I’ve been a T-Mobile UK customer for donkeys years since when it was One2One. In fact until a few months ago when I finally retired my GSM SIM card and rather late joined the 3G Smart Phone party (as opposed to the LG KS360 2.5G ‘blackberry style pay as you go phone for teenagers who can’t afford a blackberry’) my phone display still showed ‘One2One’ as the operator. Now I’m long past a teenager and the specifics of the handsets in questions are an irrelevant detour on the way to the subject of these blog posts.

Now ‘back in the day’, now it’s probably no longer cool to use this phrase, but never mind, back in the day listening to your voice mail messages would be free. However for many many years T-Mobile have charged you to listen to your voicemail.

You could pretend you were a Sunday Newspaper journalist and dial your own phone from another cheaper line and insert the pin number (which of course you had changed from the default) and listen to your messages.

Now paying 12p a minute was a minor inconvenience when I was a ‘Pay as you go’ customer. But when I switched to a pay monthly contract (on a SIM Only deal on the afore mentioned LG device) I find that listening to voicemail is not included as part of your inclusive minutes. I’m paying 12p a minute to listen to my voicemail no matter what.

Therefore the aim is to find a way to avoid this, so the obvious answer is a voicemail to email service, but if only life was that simple.

I purchased a nice 03 number from my normal supplier of such services, Flextel, this cost me a couple of quid for the number, plus a quid top up of ‘call credit’. I wouldn’t be using any of this as I configured the number as voicemail.

I set my call diversion on my phone to my new 03 number. When a message us left on the voicemail Flextel email me the message as an email attachment, which I can then listen to on my phone at no cost, the files are tiny as not to worry my “acceptable use” none specfic data allowance.

This threw up a problem. The email attachment is a ulaw formatted wav file. The native android media player doesn’t recognise this codec.

This is fixed with a 99p app called WavPlayer.

So for the price of a pint down the pub there’s no paying 12p a minute to listen to voicemail……..or THAT’S what I thought until I examined my phone bill……. Wait for part two to find out the next T Mobile plan feature I hadn’t spotted….

Those of a certain technical bent will be familiar with the concept of of the ‘hello world’ exercise when learning a new programming language or technique. Thus many moons after signing up for twitter, I’m going to try and actually use it a little bit.

Thus if I’ve clicked all the correct buttons, downloaded all the correct software and inserted all the correct codes my first tweet should be a ‘hello world’ announcement linking to this blog posting. Not only that but any future blog posts I make should be tweeted in the same way – thus guaranteeing me sending some tweets without ever needing to go to touch a twitter client (though strictly speaking that’s not true as philedmonds.com is now registered as a twitter app.)

I got sent an invite to google+ the other day. As everyone is raving how good it is, I thought at least I should check it out (even if I don’t go onto use it very much).

So clickly click on the e-mail link and get asked to sign into my google account and….

So I can’t use Google+ without a  Google profile, but ‘my organisation’ doesn’t allow me to have a profile…… as I’m the admin I didn’t know I was stopping myself having a Google profile.

A little searching later shows multiple results such as this, showing that I’m not the only one encountering this. I have a Google Apps account and I can’t have a Google Profile with this, therefore I can’t join google+ (or at least I’ll have to set-up a new google account to use google+) This comes just weeks after I finally merged my ‘personal’ google account with my google apps account with the same e-mail address with all sorts of fun and games.

So  it’s back to the drawing board before I can create my “circles” and “hangout” with people….

So at what many people would deem to be “tea time” I embarked on what I thought would be a nice simple, and relatively swift job.

Your starter question, how many ‘Windows Updates’ would you expect to be pulled down onto a XP Pro laptop that hasn’t seen an internet connection since mid December 2010?

Your answer – 64!  (This will include MS Office updates as well as Windows) -  that is before the countless other updates in the way of Firefox, Flash Player,  Adobe Reader, Java and other countless sundry bits and pieces – though thankfully these are all automated.

Next uninstall some of the assorted junk that’s found itself onto the machine and I’m two hours down the line before I get to the main task in hand, loading the 500MB download of Quickbooks 2010 software. Quickbooks is a popular accounting software package.

Now my experience in the past is that Quickbooks is notoriously fickle. However on reading up on-line while I was waiting for the myriad of updates to load it seems that Intuit have finally come into the ‘real world’ of corporate computing and made Quickbooks run as a ‘limited user’ (I guess because they’ve got to do this to have vista/7  support were even an Admin user is not running ‘administrator’ rights all the time).

Good news after much loading time (including various .net frameworks, some Office 2003 integration tools and other various bits and bobs as well as Quickbooks itself) all seemed to work, bar the fact that the install was anything but ‘quick’. I’ll stand-by to eat my words about it “all working” once our finance guy has got his mits on the laptop.

So onto the other two points of my title for this post.

All this extended evening activity lead me to a couple of listening opportunities, the first was to a radio programme that I’d not normally tune into and found myself fascinated by an Iranian drama piece on the Persian Seda programme. I didn’t understand a word of it, but found myself drawn in by the drama of the different tones of voices. Although it was spoken word there is almost a musical quality to the delivery.

This is a great example of were radio works uniquely. I’d never think of downloading a Persian podcast or search out such content on a streaming audio service, but did discover something I enjoyed via the radio.

Once I’d concluded my software wrangling duties at what some may call “supper time” I could finally jump on the train and got out my Walkman (by such I don’t mean I’m retro and playing cassette tapes, rather it is my Sony ‘iPod clone’) and “discovered” – Burst of the Worst – which gave me some much needed light relief and a few chuckles. Now this was another nice discovery but in a different way. I’d made a deliberate decision to download these podcasts, most of which are somewhat different to this “Christmas tape” edition. An interesting thought for podcasters why not occasionally throw in something a little different. The listener can always just skip past it. Obviously in this case Jonathan Marks is podcasting archive radio programmes, so perhaps decades ago him and his team were doing just this on the radio.

…you spend half an hour banging your head against the virtual wall.

Many months ago on my blog I suggested that I would do “Tuesday technical tips” – quick little bits of advice. It’s been ages since I’ve done so, then today – being a Tuesday I came across the problem as described in the title and first line of this post. If they mean nothing to you then stop reading (there will be something less geeky coming along soon.)

Here’s the senerio:

Linux server running Samba 3 as Windows Domain Controller
“New” windows xp pro workstation I want to add to the domain

All very simple – go into ‘network identification’ on the windows box, type in the relevant computer name and domain, click okay, get prompted for user name/password of an account with permissions to add workstation to the domain, type in ‘root’ as username and my carefully crafted password and rather then getting the ‘Welcome to the<NAME OF DOMAIN> domain’ message I’m expecting, I get an ‘Access Denied’ error message.

So I though, as I’m adding a ‘new’ machine, but reusing an old computer name, perhaps I need to delete the ‘old’ machine’s ‘workstation trust account’, so off I go and delete the <MACHINENAME>$ account in both the linux users and samba users list and so that the system would recreate them automatically. Still no joy.

Many tweaks later I suddenly twigged. As a good system administrator I recently changed all the passwords on our systems. This included the root password on the server. What I’d done is changed the linux ‘root’ user password, but not the password of the user ‘root’ in the samba password file. On entering my old root password into the windows ‘join domain’ window it all worked as expected.

Lesson learnt – if you change your linux passwords you need to change your samba passwords as well (or take measures to sync the two if needed or one of many other permutations of actions you might like which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.).

As I’m not a big one for doing Twitter and such like I thought I’d share on this blog a few interesting little things that have crossed my path over the past week or so.

To be honest I’m not one for wadding through pages and pages of “social media comment” on the events over in Japan – reading the papers and the TV and Radio bulletins give a good over view. However one on the ground report I found was this one: Japan Earthquake – a full diary which I found from a pointer from John Myers blog.

Over on the CMA mailing list (the place were you often skip over e-mails from “Office -ccr fm”) I spotted that the guys at Canalside Community Radio have produced this Promo which they have offered freely to other Community Radio stations to play. If you do use it please contact the guys at Canalside Community Radio to let them know.

As part of my weekly Tuesday commute I normally listen to the Podcast of Talk Talk Radio, this weeks programme had some interesting chat about the events in Japan as well.

Finally I caught on TV yesterday morning this episode of BBC Click – looking at the use of the internet and technology in the quake. I hope the link I’ve given above is a world wide friendly link, rather than the UK geolocked iPlayer version.

Rather spookily I’d been reading some things about nice new things in the upcoming WordPress version 3.1, such as in this post and others which I have failed miserably to make a note of (too much WILF’ing was going on at the time). Then last night when I was tweaking one of the other WordPress powered sites I have a hand in the ‘upgrade to WordPress v3.1′ message magically appeared in by admin Dashboard.

We’ll after my text this afternoon to my local WordPress guru of “have you updated your sites to WordPress 3.1″ was “I hadn’t seen that news” I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and upgrade this site.

So far so good – it still works!

The most obvious change is the ‘admin bar’ at the top of the screen when you are logged in but browsing the site. It also interesting to see developments in native support for custom post types (which I’ve previously achieved via plug-ins) which along with streamlined admin pages are going to make for some tense moments with some sites I’m involved with – I see some late nights tweaking on a development server is in order. (Shh… don’t tell the family).

If all else fails this new release has prompted a new blog post from me (assuming you didn’t notice my ‘test’ posts which stayed live a little longer than I’d planned while I was testing my custom XML-RPC scripts).

Just one that amused me – PSquared’s music scheduling software, Autotrack, has an option to do a web lookup on a track’s details.

Above is what I got when I wanted to check the date of The Cult’s classic “She Sells Sanctuary”.

Up till now I,ve been not that impressed with the idea of getting an iPad. After all what is it useful for?

Still trying to answer that one but two minutes in the Apple store in Manchester playing with one and I,m hooked by the Apple magic.

I,m writing this post on a iPad in said store and been throughly mesmorised. Even typing on the o screen keyboard is not as bad as I first though (Hopefully there is not too many typos in this to prove the point) althoug not sure if Id managed a long typing session. But that is not the point of the device.

But lets return to the point of do I want one? Well as I look up around the table at the front of this store there are a dozen iPads on disply, with crowds all having fun. But when I look at the price card I can safely say that my credit card will be staying safely in my wallet and saving me the “starting at £429″ price on the card in front of me.

Following on from lasts week tip about Robocopy, if you are backing up to a USB drive there is a chance that every time you use the drive (maybe on different machines) under Windows you get a different drive letter.

So if you have a batch file saved on the drive with your finely crafted backup script, it may fail if your drive D:\ is now drive E:\

Enter to the rescue just the variable you need:

%~d0

Which gives you the path to the file in which the script is being run from,

so something like

robocopy \\my-server\files %~d0\backupfolder /mir

saved as ‘backup.bat’ in the root of your usb drive will work everytime.