sticking with my BB Curve for now and not even going to bother with the Bold.  They are going to want an arm for that phone.  See my other rant about my just trying to upgrade to the Curve.

I think they dropped the ball with this one.. but to them its not about customer satisfaction.  Its about maximizing profits.

Labels: iphone, mobile, rambling

After lots of research I finally settled on upgrading my phone to a Blackberry and the plan as well.  I head on over to the Rogers web site and checkout the Blackberry’s they currently offer.  After deciding on the curve I compare the features to those of the new Bold coming out. 

I then weighed out my options of curve vs bold.  In the end it comes down to the price.  The site says $250 for the curve and I know the bold is going to cost me my first born.  So with this in mind I headed over to the local Rogers store to get it.

After a little bit of clicking around on the computer I was then informed that the phone will cost me close to $500!!!!!  This is all because I’m currently on a data plan for the next 3 years.  I was told to call customer service to see if they can do anything for me.

After a few minutes with customer servers I am told the same thing.  I asked and asked and asked and they would not reduce the price.  I currently have 2 cell phones, cable, Internet and two home phones with them and they would not cut me a break.

Do they really not want my money?  My current locked in plan wasn’t because of a previous phone I bought as my current phone I bought unlocked.  It was just for a data plan.  And I want to upgrade the plan so I would be spending more money with them to move to the new plan.  So what is the problem here?

I wasn’t too happy so I checked out eBay, Craigslist and Kijiji (first I’ve heard of this) and have found a few new curves with good prices on them.  I am still waiting on reply’s to my questions but it looks like I will get my phone this way. 

I don’t know why Rogers makes this so difficult sometimes.

Labels: blackberry, mobile, rambling

I remember the first time I heard about Windows Home Server (WHS).  After glancing over the features I was instantly in love with the idea and concept behind it all.  Three of the features that stood out to me were

• Backup
• Remote Access to Any Computer
• Pooled Storage

I instantly joined the beta… downloaded, burned, dusted off my old machine that met the minimum specs and installed it.  Within a few hours I was up and running with a new home server.

Then I got into playing. 

Backups

First played around with the backups.  I setup the connector on a few machines and instantly initiated backups.  They didn’t take long.  Even over WiFi (which isn’t supported) it still worked fine.  This was my favorite feature.  A few weeks later I had to upgrade a hard drive in one of my systems so I did a full backup (which was only partial as the system was already backed up the night before) swapped in the new drive, booted up with the CD and restored the last backup.  Within 15 minutes my machine was back up and running like nothing happened.  I was impressed.

Like all programs in beta there are  bugs.  And I did find one that I could not explain.  For some reason one of my machines would randomly start to blue screen while doing the backup.  It was an XP machine and was stable.  This is the only time I have every seen this machine do this.  I could never figure out why it did this but I did eventually find out that if I removed all of the backups on the server and make it do a full backup again everything would be fine.  For a while… it could be a week, it could be two but it eventually came back.  I never got this solved but it wasn’t the main reason behind me not moving forward with WHS.

Remote Access

This was cool.  From the Internet I could connect to any machine on my network through the WHS.  I currently do this with a combination of port forwarding and remote control software but this was cool as it all could be done through my browser.

I did have problems connecting from my work network but when it worked, it worked nicely.  The one thing about me though is when I want to do something I want to do it quickly.  With my current solution it takes me two clicks to connect to any machine at home.  With the WHS it takes me just a bit longer and I just don’t like waiting.  Its just the way I am.  I eventually continued using my current remote control solution.  But this wasn’t the main reason behind me not moving forward with WHS.

Pooled Storage

This was my 2nd favorite feature in WHS.  You basically just plug in all the hard drives you want and it add’s it to the storage pool.  Files are replicated across more than one hard drive so they are backed up if one of the drives fail at any time.  If you had to remove a drive you do it through the console and the WHS will move the files around to allow you to remove the drive without losing any data.  “COOL!”  That was all I could thing UNTIL….. I ran into problems and heard other stories.

When trying to copy all my data over to the WHS I constantly ran out of space.  Out of space?  Huh?  I thought I had 500 gigs in there and I’m backing up 200 gig.  This is where it gets confusing.  You access the storage through network shares and as you copy stuff to it, the files get put on the main drive and later on moved off onto the other drives in the pool.  I think the problem was when you copied too much data it didn’t have time to move them off in time so you ran out of space.  I think that is what the problem was, but whatever it was I got tired of it fast.  Eventually I got all the data moved over.  Sweet.

Then their was the file corruption bug.  I didn’t look into it fully as this was the deal breaker for me.  If I have a home server I want my files to be safe.  I don’t want to have to think about it much.  Once the file is copied up there I should not have to worry about.  The file corruption bug made me jump ship.  The more upsetting part about the whole thing is that they released the final version of WHS with this bug and haven’t fixed it until recently.  They now have a release candidate of SP1 for WHS.  So technically its still not fixed but in testing.  Maybe I will look into it later again.

The Other Deal Breakers

Price.  When it first came out I saw it as cheap as $175.  In Canada we add tax to that price so it gets higher.  Plus the cost of the hardware, this solution gets more expensive.  Recently I went searching and the price actually went up.  I think it would have dropped if anything.

The OS.  WHS is designed to be a headless system.  That is, you plug this box into your network with WHS installed and no keyboard/mouse/monitor on it and that’s it.  You only need to access the shares and everything else is through the connector.  I don’t know if that is what most of the users want.  I know that is not what I want.  A lot of users instantly tried to remote desktop into the box and install software to run and do various things.  To me, having a computer sitting there that does nothing but share files is a waste to me.  I want to do more with it.  Since the OS is Windows Server 2003 not everything I wanted to install on it would work.  People were constantly coming up with work around’s to get things working but nothing was ever supported and most things caused the system to eventually crash.  I know I was able to crash the system a few times with my torrent/newsgroup downloading programs alone.  I wish they would have developed it as an application you can install on top of XP or Vista instead of an entire OS.  I would have probably been happier with that.

Speed.  Since I now had to download everything on another computer and then move it over, that was extra time I had to wait before I could watch/listen to the files on my entertainment system.  I didn’t like this.  I have a 100mb network and the wait was still too long.  I know I could have put in a GB network but I shouldn’t have to fork out the extra money for that.

So What Do I Currently Use?

I have a Vista box setup as my home server.  It has shares setup on it so I can access what I want from my XBox360 and original XBox or any other computer.

For backup I use NT Backup.  Its scheduled to run once a week and I am happy with that.  It backs up my main systems to my server.  I know if my machine crashes its not a quick restore but I am fine with that.  I’m always up for a fresh rebuild of my main machine.

For server backups I have two drives in the system that are using a hardware RAID setup to mirror the data.  I’ve used RAID in the past and survived 2 hard drive failures very easily.  “Replace Drive, rebuild RAID.  Done.”  I am happy with this.  I know I can’t add and remove storage easily but again, I am fine with this.  500 gig of space is enough.  I may upgrade to 1 TB later on.  I also backup my critical data on a monthly basis to a HD that is disconnected form the computer.  This is in case the data gets corrupted by a Trojan or a hardware failure that takes down the whole system occurs.

Remote control… VNC.  Simple and easy.

I also run iTunes, Alt.Binz, FTP server and uTorrent on the system to download data while I am asleep.  This means I don’t have to keep my other computers on all the time just to download.  I also do other things with my music that is time consuming and by doing it on my server I don’t tie up another machine running it.

With this setup I am very happy.  It just works.  I actually feel more comfortable with my data in this setup.  That I guess is the key thing.  Maybe in the future I will visit WHS again but for now.. the relationship is over.

Do you have a dedicated “server” in your house?  What is your setup?

Labels: backup, rambling, review, Technology

This weekend all of the sites I currently work on went dark!!!!  After looking into it further it was discovered that our server hosting company (the planet.com) had one of their transformers explode in their data centre and it was so big that it took down three walls.  Nobody was hurt and no hardware was destroyed but they were forced to take everything offline which affected about 9,000 sites and 7,500 clients.  Over 24 hours later and they still have not got anything running.  During that time all email, web, everything was down and there was really nothing much you could do until it was brought back up.  I feel sorry for the support guys there as this is going to be a hell of a week for them.  Sometimes just rebooting a server is stressful. 

During this downtime I got to thinking about backup plans and what you can do.  Everyone should have some sort of backup plan.  You never know what can happen.

First you should assess the possible points of failure.

1. The server hosting your site going down or being hacked and deleted.
2. The company hosting your server going down.
3. The company hosting your DNS name going down.

Next you need to address each point with your options.  In case of the three above:

1. Have a backup that is done on a regular basis stored offsite.  This way you can restore anything you need or rebuild the server with little problem.
2. Have a temporary site available that you can point your domain name to if you can handle the downtime easily.  At least this will let your visitors know that something is wrong and it is being worked on.  Sometimes it takes up to 48 hours for the DNS pointer to change but I've had pretty good luck with faster turn around times than that.  This backup site should have updates as to what is going on and possibly another email to contact in case of emergency.  Alternatively this backup site could be a full backup of your current site.
3. I don't think there is much you can really do.  This would probably be worst case scenario and would probably be a much bigger problem than your site.  :)

After this you should be able to start putting together your plans and price out any extra costs you may have. 

Backup plans aren't just for web sites.  They could be for anything in life.  Here are a few I use.

• A photocopy of every important card in my wallet.  It takes you losing your wallet one time to learn your lesson.
• I backup my main computer that I use as a server for others on a monthly basis.  It includes my music and videos and any other data that I don't want to lose to a hardware failure.
• If the Internet goes down (ISP's aren't perfect and I depend on it for work) I still have dial up access I can use as well as mobile access to my email so I can at least keep on top of things.
• Weekly backups of my main laptop in case of hardware failure.  Its a full backup using the ntbackup utility in XP.  All automatic so I never think about it.

You get the idea.  I encourage all to have a backup plan of anything you think is critical.  Remember it only takes one disaster for you to learn your lesson.  What is your plan?

Labels: backup, life, rambling, web sites

I recently read an article that stated "You are nobody unless your name google's well." Hmm... well think of this as my attempt to have a web presence.

Its been a while since I've last setup a domain on the internet but I must admit, things have gotten a lot easier. I registered my name at godaddy.com (use the code dltv to get 10% off). I then created a new web site on a web server a friend of mine has and tada... its all working. The final step was to setup this blog on this site using blogger. Took me about probably 30 mins of total work. Back in the day it was a bigger pain in the ass.

What now? Well I guess the first thing I want to do is update this blogger template. Not a fan of them but I'll see what I can find. The next thing is to just speak my mind. Hey this is my little corner of the net ... I get to say what I want.

Anyways, let me get back to work, my domain name will probably take a day before it starts pointing to the site so nothing much more to do here until its up and running. But keep an eye out for newer posts.

Labels: rambling