The three year maintenance contract on my current Dell expired, so it was time to get some new hardware. I spent some time looking in to a replacement Dell, only to find that everything comes with Vista now. I wasn't too keen to jump in to a new version 1.0 operating system that boasts that it's the most secure Microsoft operating system ever (right).
Then I discovered Parallels. I could run my proprietary Windows applications on the same desktop as all of my new Mac applications. Time to switch!
A couple of thousand dollars later, and I'm the proud owner of a black MacBook, along with the uber-cool bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Parallels has this cool feature called Transporter that allowed me to make a disk image of my existing laptop, and install it into the Parallels environment by replacing all the required drivers inside the image so that it will run inside of Parallels. I was skeptical at first, but several hours later, after transferring 50Gb of image from my Dell to my MacBook, I was ready to boot up the image. It works! No, seriously - it actually runs. I can run in a window, or full screen, or this incredible mode called coherence which allows the Windows applications to run seamlessly with the Mac applications without the Windows desktop. I can even see Mac bluetooth devices inside the virtual machine, so things like syncing my Windows Mobile smartphone still works.
Needless to say, I'm completely hooked. The Linux junkie in me loves the fact that a Unix command shell is just a button-press away. The corporate side of me loves the fact that I can run all of our proprietary applications. The creative side of me loves the fact that everything just works. I've now got MacOS, Windows and Xwindows applications all running seamlessly on the same desktop. I have a machine that actually goes to sleep when I close the lid - and more importantly, it wakes up quickly and successfully when I open the lid again.
If you've ever looked at a MacBook and wondered if it would ever work in your corporate Windows-only world, the answer is a resounding YES. Take the plunge. You'll be glad you did.
]]>After another morning wasted getting bounced around from department to department at Telus (at one point, a Telus employee gave me the number of 310-1010 as the 'short-cut' to the department I was looking for. That number actually directs me to Pizza Hut!) I finally got through to a Telus employee who was actually helpful. In fact, the most important piece of information I got was a phone number to completely bypass the IVR hell! The number is 866-468-3587. Write it down. Use it. It works! Tell everyone you know!
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Weeks ago, I had already checked the battery serial number against Dell's battery recall site. This battery wasn't recalled, so I thought I was safe. Time to call Dell. At 1:30 in the morning, I was shocked to get to a human in less than a minute - and a human in Canada no less! I explained what had just happened, and explained that I had already checked the battery on the recall site, and that it wasn't a recalled battery. He checked the warranty status of my machine, and told me that it was a year and a half old - well past the one year warranty that Dell places on batteries. He gave me some safety tips on how to store the battery ("Don't put it back in the machine", "store it in a plastic or metal container", "don't handle it excessively in case it leaks", etc). He then told me that Dell would send out a replacement battery, and once I got the replacement to package up this battery in the special bag supplied and ship it back to Dell. The interesting thing is I didn't give Dell the serial number of the battery! They just automatically replaced a smoking out-of-warranty non-recalled battery without any questions!
Lego Star Wars saved my life. If I hadn't stayed up way too late playing the game, I would have gone to bed not realizing I had a smouldering time bomb sitting on my wooden kitchen table. Dell replaced the battery without question. Does this mean that they're aware of other batteries having defects in them that aren't listed in the official recall? If so, isn't that a scary situation to be in? What happens if someone is injured by a non-recalled battery?
I called Dell back today to discuss the strangeness of the no-questions-asked battery replacement and whether they had a policy of replacing all batteries whether recalled or not. The helpful service rep passed me on to a supervisor, who advised me that there is no hidden policy about unlisted Sony batteries (although if it was hidden, I'm sure he wouldn't tell me about it, would he?). He did satate that Dell has a policy of replacing any component in any Dell product that exhibits a safety issue, even if the Dell product is out of warranty, for as long as Dell has those parts in stock. I re-confirmed his statement and asked him if it was okay to state that comment on my blog, which he confirmed.
So, there you have it. Either this battery failed for a reason completely unrelated to the recall, or Dell is not being completely honest with the extent of the problems. I guess only time will tell. At least I learned that if I have a part fail on an out-of-warranty Dell product, the failure had better affect the safety of the product!
The potential impact of this is chilling. I highly doubt that Echostar is going to want to shut it's customers off, so I suspect that we'll see some sort of licensing deal between Echostar and TiVo. Unfortunately, those costs will just be handed down to us customers, who already paid for a PVR that was more than a glorified Beta Test for the first nine months of it's existence.
The pin assignment appears to be as follows:
Looking at TxD with a scope shows that it starts at 0v, and after avout 3 seconds jumps up to 3.3v. It stays at 3.3v and doesn't appear to change at all. I hooked up a MX3232 (3.3v version of a MAX232) to convert the signals to RS232 levels.
Unfortunately, I've been unable to coax the serial port to life. I tried sending carriage returns at different baud rates. I've still got to try sending a break signal. Also, pin 4 might be some sort of CTS signal that might need to be asserted. Still lots to try!
As I was disassembling the unit and removing the power supply, I noticed a cable from the motherboard to the supply labelled 'Home Plug'. It's a 5-wire cable, with a color code very similar to USB. The cable terminated in what looks like some sort of matching transformer made by Delta Electronics. Looking at their website showed that the 9200 indeed has the hardware to communicate via the Homeplug protocol. Googling shows a press release coming out talking about the feature, promising the ability to distribute satellite radio throughout the house, and having receivers talk to each other and only one needing a telephone line.
After an initial flurry of press releases, I was unable to find anything recent about this 'feature'. It certainly appears that the receivers have the ability to talk to each other. Will Dish and Bell use this to enforce multiple receivers on one account having to be in the same physical building? It's interesting that neither the user manual nor the website mention anything about these receivers using your home wiring to talk to each other.
Determining whether Dish and Bell are actually using this feature yet will have to wait until I obtain some HomePlug hardware to see what's going on.
]]>My first thougth was "Where do you buy Monkey Chow??"
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I can't wait to see how this soap opera ends...
After attempting BIOS upgrades, BIOS downgrades, system partition re-creates, etc, I finally broke down and did a systematic line-by-line comparison of BIOS settings to see if there was anything going on. There's a BIOS setting labelled "Operating System". On the working machine, this was set to "Windows 2000" (I never bothered changing the setting from when I acquired the machine). On the broken machine, it was set to "Other". I have no idea what deep underlying changes this setting makes, but for Fedora Core 5 on a Compaq DL360, it needs to be set to "Windows 2000". Crazy.
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I am a bit suspicious that they're going to post the same code as posted on the Dish site, because I believe that since the original Dish posting, there has been additional work performed on GPL'd areas, such as the SATA drivers. Once released, I'll do a diff to see if it's indeed the same code base. The best way to tell if Dish and Bell are being above board is to extract an image from the 9200 and compare strings with the released source code to see if there are any obvious differences.
After quite a bit of searching, I found a posting at the Fedora Forum describing the fix. The trick is to boot the installer with:
linux noprobe noapic noapci
Once the installer fails to find the hard drive, select 'cpqarray' and 'sym53c8xx' drivers. After that, the install will complete successfully. All credit to this fix goes to 'Mesu' from Fedora Forums.