I decided to put my Windows HTC Touch Pro 2 out in the pasture and go for the much hyped “first ever 4g phone”, the HTC EVO.  Best decision ever concerning a phone!

First and foremost, this is the best phone I’ve ever had.  The software is great, the responsiveness is amazing, and it has all sorts of randomly cool features.

The Pros:

• Great screen.
• Integration with Google products is flawless.
• Turn by turn navigation with Google maps.
• FM radio.
• Sprint TV, great during the world cup.
• Apps like Swype, NYT, Google Voice, Google Voice Search.

The Cons:

• Dealing with Exchange invitations, not as clean as with Windows.
• No unified inbox like WebOS.
• Battery hog, but all smart phones are, will need to charge it after a few hours of heavy use.
• Not enough widgets for shortcuts and displaying vital information on the screen.

~david

PeripheralErrorCode:10125 AgentID:1000 UniqueObjectID:agent.5000.1000
     MessageID:eControlFailureConf MessageType:eSetAgentStateRequest
     ErrorMessage:IPCC Error [10125]You have attempted to log into an invalid
     instrument.  If you think it is correct there could be a configuration error.
      Otherwise, check the number and try again. FilterTarget:agent.5000.1000

I recently ran into this error and for the life of me could not figure out what was wrong.  So, the first thing I did was make sure it was happening on more than one PC, check.  Next, checked if it was happening with more than one phone, check.  Next, check if it happens with both PGs… this is where I noticed that I could login to one PG, but not to the other.  Which then lead me to check the configuration of both PGs and found that the PG configuration for the PG where the login was failing had an agent extension of 7 digits instead of 10 digits.  Thus why CTIOS was rejecting my login to a phone with an extension with 10 digits.

Presto!

~david

If you recall last year I posted a few Tweets about the, then upcoming, Palm Pre and how much I was looking forward to this phone.  Later on I posted a story about about my impressions with the Palm Pre.  After a few months of sticking with it and really giving it a try I had to let it go and go back to Windows Mobile.  Yes, I am a Microsoft slave when it comes to phones.  I missed the integration with Exchange, I missed the seamless connectivity with Outlook, I missed being able to tweak it to try and make it far more efficient and faster.

It now has been around two months since I’ve made the switch and I can’t really complain, I got everything I expected from Windows Mobile.  First, let’s start with the phone.

The HTC Touch Pro 2 retails for $599.99 at Sprint.com.  Yes, that’s $600 dollars for a phone!  Yes, I thought it was insane when I saw the price tag.  Not only is/was the phone incredibly pricey, it was close to impossible to find it at Sprint stores.  The excuse I always got was that since it was so pricey not a lot of stores carried it and it was considered a specialty item.  Good thing I didn’t ask for diamond encrusted keys.  Regardless, I turned to my trusted friend Craig Newman and his awesome website http://craigslist.org/ and found someone letting go of their phone for $250.  Finding the guy, haggling with him, and finally getting the phone is a whole other story, but ultimately I paid the asking price and began my journey back to the dark side.

Happy with my purchase I decided that this phone had so much potential, which was being thrown away by the stock operating system provided by Sprint.  First and foremost, there was Windows 6.5 and the phone runs Windows 6 stock.  Second, there was HTC’s Sense UI, among other tweaks available which would put this phone over the top when it came to usability.

When it comes to hacking your phone and making it do things it might not be supposed to do, you head over to the always awesome and informative, http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/.  After a few days of research I decided to give Mike and his http://www.mightyrom.com/ a spin.  Flashing your phone is not for the faint of heart, I was pretty nervous something would happen in the middle of the flash which would render my phone useless, but thankfully everything has been great so far and I’ve enjoyed what my phone has become.

The key features I love about this phone:

- Great voice quality, including the speaker.

- A keyboard, I love having a physical keyboard.

- Very responsive, more than my Palm Pre.

Cons:

- This thing is a brick, it’s huge.

- It’s Windows, which needs a kick to restart it ever few days… well maybe about once every two weeks.

- Windows Marketplace sucks.

~david

In case you remember my post from last year about my recent switch to Sprint Everything Plan, I wanted to provide a small updated on how my cell phone usage has increased.

If you compare my usage from the year before I’m averaging around 1000 more minutes per month.  Now, at the end I’m getting a cheaper price/minute, however I sometimes worry about how much radiation I’m exposing myself to… oh well, just wanted to post something interesting and let me people know I’m still alive and kicking.

~david

Here’s an annoying runtime error I just ran into using Wireshark Portable.

Looking at this Wireshark bug ID shows a possible solution:

1) copy WiresharkPortable\Other\PortableSource\WiresharkPortable.ini  to
WiresharkPortable\WiresharkPortable.ini
2) edit WiresharkPortable\WiresharkPortable.ini and change the line:

WinPcapInstaller=WinPcap_4_0_2.exe

to

WinPcapInstaller=WinPcap_4_1_beta5.exe

However, the INI file mentioned above already has the correct beta5.exe WinPcap line. However, just moving the INI file to the WiresharkPortable folder did the trick.

~david

As many as you know or notice on my site, I love Jeroen Smeets’s Last.fm Plugin.  Recently I had some issues with it not displaying correctly on my site.  A simple deletion of the plugin via the WP administration page and re-adding it again and we were back in business.  The new version of this plugin looks great!

~david

I try to stay involved with Cisco’s forum as to try to give back to the community a bit as well as trying to get some knowledge from the masses.  While I’m not a know it all it’s nice to have a little bit of recognition.  Last week i went from Bronze to Silver, which based on points others award you for the answers you provide. :-)

I have a long way to go before getting those 25k points… wonder if I could turn them in for cool Cisco gear?

~david

As many of you might know, I was an early adopter of Sprint’s Palm Pre here are some of my initial impressions.

1. It’s a completely new way of navigating and getting around to different menus.  You’ll either spend all your time running your finger across the bottom or figuring out how close to the corner to tap to bring up preferences.
2. The screen is amazing and very responsive.
3. Integration with Exchange is great, the only thing I’ve not found is how to edit meeting invitations acceptances or rejections.
4. Setting up your initial contacts is a pain as it imports the contacts from every account which you set up.  I manage my contacts through Exchange and had to delete all of the Gmail contacts.
5. The keyboard is rather small, but really shouldn’t be a huge issues unless you have monster paws.
6. No T9 or similar program to auto guess what you’re trying to type.  You have to do it the old fashion way and type out the whole thing.
7. When browsing the web and you zoom in and click on a link the page goes back to it’s tiny view and you have to zoom in again.  It would be ideal if once you zoomed in, all subsequent pages were zoomed in too.
8. Palm decided to have a tiny little cap over the charging port.  I’m awaiting the days for this cap to fall of or be ripped out by accident.
9. Palm didn’t really use a standard Micro-USB port.  I have 4 of these chargers and they are now only good for my GPS.  Thank you Palm for having me have to carry just another charger.
10. Alarm clock will go off on the weekends even though it’s set for weekdays only.  Sprint acknowledged this bug and said an update should be out by the end of the first week of the Pre’s release.

That’s what I have so far.

~dmacias

It has been some months that I’ve been working on trying out different offline WP editors. I was getting tired on having to be online in order to add new stories. After much searching and much trial and error on stumbled upon Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. I have to honest, I figured since it was Microsoft’s and it had the whole "Live" tag with it, that it would somehow be tied to MS Messenger, Hotmail, etc. However, that’s not the case, it is completely stand alone and a great tool. Per it’s Wikipedia page it supports:

• Windows Live Spaces
• SharePoint blogs
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• WordPress

Needless to say you should see a bit better formatting on my posts. Here’s a quick screen shot of the UI.

Notice the Edit, Preview, and Source buttons at the bottom of the main window, this allows you to quickly switch to different views and thus modify your page accordingly.

Another thing I love is how you can open any currently posted article and edit it very quickly.

Ultimately, I’m extremely happy with it.  It’s fast, has a very small memory footprint and it has a lot of plugins.

~david

I really debated calling this, “How ICM Script Editor Allows You To See The Forest Through The Trees”, but I try to make titles which are relevant to my post.  Regardless, here is my latest fun encounter with Script Editor.

I was working on a script, which all of a sudden didn’t work as it originally did.  I checked the ToD routing logic, it was right.  I checked the admin scripts, they were right.  I checked every single node leading up to that step and they were all right.  I had two co-workers check it for me and they could not find the error either.

This is a small example of what I was looking at:

Now, in the above example it should be really apparent what is wrong, if you haven’t caught it, I’ll let you see what a correct script would look like:

Yep, no connection to the If node.  Now, you’re probably thinking, what is this guys thinking, that’s so easy to spot.  You’re right it is easy to spot when you have 4 nodes, but when you’re script spans multiple pages and has hundreds of nodes, it’s a little harder and honestly after starting at a script like this for weeks

you become crossed-eyed.

~dmacias