Blog Branching

Try and say THAT three times fast!

Setting up a different home for the IT centered pieces.

Teleport over using this link.

Remote Codes

Finally had a little time to set up the TV & the legion of remotes on the coffee table.  Wasn't able to find anything online, so I figure I'll do a quick blurb.

The Sony RM-ADP021 doesn't seem to have any three-digit codes for Haier TVs, or newer brands (Visio, Hisense, etc.).  As they mention in one of their FAQ entries, you can go trial-and-error 'til you find one that works.

For my case, that was 503.  i.e. Haier is grouped with the Akai, Daewoo, etc brands.  Not all the TV-mode buttons work (i.e. the arrow buttons), but it's passable (input, volume, channel, power, etc.) as a replacement for the full TV remote.

Memory and Storage Upgrades on Acer Aspire One D257 (-1907)

Alright, the first batch of pics were taken in mid-2012.  Finally have some time to put some words by the pictures, so here we go!

Picked this little netbook up from bestbuy for a one-month backpacking trip that required some photo storage, emails and quick web surfing.  Even back then, there were better options for each of those goals.  But to balance them all, along with the all-important tenet of backpacking mobility (weight & packability), on top of budget, meant this laptop baby was going to Chile & Peru!

Upon return, the single gig of RAM wasn't tolerated for very long.  And these days with all the storage/IT re-routing happening at home, the hdd chamber needed some accessing, too.  Was able to find some relevant & helpful videos online, among the haystack of vids for the slew of Aspire One variants (like this); but having to sit through an entire vid, or trying to cherry-pick the exact moment to fast-forward/back-track to, wasn't terribly convenient.  So that's where the idea for this came along.

OK!  Without further adieu:

tpfancontrol quick hack & best practices

Quick Hacks

Some quick notes, after installing tpfancontrol, since I found Smart Mode 2 more useful than Smart Mode 1, and couldn't find a good way to get it to default without this hack.  This is Windows 7, btw, differences may exist with other OSes.

Setting up Fibre Channel storage on SLES servers

So I recently had to do a storage setup at work.  Based on some components mentioned above.  There wasn’t really a single end-to-end document online that described the steps, so I figure I might as well write one.  This is likely a super rudimentary delineation of the storage possibilities on Linux, so please regard it as such.

Pre-requisites

DISCLAIMER: So obviously, I am not to be held responsible for any resulting damage that comes from following these instructions.  Your system is your own, and it is assumed that you’re smart enough to not permanently damage your system.  Thus, by proceeding, you consent to relinquishing any blame or responsibility on the blog author (me) for any damage that would result from reading further.

I’m also going to assume that the physical hookups are complete.  That is, server and storage is properly cabled, properly powered, OS installed, necessary device drivers (network adapters, I/O adapters, etc.) are installed and configured (e.g. the systems are on the same internal network and can ping each other).

So that we have a concrete example to work with, let’s assume that this is our setup:

Assumes rest of configuration is complete. e.g. network & management connections are established

AIX scripting, loop iterations on integers

I usually work with ksh, but this might work for other shells as well?

 for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  
 do  
 #stuff  
 done  

while loop over number range:

 counter=0  
 max=50  
 while [ $counter -lt $max ]  
 do  
 # stuff  
 let counter=$counter+1  
 done  

where some of the ideas orginated from:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1591109/how-can-i-iterate-through-a-range-of-ints-in-ksh

Getting contacts transferred: phone to phone

I've been trying to transfer my contacts from my old phone (Sony Ericsson w880i) to my new phone (Sony Ericsson X10). You'd think that being from the same company, and having a all-in-one suite from SE for phone operations (e.g. saving txt msgs, contacts, calendar entries, etc., etc.), that contact migration should be a breeze! Unfortunately, and most-disappointingly, the PC Companion migration feature requires you to transfer them through a google account. Not sure what would be needed if both phones weren't Android based, or if access to the internet wasn't available.

There's been various sites and forums that mention alternatives, but the only one I've found revolves around an MS Outlook contact list, which I also don't have. "What gives?!", I think to myself. Transferring contacts phone to phone shouldn't be this hard, especially if they're from the same company. Luckily, after playing around with the phones for a bit, I found the solution: vcf files over bluetooth. The w880 allowed for all my contacts to be saved into a vcf file, and both phones talk over bluetooth, and the X10 supports the reading, and interpreting of vcf files. Thus, the solution was discovered!

For the detail-oriented. The X10 was running Android 2.3.3. Not sure about the w880i (but it wasn't the latest version). So in conclusion, if you need to transfer contacts between phones, and you want to do it simply, quickly, and generally independent of phone manufacturer, look into vcf transfers over bluetooth.