Now from home

I wrote some time ago that I was having problems with my Windows Home Server and my main PC, mainly because the transfer speeds from my WHS to my PC were ridiculous. Uploads were fine though.

After looking into it for a long time, the problem was that my router/switch, an SMC Barricade, was not handling the traffic from the WHS properly. Every other PC was working right.

Anyway, I’ve changed the router by a Linksys WRT320n. This means that I’ve upgraded my LAN from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

Transfer speeds are now ok, getting 60 MB/s out of the box. Also, the wireless speed has improved dramatically, specially when using my iPhone 3Gs. Using my old router I was unable to watch YouTube videos and now they are loaded in no time.

I’ve been using this router only for a couple of days, but I’m already very happy with the upgrade.

I have had only one minor problem setting up the wireless connection. For some reason none of my WIFI devices were able to connect to the router. I needed to manually change the ‘WIFI channel’ from Auto to channel 11 in order to get it to work.

Es decir, con Movistar. A cambio me concede el deseo de disfrutar de un iPhone.

En los comentarios de este post comentaba que me había rendido en el tema del iPhone y que no quería seguirle el juego a Movistar. Sin embargo, caprichos del destino, mi teléfono decidió aprovechar el  magnífico tiempo que hizo este pasado puente y se dió un chapuzón en la piscina. ¿Qué mejor excusa para retomar el tema de iPhone?

En fin que tomada la decisión, me empapé bien de las tarifas disponibles y me lancé de nuevo a la caza.

En la primera tienda que fui no tenían. En la segunda sí habían y esto es lo que pasó:

Yo: Buenos días, ¿tienen iPhones en stock?

Movi: Me tienen que entrar… ¿para qué era?

Yo: Portabilidad

Movi: ah, pues me parece que alguno tengo en el almacén.

Yo: Entonces, ¿me espero? (había más gente en la tienda)

Movi: Sí, espérate.

Vamos a ver, ¿te tienen que entrar o tienes? ¿Es que depende de si es una portabilidad o no? La respuesta está clara.

Cuando termina con la persona que estaba atendiendo, mete la mano debajo del mostrador y saca un iPhone 3GS precintado.

Me quedo flipado con la desfachatez de la dependienta. La cosa sigue…

Movi: Bueno tenemos varias tarifas…

Yo: Quiero la de Autónomos 12 con el plan de Internet básico de 15 €

Movi: A ver que consulte las tarifas…

(2 minutos mirando cosas en la pantalla del ordenador).

Movi: La tarifa de Autónomos 12 obliga a contratar el plan de datos Premium de 40 €

Yo: Imposible. Acabo de verlo en Internet

Movi: Bueno, ten en cuenta que la página de Internet trabaja con otras tarifas.

Yo: Ok, entonces me lo pillaré por Internet.

Movi: Espera que mire los correos electrónicos a ver si ha entrado algo más nuevo…

(Otro ratito jugando con el ratón)

Movi: A si, si. Aquí está tarifa 15 € con portabilidad… Vale, puedes contratar la de 15 €.

Movi: Bueno, pues entonces el móvil te sale por 139 €

Yo: Seguro, creo recordar que con portabilidad eran 99 €

Movi: Si, sí. Aquí lo tengo.

Yo: Pues estoy seguro de que he leído que eran 99 €. ¿Puedes meterte en la página del iPhone / Movistar y comprobarlo? Si pone 139 € me lo llevo sin más.

(Reticente, se pone a buscar pero no encuentra la tabla de precios)

Movi: Pues mira, no aparece y esto es la última información que me ha llegado.

Yo: ¿Estás de acuerdo conmigo en que no tiene sentido pagar 40 € más por lo mismo? ¿verdad?

Movi: Espera que voy a llamar…

(llama a alguien)

Movi: Ok, 99 €.

Yo: Vale. Vamos a hacer los papeles.

De verdad que estuve a punto de coger y marcharme. Pero pudo más la atracción de Apple.

Por supuesto el tema del seguro se lo reservó hasta que todo estuvo firmado.

Movi: Ay!, casi se me olvida. Sabes que el seguro es obligatorio ¿no?

(haciéndome el tonto y con sonrisa socarrona)

Yo: ¿Seguro? ¿Qué seguro? Yo no quiero ningún seguro.

(con cara descompuesta y visiblemente nerviosa. A estas alturas la tienda estaba llena de gente

Movi: Si, sí, es obligatorio sacarse este seguro para todos los móviles que superan (no se cuántos) euros.

Yo: Ok, si que lo sabía. Me parece que tomáis el pelo a la gente y que probablemente no sea ni legal. Pero bueno, cobrame los 40 € del seguro.

Movi: Ok, pues ya está todo. En unos 6 días te llamaremos

Por si alguno tiene la duda de lo que te cubre el seguro, os lo pongo a continuación. A la vez da risa y ganas de ir a la OCU.

- Robo o hurto (no especifica cantidad pero me he enterado que cubre 200 €)

- Llamadas fraudulentas hasta 2 horas antes de la declaración del siniestro y hasta 1200€

- Reparación del terminal, hasta 90 € (periodo de carencia de 45 días)

- Pérdida, con reembolso de 100 €

Y ya está!. Teniendo en cuenta que tendría que pagarle a Movistar 584 € si no cumplo los 18 meses de permanencia, en caso de robo o rotura el seguro no sirve para nada.

Todo esto intentando captarme como cliente nuevo. Imaginaros dentro de 18 meses cuando quiera cambiar mi iPhone por otro. Terrible.

Espero que esto le sirva a alguien que todavía vaya detrás del iPhone. Ir preparados porque van a intentar jugarosla en todos los pasos.

También recomiendo leer los ya famosos posts de: La odisea de comprar un iPhone en España I, II y III

Last month, my Sony HC-90 Handycam stopped working. The failure was quite simple, the objective’s cover didn’t fully open. I tried to repair it myself but it was impossible. I contacted Sony Service Support but they asked me 60 €. Too much for such a simple problem.

I decided to check what the market could offer me. I remembered to have read some great reviews about the Flip Ultra camera, which opened  a new segment called ultaportable video cameras. I started reading reviews and comparisons charts with other ultraportable cameras.

Turns out that the Flip can’t be bought in Spain, so I lean towards the Creative Vado HD. It compares very good with the MinoHD.

For just 200 € shipped (much less if you can buy it from Amazon!) you get a video camera that fits in your pocket (just like a mobile phone), that can do HD (1280×720) and that has no moving parts. It has 8 GB of memory which is enough for 2 hours of high definition video. It also includes an HDMI cable.

Video quality is great even indoors with low light. Of course it cannot be compared with other bigger HD cameras, but it’s ok to shot home videos.

The camera has been designed with one goal in mind: simplicity. You turn on the camera (by the way is ready to shoot video in 1 second) and press the red button to start recording. Press it again to stop it. Each time you press the red button a new file is created.

The you can view the videos on the built-in small screen and delete those you don’t want. You can directly plug the camera to your TV (via HDMI), or connect it to any USB port in your computer and transfer the files.

It also includes some software to manage the videos and uploading them to YouTube and other services but I have not tried it yet. Honestly I don’t care about that software.

I’m very happy with the camera. The best advantage I see over traditional cameras is that you can bring it with you all the times and therefore you shoot a lot more videos. Ask my son

As soon as Windows 7 RTM got released I upgraded my main computer and my laptop. On my main machine I put Windows 7 x64 as I have 8 GB there. Everything worked great except the network card. I was unable to get more than a couple of hundreds of KB/s of transfer speed.

I updated the drivers to the latest version from Intel, but it made no difference. Of course this was a show-stopping problem because backups takes forever and even browsing photos from a network share is simply impossible.

I’ve finally solved the problem purchasing a 6 € Gigabit network card. It works just fine and now I’m getting around 12 MB/s again (my network is 100MB for now).

I’m sure Intel will update their drivers before Windows 7 reaches General Availability.

This week I’ve been doing some improvements in my business infrastructure. Basically I’ve been upgrading to Windows 7, moving to Gmail and trying to get rid of my old general purpose server.

I’m very happy with all the changes.

First of all Windows 7 rocks! It works like a charm.

Second, my move to Gmail has been painless. Now I can handle all my email from one just place and one account. I’m no longer using Outlook, so one app less to install and configure. Besides this I can access my email from anywhere and by the way, the offline feature is working great too. This move is going to pay off in my next trip to Germany on September.

Finally I had an old P4 running Windows 2003 server. It was used as a file server, print server, FTP server, subversion server and it run a couple of VM). I setup this machine years ago and it has serve me well. But now that I have a WHS is kind of redundant. Not to mention is always on and it makes a lot of noise.

So I’ve been moving away each of its responsibilities one for one.

The file server is now my WHS. Nothing to change here except some network mappings.

I connected the printer to the WHS and install the drivers. No problems.

My code repositories are now hosted on the WHS machine. This was a little trickier but I managed to install the SVNSERVE service directly.

When I need to enable FTP connections I’ll do it on my machine. And the VM runs on my Quad-proc machine nicely when needed, especially now that I have 8 GB of RAM.

It seems that next week I’ll probably be upgrading revamping my main development machine (Vista x32 bit) to the new Windows 7 x64 operating system. Currently I have 4 GB installed, even though only 3.3 GB are really available because I’m running the 32 bit version of Windows.

I’d like to increase my RAM to 8 GB. Unfortunately my Dell VOSTRO 400 only has two memory slots (see note), so I’ll have to throw away the memory I have and buy two 4 GB modules. I’ve browsed the web sites of the usual local shops and to my surprise, none of them have 4 GB modules. All I can find are 4 GB kits which means 2 GB x 2.

I’ll have to find an online store which ships to Spain… any suggestion?

UPDATE: Ok, it’s true that 4GB modules are not easy to find but, fortunately, I was wrong and my VOSTRO 400 has 4 memory slots. I think I get confused because I recently upgrade memory on my DELL M65 and it only has 2 memory slots.

I’ve just upgraded my Dell M65 from 2GB of RAM to 4GB because I’m going to use some VM. As I wrote some posts ago, I’m running Windows 7 (64 bit) in this laptop, so I expected to see the whole 4GB of RAM available. However, it seems that this laptop maps some device’s memory into RAM and therefore only 3326MB of RAM are available.

I’m posting this because it can confuse some people. 3326 MB is almost the same amount of RAM (3325MB) that is available on my 4GB desktop computer which runs Vista 32bit. However, the Vista machine looses some RAM because is running a 32bit Windows and the laptop because the hardware is using some system RAM.

Microsoft has demoed a new device for their new  XBox 360 that removes any need for controllers. This device is able to track all your body, it has built-in speech recognition and more. The demo video is just awesome. I especially like the kun-fu game. If it’s as accurate as it seems, it could be a real step forward how we play games.

I also think that even some hardcore gamers won’t like the device, this add-on will achieve its goal; which is no other that to attract all those people who don’t play games.

Since I started working from home I tried to avoid the temptation of purchasing a console. I know it’s a time-sucker. However, I keep adding reasons to finally go ahead. Let’s see…

• It will precipitate the acquisition of a new TV. We’re still using an old (10 years) and heavy 32” Sony TV. It still looks superb which is a problem because I have no excuse to change it.
• A console will provide high-definition content for the new TV.
• Finally we’ll be able to see our photographs in the living room and not to force our family to stand up in front of my computer
• I need some game training. I have an 8 month old baby who is growing fast. I don’t want to be beaten by my own son in a few years. (That’s the secret reason why I’m doing push-ups too)
• I’ve shown this Project Natal to my wife and she really liked it.

I’ll keep adding good reasons in the months to come… Let’s see if I have enough by December

Due different reasons, my wife’s holidays this year are going to be split in different weeks. Last week was one of them. We rent a great villa in Benissa. We did it using the web Homelidays.com which, by the way,  I strongly recommend.

I packed all I need to move my office, which basically means my laptop and my mobile phone. As soon as we got there, I connected my laptop and tried to find a unsecured WI-FI spot. No luck! All our neighbors had properly set up networks (but I wanted to be sure . Then I tried my phone. It connected without problems and I was able to read my email at a reasonable speed. Then I relaxed!

That very same day, at night, I tried to check my email accounts again. I powered up my DELL M65 notebook and the screen didn’t lit up. This has happened to me several times using this laptop and usually it’s been fixed by powering down the laptop and turning it on again… but not this time!

Luckily, my wife brought her laptop too. I connected the mobile phone and… no drivers! Paradoxically Windows needed to connect to Internet to download the drivers to be able to connect to Internet. Oh, boy!

Next day I drove to Benissa and connected to Internet, using my wife’s laptop, while enjoining a great breakfast. I installed the drivers so I could connect to Internet using my phone again.

Later that day I check my email using my wife’s laptop and my phone. Everything was fine except that after a while the connection speed plummeted down dramatically. A client sent my a small PDF, only 500 Kb, and I was unable to download it. It seems that my phone company gives me some 3G juice but only for a fixed amount of data, then it falls back to GSM. Ok, I’m on holidays. Sure my client can wait until tomorrow. Next day I was able to download the PDF and answer his question, but then I received a phone call. One of my apps was not doing the automatic invoicing due an error. I knew exactly what the problem was, but without my source code and without a decent Internet connection I was screwed. I had no other choice but to drive back to my office (120 Km).

At least I was able to fix the problem with my laptop’s monitor. Dell support was excellent. It turned out that the VGA connector was not properly connected.

Note to self: Broadband Internet is a must when on vacation.

I use Picasa as my photo management software. It’s a great application (Note to self: I should write a review).

It’s been working flawlessly for years, but it lost all my albums and photos today. I opened it and to my surprise, it only showed one folder. I checked Tools –> Folder Manager and the right folders where selected.

It seems that Picasa’s internal database sometimes gets corrupted. The solution Google offers in their FAQ is to rebuild the database. These are the steps to do it on Windows:

1. First, uninstall Picasa.
   1. Click on the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
   2. Select All Programs.
   3. Select Picasa 3.
   4. Select Uninstall.
   5. In the confirmation window that opens, click the Uninstall button.
   6. Click the Yes button to remove your database.
2. Once you’ve successfully uninstalled, you can download and reinstall Picasa by visiting http://www.picasa.google.com.

However I use another solution. I located the Picasa settings files stored in two folders:

C:\Users\Jose\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2
C:\Users\Jose\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums

So I went to my Windows Home Server and opened the last backup. It mounted my backed up C:\ drive as a new drive and I simply copied those folders to my machine. Opened Picasa again and all my albums were there again. Cool!

So, if you happen to have a backup of your Windows user profile folder, you can easily solve this problem by  restoring the appropriate folders instead of uninstalling, installing and reconfiguring Picasa.