Will I be saved by The Energy Detective (TED)?

So long story short...

I was living in the dark ages with a low power bill and a 13" TV. We decide to get a new TV. Want good picture, large screen and low price. Can't have it all. So I buy a soon to be dinosaur Panasonic Plasma 40". Return it if I don't like up until 30 days. Sounds fine.

Meanwhile at day 32 I happen to get the latest power bill. MORE THAN DOUBLED!!!! Too late - can't return it.

Decide immediate course of action is use power bar on TV and peripherals suspecting phantom power ( let alone regular use of this beast). Decide to order one of the Energy Detective ( TED 5000-C ) devices and look for other ways to reduce power. So popular of course I may have to wait 3-6 weeks before it arrives.

Preparing for the worse - may end of selling the plasma to save hundreds of dollars each month.

Patching Office 2000 with SR1

I recently needed to install Microsoft Office 2000 fully patched from an old CD I had lying around. After installing the original release, I started down the patch trail, because it looked like the Excel file I was trying to read wasn't going to display properly in the Excel viewer app that M offers.

After trying the SR-1 patch from the Microsoft website, it failed with a error in the log of

Starting execution.
Command line: /c /L2
Opening the patch source file, C:\DOCUME~1\plynch\LOCALS~1\Temp\IXP001.TMP\source.ini.
Searching installed products.
Detected the following products for patching:
Microsoft Office 2000 Premium (9.0.2720), {00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is patchable.
{00010409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00020409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00030409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00100409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00110409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00120409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00130409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00160409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00170409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00180409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00040409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00140409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{004A0409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{00150409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
Product is not installed.
{3C5E0FF2-BE09-11D1-998E-00A0C90A43B3}
Product is not installed.
The following patches are applicable:
Office 2000 SR-1 Core Update, {0DC0F122-1B1C-11D4-AED6-00C04F022C53}
Location: http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000prem/Update/3821h/WIN98/EN-US/data1.msp
The version of IE installed on the computer is 8.0.6001.18702
IE has already been updated to the level of Office 2000 SR-1 or above
Error: The file, C:\DOCUME~1\plynch\LOCALS~1\Temp\sr1patch\{0DC0F122-1B1C-11D4-AED6-00C04F022C53}, has an invalid size.
Beginning download of http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000prem/Update/3821h/WIN98/EN-US/data1.msp.
Finished downloading http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000prem/Update/3821h/WIN98/EN-US/data1.msp.
Error: The file, C:\DOCUME~1\plynch\LOCALS~1\Temp\sr1patch\{0DC0F122-1B1C-11D4-AED6-00C04F022C53}, has an invalid size.

Well that was fun....

Apparently the fully standalone SR-1 update was no longer available from Microsoft. The office update site just offers the 166k setup installer o2ksr1a.exe which has to contact the Microsoft website to download the real guts.

So I had to resort to patching the original office setup files with the administrators patch file. Since I never did that before I thought I would make note of it here:

1. Copy the entire administrative share or create a new administrative share of the Office installation to a directory ( Example c:/sr1 ).
2. Download the Data1.exe file found here. ( Edit: As noted here use the direct link to Data1.exe because since I wrote this post it no longer appears listed on the download page). Then run the exe and extract the contents to c:/sr1
3. Open a cmd prompt, cd c:/sr1 and type the following to update the original release of office to be sr1 in your administrative share. More info here. C:\sr1>msiexec /p DATA1.MSP /a data1.msi SHORTFILENAMES=TRUE /qb /L* log.log
4. Now run the office setup again and sr1 should get installed.
5. Continue on with the rest of the updates to office, which can be found here.
   

IPhone 3GS is coming June 19

I've been strategizing how and when I will get an IPhone ever since I bought one for my wife back in February. Now that the latest hardware is due out June 19, I expect to be taking action soon.

Rogers seems to be missing any mention of the launch on its homepage. Who ever is in charge of marketing there appears to be missing the boat. Fido at least has one banner ad, although it just points to the apple home page. Curious...and typical Canadian...



If you haven't checked out the WWDC Keynote mentioning all the latest Apple goodies, I recommend it.

Update
Fido at least now has a FAQ. Good news is the prices appear to be the same as the US prices.

Ebooks on the IPhone

My previous solution to reading documents on the IPod Touch was emailing myself the document as an attachment and opening it up in the email reader on the device. Inspired by the many ebooks offered at Pragmatic Bookshelf, I tried to find a better way today.

It seems I have just found a pretty good solution thanks to this post. The parts are:

1. Calibre -"a complete e-library solution and thus includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion, as well as e-book reader sync features and an integrated e-book viewer."
2. Stanza for IPhone - The most popular IPhone ereader.

There are limitations with converting a pdf for example and displaying that on the device. For example, I took an Apple developer library PDF file, converted it to epub format with Calibre and synced it too my touch. Opened it in Stanza and most of the text was missing. The same book opened in Stanza desktop opened and showed words just fine, however lacked the images.
I also tried the Stanza desktop app for converting the pdf and syncing it to my device. It couldn't open the PDF file and display it correctly for some reason.

I guess converting pdfs is still a fine art. It appears that for books targetted as ebooks, the Stanza reader will work out just fine and Calibre will do its job helping to keep it all organized.

Learning Objective-C Begins

So I've primarily been a Java and Web Application Developer for the past ten years. Seeing how it was always easy to find new technologies/strategies/methodologies to learn in the Java world, I never gave serious thoughts on trying to focus on other languages. I still think I could work in Java for the next 10 years and still not get bored or run out of things to learn.

However the realities of my situation have motivated me to at least explore learning Objective-C and developing something for the Apple platforms.

1. I own a very powerful Mac Pro and an IPod Touch. I love them both and don't see me switching to a Windows or any other OS ever again. Aside from my day to day hacking, I seem to be squandering an opportunity to really make use of this hardware at my disposal.
2. I am currently not employed. Most likely I have the entire summer to try anything else other than what an employer needs from me.

So I've waded into the shallow end and it is not bad at all. First up were the Coding in Objective-C screencasts by Bill Dudney over at Pragmatic Bookshelf. Bill does a good job with these and I breezed through without any problem. Next I picked up Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephan Kochan. It's always nice to have a reference like this on hand in hard copy. I've gone through the first couple chapters and the book is showing me exactly what I need to know.

First impressions are Objective-C is not that difficult to get started in. I am really impressed with the power of Apple's XCode IDE as well. I regret not making the time to start playing with it sooner. This looks like it is going to be fun.

Latest Greatest Google Invention: Google Wave

Despite what one may think of Google, I think it is nice that there are companies that can afford to have very smart people dream up new technologies for the rest of us. I took 1h 20m to watch and listen to the Google Wave presentation at Google I/O and was glad I did.



I can't help admit the demos were pretty cool. The real time translation at the end was a showstopper. What do you think?

Sorting Account List in Thunderbird

It has always annoyed me that sorting the account list in the left pane of Thunderbird was not a built in option. I finally broke down and did something about it - I found a great Thunderbird add-on called Folderpane Tools 0.0.5.1 that does just this and now I can put all my old email accounts at the bottom of the list.

Problem solved. Thanks to the author.

Integrate Mac OSX Address Book and Thunderbird

Since I have an Ipod Touch, I pretty much have to store my contacts in Mac OSX Address Book application so that they can sync to my device. Problem is, I also prefer Mozilla Thunderbird to handle my email. When I had looked in Sept 2007 ( when i got my Mac Pro ) there was no easy way to have my contacts in Address Book available to Thunderbird. In fact there was a bug open since 2003. Hoping this has been addressed (no pun intended), I did a quick Google and found that there is now a way... and actually there had been for a long time which either I missed or ignored before. A good summary of options to share address books with Thunderbird is here.

Since the release of Thunderbird 3 in 2008 never happened, I am left with the choice to install beta2, one of the nightlies, or build from scratch myself. The nightlies are found here.

I downloaded the May 30 nightly, but I have not decided to give it a whack yet. If I do I'll post back to let you know my experience.