The discussion was fantastic in the depth of categories of technology covered. As usual, Bill Gates is a fascinating person with some great ideas of where technology is or should be going. Good stuff – and the best part being a short discussion of Bill’s fun with his Porsche 911 in Albuquerque in the late ’70s. 🙂 Also, if you haven’t seen Robert’s work at PodTech, you should check out his ScobleShow site – there is a lot of great information he’s got posted.
Interesting move by IBM, and one that bodes well for the enterprise. As this eWeek article points out, Lotus is “going back to it roots” in business collaboration software.
This is the fun kind of technology story that I wish we would see more often. Research the literally pushes the boundaries of what we accept. Not just the next evolutionary step, but the next dozen past that, just to find where the next bottlenecks are
Necessity is the mother of invention – always a great innovation motivator! This is a neat utility for the UMPC that helps change which apps is on top instead of fumbling with the taskbar or finding a way to ALT-TAB to your next app.
More and more lately I’m finding that I work better without distraction. I know that’s kind of a Doh! idea, but I’ve been working for so many years allowing myself to be distracted and interrupted multiple times hourly (forget daily), to the point where its difficult to get back into the “groove” where your focus and attention is solely on what you are working on.
To combat this, I’ve started to listen to music while working on something at my desk. I know there are many who do this already for the exact same purpose, and it seems to really help get a person back into their most productive working mode.
This past week, I have noticed how much more actual work I’ve gotten done when adding this to my work practices. It also has brought home exactly how often I’m interrupted in my tasks. There is a constant stream of people who are stopping by to ask questions – some that they should already know the answers too, but that’s another post – right?
I’ve found listening to tunes is most effective when working on scripts and documentation. There is something about it that helps stimulate the brain to stream the ideas in a more logical, orderly sequence. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to distract me from what I’m doing as I have long believed it would
So I’m really interested, how do you “drown out” the rest of the office to focus on your tasks? What do you do to help foster creativity?
I’ve had the worst problem with my T-Mobile MDA dropping calls about 4 minutes into a call. While the exact time of the drop varied (sometimes up to 10 minutes into a call) it was consistent to the point that everyone I talked to knew about when it would happen.
I’ve been searching all over the ‘net trying to find the cause of the issue and a fix/workaround for it. I finally found it! Not only are MDA’s having the problem, but many HTC Wizard class devices like the Cingular 8125.
The problem seems to appear after upgrading to the latest firmware from the provider – in my case the v2.26 ROM from T-Mobile (though I did see it as well with the 2.24 ROM for QTek on my device). The issue is that HTC had implemented a “feature” in the latest ROM that would help a data connection re-establish itself when it was unsure if the GPRS/EDGE connection was there. It would simply reboot the radio portion of the phone – whether a voice (GSM) session was in process or not!
The fix is to simply add a registry key that disables this new “feature”. Now that I know what the fix is, I needed to share it with anyone who passes by my blog. If you have this problem and use a HTC Wizard class device listed below, please check out the fix and the link to where I found it.
Due to network conditions, signal coverage and some other factors, there is a small chance the data connection can become detached from the network, but the device is not aware of the detachment. This is normal in real world scenarios. Since data packages can be sent without any error being returned, the device may incorrectly think the connection is still valid. To correct this, HTC introduced a mechanism to watch for such conditions. After the device sends out data without receiving any network acknowledgment for a certain period of time, the device will try to detach from the network and re-establish the data connection. Usually this will silently re-establish the data connection without the user noticing it. Due to radio platform limitations, this task cannot be performed during a voice call. When both of these conditions are met (data being sent out for a period of time with no network acknowledgment, and an active voice call), the device will reset the radio to address the problem.
HTC has provided the following registry key setting to disable the auto-correction mechanism:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEDriversBuiltInRIL]
“GPRSStallWorkaround”=dword:0
I truly hope that this helps you with your HTC Wizard class device – I know I’m much happier now that I’ve found the fix for the problem.
