The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • MotionBox Sold to Snapfish

    I’ve been a MotionBox Premium user for almost 2 years now, and this evening I received an email saying they sold themselves to Snapfish.  Lucky for us, we get to use Snapfish free for a year!  If only you could hear my voice, there’s plenty of sarcasm in it.

    Offering Snapfish for a year is a joke.  Why?  Because it in no way compares to what I’ve come to expect from MotionBox.  I quickly created a Snapfish account to try it out, but found:

    • No HD playback
    • No video embedding in other sites like this blog.
    • 500 MB video file limit
    • 10-minute video limit

    Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement?  My wishlist (all things I had with MotionBox) is:

    • Unlimited number of videos and storage
    • No video size limit
    • No video length limit
    • HD playback
    • SD quality fallback for those viewers not on a fast connection
    • Embeddable videos
    • Automatic transcoding between formats – including iPhone compatible.
    • Privacy and sharing features (easy to view by intended recipients)

    R.I.P. MotionBox, I think you’ve left plenty of disappointed customers behind.

  • iOS 4 Wi-fi and Exchange Syncing Problems

    Ever since upgrading to iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G and then on the new iPhone 4 I have been seeing problems connecting to my local Exchange server when I was on wifi.   Even with previous versions of the OS, the iPhone never seemed to do Push reliably on when on the same wifi network as the Exchange server.   The problems with iOS 4, however, seem more severe.  Even force-checking the email on wifi would result in the phone just sitting there “connecting..” but never actually working.

    Tonight I decided to take some time to look into it – and I think I have it fixed.  Maybe this will help some others with the same problems (and judging by various forums, there are plenty of you out there).

    The issue boiled down to a combination of iOS 4 being unable to resolve DNS names ending in .local and my local DNS configuration.   The mail server hostname I the phone was accessing wasn’t .local since it’s publicly accessible, but it did have a CNAME DNS record on my internal DNS server that aliased to the .local name of the server.   On a hunch I removed the CNAME and just made an A record point to the local ip address of the server, rebooted the phone, and voila!  My local Exchange mail works as it should!

    To to summarize – don’t have any .local names involved in the lookup of your mail server.    Change your DNS config if you can, and reboot the phone.

  • No More Monkeys

    David has been singing this a bit lately and it’s pretty funny…

    http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13406767&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

    (edit: video hosted by Vimeo now)

  • Springfield Sliders

    Today’s weather was fantastic so we decided to make the most of it by heading to the ballpark!

    We took david to a game last year, but he was just a little too young to begin enjoying it.   Today, however, he had a BLAST.  He was cheering the players on and happily watched 6+ innings before it was time for us to leave.  To top it off he got to meet Speedy 🙂

    More photos in the gallery.

  • Happy Birthday Ana!

    Today is Ana’s birthday, so David and I spent some quality time in the kitchen getting this cake made.  It turned out well, and David’s choice of toppings is quite the addition!

    Happy Birthday Ana, We Love You!

  • Garden with Rabbit Fence 2.0

    Here’s the garden Ana has put in with David’s help. Unfortunately there are no photos of all of the digging and planting David was doing, as I was busy working on getting the deck washed.

    The fence around the garden is new this year and is much more substantial than the one last year. Here’s to hoping it thwarts those rabbits. I’ve already told Ana that if it doesn’t work we’re upgrading to lasers.

  • Microsoft Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2008

    If you use Visual Studio 2008 and install Microsoft Office 2010, it looks like there’s a very good chance your Visual Studio Web Designer will be clobbered. The symptom is when you go to visually edit a web page (html, aspx, etc) in Visual Studio, it will appear to completely lock up. Actually, I think what is happening is a message box is popping up, UNDER Visual Studio so you cannot click it or do anything but End Task to close Visual Studio.

    Some searching around quickly came up with a few things to try.

    You need to run “C:Program Files (x86)Common Filesmicrosoft sharedOFFICE12Office Setup ControllerSetup.exe” and select Repair (drop the “(x86)” portion if you’re running 32-bit).

    On one of my machines, this was sufficient to repair the problem and Visual Studio went back to normal. However, on another computer I had to completely uninstall that software by selecting Uninstall instead of Repair. When that is done I then ran the Web Designer Core setup from the Visual Studio CD located at WCUWebDesignerCoreWebDesignerCore.exe. Be aware that if you were running VS Service Pack 1, you’ll want to reapply it after that setup completes.

    One the topic of the Office 2010 install, I must say that my experience has been dismal. In addition to this problem of breaking Visual Studio 2008, on one of my machines I had to manually uninstall Office 2007 because the new 64-bit setup detected that the old version wasn’t copletely gone after uninstall. As you can guess, this was a pretty lengthy process, following a document from Microsoft led to about 10 minutes of hunting down and deleting various directories, files, and registry keys. Ouch.

    Office 2010 is a nice upgrade, but Microsoft sure seemed to have botched the install.

  • Bowling and Batting Practice

    I’m doing a little photo and video editing as the weekend winds down and thought I’d post these for all 2 of you that follow this blog.  Here’s David during his two games of bowling, in which he scored a combined 46!  He gets emphatic about doing it himself, so those are 100% his.

    http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13615811&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

    And to wrap up the weekend, he took a few swings off of the tee.

    Notice the goggles – apparently he forgot to take them off after his work in the lab.

    Updated: embedded video from Vimeo instead of MotionBox.

  • Avoid Webhost4Life for Hosting

    For a couple years now, I have been using Webhost4Life to host my Chef website, ejichef.com.   At $10-$12/month, they weren’t the cheapest option out there for Microsoft-based shared hosting, but they also weren’t the most expensive.  All-in-all I never had any major problems with them and their support was reasonably responsive (again, given the cost).

    I have learned that the company was recently purchased, and I had been getting emails about an impending migration to a new hosting “platform”.  My site’s turn was in the middle of the week last week, and I received an email when it was complete.   I quickly visited my website and navigated around, it all looked ok.   At first.

    A day later when I received my daily download report, I saw there was absolutely no traffic to my download (hosted elsewhere).  A little investigation showed that during the migration they had deleted all of my custom DNS records.  Frustrating, for sure, but not terrible.  I logged in and added the records which inexplicably caused my site to go down. 

    I chatted with a support rep online, who didn’t even try to solve anything and immediately created a ticket and told me it would be quickly resolved.   8 hours later there had been no change to the ticket so I chatted with someone else and was fed the same 4 auto-response lines I have learned to be the extent of their services.   Once again I was assured it was being worked on right now and will be fixed in 2 hours at most.

    10 hours later (around 18 total) I finally received an email that it was fixed.  What complex operation took the skill and expertise of an engineer?  Restarting IIS.  

     Strike 1. 

    Another day or two goes by and I go to look at the contents of the database that was migrated, and find that it is completely empty.  The schema was migrated but none of the data.  What were they thinking?  I went to take a backup of the old database, but found that I needed someone in tech support to do it.  After another chat, I was told they had to create a ticket to have the backup and restore done again.  I have never seen this ticket or heard if it has been completed (I had my own backup which I restored elsewhere, so it wasn’t critical).  Strike 1.5.

    Shortly after this, a couple Chef purchases came through but the license key generation code failed.  After some digging, I find that the problem is permissions-related and I gather all of the links and information needed to create a very detailed support case.   I created submitted the ticket, and here I sit on day 4 with it still not functioning.  Strike 2.5.

    What has thrown me over the edge is my interaction with the support team over these past 4 days.  The only activity I see on the case are my inquiries into the status  – not a single word back about what is going on, an ETA, or a request for further information. 

    I have chatted online with support too many times to count, each time being told (after putting me on hold for 4-5 minutes) that they had just personally talked with an engineer and they were working on it as we spoke.  I was repeatedly assured that the fix was at most 2 hours away.  Multiple times I was told they had just escalated the ticket to High Priority, which I’ll note is never reflected in the ticketing system.  During the first conversation the technican was in a hurrty to get off of the support line and told me that they had reproduced the error (and of course it will be fixed in 2 hours..), even though I had not given them instructions on how to reproduce it.  They quickly diverted the conversation when I brought this to their attention.

    I had been seriously considering upgrading my Webhost4Life account to a VPS (virtual private server) before all of this happened.   I’m thankful this all happened before I signed a year-long contract because I cannot imagine paying the VPS price and ending up with support like this. 

    During the frustration of that first 18 hour outage I opened an account with KickAssVPS.com and just yesterday made the decision to transition everything over to it.  As of right now I am no longer using my Webhost4Life account and am trying to cancel it.  While the cost is obviously more expensive than shared hosting, the KickAssVPS experience has been nothing short of excellent and I’m looking forward to using them for a long time to come.

    Hopefully my cancellation will be complete soon and I can say goodbye Webhost4life, and good riddance.

  • “Big Boy Bed”

    Tonight is David’s first night in his new toddler bed!

    He has been excited since this afternoon when he helped me put it together, so he hopped right in tonight at bedtime.  It remains to be seen how long it will take him to get to sleep now, though 🙂