Monthly Archives: November 2003

Vegas!

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My wife surprised me with a long-weekend trip to Vegas. What a wonderful break. Now, I’m not one for all of the glitz and faux-rennaisance crap that they have here (I grew up in Europe – a fake Eiffel Tower just isn’t the same as the real thing), I must admit that I’m having a great time!

It’s great to have a few days away from work, where I’m too far away to deal with anything even if an emergency came up. We’ve been to see The Blue Man Group (my favourite) and Celine Dion (Cheryl’s favourite).

I managed to sneak in damn-near half a suitcase of technology to bring with me. High speed Internet access in the hotel room is becoming more common, but I was downright shocked to find a Wi-Fi acces point hidden underneath the desk in the room! So I’m blogging from the Zaurus wirelessly!

The one piece of technology that doesn’t work is my brand new camera phone! I’ve got voice service, but no net access, and no ability to blog pictures!

Free Samples

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I was doing some research on the Texas Instruments website the other day looking up some specifications on some serial interface chips for a project I’m working on. I happened to stumble upon the fact that the have a free sample program! I was a bit skeptical while I entered my order, but yesterday UPS showed up on my doorstep with a package from TI! I didn’t even have to pay any shipping, and it arrived 2 days after my order. Very impressive.

Moblogging

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A few days ago, I acquired a new cell phone from my local provider Telus. It’s the LG 5450 camera phone. Along with a camera phone comes moblogging. It took me a few days, but I’ve got the moblog working (note the pictures on the left of the main page). I’m using TextAmerica.com to host the pictures. They’ve been very helpful. I had an issue with the way that Telus formats their email message containing the image – they were very quick to modify their code to accept Telus postings.

Nerf Gun

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Today, we rolled out a new insurance sales module for our in-house POS/CRM system. The company decided to hold a little party for the IT department to celebrate the rollout. The coolest part was we got a Nerf gun! Needless to say, productivity in the department plummeted for the remainder of the day.

Toshiba Magnia SG20

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Yet another cool piece of hardware has made its way to my test bench. This time, it’s the Toshiba Magnia SG20. I would hazard a guess that Toshiba made way too many of these things, because everyone and his dog is selling them on Ebay.

What’s inside? Within 15 minutes of it arriving, I had it ripped apart to see what made it tick. Very impressive. This box is ideal for a small all-in-one server application. My original intention was to use it as a captive access point for some public-access Wi-Fi hotspots that a few friends and I want to set up (as an aside, check out the software that we’re thinking of using – NoCatNet). After ripping it apart, I’m thinking that it might work better as a mobile server for my truck.

I’ve tried doing some searching on the net for any links to people hacking this unit (there must be people hacking it – it’s just so… hackable!). All I’ve been able to come up with is a Latvian site with some nice pictures. A bit more digging, and I found a Yahoo group.

I found one tidbit of information somewhere (I can’t find the link at the moment) that mentions that ‘telnetuser’ and the admin password is used to telnet in to the box to get a command prompt. I’ll test that theory as soon as I’ve put it back together!