For Christmas this year, the big family gift was a new Samsung PN58B860 58" Plasma TV. Our old TV worked fine, but with the baby on the way I we wanted try and reclaim some living room space—much of which was being taken up by our old Mitsubishi 55" rear projection TV.

We absolutely love the picture, but from day one we started running into a problem with the TV in which it would just randomly power off and then immediately back on. I went through a battery of tests trying to determine if it was a power issue, cable issue, etc. I tried replacing the HDMI cable, hooking the TV up directly to the cable, changing outlets, etc. Nothing I did resolved the issue. Since the problem was random (on average, probably happened once an hour, but we might go a couple of hours with no issues or it might happen several times within a few minutes.) It didn't matter what we were watching—could be cable TV, a DVD, playing XBOX, etc. The TV would just turn off and then turn right back on.

After talking to Samsung and HH Gregg everyone seemed to think it was the power supply on the TV and since the TV was less than a week old, HH Gregg delivered a replacement TV. However, the new TV was having the same problem. So, once again I started going through my battery of tests trying to figure out what was wrong.

After testing tons of things, I finally found the root case—the Internet connection.

Newer TVs are now coming with Internet connections. Being the tech guy I am, I immediately hooked my TV up to the Internet so I could get firmware updates, view Flickr photos, etc. To get up and running quickly, I had plugged my TV into the wireless bridge I was using for my XBOX 360—which I had the IP configured as the DMZ in my firewall (which I had done to resolve some issues with online play.)

Since now the TV was acting as a DMZ, all unrecognized traffic was being routed to the TV. I suspect what was happening is various ping and exploit attacks on my IP address was causing problems with the TV, so the TV would just shut down and power up again. I just never thought that the Internet connection would be the root casue of the TV rebooting.

Anyway, if you have a Samsung TV that's recycling the power, try unplugging your Internet connection and see if that improves the situation. Also, never run a device as a DMZ unless you know what you're doing!

Ever since upgrading to Windows Vista, I've had a probably with a program that I run infrequently where I'd get a message of "The Publisher Could Not Be Verified" and have to click on a box to verify I want to run the program. Since I don't use the application very frequently, the annoyance was minor.

Today I found myself needing to frequently re-load the application, so this message became really annoying. Windows Vista has an "Unblock" function in the file properties (right-click on the file from Windows Explorer and select "Properties"—it's on the general tab,) but this was not working for me.

I could click the "Unblock" button and apply the change, but the change wouldn't ever take. Since this program is my Program Files (x86) folder, I suspected this was the culprit. While I tried a few things to try to make the change as an admin (such as changing the file attributes—which forces you to grant admin privileges) the thing that end up working for me was to copy the files to another folder (like the desktop) go through the "Unblock" procedure again and then copy the files back to it's sub-folder in the Program Files (x86) folder. This seemed to do the trick.

So, while I'm sure there's a better way to get this to work, if you're getting the message "The Publisher Could Not Be Verified" every time you try to run a program and just using the "Unblock" function doesn't work, try moving the file to a folder that doesn't need administration privileges to modify the file.

I've been fighting a bit of a battle with my development server. When I originally set up the box, I created the C: partition with a relatively small size based on some performance guidelines I had read. While I had plenty of space when I built the server, the ever growing Windows folder has eventually eaten up all the disc space. The biggest culprit of this being the C:\Windows\installer folder—which gets larger each time Windows does an update.

Today I finally had no choice but to do something. There aren't a lot of choices when a system drive is running out of space, you basically can:

• Remove unused files—been there, done that; nothing else to remove
• Backup and reformat—which is way too big of pain to do
• Use a tool to resize the partition (which only works if your drive has been partitioned into multiple logic drives)
• Move files to a different drive and create a symbolic link (junction) to the folders

I thought about going the resizing route, but there's some risk involved and I wanted to minimize the time I was working on this. So I decided to go the junction route.

Since the C:\Windows\installer folder was without a doubt the folder eating up the majority of disk space for me, I decided to move this folder to another drive. However, there are some caveats of moving the C:\Windows\installer folder where if you don't get the permissions just right, then Windows will delete the junction and the folder it points to—where leaves you screwed.

Fortunately for all of us, Simon Bailey has written a nice batch file you can use to move C:\Windows\installer folder for you. If you're not interested in the batch file, you can also read his detailed blog post on the steps for freeing up space on your C: drive.

Now that I've freed up gigabytes of data from my C: drive, my server is happy again—which makes me happy.

I've recently migrated two of my PCs to Vista. I was trying to wait until Windows 7, but I had to physically replace the boxes so my hand was forced into (yeah, I could have downgraded, but I figured I should actually work with Vista a bit before moving to Windows 7 if for no other reason that to appreciate it more.)

Anyway, one of the problems I've had was logging into the boxes using the administrative shares. Well this is disabled by default (and for good reason,) I needed a way to access via the shares and came across this article from Microsoft:

Error message when you try to access an administrative share on a Windows Vista-based computer from another Windows Vista-based computer that is a member of a workgroup: "Logon unsuccessful: Windows is unable to log you on"

This has allowed me to access my box from Windows XP and my other Vista boxes when I log in w/admin credentials—which is exactly what I wanted to do. While this isn't a recommended thing to enable, it seems you can toggle it off/on without rebooting—which is nice.

Over the last few days I've been setting up a new laptop and got Thunderbird up and running (which I'm now going to try to use exclusively.) I've been using Thunderbird on my laptop for work related e-mails for 4 or 5 years now. One of the issues I've always had with it was handling TNEF encoded messages (aka "winmail.dat") that Outlook insists on sending.

Now this is really a problem with Outlook in that it doesn't always honor the "HTML" format and sometime insists on sending e-mail in Outlook's native format. If you use Outlook, you have no problems. However, every other client will just get the dreaded "winmail.dat" file as an attachment.

In the past I've just used program (like Winmail Reader) to open the winmail.dat file and view the RTF and attachments. However, I decided to search the Thunderbird Add-ons page to see if anyone had developed a better solution and thankfully Aron Rubin has developed the wonderful LookOut add-on.

LookOut automatically converts the winmail.dat into it's associated attachments and creates a RTF file that you can double-click on to open in Word (or your associated RTF application.) This solution works really well, because I know longer have to open the winmail.dat in an external program just to see the attachments.

So kudos to Aron Rubin for this excellent add-on!

While my current monthly download usage is pretty small, TimeWarner's decision to implement download caps really irritates me. They want to implement caps of 1 GB, 10GBs, 20GBs, 40GBS and 100GBs based on different tiered packages and then charge you overages for every GB over your limit (with the a $75 cap of overage charges.)

They've been facing a backlash about this decision and rightfully so in my opinion.

As I stated earlier, my current download usage isn't very high, but one of the immerging Internet markets in downloadable movie rentals. When the XBOX360 introduced it's Netflix interface for watching streaming movies online, I thought that was a huge jump forward in downloadable movies. Well the Netfix streaming library is still too sparse and doesn't include enough new movies, that will change over time. I certainly see a time in the near future where you'll be able to rent movies purely online.

This is why I'm so irritated with download caps. We're seeing more an more Internet based services succeeding. We're seeing more SaaS applications having success, streaming video taking off and of course iTunes has seen great success. All of these services share one thing in common—they require downloading content to use the services.

If TimeWarner really needs a way to help recover costs, don't limit how much I can download, limit how fast I can download it. TimeWarner has kept bumping up the bandwidth transfer rates, but most people don't need 6Mbps or 8Mbps sustained xfer speeds. I'd much rather see them keep the tiered xfer rate pricing and keep the uncapped download speeds. Let the people who need the higher transfer rates (because their transferring tons of data simultaneously—which is where the real problem lies anyway) and let the rest of us just download the data we need without having to worry about our download usage.

This really makes me hope Verizon bring FiOS to Central Ohio sooner, rather than later. Verizon currently has no plans to cap their download usage and the xfer rates are already much higher than TW. If TW does implement download restrictions, that will be the straw that broke the camels back.

Not only will they lose me as a RoadRunner customer, they'll probably lose me as a Cable subscriber as well.

I ran across the ScreenCastle service the other day and wanted to blog about it. ScreenCastle offers a free Java-based screencast recording solution. What separates it from other solutions is there's no installation required—other than accepting the Java cert when the applet loads.

It's definitely not as feature rich as Camtasia or Jing, but it will serve the most basic purposes for recording.

Where it really shines is as a tool for debugging a customer's problem. They don't need any other software installed, they just go to the ScreenCastle website and click on the big red button and record away. When their done recording, the video gets pushed to the ScreenCastle server and then provides the user with links, embed code, etc—which they can then e-mail to you.

The service is offered by Skoffer—who has published some information on their limited API. They show some examples on how you can integrate the service into a Wiki or Blogging service (such as WordPress.)

I'd love it if they opened up the API a little more, so that you could potentially push the content to private servers (or at least be able to download a published file and then remove it from their servers.)

Anyway, this is a great tool if you want to be able to have a customer record what they're doing on the screen and send you a video of it.

One thing that's always bothered me about Firefox, is the lack of the ability to customize the icons in the status bar. As you add various plug-ins, the order of icons in the status bar can change and isn't always ideal. Plus, when you have multiple installs of Firefox on multiple boxes, I find it disrupts my workflow when icons are in a different spot for each browser (even with the exact same plug-ins installed.) So, I decided I finally wanted to re-arrange the order of my icons and get things working in a fashion that suited me better.

There are two main ways to change the order: 1) via a manual editing or 2) via another add-on.

You can manually re-arrange the order of the icons by editing the extensions.ini file located in your personal profile directory in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{profile}. What you need to do is change the order and position of the entries in the [ExtensionDirs] section of the INI file. While this works, it's a bit of a pain since the entries aren't easy to decipher (since values don't match up to a user friendly label.)

This led me to a find an add-on to simplify the task. The add-on I found was the Organize Status Bar v0.6.2 add-on. Using this plug-in gives you a very visual way of organizing your status bar. You can completely order things in any manor you want. Here's a screenshot of the add-on in action:

What I like about the add-on is that it highlights in yellow the currently selected icon and also has options to hide or show an icon if you don't want it to show up in the status bar. This add-on does exactly what I needed—I just wish the functionality was native to Firefox like the organizing toolbar feature.

[UPDATED: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 8:41:22 AM]

I just noticed that Google appears to have added some new features to the results page. The new features are buttons for "Promote", "Remove" and "Comment".

The "Promote" feature appears to be a way to give your "thumbs up" to content—which I'm sure will affect the rating of a page and thus affecting SEO. The "Remove" feature appears to be the way to report a bad link (like a Black Hat attempt, or just some general spam page.) Lastly, the "Comment" feature appears to be a way to add a comment about a page.

This new feature is part of Google's new SearchWiki. I think they must be selectively releasing this functionality, because I'm not seeing it every browser on my machine—so it's either cookie-based or browser-based.

UPDATE:

It appears all you need to do is log in to Google in order to see the SearchWiki features. Logging out will turn the feature off.

Here's a video that talks more about SearchWiki:

Windows 7 is introducing a new feature called "Aero Shake." The concept is you simply drag and "shake" a window's title bar and all background windows will either be minimized or restored (based on their current status.) Here's a YouTube video of the feature in action:

While this feature looks cool, I'm wonder how useful it really will be and how intuitive it will be to the user. Since I tend to run most windows maximized, I'm not sure if this will provide much value to me.

Do you see this as be a good or bad UI design pattern?

I can't even tell you how much my yellow Lab would love this toy. If we set this up in our house, I'd never see her again.

It's pretty cool to see this kind of robotics in motion. This is definitely something you want to watch all the way through. The highlights for me were watching it regain it's balance after being shoved and after slipping on ice. It's also pretty cool to watch it run and jump. It's pretty spooky just how close it looks like a quadpedal creature.

Probably the biggest problem I've had with Microsoft Outlook over the last decade is with my Outlook Profile getting slightly corrupted, preventing me from closing open "archive" PST files. When you attempt to close the PST, you'll see the following message:

 
Error: The operation failed. An object could not be found.

This is actually caused by a Registry corruption to the Outlook profile that is in use. Microsoft recommends creating a new profile, but that makes you re-create all your E-mail Accounts and you lose your rules, autocomplete addresses, etc. You can back up your rules, but re-creating a profile is a bit of a pain if you have a complex Outlook configuration.

Today I ran into this problem again. I was migrating all my archived "Deleted Items" for 2007 to a new PST so I could permanently archive the file. After moving all the files, I wanted to compress my archived "Deleted Items" folder but couldn't because I was getting this error message.

Since I really didn't want to re-create my profile, I went out searching for a tool that might be able to clean up my profile for me. Fortunately after a few minutes of Googling, I came across CodeTwo PST Ghostbuster.

This program worked like a charm to clean up my profile. You'll want to use the "Backup" feature before you attempt deleting a PST—just to make sure you can restore things if something goes awry.

If I could make an improvement to the program, it would be for the list of PST files to delete to be a select box of attached PST files instead of having to type the name of the PST folder into the text box. However, the program worked as advertised and saved me lots of time since I didn't have to migrate to a new profile.

I've been using Windows Live Writer for posting all my blogs. Overall it's a terrific program. It's got a very simple, easy to use interface and it drastically eases the process of blogging.

However, the one complaint I've had with the program is there's no easy way to "add" common HTML tags that you commonly use to the interface. I use the <samp> tag quite frequently when showing inline sample code and for variable names (although I suppose I should use the <var> tag instead.) To use these tags I've had to drop to the HTML Code view and manually add the tags. This is a pain to do—especially on longer posts where I need to add the tag frequently.

To solve my dilemma, I've been periodically searching for a Live Writer Plug-in that might allow me to add some custom HTML snippets. Well today I just happened to stumble on a great little plug-in called Dynamic Template Plugin for Windows Live Writer.

You can use this plug-in for doing something as inserting static text or for modifying the selected text. The real power comes from the fact that the plug-in allows you to use C# code snippets. You can even have the template prompt you for input.

To get you started, here are a couple of templates I just wrote to help me out with a few tasks: