After finding out my iPhone wouldn’t upgrade while using Windows XP in a VMWare guest OS on my Ubuntu system, I ran across this blog post by Ivan Kuznetsov. It kind of worked for me and you will need a non-usb keyboard and mouse if you’re not using them currently. During the Restore process in iTunes, the phone was still being picked up by Ubuntu, and iTunes had to be stopped and restarted using End Task in the Task Manager of Windows. I think some usb process in Ubuntu was finding the phone during the initial stages of the Restore process in iTunes.

I wouldn’t recommend using this method since it takes too long to figure out. Just dual-boot windows and install iTunes there to upgrade the firmware.

If you decide to upgrade the firmware using linux, use the Updater Log file to monitor  the progress. It can be found here on inside your Windows VM: C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Updater Logs\iPhoneUpdater##.log and look for the most recent file in that folder.

There are about a 1000 lines in my logs and if you think the process is hung, check out the log file to verify. If you use notepad to view the file, you will have to re-open the file each time you want to see the new lines added.

Here is the end of the first log file where the phone was put into Recovery mode and iTunes lost the connection. The phone was on and the screen had went from the plug in image to just black.

2010-02-02 02:41:23.440 iTunes.exe[4020:c94]: : operation 31 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:41:24.440 iTunes.exe[4020:c94]: : Recovery mode succeeded

At this point I killed iTunes and restarted it and clicked on Restore once it recognized the phone again.

The beginning of the second log file after iTunes was restarted…

2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: restore library built Aug 24 2009 11:22:55
2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: iTunes: iTunes 9.0.2.25
2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: iTunes: Software payload version: 7D11

2010-02-02 02:48:24.421 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 14 progress 98
2010-02-02 02:48:25.530 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 14 progress 100
2010-02-02 02:48:25.671 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 15 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.155 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 16 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.171 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 15 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.171 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 16 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:42.702 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 27 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:45.733 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 27 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.030 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 17 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.249 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 25 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.483 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 35 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:48.139 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 18 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:49:52.795 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 19 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:42.979 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 32 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.104 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 29 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.120 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 29 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.135 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: device returned AMR error 0
2010-02-02 02:52:43.135 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : Restore succeeded

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After looking around for a clean and simple theme for my blog I settled on using Thesis. The first time I heard about it was on some blogger site (although I don’t remember which one). After it was installed and I started playing around with I was even more impressed with what I saw. It did take some time to get the look I was after and to understand how the settings affected the overall look of the site. I recommend that you watch the tutorials first before you commit to this theme. The best feature is the semi-future proofing code that you can add to move sections of the site around and you don’t have worry as much about how the next release will affect the site. With the last blog engine (GraffitiCMS), I simply had too many hacks in place to make it do what I wanted and the lack of support from Telligent made the decision to move easier as well.

Go ahead and give Thesis a try.

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1. Moving my blog from Graffiti CMS to WordPress After years of using Graffiti CMS from Telligent and waiting for updates to this very cool blogging platform, I decided...

After years of using Graffiti CMS from Telligent and waiting for updates to this very cool blogging platform, I decided to move on to WordPress. Graffiti CMS was very SEO centric and I spend a fair amount of time configuring it to do what I wanted. I thought about staying on a .net platform since I am a .net developer, but the popularity of WordPress and availability of some very awesome plugins made the decision easy.

And there are some others who had the same idea: Migrating blog from GraffitiCMS to WordPress and Now Running on Behistun and ASP.NET MVC

Here are some of the problems I ran across since my site runs under IIS 6.0:

• 403 errors when logging in – my ISP needed to make a change to allow script execution
• permalinks needed to be setup so the links would be formatted like this: http://domain.com/category/postname – see below for details.

How to setup Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS

• create a file named wp-404-handler.php in the root of the WP folder with the following code:

<?php
$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
$pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
include('index.php');
?>

• Go to Options -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin page, and choose an appropriate structure for your links. I chose Custom with this pattern: /%cateory%/%postname%/

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Gmail is great and their keyboard shortcuts help out quite a bit, but it was missing the ability to delete the current message and move to the next message in any folder or list of messages. After discovering AutoHotKey (AHK) to build and customize shortcuts for applications, I decided to solve this problem I’ve been dealing with for some time.

I did find some pages online where people were asking how to make this work or why Gmail doesn’t offer this feature. So I looked at the Keyboard Shortcuts in the Gmail Lab for a solution, but you can only do one command at a time there. So the key sequence is #o (pound sign and then the letter “o”) to move the current message to the trash and then open the next message.

Sidenote: Even if I wanted to use the delete key and then the letter “o”, I couldn’t put in \127 for the ascii code for Delete in the Keyboard Shortcuts Lab feature. It seems that the textbox only allows 3 characters.

So I cooked up this solution to make the delete key do it all – #o.

First, you need AutoHotKey installed. Then you need to create a new AutoHotKey file or just edit the AutoHotkey.ahk that gets installed by default. You can have multiple AHK files loaded at the same time if you want. I just keep using the same one for all my shortcuts.

Edit the AHK file with notepad or your favorite text editor and copy/paste the following lines. I prefer to use Notepad++ but it really doesn’t matter.

SetTitleMatchMode 1
#IfWinActive Gmail -
Delete::
; Delete the current message and
Send #
;read the next message
Send o
return
#IfWinActive

Double-click on your newly edited and saved AHK file. This will load it and you will see AHK running in the system tray as a green square with an “H”.

Now open Gmail and go to your inbox or spam folder where you have messages you want to delete. Then click on the first one to read it and hit the delete key.

In order for this to work after you reboot your computer, you need to add a shortcut to this AHK file to your startup folder so it loads automatically after a reboot.

There are a couple of things that could go wrong where this solution will not work:

• If you changed the Keyboard Shortcut in Gmail for Open conversation from a “o” to something else or you changed the Move to trash from “#” to something else, you need to change the AHK file to match. Look at the lines that start with Send in the AHK file and change the characters as needed, save the file, right-click on in the system tray so you can click on Reload This Script. Then see if the delete key works like you want it to.
• If you enable the Title Tweaks in Gmail Lab to show the folder name followed by “- Gmail” in the title of the browser, you will need to change line 2 in the AHK file to

#IfWinActive - Gmail

Here are some notes about the AHK commands used here:

• Since AHK can map keys in any application I needed to specify the title or window name of the application and SetTitleMatchMode 1 describes how AHK will look for the title. From the AutoHotKey documentation: A window’s title must start with the specified WinTitle to be a match
• To make AHK only take over keys in a particular application, use IfWinActive see the AutoHotKey documentation for more details.

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Every search on Google equals This site may harm your computer

I was just trying to find the site url’s for My Toolbox post and everything I searched on was harmful to my computer. Looks like this Google inspired technology has been around for a while according to codinghorror.com

Even links to Google support are harmful (see the second item in the search results image)

The problem finally went away and had me wondering if there was a virus or browser plug-in gone bad. But I found confirmation of the problem here http://www.seorly.com/?p=69 

Looks like Google had the problem worldwide.

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Here is my list of cool applications to make my computing life better.

AutoHotKey – a free, open-source utility for Windows that can: Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. Create custom data-entry forms, user interfaces, and menu bars. Remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Convert any script into an EXE file that can be run on computers that don’t have AutoHotkey installed.

Launchy – a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes

Process Lasso – improves your PC’s responsiveness and stability. Process Lasso intelligently adjusts the priority of running programs so that badly behaved programs won’t interfere with your ability to use the computer. In addition, Process Lasso offers capabilities such as default process priorities and affinities, termination of disallowed processes, instance count limits, and much more!

DropBox – get 2 gigabytes of online storage for free. You can sync your files automatically to your window or mac computers and the web. Access your files from any browser or mobile device. Share files with your friends and family. View your photos in a gallery and share them easily with anyone. .

OpenDNS – a free and very fast replacement for your ISP DNS and also get DNS content and phishing filtering.

ObjectDock – a free quick launch taskbar that looks and acts like the Mac OS X taskbar. ObjectDock enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock.

Cropper – a free screen capture utility. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It’s also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site.

FileZilla – a free Windows, Mac, Linux FTP client.

Picasa – a free photo organizer from Google.

Beyond TV – gives you the capability to turn your PC into a digital video recorder (DVR). Its simple user-friendly interface lets you browse your TV listings, record shows, and watch live TV from your PC with no subscription fees, ever!

Second Copy – makes a backup of your data files to another directory, disk or computer across the network. It then monitors the source files and keeps the backup updated with new or changed files. It runs in the background with no user interaction.

And I use several of the developer tools that Scott Hanselman uses.

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I started to notice that my computer was running slow, so I decided to look into why this was happening. Some slowness is expected with a windows over time. I have generally had to re-install the OS about every 4-5 years just because of all the stuff that gets installed or if I have a hardware failure where the cpu or motherboard is different. Some of this is acceptable although it’s a real pain taking time to reinstall the applications again and reconfiguring apps and adding back the OS performance tweaks.

So here is what I found and how I fixed it.

When copying files to and from the hard drive, the drive was transferring at about 7mb per second when it should have been transferring at over 30-50mb per second when using TerraCopy. The IDE driver was set to PIO instead of UDMA. My drive is a fairly new SATA drive that should transfer at 100+ mb per second.

These 2 sites will provide all of the technical details on why this happens and how to fix it.

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/uDMA_fix/
http://winhlp.com/node/10

Look in Device Manager to see if you have the same problem:

• Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System > Hardware tab > Device Manager button
• Look at each of the IDE controllers and see if the Current Transfer Mode is PIO
• IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers > Primary IDE Channel > Advanced Settings tab

I simply followed the Solution section of the first website. http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/uDMA_fix/#Solution

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In case you didn’t know, Google has created a new browser called Chrome. I’ve installed it and it looks great for a beta application. I found this YouTube.com video from Google that shows all of the features in detail.

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At work I’m behind a firewall and the WLInstaller.exe could not make a connection to the Live Update server, so I couldn’t install Live Writer. I was using the beta version which worked, but lacked some features. After spending a fair amount of time looking for real installer of Live Writer, I finally found something that worked.

Damien Guard took the time to extract the real installer and added it to his blog.

Kevin Miller wrote about his experiences with the Live Writer installation

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Adobe, the maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop, launched a basic version available for free online. While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Photoshop Express, is easier to learn. Photoshop Express is completely Web-based so you can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser.

I would predict that most consumer applications would move to the web as bandwidth increases and browsers become more capable of hosting robust applications.

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