twit the quail leaves incubator, enters brooder

Removing lint from 2.5mm jack - unjamming microswitch

My (awesome!) phone is "naked" in my pocket all the time so lint, & gunk get into the 2.5mm headset / audio jack at the bottom:



And the microswitch inside would occasionally jam, so that the phone would never come out of "headset mode," even after the jack is removed. One day last year it just would not come out of "headset" mode at all. So for several months I have been walking around with a bluetooth headset all the time because the phone could not function without a bluetooth headset or a wired headset. It was very inconvenient. Finally, today, I started searching for a way to unjam the microswitch and found it here. live.com search is awesome! To unjam a 2.5mm jack microswitch:

• Start playing a music file or anything that should go through the main speaker
• Make sure it is playing by attaching headphones to the jack, then remove the jack.
• Soak a Q-tip in WD-40 and twist the cotton end into a tiny corscrew that fits in a 2.5mm hole.
• Twist the WD-40 soaked cotton into the 2.5mm hole and twist for three minutes.
• Put the headset in to make sure music is still playing
• Repeat if necessary

It works!

network for track meet

I think we need three wireless access point routers, one each at Registration, Announcer's booth, and at the finish line. They need to be on the same network so that all laptops, computers, and cell phones using the wireless network can communicate with each other. Should we run them in WDS mode or wireless bridge repeater mode? If all three wrt54g routers run dd-wrt, and the one in the announcer's booth has the radio power cranked up to over 100 milliwatts, will everything work?

The registration area has six (6) computers and two printers. Coaches sign up each athlete for each event; the meetmanager software tracks payments, assign heats, lanes, numbers, and schedules. Logistically the people entering the data share the registration area with food and souvenir vendors so it is crowded.

The announcer watches meetmanager's scheduling screens to see which races and events to call. The athletes must gather and stage in certain areas and then be sent to the right lane at the right time. Only one machine is needed in the announcer's booth.

The finish line has the photo finish cameras and electronic timing. They take a feed from meetmanager to get their data set up and meetmanager takes their results electronically to record times and scores. There are usually three or four machines at the finish line running meet manager. One of them is tethered to a cell phone and it uploads results from meetmanager to the public Internet as the races finish. Dozens or a hundred fans are under the announcer in the stands. There are lots of coaches, athletes, and helpers running around with phones, wifi-capable devices, etc.

FAQ

• Are the three spots shown connected with wires?

No; there are no wires, just power at each location.

• A wired backbone?

No network wires of any kind anywhere.

• You may be using a mixed AP/peer-to-peer mode?

Yes. The AP’s must be joined by bridging, repeating, or wds.

• Do you have a line diagram you can draw on a white board of each connection?

No, but the idea is that there are about a dozen machines, 6 at registration 5 at the finish line, and 1 in the announcer’s booth on one net with 3 wireless routers and no wires.

Agents in the Matrix and tough economic times

Before the movie "The Matrix," John Quarterman wrote an interesting book with the same title and around that same time Alan Kay published a great article about "software agents" that captured my imagination. Microsoft was interested in these ideas as well, and we brought some people and technology together into a suite of offerings that became http://agents.live.com/ (Windows Live Agents). While teaching in Microsoft's (awesome) Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View I met a talented, articulate, warm and friendly developer in this area who is now looking for a job. I believe there is a huge promise and potential to Alan Kay's vision that we in computer science have yet to realize. But the economics and business models apparantly don't work so we're stuck with less appealing software, sigh.

OneNote rulez!

OneNote is the best computer application around. And now we don't need to retreat to live mesh or windows live sync or Groove or other file sync methods to get onenote notebook synchronization over the public Internet. OfficeLive now offers sharepoint services as part of the standard small business offering.

- Go to http://officelive.com/
- Sign up for a *SMALL BUSINESS* account with a liveid
- In the left column, click on "Business Applications"
- Click the green "Activate for FREE" button that appears
- In the left column, click on "Team Workspace"
- At Right-most column header, click on "+Add"
- Choose "Document Library" from drop-down
- Name it "notes" (or whatever you want)
- Under "Document Template" drop-down, select Microsoft Office OneNote section
- Click "Create"
- Under "New" drop-down, click "New Document"
- In OneNote, save the file (it's just that simple!)

Add people with a liveID as editors and such to your sharepoint site so they can also open, sync, share, notebooks. OneNote uses your liveID credentials and syncs to the sharepoint when it sees 'net. Pretty slick!