Monthly Archives: December 2004

LG PM-325 Review

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LG PM-325For the last four months I’ve put up with mediocre Bluetooth support on my SonyEricsson T608. The T608 is basically the bastard child of Sprint PCS. They don’t talk about it, it was never publicly available on the site or through the stores. So when they announced the LG PM-325 had Bluetooth I was excited to finally have a phone to take advantage of all Bluetooth had to offer.

Yesterday I picked up an LG PM-325 at my local Radio Shack and had it activated. From the very beginning there were annoyances. The following things are just a few of them.

  1. When the phone is slid closed (it’s a sliding phone) you cannot scroll through your contacts, however, you can scroll through your call history.
  2. The default shortcut when you scroll down is to go to the menu with call history selected. It took me about five minutes to figure out how to set the shortcut to scroll through my contacts when I pressed down.
  3. After searching all over the web and tinkering on my own I’ve come to the conclusion that the phone doesn’t appear to support any Bluetooth functionality beyond pairing, which basically makes Bluetooth worthless in this phone. If anyone knows how to get this working with iSync or as a Bluetooth modem please contact me or post a message.

Needless to say I continue to be disappointed in what Sprint has to offer in the way of Bluetooth phones. Crappy or no DUN support (in OS X anyways) and no OBEX support. They finally tout a Bluetooth phone publicly and I can’t even sync it with my contacts or use it as a modem, much less send SMS messages through it.

Looks like it is time to “move” to Europe and switch carriers.

Celebrity Sightings

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I always hear about people who see famous people at airports, resturants, etc., but I’m never one of those guys. Unless you count the time when I was three and I met Michael Landon, which I don’t remember at all. Then, out of nowhere, I see two huge sports figures in less than two days.

  1. On Friday, at the Seattle airport, I’m standing in the security line waiting to go through the metal detectors when I notice a guy in a baseball cap walking past me who looks oddly familiar. I take another look and think that the guy looks just like Curt Shilling. I take a third look and notice he was walking with a cane and favoring his right foot. Sure enough, I was standing about two feet away from one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Under different circumstances I would have said something, but he was about to get into line to get frisked so I held back. By the time I got through security he was long gone.
  2. On Sunday, Josh and I decided to hit up some Qdoba. We walk and I notice a guy with a funny shirt that says Titanic Swim Team on it. I was laughing my ass off until I noticed the guy who was wearing it was none other than Michael Phelps the prolific young Olympic swimmer. I didn’t talk with him either. He was eating with a lady friend.

You may be wondering why I didn’t talk to either of them. Gotten an autograph or maybe a picture? Well, I think if I were in their position I’d rather not deal with someone like me. No matter how gracious I could have approached them I would have still been approaching someone about to get searched in a security line or someone in the middle of enjoying a meal with their lady friend. If I had been at a bar and either of them had walked in I’d buy them a beer and tell them how much I admire what they’ve done, but in both instances it was neither the time nor the place.

Even though I didn’t get an autograph or a picture I still have a few great stories. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t know how to even approach someone with the tenacity and will to win of Schilling or Phelps.

On a side note, I really did want to tell Phelps I turly admired how he handled his DUI charge. A young kid who has the guts to stand up under such a microscope and admit he was completely wrong, made a mistake and was sorrry is rather refreshing. Most high paid athletes these days try to spin things. Phelps took responsibility for his actions, which is all you can ask for.

Cell phones on airplanes

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The FCC is considering cell phone use in airplanes. This sucks. I’m going to hate being the person sitting in between some person talking about their gas and another person talking about how cute their kids are on the plane. The last place on earth I can sit in peace amongst strangers without being annoyed by cell phone users is about to disappear.

I guess I’ll have to retaliate by watching R-rated movies while in flight on my huge ass 15 inch laptop screen. How’s that for being rude in public? Maybe I’ll even watch it without headphones on so everyone can hear f-bombs every few minutes.

MySQL Replication HOWTO

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So, you’ve got your MySQL database all up and running. Life is good. The problem? You get a ton of hits a day and your tables are too big for you to dump using mysqldump. Some of you non-techies might be wondering why this is an issue. Well, mysqldump uses a table level lock while dumping a table, making it inaccessible to your website while the dumping is taking place.

As a way to both have a hot spare to run heavy SELECT statements against and a way to run mysqldump without worries of table locks I recently set up MySQL Replication. It was almost too easy. The steps I used to set this all up where as follows.

  1. Create a user on your master server that your slave can use to connect remotely with. This user MUST have at least REPLICASTION privileges (I just set up a user with all privileges).
  2. Make sure you put log-bin and server-id=1 in the [mysqld] section of your my.cnf file on your master server.
  3. Put log-bin and server-id=2 in the [mysqld] section of your my.cnf file on your slave server.
  4. Add master-host, master-user, master-password, master-port to your /etc/my.cnf on your slave with the account information you created in step 1.
  5. Shut down your slave database
  6. Bring down your master database and tar up its data directory and then copy it down and untar it into your slave’s data directory. Make sure all of the permissions are set correctly on the slave’s data directory (mysql.mysql and 700 on DB directories).
  7. Bring up your master database and then bring up your slave database. You’ll note that you now connect to your slave in the same manner that you connect to your master database (ie. if you have a root password set on your master you’ll use that login information on your slave as well).
  8. I had to run a CHANGE MASTER TO and then a START SLAVE command before everything was replication perfectly, but after that it worked fine.

Now, when you create tables, alter tables, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc. those queries will be sent to your slave as well. This was just meant for archival purposes only, you’ll definitely want to read the manual before attempting to do this, but it is quite easy. You’ll also want to note a few things once you do have it working.

  1. If you run a bad query (ie. DELETE FROM users) it will bone your slave database as well. The whole point for me was to set up a slave that I could run mysqldump against without bringing down my live server.
  2. Running queries that alter the slave will cause huge problems with keeping your data in sync between the two. You might want to look into looping your master and slave (ie. A is B’s master and B is A’s master, which is possible).

Hope this helps someone else out there.

Internet Explorer Reloading/Refreshing Bug

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I was handing off a recently created application to a few of my bosses and coworkers when one of them noticed that that page was constantly refreshing/reloading over and over. The page never fully finished loading before the next reload/refresh would occur. I scoured the internet before I found an article about a guy who was experiencing a similar problem only with HTML emails in Outlook. A reply to the article said that Internet Explorer, which Outlook Express uses to render HTML email message, does not properly decompress gzip pages. Sure enough, Internet Explorder has a gzip bug that is both known and has a hotfix for.

For those of you wondering what gzip output is, it allows a systems administrator to send webpages as gzip compressed archives (much like a WinZip file), which are then uncompressed by IE/Mozilla/Firefox and rendered as HTML/images. Well, evidently, IE doesn’t do this properly. So the fix was to comment out output_method=ob_gzhandler in my php.ini file.

Internet Explorer sucks and cost me 2 hours of work today. Thanks Microsoft!

Whistler, British Columbia 2004

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whistler On Wednesday we packed up with Josh and Alysin we headed up to Whistler for a weekend of hot tubs and snowboarding.

The long weekend was great. We had a great time on the slopes and took some amazing photos. The snow was a dream compared to the shitty snow I was used to in the midwest. Josh was complaining the whole time, but I told him he had it better than he’d ever know. The picture to your left was taken overlooking a cliff. Behind me are mountains and below is a valley with a lake. Needless to say the views and the slopes were enough to take my breath away.

Whistler is amazing and I definitely recommend checking it out. We were able to hit up shopping, hot tubs, bars, great resturants, etc. all within a few minutes walk. Many thanks to Josh and Aly for hooking it all up. And, we met another couple from Michigan who were foolish enough to take Lauren and I on in euchre. Let the games begin!

Ken Jennings Loses … finally.

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The amazing Jeopardy phenom, Ken Jennings, has finally lost. Ken Jennings lost today to Nancy Zerg from California. I never watched him work, but I heard he was simply amazing. Here are a few stats for your amusement.

  1. Jennings’ average daily haul was $34,063.51.
  2. He toyed with the previous daily record of $52,000 — tying it four times — before shattering it with a $75,000 win in Game 38.
  3. He gave more than 2,700 correct responses.

Holy crap.