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Well, just shy of 2 years, the battery in my iPhone 3GS had gotten pretty sad.  While it would charge up to 100%, it would run down really fast.  I wasn’t able to get more than half a day of good use out of it before it needed recharging.  Even sitting on my desk at work doing nothing it would lose 20% in an 8 hour stretch and seem to be getting worse every day.

Call up an Apple store, and ask them.  Battery replacement on a iPhone 3GS?  $199.  Really?  $199 sir.  Hangup.  I look around on the internet.  Lots of folks selling iPhone batteries, and most for $5-$15.  I start looking around for the most reputable guys, and find iFixIt.com.  They have lots of great step-by-step diagrams, descriptions, videos, and pictures.   Even better, they have a comments section that has literally hundreds of folks who put tips/gotchas/etc. This is looking good.

They sell a 3GS battery kit with all the tools you need for $15 – which includes a tiny screwdriver and a small plastic pry tool that they claim is the same one made for Apple.  You can also buy other helpful tools like a suction cup for removing the 3GS screen.  I decide to take the risk and have it all shipped – $25 total.

Kit comes in the mail and looks pretty well packaged and has all the tools I need.  I open it up and go to the website for instructions.

I follow the instructions pretty closely.  This isn’t like swapping the battery in your remote.  Mine has 16 different steps with no less than the removal of 10 different tiny screws and 7 different tiny ribbon cables.  You need to remove the screen, logic board, camera, and …well… basically everything because the battery is on the very bottom *glued* to the back plastic panel.  I remove it all, install the new battery, and reverse the 16 steps.

I flip it on, *blip!* it makes the normal startup sound – the screen backlights – but NO image/icons/etc.  🙁 I plug it into my computer and it syncs and sees the phone just fine.  I can even see my pictures and music on it – but no image.  I take it apart 2 more times and try re-seating the 3 display cables.  Same result.  Ugh.  I go to check iFixIt.com’s forums, but the site is now down for maintenance – right in the middle!  I remember from a previous look on the forum where one guy had to restore the factory defaults to fix a problem with his phone not charging properly.  I figured what the heck and tell iTunes to restore to factory defaults.   Turns out there was an update due, so it took 30 minutes to download the patch and another 15-20 to restore the defaults.  Shesh.  But right after the restore of factory defaults – I get my display back!  WOOT!  I restore everything, then make a phone call – works like a champ!

I make a phone call, test the buttons, test the camera/screen/music/etc, and everything seems to work great.  Why a software reset is needed to have your display come back after a simple battery replacement is beyond me – but there it is.

So, I don’t recommend the procedure to everyone.  It took about 30 minutes of steady concentration and a equally steady hands – but it seems to be working like a total champ.  It just finished charging to 100%, so we’ll see how well this battery lasts, but it already seems much better.

Yeah, so you automatically got the newest driver for your Canoscan when upgrading to Windows 7.  However, when you go into Photoshop CS5, you no longer see TWAIN devices listed(!).  Unfortunately, in Adobe’s infinite wisdom, they have discontinued installing TWAIN support by default.  You need to go here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4688

to download the ‘Photoshop CS5 Optional Plugins’ free download.

Edit: Note – this ONLY works with 32-bit version of Photoshop CS5.  There still is no TWAIN support on 64-bit Photoshop.

Unzip the file, then copy Twain_32.8BA from the zip’s
\PSCS5OptionalPlugins_Win_en_US\Optional Plug-Ins\Win32

directory, and copy it into your Photoshop CS5 32-bit plugins folder:

C:Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Plug-ins\
directory.  Restart Photoshop and you should see your TWAIN capture option again.

Did you take advantage of the super Steam holiday sales?  I did, and got the complete Battlefield 2 pack for $4.99.  However, if you installed it and got it all working – you might keep getting kicked out of network games because PunkBuster reports that you have an ‘Invalid driver version/game’.  This is because of the Steam Community overlays.

1. At your game library list in Steam, just right-click the Battlefield 2 icon
2. Select Properties
3. Go to the General tab
4. UN-select the ‘Enable Steam Community In-Game’ option.
5. Voila

Yes, annoying.  Can’t believe old games like this haven’t been re-modified by steam to not need the now-ancient PunkBuster system.  The fact they’ve had to update PunkBuster to be separate Windows Services now in order to work shows you it’s time to see that stuff go.

If you have any of the Adobe suite and continually get the registration box when starting the app (even if you’ve filled it out 10 times before or told it not to register) you’re in good company.  You just need to start the app in Administrator mode, make you registration/hit the don’t register button, and THEN the registry can be properly updated.

Thanks again UAC for messing up my life in weird, cryptic ways that not one grandmother would ever be able to figure out.  But I’ve ranted about this before…

The guys from Car Talk have weekly puzzlers, but this question wasn’t a puzzler, but this came from a truck driver who called in.  He said (basically):

“I have big cylindrical tanks on my truck that lays sideways under the foot step.  Problem is that my gas gauge is broken.  I have a stick that I can put in vertically, so if the gas is at the 20″ mark on the stick, it’s full.  If the gas reaches the 10″ mark on the stick, the tank is clearly half full.  Where should I put the 1/4 and 3/4 marks on the stick?”

First you’d think they should be at 5″ and 15″, but that’s not right because the tank is round, which means the bottom and tops have less volume per inch of height.   Then you think this is a problem is an integration problem – which it can be – but the integration becomes extremely hairy.  Then, you find you can back up and use a geometric method (and when you can’t reduce anymore) use a numerical method to solve it.  So let’s get started!

We see that needing the actual volume of the cylinder is unimportant since you can solve this problem with just the cross-section – which is a circle.  What you want is a circle with a chord across it in which the volume between the chord and the outer wall is 1/4 the capacity of the circle.  So, you draw a diagram, and get started!

Unfortunately, you see that the equation becomes very difficult to solve analytically – and one must resort to numerical methods to get an actual solution.  I used the Mathematica online site, but you could easily use the Newton-Raphson method as well.  Whatever way you use, you find that he should mark the 1/4 tank line 5.96027 inches from the bottom of the stick.  3/4 and 1/8th values are also shown.

The value of this equation can quickly be used to calculate 1/8, 1/16, and all other desired fill marks by simply changing the 1/4 * pi * r^2 line whichever fraction you’d like. In fact, you can graph it to get any value:

Ignoring negative volumes, you see that the tank’s volume compared to it’s theta (roughly equivalent to height) forms a S curve, so that you can see that the height changes more rapidly w.r.t. volume when close to full/empty than in the middle – just like we’d expect.

So, that’s your answer.  Turns out, others have solved this since it’s a common problem with all kinds of other tanks (fuel oil, gas stations, etc).  Here and here are other solutions that verify the same process and confirm that the final equation is unsolvable analytically.

Another person pointed out that most semi’s have TWO tanks – one on each side – which are connected by a balancing flow connector.  So both tanks fill and empty evenly.  Even though this seems to mess up the problem, it actually does not.  In order to represent that situation, you simply multiply both sides by two (two tanks, two times the target volume) – which cancel each other out.  You could have ANY number of tanks connected like this and the answer is the same.

It also doesn’t matter how long the tank is either (so long as the tanks are the same size if you have more than one).  Finally, the theta angle you calculate doesn’t even depend on what radius of the tank!  So if you calculate the thetas for all the fill points, then you can calculate the 1/4 mark on ANY size tank.  Pretty nifty huh.

I mean, come on already.  I have 8 gigabytes of memory in my machine; and 3 terabytes of storage.  Yet, I just spent 30 minutes getting hosed by an (admittedly poorly written/buggy) installer because I’d exceeded my DOS path length in Windows 7.  Yes, here’s the official solution to an error if you install the Intel Compiler and get this message:

Unable to install the integration into Visual Studio. Failure in “<blahblah>integrate.bat” “<blahblah>Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common 7Tools”

If you see it, do this:

Because some others seen the same problem, I’m posting the solution and the rootcause here.

The rootcause: our installation adds the “bin” directories to the “path” environment variable. so after installed many compiler updates, the “path” exceeded the max and the “C:Windowssystem32;C:Windows;” dirs got pushed out; and potentially off the end of the path.

The solution:
1. uninstall the last compiler update that has reported the error
2. clean-up the “path” to remove all the bin directories added by Intel Compiler installation.
As for how to clean up, goto the property dialog of “my computer”.
make sure the system directories are there.
3. install the compiler update again: it will add the bin dir again. this is so you can run your program without adding the bin dir.

The installation of newer compiler does check the length of “path” if I remember correctly. But I need to verify this.

But I mean – why am I still losing productivity with this kind of bug?  Haven’t we the technology to make a path variable as long as we want now?  Ring, ring!  Hello?  1984 called and wants its operating system back.

Yet another case of Steam’s PC client giving me headaches that can’t be solved by mere mortals.  I don’t think I’ve had  ONE successful launch day download that didn’t require 2+ hours of fixing/waiting/etc.

Left4Dead2’s new DLC level “The Passing” added one more mission and several new gameplay modes on Thursday last week (which was free on the PC, but cost money on the XBOX).  I forgot to leave my machine on during the day of launch, so I had to start downloading when I got home from work.  My bad – but I was surprised that they didn’t let people start pre-loading like they did for the original launch of Left4Dead2.  Anyway, after getting several ‘Servers too busy – try downloading later’, I finally got a download started.  4 hours later it completed. Steam restarted to install some patched, and then when I restarted Steam, my Win7 x64 popped up a dialog saying it was going to apply compatibility settings to steam because it detected an install problem.  There was no way to say “No – DON’T do that”, so it went ahead and applied these ‘settings’.

Then, when you tried to start Steam again, you got error dialogs from Steam saying:  “Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press ‘Cancel’ to permanently ignore this warning and continue.” I click on the file properties for the executable and go to the compatibility tab -but it says there are no compatibility modes set.  I try setting/resetting them – still get the error.  I look online, people have tried completely installing/uninstalling ALL their games/Steam – no luck either.  Finally, someone grabs Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Tool and found the compatibility keys for Steam.  He then dug around in the registry to find where those keys were kept, and does this:

To fix the issue:

1. Hit start->run->regedit
2. Go to key: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionAppCompatFlagsLayers
3. Look for a entry with your path to steam.exe
4. Delete that entry
5. If you dont find it there try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionAppCompatFlagsLayers

So, there’s your fix

 

I ran into a majorly weird bug with Windows 7 Ultimate – one that I’ve now confirmed on two different machines and even went so far as to contact Microsoft about.

I have a really great Dell 30″ Ultrasharp monitor at work. Beautiful monitor, big, and has a nice set of USB and card reader ports on the side. I love the monitor and used it under Vista for years now.  However, after upgrading my machine from Windows Vista to Windows 7, all kinds of stuff started to go horribly slow or just not work on the machine. I did a fresh install, and then all heck started breaking lose from the get-go.

Compiling apps with Visual Studio started taking much longer, all kinds of apps started acting strange by going grey and not accepting input for long periods of time, multimedia apps will sometimes have huge delays before starting (Winamp once took 30 minutes to start playback), others will have very slow/choppy playback, and many USB and other devices didn’t show up or work (mice, etc).  I found that none of the ports on my Dell monitor worked.  Further exacerbating the problem – you couldn’t open most of the system tools.  The Disk Manager tool would just sit and say it was trying to connect to the Virtual Disk Services forever, and most control panel apps you’d click would never come up.  Yet at all times, the CPU will show 1% utilization.  Within about 10 minutes of bootup – everything you did was unstable and hickup-ridden.  It made using the machine intolerable.

In a fit of frustration, I started unplugging devices to reduce the number of variables – and when I unplugged the monitor’s extended USB ports plug – all of a sudden the machine snapped to life.  The device manager popped up and listed a whole pile of new devices and install them.  All of a sudden – everything worked.  No more app timeouts, no more long delays, no more missing devices.  I plugged back in the USB ports of the Dell monitor, and it went back to being broken.  Holy cow – a USB port/cardreader was bringing Windows 7 to its knees.  I plugged the monitor back into my vista box to see if it really was the monitor – but everything worked perfectly.  I went over to my bosses cube who had the same monitor.  He was having video playback problems – it was going really slow.  I told him to unplug the USB ports on the monitor, and as soon as he did that – the video instantly went full speed.  Neither of us would believe it if we’d not seen it with our own eyes.

As of now, I have this logged with Microsoft under ticket #1125286661- we’ll see if anything comes of it.

Miss the old-style Vista stocks widget/gadget?  I do – and the new one has a terrible look and feel.  So they finally fixed the old one to work on windows 7.

But classic Microsoft help forum though – they bitch and moan about how there’s a new version that’s SOOO much better and you’re basically stupid for not using it.  Only after tons of people complain constantly on how the new one is terrible (which IMHO it is terrible looking) – *then* they finally fix the old one and release it quietly.  Man – take a page from customer service people – the customer is right – not the engineer in the case of look and feel.

Anyway, here’s the gadget:
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=2640b097-ed79-4aad-8877-313d5a8558c9&bt=1