Looks like last Thursday/Friday night’s firmware update for the AT&T MicroCell fixed the issue I was having with calls going straight to voicemail. My support case got escalated around, and I got a call on Thursday to reboot the device on Friday morning. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one complaining about this, and it was lucky timing for me that they now got it fixed. So far all calls have come through, but of course I’m still a little paranoid.

If you’re looking to get an AT&T MicroCell, my unfolding story might interest you. I switched to AT&T with the lure of the iPhone 4 and partly because my T-Mobile reception has never been that great in my home office. Unfortunately, AT&T’s reception was even worse in the whole house. I thought I’d suck it up and drove to the nearest AT&T store and picked up a MicroCell.

First, the device needs to be (at least initially) by a window for it to get a GPS lock. You can plug in an external GPS antenna, which I bought and plugged in. Good to go, I don’t need to have this box in the living room anymore.

Second, iPhone’s location services are screwed up when it triangulates based on the M-Cell as the tower. This happens inside where the phone can’t get a GPS signal. AT&T’s response is that it’s a “feature” so they don’t give away your private information to third parties. Whatever. All my photos are now tagged as being taken in Santa Cruz – great.

Third, and most importantly, my phones don’t get incoming calls reliably; calls go straight to voicemail. I’m seeing a full five bars, and I’m making sure to obey Uncle Steve’s “hold differently” advice, but no luck. While I was on the phone with AT&T support today, about 80-90% of calls didn’t come through. Calling from MicroCell to MicroCell, our VOIP landline, an international phone roaming on T-Mobile, and calls from AT&T went straight to voicemail. Nice.

What makes this issue intolerable is that with bad reception you can at least see some indication that you won’t be getting calls. With the MicroCell you end up being paranoid because all you see is a full five bars (“more bars” per AT&T’s marketing. And yes, those making folks must enjoy their liquor) and you don’t know if you’re missing calls or not. Not great when you’re working from home and the boss tries to reach you.

So I upgraded to Creative Suite 5 and imported a Premiere Pro project I’d been working on. The preview for my Panasonic GH1 AVCHD 720p files was a bit messed up. It looked “jumpy”, i.e it pixilated and seemed to move up and to the left every second or so. After messing around with drivers, turning of Mercury GPU acceleration etc I ran into a tip on the DVSUser forums.

To fix the issue, right-click on the playback video, and select Playback Resolution/Full. It was set to 1/2 by default.

OK, fiddled around a little today with GWT trying to get i18n working with UiBinder. Ran into some issues that I was able to sort out so here’s the obligatory post. I’ll leave reading the basic information from the GWT docs up to you and only highlight the steps that seem to be missing. GWT 2.0.3.

Rough Overview

1. Create a UiBinder *.ui.xml file with <msg/> elements.
2. Compile the project using the –soyc or –extra compiler argument. –soyc does some extra legwork, so you may want to configure –extra instead. This generates .properties files in the extra folder.
3. Copy the generated properties file(s) from the extras folder into the folder where the *.ui.xml lives.
4. Rename the properties file(s) removing the namespace from the beginning. Note that the class name is duplicated. For example, if the your UiBinder file is named MyView.ui.xml, then the properties file should be named MyViewMyViewUiBinderImplGenMessages.properties.
5. Create translated properties files by appending _XX (language, independent of country) or _XX_YY (language_country) to end of the filename, before the extension. For example, MyViewMyViewUiBinderImplGenMessages_fi_FI.properties.

Editing Properties Files In Eclipse

Please be aware that the properties files need to be encoded as UTF-8 and by default Eclipse will encode using ISO-8859-1. You’ll probably want to change the default encoding for .properties files as follows before editing them. Otherwise, Eclipse will simply save them with the incorrect encoding.

1. In Eclipse, click the Window-menu, and then click Preferences.
2. Expand and select General/Content Types in the options tree on the left.
3. In the Content types list, select Java Properties File.
4. In the Default encoding field, type UTF-8.
5. Click OK.

Set Default and Fallback Language

[Untested, beware] By default GWT uses a locale named “default”. You’ll most likely want to change this to whatever your real default language is. You do this in (each of) the module XML files, for example MyModule.gwt.xml. Here’s what I did to switch to “en” as the default and remove the “default” from the compile permutations.

<extend-property name=”locale” values=”en”/>

<set-property name=”locale” value=”en"/>

<set-property-fallback name=”locale” value=”en”/>

And then I added another language:

<extend-property name=”locale” values=”fi”/>

Optimizing Compile Permutations

While I’m almost still on the subject of compile permutations, you can continue to edit the MyModule.gwt.xml file to optimize how many permutations GWT creates for languages and browser combinations. To remove languages for development, just comment out the extra languages you added in the previous step. To modify which browsers should be compiled to, add and edit the following like:

<set-property name=”user.agent” value=”safari,ie8"/>

Separate multiple browsers with a comma. Here are some supported values:

• safari
• gecko
• gecko1_8
• opera
• ie6
• ie8

UPDATE:

I'm turning off comments again, getting way too much spam and the spam solutions let through too much.

I’ve re-enabled comments on the blog. They still need to be approved manually by me so don’t be surprised if it takes awhile for them to show up.

//Tomi B.

Another great post by our guest blogger Richard Perlman:

I hacked at the VistaICM email process and here is what I found:

Part 1: The information for the email is sent, via HTTP, to outgoing.in2myhome.com. So, If you are running a local DNS server, you can enter a record for that host/domain and resolve it to some other HTTP server.

Part 2: The information is sent as a GET request. I.e. It’s ALL in the URL. Really simple (and insecure). For example, here is an “Armed” notification:
GET /email.aspx?address=alarm%40foo.com&subject=Security+Alert&message=System+Armed&mac=00%3A0e%3A70%3A00%3A35%3A7d&time=02-16-2010+01%3A03%3A33+PM

So, all that would need to be done is to write a simple cgi-bin script to handle requests for /email.aspx to parse the GET request and create an email or do whatever you wanted.

Richard

I got a great email from Richard Perlman containing detailed information about the latest ICM update 2.8. Since people tend to end up here for info on the ICM he wanted to share it with the rest of you. Thanks Richard!

Many changes in the Vista ICM, some significant:

Most notable: Honeywell has discontinued the Vista ICM. It seems there was some disagreement with in2net over fees. Since in2net seems to have designed most of the internal code, it doesn't look good for further support. I have emailed them, but they don't reply. The immediate result is that email is effectively dead, unless you pay a fee. If you are running a DNS service on your network it should be simple to "deflect" the HTML connection used by the ICM to pass email messages to in2net to a local web server. Then you'd just have to figure out how they pack the email message into the HTML content.

Other things as of release 2.8:

1. There is no more backup (i.e. download). You can still upload, but "download" is pretty much limited to cat/copy/paste.
2. A lot of the web pages, like the PDA page, are now configured differently, not as easy to change.
3. I found the same TCP data that was on port 50003 on port 50001 too and I also found an in2networks debug facility of port 50501. But, I can't make any sense of it.

On the other hand, using the TCP interface I have been able to build a fairly simple state engine in Perl. This maintains a state table for each zone, as well as reporting the panel state. The script was customized to Interface to the Indigo home automation system running on a Mac. But, it could be easily modified to report to other services. Take a look at:

http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5444&p=32308&hilit=ademco#p32308

If there is sufficient interest maybe we can set up a small mail-list to share ideas and discoveries, etc.

Richard Perlman

'Twas a nice trip to Castello di Amorosa in Napa Valley, California.

Castello di Amorosa from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

NorCalChallengers @ San Juan Bautista from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.

NorCalChallengers @ Blackhawk Auto Museum from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.