I have been an iPhone user since the first day of it’s release in 2007. When Apple released the 3G model, and my town was stuck in EDGE misery, I patiently waited for AT&T to upgrade our area to 3G, and eventually, they did. Since that time, their network has slowly improved to a point where my phone calls don’t completely suck.

After seeing the Gizmodo and Engadget articles showcasing the new iPhone 4, I was happy to see another round of worthy improvements to my favorite phone. At the same time, I have been watching the Android software mature, and see it coming to a place where mainstream adoption is growing, and giving Apple needed competition.

When AT&T announced their new rate plans, limiting to users to 2GB per month, including charging an additional $20/mo to allow tethering, I was terribly disappointed. So much, that I decided to look at Android phones on other carriers. This search led me to the HTC Evo on Sprint. This new flagship phone for Android is rich with features. A 1Ghz snapdragon processor, Android 2.1 with HTC Sense, an 8MP Camera and a basic camera on the front. It records 720P HD video, and uses a nice 4.3 inch touchscreen that makes typing very easy.

The moment I picked up the phone, I was impressed. The screen alone made the device a pleasure to use. My first day at work, I used the phone to stream Pandora for about 30 minutes, run Meebo chat in the background, and occasionally check email. Three hours later, I noticed my battery was at 50%.

At this point, the love story began to fall apart. Over the next two hours, the battery went from 50% to 20%, and by the sixth hour of the day, it gave me a warning to plug in. 10 minutes later, the phone was dead. This is not what I want from a phone half way through a day.

After a brief amount of research, it became obvious that I was being overrun by multitasking. You know, that thing Apple has been avoiding for so long. It turns out that you can’t leave programs like Meebo running long in the background without killing your phone. I downloaded the advanced task killer, which helped ensure other things were kept in check.

After a few days, even with the task killer running, the battery was still disappointing. I came to the realization that while the features are great on paper, the reality is that you can’t actually use many of them, unless you keep a charger nearby. I don’t have such a luxury on many days.

For me, this battery issue is a total deal breaker. What a disappointment. With a better battery life, this phone would really give the new iPhone a run for its money. On top of the battery issue, I noticed a couple things with the camera. First, the 720p recording is basically useless in indoor light. While they advertise 25fps, that only happens in places with a LOT of light, like direct sunlight. At night, under my living room lighting, I got 9fps, which is pretty terrible. Additionally, I found that the camera software would often crash on me.

I hear that things might be better when Google releases Android 2.2. Unfortunately, I am not interested in signing a two year contract on that hope.

Recently, I had a discussion with an IT team, struggling with managing over 100 desktops.  Currently, they don’t use any centralized directory for authentication and access.  While it surprised me, they had some reasons why.

In the discussion, I recommended moving in this direction.  One of their hurdles is that they manage a multi-platform desktop environment.  I decided to look at two different scenarios, and do some preliminary tests:

• Connecting Mac and Windows clients to an OS X Open Directory
• Connecting Mac and Winows clients to a Windows 2008 Active Directory

My focus was on cross-platform management, Windows to Open Directory, or OS X to Active Directory. After a brief amount of research, it became clear that the first scenario is not an option right now, as Apple’s Domain setup doesn’t support Windows 7 clients.  The second scenario, however, does support both platforms.  There are a few minor issues to be aware of.

Here is the basic setup process I went through for connecting OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) clients to Active Directory (Windows 2008 R2):

Go to System/Library/CoreServices, and click Directory Utility:

Enter your domain name (forest name is the same in this instance), and create a Computer ID (call it what you want).  Click on the “Create mobile account at login”.  This basically caches Active Directory credentials locally, so if the user takes their machine somewhere outside of the network, they can still login.

Click “Administrative”, and enter a preferred domain server.  This is not necessary, because it can search for domain controllers at login, but this improves speed.  You can also decide which Active Directory users or groups can have admin access on the machine.

Click “Bind” (These image show “unbind” because I already did it).  It will ask for domain admin credentials, which I entered, and this machine became part of Active Directory.  From this point on, any Active Directory user can login to this machine (No need to create local accounts).

From here, I decided to go one step further, and auto-mount the user home folder from the server.  This can be done for any network share.

I created an automator application, that runs a shell script that looks like this:

It pulls the $USER information from the system, and is whichever user is logged in, in this case Shannon. I named the Automator application “Mount!”, and stored it in my documents folder.

I added this to my login through the login options section of Accounts (although, if you want to do it for all users, there is another place we would put this application).

Now, whenever this user logs into this machine, using the Active Directory account, it auto mounts the network folder as well.

Some things that are important to note:

• When setting up the AD Binding, choose create mobile account at login.  This basically caches permissions, and creates a local home folder, allowing machine logins when not on the AD network.
• While I run my networks DNS i provided at the gateway, I forward all DNS requests about this internal domain to the domain controller.  I did this due to the unique DNS setup Windows does for it’s AD domain.  For me, this solved issues related to the “Network Account Server” showing unavailable in the login Preference Pane.

I finally have access to the MobileMe Beta of their new webmail interface, and I must say, it’s pretty decent.  The first thing I noticed was that it loaded faster than the normal webmail.  I don’t know if that’s due to less users being on the beta, or if it’s an actual improvement, but I like it.

Additionally, the new message formatting ability is a welcome improvement.

Other than those things, it just looks slightly different.  They have have a new “archive” option, but I don’t really understand it.  When you use it, it just creates a new folder, and dumps your email in it.  Not sure what the point of that really is, since it’s not really an archive.

Overall, I think it is a good update, but nothing to get overly excited about.  When they let us use our own domain names with MobileMe email, it will be a noticeable change.

Recently, a friend of mine who has experienced the staining and iSight issues decided to upgrade to the new Unibody MacBook.  After helping her move data from the old to the new,  got the “opportunity” to figure out how to solve some issues.

First,  I had to solve the stained wrist wrest problem.   I have previously used the Mr Clean Magic Eraser to clean MacBook’s, but this time it only had average success.   I then found an article that said nail polish remover was an alternative cleaner.   I tried it, and it seemed to help more.  After both cleaners, the wrist rest is still slightly stained, but i’ll keep working on a fix for it.

Second, and more annoyingly, the built-in iSight wasn’t working.   I did all the usual things like reset the PRAM, and the PMU/SMC.  Nothing worked, and I noticed that the device didn’t even show up in System Info.  More digging led me to some folks who pulled out the LCD screen, and found that the iSight camera cable was slightly unseated.  That seemed like my last best hope, so I went and grabbed some tools.

I found a decent set of instructions for doing the screen removal at ScreenTek Inc. The bevel removal seemed to be the trickiest part. There are no screws, just plastic clips, which translates to “easy to break”.  Fortunately, the removal went ok, and all the clips were still intact afterwards.

I got the screen apart, and sure enough, the iSight cable was slightly out of place.  Slightly, in this case, means less than a centimeter, seriously.

I pushed it back in place, and launched Photo Booth to test.  I saw the green light come on, and then saw video. It worked!

I put the LCD back in place, and screwed it back in (17 screws).  After snapping the bezel back on, all was well.  The OCD in me had to immediately clean the screen, because there were some slight finger prints.  Now, I am back in business with iChat and PhotoBooth goodness.

Oh wait, I just realized how messed up the trackpad button really is.  I’ll leave that repair for another day.

The change of the battery made upgrading a hard drive slightly more difficult, as there is no panel that opens to do that anymore.  The solution now is to remove the whole bottom casing.  There are 10 screws involved, and 3 of the back screws are longer than the others.  It is important to keep track of where the screws go.

Once removed, you have access to everything, including the battery with a sticker saying Do Not Remove.

On the lower left, you see the hard drive, positioned in the same place as the original Unibody MacBook.

There is a small black bracketbetween the hard drive and the DVD drive with two screws.  Remove those screws, and pull out the bracket.  Once removed, the hard drive is free.  Remove the SATA connector from the drive and pull the drive out.  There are 4 screws on the hard drive that need to be removed and installed on your replacement drive.  They require the T6 Hex screwdriver, found at your local geek supply, such as The Shack.  Once you have moved those little screws to the new drive, connect the SATA cable and position the new drive.  Put the black bracket back in place, and secure.  Do the same for the bottom casing, and you are done!

Of course, now you have a Mac with a blank drive which isn’t terribly useful.  Turn on your Mac, pop in the OS X install DVD, and hold down the Option key until it gives you the option of booting from that DVD.  Install the Operating System, and then off you go.

Enjoy the new hard drive.

Mac’s have not always been the most friendly machines to perform such upgrades on.  Powerbooks were notorious for the thousand plus screws necessary to make any sort of upgrade.  There have been some exceptions where Apple made hard drive installs not so bad, such as some older iMacs and the latest generation of Macbooks.

I recently decided to upgrade the hard drive in my Aluminum 24″ iMac.  I assumed it would be relatively straightforward, much like the ram install was.  I was wrong.  I had to remove the glass, remove the aluminum top, remove the LCD screen, and work  underneath it to reach the hard drive.  Good times.

In the end, the upgrade went fairly smooth.  I did run into a couple problem areas, that I made some notes on.

I followed the instructions made available at Amfiteatar.

Some things to be aware of:

• The magnetic pads around the aluminum rim that hold the glass in place are a bit poorly designed.  I had one fall off because it’s sticky adhesive was no longer useful.  I had to improvise.
• Be very careful handling and storing the glass top.  Nobody wants to break it, but equally important is not getting ANY lint or smudges behind the glass.  If you do, you end up noticing after the reassemble, and you’ll have to remove the glass again.
• Be equally aware of how you handle the LCD screen.  Similar to the glass, it easily attracts dust and finger smudges.

Follow those instructions, and you’ll have a faster and bigger hard drive in no time.

At times, I have the need to help a user to remotely solve PC related problems.  The difficulty with the built-in solution for Windows (Remote Desktop), is that it requires port mapping in your firewall and configuration that the user may not be efficiently capable of.  A similar situation exists when trying to use VNC or other remote support tools.

There are ways around this.  MSN Messenger users can invite other MSN Messenger users to assist them, and XP has a couple other ways to invite someone to help.  Again, these solutions often suffer from network access (port mapping) issues.  More importantly in my case, I am on a Mac, and none of those invite based solutions are feasible.

One evening, I found myself needing to help someone in another state (using a Windows XP machine0, but not capable of getting set up for remote access with the built-in solution.  After several failed attempts at walking this person through some problem resolution steps, I gave up, and started looking for a Plan B. After a brief Google search, I found TeamViewer.  As usual, I am a bit nervous about applications that give this sort of machine access.  It could be some sort of malware/spyware, that creates more problems while it solves others.  I did a bit of digging on TeamViewer, and everything I found confirmed its legitimacy.

It’s a secure RSA authentication system, that utilizes a TeamViewer server as a middleman.  TeamViewer provides the technical details of how it establishes connections HERE. The setup is incredibly easy, and it works on mac and windows machines.  The user downloads the client app, and just double-clicks to open it.   No install, no mess, just an executable.

On your machine, you run the full application.  The user provides you a client id, and a unique session password.  You enter those two pieces of information into the application on your machine, and it establishes the connection.  From there, you have full desktop control of their machine.  You can see some presentations of that setup here.

I have now used it several times with different people.  It has worked without issue every time.  It’s free for personal use, and has some licensing costs associated for businesses.  The download is free either way, so businesses can experiment before buying.

Why is the transaction time important?  It can mean the difference between receiving or not receiving some email.  If the transaction time gets too high, other mail servers may just timeout trying to communicate.  This is obviously not a good situation for a mail server.

Ideally, the transaction time should be under 1 second, and that’s what I wanted this exchange server to show.  The first point of interest was the Cisco firewall, which has some ESMTP inspection policy in place.  There are known instances of mail servers having trouble sending or receiving with this policy in place, but I couldn’t find any issues related to transaction times.  The second place to look is the server performance itself.  Processor, RAM,  or drive performance issues could theoretically be affecting transaction times.  None of these are of concern for this particular server.

Further digging got me to a feature in exchange known as Tar Pitting. As the Microsoft Support article explains:

• Tar pitting is the practice of deliberately inserting a delay into certain SMTP communications that are associated with spam or with other unwanted traffic. To be effective, these kinds of communications typically rely on generating a high volume of traffic. By slowing an SMTP conversation, you can dramatically reduce the rate at which automated spam can be sent or at which a dictionary attack can be conducted. Legitimate traffic may also be slowed by tar pitting.

That last statement about legitimate traffic being affected is true.  I dug into the registry and found that indeed this mail server was inserting a 5 second delay.  Microsoft points out that this feature is of little value, unless you use recipient filtering.  That technique is not used on this particular server, so the delay isn’t of much use.

I set the delay to zero, and tested.   Transaction times are now averaging .42 seconds.  That’s much better.