So very excited to tackle a project and work with my hands I set forth on Thursday night…and it went a little something like this..

This was the borrowed TV that I had that needed to go.

face down this is what the 37” LCD looks like

This is the hardware from Sanus to make it happen

Hardware mounted to the TV

This is the space sans the old TV

This is me finding and marking the stud. I have recently been told that this may not be the best way. However when you are hanging 75 lbs of TV 18 inches off the wall it really does matter if you are dead center of the stud!

That is an impact drill, lag bolt, mounting plate, and a … torque wrench ~ I mean really who wants a TV to fall down, this shit counts!

Mounting plate is on the wall with three lag bolts in it, and yes the little orange thing is a level, just wait…

Yes I noticed it is slightly off, but let me see you do better.

………

And now we segway into the BullShit…

So at some point into this project I put my knee or arm into the screen because after mounting it … something just wasn’t right, you be the judge…

and that was the horror I seen when I decided to plug in the TV before hiding all the wires… ugh

this is what it looks like full screen, yeah I jacked it up, somehow, someway!

….

Moving on I now have a $150+ mount on the wall with a busted TV, guess it is now time to buy a new one, even though I hardly watch TV…

Enter…

So on the right is the broken one, and on the left is the new 32” LCD TV that includes a DVD player. I went with the smaller one because it was the only one I could find in stock between Bestbuy and Costco. Anyways this isn’t for home theater it is just for sleepy time.

Now the mount has been moved from the busted ass 37” to the brand new 32”

….

So you might be wondering why does this matter?

this was what I had from bed before..

as you can see … it sucks. no view.

and now?

We have a 32” LCD hanging out saying ‘Hello’

this is the side view at full extension, if you ever want to hang a TV with intention use Sanus, they have beefy mounts that work!

This is what it looks like from the front, anybody see wires??? yeah I don’t think so, that is not how EvilBobby rolls!

If you made it this far at least leave a comment

enjoy!   Picture [2500 x 1600] <—it’s big

Firefox has a couple of plug-ins that I just can’t live without. Firebug and IE Tab. Many times I will use Firebug to dig into other websites to see how they are building their pages or what technology it is based on. IE tab is a great way to verify cross browser compatibility when developing a site.  I have found if I just build my UI in Firefox it is usually only a few steps away in IE, however the reverse is almost never true. IE tab also allows me to run my Windows Home Server (WHS) in several tabs. This results in running multiple Remote Desktop Sessions (RDP) some physical some virtual.

I found that as I became more involved with good front end web site construction that without firebug you are just wasting your time. Another power feature for Firefox was the ability to clear private data quickly. You can set this up under options -> privacy -> clear private data. A couple of hints: I turn off confirmation and pre-select what items to clear when using the quick keys ctrl+shift+del.

When monkeying with css and JavaScript I just need to clear the cache. Everything else I leave intact.

When working with session data or login credentials I clear cookies.

Big downfall of this was that I would always get logged out of any of the accounts I was logged into, including the remote desktop sessions in my Firefox IE Tabs. Yes I know you can clear cookies per domain in Firefox but it is not as quick when you are making rapid changes to a site.

Enter chrome: I installed it when it first came out but without plug-ins and the simple interface I didn’t see the point. However now I found a purpose, I could use chrome to stay logged into all of my accounts when doing web development with Firefox. Over time I have really started to like chrome, it is fast, clean and simple. Further as I have added a second monitor at both home and work I now see a perfect use for removable tabs in chrome. Sometime I need to look at Gmail and my Google calendar or a Google doc at the same time…simple drag a tab out to the second monitor. When I am done I can either just close it or shove it back into chrome on the original monitor.

Now if you paid attention you will notice one hitch in this solution…WHS and RDP sessions. There are no IE tabs in chrome and you can not install active x controls in chrome (thankfully). Re-enter Internet Explorer. If I left these in Firefox I would drop all of my sessions when clearing cookies (sometimes I have 3 going at the same time).  As usual IE is painfully slow just opening new tabs and I just can’t use it for regular use but great for WHS/RDP.

So now to complete my trilogy I use Chrome for login accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Tr.im, Stackoverflow, Pandora to name a few. Firefox to work on web UI (css/JavaScript) and to lookup anything I am researching. And begrudgingly I use IE8 to run my WHS/RPD sessions; occasionally I will view my pages to make sure they are ok in IE 7/8.

So which browser is the best, as usual it depends.  But I have given you some solid info on my strategy so maybe it will help you make an informed decision.

calendar and such on my handheld when I decided to check the App World. First up was Pandora. I decided to install it real quickly, thanks to the App Store and Vendors making custom mobile apps, this went very fast.Further I was able to create a new account right on the handheld. I have yet to be to Pandora’s website.

After creating a few stations I remembered that my Sonos system has some tie-in with Pandora. Took me about 1 minute on the laptop to add the Pandora service to my Sonos system, and Viola – I was listening to a custom playlist that I created on my BlackBerry. This is so cool!!

The Music that was coming from the BlackBerry was actually really good considering the size of the device (and hence speakers), but one thing I remembered was that at home my Bold was connected via Wi-Fi. I decided to do a little test when I left for work. I plugged my BlackBerry into my car stereo, very simple since the BlackBerry uses a standard headphone jack. This was awesome I was listening to a custom station, which was Dave Matthews, in my car and it sounded good. Even better when I drove away from the house the music never skipped, stuttered or dropped as my device simply switched from Wi-Fi to3G.

Score for techies and music lovers all over. I can think of endless possibilities for my new Pandora addiction.

Only downside…30 minute drive to work and my Bold was getting hot.

Blogs have also become part of my ritual, and hence RSS feeds. Now we have a match made in heaven. I took the LinkedIn updates RSS feeds and plugged it into my Google RSS reader account.

What makes this really cool is that now when any of my ‘connections’ has an update, I get little snippets in my RSS reader.

So what is an update?

Usually a change of any of the following:

• Profile picture
• Job status
• Bio update
• New connections (really cool)

All of these let you stay connected with changes to your network. And it just fits with my daily workflow without cluttering up my email box with summary emails.

So stay linked in and use your favorite RSS reader.

Now if someone can explain to me how the blackberry can track satellites while being buried in my fanny pack, that would be great.

As you can see from the picture even in my office where I took this picture it stated it is tracking 9 satellites????

Great job Adapta for giving us SpeedOMeter for free.

these are the steps that I went through that eventually ended up with my bricked phone:

1. Swap the battery with a known good one. It stopped dying so I gave the good battery back to Nicole and ordered one. Which also meant I looked like a total retard carrying around an external battery for my cell phone until the new one arrived.
2. Web pages throwing errors? I tried wiping the phone from the internal device menus, reconnecting to my exchange server. I doubt the exchange server had anything to do with it but I depend on that connection. Anyhow after wiping it the web no longer had any issues.
3. GPS still not working? I downloaded the latest Google Maps and It still would not lock in. Finally I called AT&T customer support to find out why the GPS stopped working. This was one of the most painful conversations I have ever had with tech support. I spent 1 hour trying to explain that GPS has to do with satellites and not any mobile communication networks EDGE/GPRS etc. The one rep even tried to tell me I had to pay for the AT&T mapping service so that my phone could get the GPS signals from the wireless network??? I finally gave up and decided I would do more research on my own.
4. Try upgrading the firmware on the device. I had actually never hooked my blackberry up to the computer because I used exchange and everything I needed before came over the air. So I had to download the blackberry desktop manager software and the newest firmware which was 4.5.0. I followed the instructions I could find online and after the second failed attempt the device no longer responded, hence the term brick.

So now I have a phone that does not work at all. So I used web chat to contact AT&T since I got the link for all of the above software from their site. After about 30minutes of chatting it was determined by the rep that since the computer would no longer recognize or connect to the device that nothing could be done. He was very knowledgeable (so I thought) and did not waste my time, he could tell I was no amateur.

The phone is just over a year old and thus out of warranty. I looked about replacing the phone with a newer model but just didn’t like the thought that it could really be dead. I did some more searching and pieced together some ideas.

Basically I just opened the blackberry desktop manager again, connected the phone via USB (which still only showed a sad little blinking of the power LED, but no inkling that the computer recognized it) and attempted to delete all the applications from the phone. Strangely the computer software started to do some processing? Then it switched to say deleting applications from device?? how was this the computer did not even show a USB device attached and there was no change in status on the bricked phone. After about 10 minutes the computer software said that the operation was complete, I hit a button on the phone and it said it was connected to the computer.

Strangely enough the upgrade to the new firmware had somehow taken place, and the phone was no longer bricked. Better yet it somehow kept all the settings to my exchange server and started re-importing all of my emails, contacts, calendar appts and notes.

I guess that point is don’t ever underestimate a true geek when he is determined not to let the ghost in the machine win!

• Save time when deploying – in the past when I would post my little hobby projects to the web I would sometimes get errors and spend hours trying to figure out why.
• Improve my skill set in the full system – building web pages and code files is all fine and dandy in a development environment but if you don’t understand the full system then finding problems in a production environment can take much longer.
• Had a problem when deploying locally – My project was working on my local IIS but when deployed to a real server 2003 running IIS6 it only showed a yellow screen of death.
• Local IIS and dev web server close but not the same – while visual studio provides a built-in development server and vista includes a local IIS this are still limited and do not exactly function like a real production system. In short these mock servers are good for rapid development but your code still needs to be tested in a production environment

How my environment is setup

• Recently I upgraded – My home computer is now a Quad-Core, 4gb Ram, Vista Ultimate x64, which I have been pleasantly satisfied with. This was a huge step up from my 7 year old 2ghz Pentium 4, 512mb, XP pro system…huge difference.
• Vmware workstation – I have been playing with virtual machines for the last 8 months but since I got my new system it has gone into overdrive. This allows me to setup all different types of environments in a virtual setup.
• Microsoft Dreamspark – through this program I was able to get free copies of Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2008 and Vista Business. Thank you!
• Modify hosts file – this is a tiny text file hidden in all windows systems that is looked at first before any other DNS information. With this I am able to point internet domain names to my local server to mock a real environment.

How I applied this

• Referenced MSDN article – I had heard of remote debugging but was not aware how it really worked. This document got me pointed in the right direction.
• Installed service on the server – I used remote desktop to login to my server and installed the service that allows remote debugging. This was found with the install files that came with Visual Studio 2008. After installing I just had to start the service
• Attached to process from inside of VS2008 – While Visual Studio is running on my development machine I opened a file system website that was located in my network on a Windows Server 2003 machine. In order to debug on a remote machine the source code needed to be located on my local machine and I needed to attach to the w3wp.exe process on the remote server. At this point I had to hit pause on the debugger to break all threads and then hit continue. At this point I was able to set break points anywhere in my code. With this I would go back to my internet browser and hit the page on the website that would hit the break point, which further allowed me to step through the code as it ran on the remote server. Caution if this is a real production server that others have access to it will halt all website operation!

What I learned

• This is a powerful tool – the ability to hook directly into a production server and step through the code is very powerful, sometimes there are unknown environment variables that only come into play when you are in a production environment
• Don’t forget the basics – The instructions for deployment of this open source project stated that the asp.net process needed to have write access to a directory – duh! So in reality I didn’t need to step through my source code just to view the error that stated the write of a log file failed because the asp.net process did not have permission to write to a directory.
• I know have a new tool in my arsenal – I have another tool in my bag of tricks to troubleshoot problems. And it turns out the environment I setup at home is extremely close to the development server at work…a virtualized Windows Server 2003. So I could do this same thing at work if needed.

If you are not familiar with my setup I have my monitor, keyboard and mouse on a suspended desk and the computing hardware buried away inside the closet. This requires about 15 foot of extension cables of various types to achieve. Sadly enough my monitor was only able to achieve 1920 x 1200 on the existing cable that was in the wall. This may sound like plenty but it is not why I went with a 30" monitor and an Nvidia GeForce  9800 GT with 1gb of ram. I was surely looking for more. After examining the patch cables I discovered that a while back I had installed three cables to connect the previous monitor to the previous computer, which happened to be 2 dual link DVI cables and 1 single link DVI cable. And further the one that was buried in the wall was the single link.

All was not lost though, I had thought ahead and installed some PVC piping in the wall that contained all my cabling, however due to the aftermarket install it was limited to about 1.25" in diameter that was inside the wall. After reviewing my pictures from the install I remembered that I put the original DVI cable through before closing up the wall, because it was a tight fit. This same pipe contains a network cable, usb cable, two audio cables, and an RG6 coax cable. Needless to say it was a tight fit.

I started looking for options. My monitor would support HDMI input (which has a small connector) but that after extensive research was to no avail. Turns out that HDMI only supports single link (1920 x 1200) DVI conversions. There is a HDMI type B connector that supports dual link but nobody is producing it. So I was now forced to feed through a new DVI cable in this narrow pipe. Turns out that some of the PVC pipe connectors must have come loose since the install because just
pulling out some of the unused cables they seemed to snag, WTF!. I was not going to open up the wall again because it looked like this when I broke it open before about two years ago. Ouch!  

 
So after trying countless times to push/pull a new dual link DVI cable through the wall that I was going to have to create a new approach.

At this point the situation looked like this.

It took a good nights rest and another trip to Fry’s to figure out the new plan of attack. And then it came to me, use a smaller DVI connector, but did it exist….kinda

This is what a DVI connector looks like (this happens to be the P.O.S. that I for some reason installed inside my wall) it is very large and has lots of points that could snag inside of the wall. In order to work around this size limitation I needed to chop it down to size, but would it work? I used the single link cable as a tester to see if I could hack it down.

  The connecter could be hacked down to a much smaller profile. Keep in mind this was still the single link cable. I was not ready to start hacking away at my new $50 cable that needs to go inside my wall. Also notice the large gash in the right side cable. Something in the wall was surely causing a hard snag…ouch. So now I had my plan of attack, cut the new dual link cable connecter down to size and shove it through the wall.

  I had no problem using that big ol’ saw to chop my new DVI cable down to size to fit through the narrow opening in my wall.

  Finally I had a solution, the new dual link DVI cable was hacked down to size and I was able to get it in the wall, and further I could push my other coax, usb and audio cables back through also.

These are the finished shots after having the cables all buried back in the wall.

That big black box is the monitor power supply

That strip of yellow wall has all my wires running through it and into the closet.

So back to my original point, ‘What is Dual link DVI?’ I have learned that if you want 2560 x 1600 (holy sh!t that is big) than you must use dual link DVI cables to push that signal. HDMI cables are great if you want to do 1080P (regular hi-def TV signal) but if you want the ultimate in screen resolution then dual link DVI is the only way to go. Single link DVI maxs out at 1920 x 1200, and my monitor limits the HDMI to that same resolution. Found out this little gem deep in the owners manual

I have added a screen shot that was just taken with print screen to show you all that can fit on this large of a monitor…this is awesome!!!

If you are a geek you can view this image alone by itself or download it but you will see this is massive. Wow doesn’t the Google/Firefox search page stuff look strangely small??

Finally done, note to self: if you want massive resolution then use dual link DVI and no
thing else.

So I booted from my Windows Home Server pc restore ISO (image of a cd) and got ready to go but suddenly realized the VM had no access to my network. It turns out that the restore cd didn’t have drivers for an antiquated AMD network card, which happens to be the network card that VMware uses to virtualize a network card. Off I went to the net to find some program to make a floppy disk image. I discovered WinImage, which has a fully functioning trial and was able to burn a floppy image of the drivers that I got from AMD. Once this whole process was done I was able to mount the floppy image to my VM and told the restore program to scan the "floppy" drive for drivers for the network card. And Viola, the system now has access to the home network, and thus my home server.

The Windows Home Server was able to then restore my system in about 15 minutes. Using this little technique I was able to turn my laptop into a virtual machine and now it can be run from my current desktop. Even further I am able to backup the VM to the home server so at some later date I can just restore it back to my laptop when and if I decide to fix it.