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

Well, for those of you struggling trying to get SyncToy working on Windows XP 64, here is the fix.

Download custsat.dll version 9.0.3790.2428 and replace it in the SynToy install directory (usually C:Documents and Settings<usernam>Local SettingsApplication DataSyncToy)

Cheers.

~david

So I finally cracked down and started playing with the future of the Windows Servers. I am talking about the Windows 2003 server. Read on to find out what some of my initial thoughts on this new operating system.



edit: 04/08/04
Security Focus just posted a new article on the IIS6.0 security :-) Talk about timely.1. It actually loaded pretty fast, which I was surprised, I didn’t use a beast of a machine, but what I did use, seemed to work well and have a nice response time.



2. Security, this has to be the first server where it seems like the computer is tight down out of the box. A couple of ports were open which seem to be unnecessary, but I will not close then until I find out more about the operating system.



3. The interface is a great improvement from that horrible interface called Windows XP.



4. Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition v8 does not play well with 2003, at least for me, and I am having a hard time automating the virus updates. I think it might have something to do with Windows security.



5. I absolutely love remote desktop connection; MS finally got on the ball and did what PC Anywhere and tightVNC have been doing for years.



6. Sharepoint is nice; I just need to read up on how to configure it correctly.



I don’t see the migration from Windows 2002 Server to Windows 2003 should be too painful. However, I think that with the new IIS 6.0 that my Linux server might end up doing something else.



-david macias

The saying is that treat a job search like a full time job. Right, specially when you already have a job that is close to full time and you’re a full time student. So can you really have 3 full time jobs? Not really.

The point is that I looked around the web for a tool that would help me manage all my information concerning my job search. The tool I am createing will manage:

So at work I usee MS Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express for my personal email. So, I just reformatted my machine and decided to try a new/better email client. I had heard a lot about Mozilla Thunderbird so I decided to give a spin. The installation was quite painless, and it is very fast. I am also using it for surfing newsgroups and so far so good. There is somewhat of a learning curve and I am still trying to figure out the new keyboard shortcuts, as well as how NG posts are handled when received. Overall this is definetly a step forward passed Outlook Express. Next, I will try to import all of my old email, as well as try some themes and extensions.

-david macias

So someone sent me a word document that was write protected, and I needed to edit the file, I had no password, and no way of asking for it…So I looked around the web, and they mentioned that there was a pretty easy way to do this:



Create a new blank document, then insert file, and insert the file that is protected.



Sure this works, however if your file has images or headers and footers, they sometimes get lost in the process. So there has to be a better way.



Here it is:



Save your protected file in RTF format. Then using good old Notepad, open that file up. Look for the following string of text:

formprot/allprot/

Delete that, save the file, open the file, and now you can edit your file.


This has been tested only with Office XP. If you notice some different behavior let me know.



-dm