Newt3

Busy time...

It’s unbelievable how busy we are this year. The contract I’ve  been working since last July ended February 9th. On the 15th we hooked up our 5th wheel RV and headed to Florida arriving in Winter Haven, February 24th. We had a great reunion with all our friends. On March 28th we left Winter Haven for Cedar Key. FL for a 4 day visit. Stayed in a small RV resort and enjoyed the small town of Cedar Key. Took a boat tour or all the nearby islands and collected a mess of sea shell’s. Cedar Key is one of the oldest towns in FL and its claim to fame are its cedar pencils. The cedar trees are all gone along with the pencil business. Spent 4 days at Cedar Key. From there we traveled to Pensacola FL where we spent a week seeing the sights. Spent a day at the beach, swam in the gulf waters... very warm, and visited the National Naval Air Museum. What a wonderful museum, spent the whole day there and still did not see it all. This is defiantly a place we will come back and visit. From Pensacola we headed back to Arizona arriving back at our house April 14th. Sandy left for a 10 day trip to Hawaii on the April 19th. While she was away her mom had a fall. She was in the hospital for 3 days then a care center for three weeks. Which is were we spend much of our time also. All is well and she is now home. To my surprise, I start work again, this time a permanent position as a Programmer Analyst. Our plans to travel north this summer are now on hold... we still plan on visiting Eagle Lake CA in August for two weeks.

 

Another year...

Tomorrow is the last day of 2011. Now that I am working again the time really fly's. As I reflect back its difficult to believe that my last post was back in August.  So much has happened.

 

We spent the Thanksgiving weekend with Bill & Bev at the Crazy Horse RV Resort on Lake Havasu. Had a wonderful time. It was our first trip to Lake Havasu. Bev's decorations for Thanksgiving were spectacular... I baked the turkey. Once again we had way to much food. We eat three days on the leftovers and still had throw aways.

 

In December, while driving home some idiot lost control of his vehicle and smashed into our new truck. He did $5000 worth of damages. Repairs restored the truck back to its original condition... well almost, we now have an accident on the history of the vehicle and will see a loss of value come trade in time. We still need to settle with the other drivers insurance company. I intent to recover a fair loss-of-value payment.

We had planned to spend NewYears in Quartzite, AZ but repair didn't complete on time so instead we spend a wild NewYears night at home.

 

Only one resolution for the new year, and that is to complete the current work contract  and get back on the road RVing.

DTS with SQL Server Managment Studio 2008 r2...

It took awhile but i finally got the DTS 2000 Package Designer to work under Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2008r.

Its a two step process.

First download and install SQLServer2005_BC.msi and SQLServer2005_DTS.msi 

Second revise the systems path file so that C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Bin\; is defined before C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Bin\; 

That's it. You should now be able to view and edit DTS packages.

Refer to social.msdn.microsoft.com/forum/en-US/sqlintegrationservices/thread/bcae9086-4345-4c59-8dd8-9ddeca4edc45/ for additional details.

Disable Snow Leopard Dashboard...

To disable the Dashboard on a Mac running Snow Leopard just execute the following line in a command window.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock

and to re-enable it just dexecute this line in a command window.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO && killall Dock

Dashboard is a resource hog, so if like me you don't use it you can now get it out of your way. Credit goes to jonathans blog for the execution code. 

 

PHP Client - WCF Service

I spent the last couple of days working with PHP 5 to connect to a WCF service hosted on a remote server. Its like a proof of concept... After many failed attempts at getting a PHP client to connect it happened. I got the connection and figured out how to pass a parameter to WCF and get a return value. In the process I spent a good bit of time Googling for answers. 

In all my Googling, I never found any meaningful help. It was only through gleaning key pieces of information  across multiple searches that I was able to get PHP to WCF to work. I really need to publish a paper on this subject, and provide some simple code to demonstrate what works. Thats for the future... in the interim here is the PHP code that works on all but my site host's server.

<?php 

    echo "start -> ";

    $wsdl = "http://newt3services.com/Service1.svc?wsdl";

    echo " set wsdl var -> ";

    $soapclient = new SoapClient($wsdl);echo " created soapclient ->";

    echo $soapclient->GetData(array("value" => "5"))->GetDataResult;

    echo " end ";

?>

Click here to execute the code and get the correct result: execute php

Click here to execute the code and get the incorrect result:execute php

No iPhone...

I didn't get an iPhone. Instead I went all out with the Motorola Atrix. All out in that I purchased the phone with no AT&T contract and ported my Verizon number to it. The intent is to position myself for the iPhone 5 which is rumored to be out later this year. Actually it will be out around the time AT&T is to release their 4G system. Interesting coincidence.

Going with the Atrix met my principle goal of having more then one data system available as we travel around the country.

 

HTC Inspire and Motorola Atrix Comparative Review...

Verizon data service was very unreliable during our winter RT travels this past winter. From Texas to Florida, when we had service it was dirt slow on both the MiFi, and iPhone and Samsung Fascinate operating in wireless tethering mode. When we made this same trip a couple of years ago service was great. Fellow RV travelers with  AT&T service had a much better experience. Verizon phone service was OK with the exception of wester Texas. Its just data thats the issue. As both my wife and I are constantly on line, poor data service is a big problem.

So, prior to our next trip I intend on acquiring a non Verizon smart phone with the capability of providing a mobile hotspot for at least 5 devices. This device will be my phone so it must meet my needs as I live on my phone.

To this end I selected the HTC Inspire and Motorola Atrix from AT&T as potential candidates. Both are 4g phones, which will be nice when AT&T decides to role out their 4g system.

In comparing the two phones I discovered:

1. The 5 megapixal camera on the Atrix produced better pictures then the 8 megapixal camera in the Inspire.

2. The Atrix produced better movies then Inspire. The Inspire movie had a purple hue where the Atrix more closely reproduced the action color.

3. The Atrix phone audio is loud and clear where the Inspire was a little distorted.

4. The Inspire had a much bigger screen. However, it had a lower resolution.

5. The Inspire had HTC Sense which is far superior to the Atrix Motoblure.

6. Both devices produced very good WiFi Hotspots.

7. AT&T loaded ton's of blot-ware on both devices and locked each down where you can only install application from the Google app store.

Tomorrow I am returning both phones to AT&T. Of the two I thought the Motorola Atrix was the best. However, AT&T and Motorola have chosen to screw up both phones with unnecessary lockdowns and meaningless blot-ware.

I previously tried out the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S 4g phone. It's WiFi Hotspot services in Phoenix with 4g service was super fast. Actually connected 3 computers running downloaded video with no problem. The phones audio was an issue. It took 14 tries to get an almost acceptable voice mail message recorded in a quite room.

Looks like the only real option is to get a AT&T iPhone.

 

Android users are screwed...

The android market space is under attack. An undetermined number of its applications have been modified by hackers to capture unsuspecting users personal data for unknown nefarious purpose. So where is Google or the phone carriers? Who has taken the lead to address this problem? I haven't heard one word from anyone on weather or not my phone is infected. Nothing about how to check for infected or a fix.

With a potentially infected phone, do you want to login to your bank, credit card, facebook, or any accounts. Who now knows all your contacts or monitors your messaging? Who has invaded your phone life?

I for one have turned my android phone off, its just to risky.

The android community is just screwed... so where is Google?

Florida 2010 - 2011; Retirement is tough...

Left Home December 1st with our little R-Pod and Toyota 4Runner for a two month excursion accross country to Florida. Our itent was spend Christmas at Disney World, then make a quick trip down to Key West and then home by February 1st.

Well it hasen't worked out that way. We did make a really great trip from Phoenix to Florida, stopping along the way and meeting some really wonderful fellow RV people. However, once in Florida we traded our 18' R-Pod in for a 36' Keystone Montanna 5th wheel with 3 expansions To tow this monster we traded the 4Runner in for a 2011 Chevrolet 2500 HD, Diesel truck. We are now full fledged members of the traveling RV community. It was never our intent to make the traded on this trip. It just happened that we stopped and looked a the Montanna and recognized that  we truly loved this rig and the RV life.

I have never towed a big rig like our Monatanna, and our first trip was to Key West with a stop in Fort Lauderdale. The first leg of our journy was really uneventful as most of the time we were on 4 lane roads. The second leg was different. I chose the seniec route through Miame to route 1 to Key West. The weather was overcast with spots of heavy rain, and wind.  Route 1 is a beautiful drive on a mostly single lane road where your average speed is like 45 mph. Needless to say its a long 130 miles. But once again the tow was easy. 

We are back in central Florida till the end of February when it off to Kissimmee, Florida for a week to meet up with the kids and grand kids. We are taking the kids to Disney World for a couple of days. From there we plan to head back to Phoenix... well thats the plan. Who knows we may be home by April or ???

Retirement is tough, but you know someone has to make the sacrafice. Hope to blog more about our experiences and the wonderful friends we have made along the way.

Here is Sandy with the two Bee's we played bingo with every Tuesday night. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here we are at the souther most point in the Continental US...

iPhone 4 User Experience Update...

Moving back to the iPhone from android continues to be a great experience. For me it does everything I want effortlessly. Even the AT&T service seems to have improved. There people seem to be friendlier and are very helpful. Most importantly I no longer have dropped calls. 

Holding the phone where it is totally enclose by the hand does degrade the signal strength. I have tested this in several locals and find it only happens where the AT&T signal is down to one or two bars. With my speck protective case installed I can't reproduce the problem. I'm sure all the tech pundit's will continue to rail about this issue but really it's a non issue for real people. Yes pundit's are nor real people but a collection of talking heads spouting anything that will get the noticed. And yes I am referring to you Molly Wood. 
The iPhone camera is fantastic. It is now my only camera. Our trip the month of August was solely record with the iPhone. Actually sold my Canon digital SLR on eBay. For me the camera in the iPhone meets all my needs.

One real reservation about moving to the iPhone was giving up Google navigation. Turns out that the AT&T navigation system really works great. It's not free. However I actually like it better then the Google system. But if it were free I would really love it. For me the $10 per month fee is worth it, as I use it almost daily to navigate around my area (Phoenix, AZ).