Listened to net@night 161: Felicia Day

• Netcast
• Introduced me to Felicia Day, who appears on many lists for hottest geek girls (e.g. The Top 10 Girls Geeks Love).  She apparently was on Buffy.  
• Funny videos (Game On, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar) starring members of The Guild, a comedy web series
• Which led me to watch Episode 1 of The Guild which was quite funny.  Will watch another episode when I have time
• From desktop publishing to YouTube, computers and digitization has polluted the world with paper (by users that didn't know how to use computers properly) but more recently, also put into the hands of people the power to express themselves and share/broadcast professional productions out of their basements, home offices, and backyards

Listened to Windows Weekly 166: Revenge Of The White Icons

• Netcast
• Windows Phone 7 integrates your various accounts to services, e.g. your Flickr photos, Facebook photos, etc. all live together.  Contrast this with the need for a separate Flickr app, separate Facebook app, etc.  that you start up and exit, start up and exit.
• This drive in the marketplace to have apps for everything is a throwback to when we had desktop apps for everything rather than using online services.  That is, the pre-Internet age.  E.g. CIBC now offers a Blackberry app for online banking--why?  Why not have a web site that is optimized for smaller screen devices so all mobile devices can use the web site.  Google seems to be able to design decent mobile device-optimized web sites (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.) so why can't other organizations?  Native apps seem better suited for those applications taking advantage of or accessing the specific hardware of the device, or intended for offline use/don't need constant internet access to function adequately

Listened to This Week In Google 52: Android Goes To War

• Netcast
• Users of social networking websites should be given a clear choice of what they make public and what stays private (by default)
• However, there are benefits to making things public, e.g. your real-time location may give you coupons to a bakery you are in.  Also, people may share things with you they might not otherwise do, by knowing what you've made public--mutual benefit because of openness 
• The problem is when some social networking websites prevent access to data (via APIs) that people have already indicated as public.  This data then cannot be mined by other organizations or analyzed for societal benefit
• With data showing that more Android phone are being activated per month than iPhones, and the number of Android apps becoming available, iPhones and their apps may be relegated to a niche market, like computers with Mac OS, in the near future.  The $99 USD to become a iPhone developer and the need to do development on a Mac hampers innovation (as some of the brightest developers may simply choose not to be limited by Apple)

Listened to TWiT 256: The Shirtless Page Turn netcast

• Netcast
• Innovation happening in smartphones that happened earlier with PCs, then Internet
• Consumers seem to want what is intuitive (touch) rather than what is fast (keyboard or mouse or other hardware)
• Google Search has to overcome flotsam created by search engine optimization, scraper sites, associated content (created by companies such as Demand Media)
• Funny Bing commercial 
• algorithms can be "gained"
• Facebook has real people (your "friends", people in your network) providing recommendations/Likes (aka search results).  These are the "curators"
• but how large is your circle of "friends" and how diverse are they?  Because people like people like them, what is truly new that you would learn from them?
• other social bookmarking services such as Delicious may be the answer

Restoring Windows Mobile phone

After resetting, need to restore applications and data.  My steps, approximately: 

1. Install programs from CAB files copied from computer to Storage Card
2. Set-up wireless connections 
3. Don't have MyPhone CAB, go to mp.windowsphone.com to download Marketplace bootstrapper.  Using Marketplace, install MyPhone
4. Restore data from MyPhone server.  Do NOT synchronize Contacts or Calendar
5. Configure ActiveSync with m.google.com to synchronize to Gmail Contacts
6. Use SyncMyCal Mobile to sync with my multiple Google Calendars
7. Customize which applications are launched by buttons
8. Speed Dial settings
9. Miscellaneous settings:  Display clock on title bar, Set phone to Vibrate and Ring

Re-setting Windows Mobile device

In an attempt to draw out the life of my Windows Mobile device bought in Sept 2007, I will be resetting the device (Start > Settings > System tab > Clear Storage). This seems to have fixed some stability issues in the past and I hope it will fix my recent problems with extremely short battery life, the phone not answering calls on occasion, and parts of the physical keyboard not responding well.  Not sure if Windows Mobile has registry problems like older versions of Windows.  Prior to resetting the phone to manufacturer defaults, for myself, I need to do these steps to back up the data:

• Back-up data on device
• Sync to m.google.com and then to computer using ActiveSync 
• Sync to myphone.microsoft.com using My Phone app  
• verify latest data in destinations

• In MS Outlook, save Contacts to .pst file.
• Calendar is read-only in Google Calendar ... no need to back-up
• Note programs installed on device, for later re-install  

ATI graphics card, dual screens, and Ubuntu

For some reason, whenever I have to re-start my Ubunutu 9.10 machine, which is very seldom, I have to cross my fingers and hope that I don't have any strange display issues.  Just this past weekend, there seems to have been a power outage at work and when I tried to boot into Ubuntu, I saw a blank screen rather than the login screen.

After booting into Windows XP without issue, I eventually choose to boot into "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic" rather than the current default "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-20-generic".  I received a warning about my graphics configuration but was able to log in.  My display was duplicated on both monitors.

When starting ATI Catalyst Control Center, I received a message similar to "There was a problem initializing Catalyst Control Center Linux edition. It could be caused by the following. No ATI graphics driver is installed, or the ATI driver is not functioning properly. Please install the ATI driver appropriate for you ATI hardware, or configure using aticonfig."

There was further messing around to fix the problem which I think can be filtered into the following:

1. Use the lspci command to determine the ATI hardware you are using so that you can download the appropriate driver.  You also may just need to re-install the driver that you already have!  The current driver file for my hardware is ati-driver-installer-10-4-x86.x86_64.run
2. Attempt to run ATI Catalyst Control Center from the menus
3. If unsuccessful, run sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=left
4. Output should be similar to:
   
   

   Found fglrx primary device section
   Found fglrx secondary device section
   Using /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   Saved back-up to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.fglrx-6 

5. Reboot.  Attempt to run ATI Catalyst Control Center to refine settings. 

Hopefully this doesn't happen again for awhile.  If it does, I'll update this post as appropriate ...

Follow-up to this:  Upgraded computer to Ubuntu 10.10 and had to fuss with the dual monitors again as I was either getting mirrored screens or blank screens.  Steps this time:

1. With both monitors connected to computer, run ATI driver (ati-driver-installer-10-10-x86.x86_64.run).  My graphics card is a ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3470
2. Execute sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=left
3. Reboot, but have only one monitor connected until after login into Ubuntu
4. Reconnect other monitor
5. Go to ATI Catalyst Control Center (Administrative) and set up Multi-Display.  Without reboot, the dual monitor (non-mirrored) should be working!