Category Archives: Technology

Hearing loss poll

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With age we lost the ability to hear high frequencies. I’m 28 and I cannot hear frecuencies above 15KHz.

Here is a ringtone called ‘the mosquito’ which young people use for their cellphones to prevent adults from noticing that their cell phone is ringing. The ringtone frecuency is at 17KHz.

I’m curious to know if you can hear this ringtone or not: Please leave a comment on this post with your age(*) and let me know if you can hear it.

(*) If you are a young, single, sexy female, you can also leave your phone number. :)

You can learn more about the mosquito ringtone here.

Still having issues with my PowerBook

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A few months ago I had problems with my PowerBook when I was organizing all the pictures I took in my last trip to Colombia. While working on iPhoto, the PB froze and I had to hold the power button for a few seconds to shut it down. When I turned the PB back on, it showed me a screen with a flashing folder and a question mark, which means that the PB cannot find the OS. I tried to boot with the OS X DVD to run Disk Utility and this tool failed to recognize the Volume and I was afraid that I had lost all my data. I didn’t have a backup of my data and I was really frustrated. Finally I got a copy of Disk Warrior and this amazing application recovered all my data. To prevent this from happening again, I bought a 300 GB external Seagate FW hard disk and backed up all my information.

PowerBook G4

Although the data was recovered, my PowerBook wasn’t behaving very well, so I decided to wipe out the OS, reformat the hard drive and install everything again. This worked fine for a while but then I started noticing that during a session eventually my PB would refuse writing to disk, until it was rebooted. This started getting very annoying until one day when I tried to reboot again the evil screen with a flashing folder and a question mark came back again. I used Disk Warrior again to fix the problem. But a few days later the same situation happened and this time, after running Disk Warrior, the OS was all messed up: there wasn’t a menu bar on the top and I was unable to launch ‘System Preferences’. That’s was when I decided to call AppleCare. I told them pretty much everything I’m telling here, and they asked me to run Disk Utilities to verify the disk. The disk verification returned that everything was fine, so the support person told me to reinstall the OS keeping the ‘User and Network preferences’ which is an option the installation gives you. I told him that I didn’t wanted to install the OS back, but instead I wanted a final real solution for my problem, but since this was the first time they heard from me, and since the disk verification went fine, that was all they could do at the time. I had no other option than to follow their instructions. The laptop worked fine until I had to reboot it and got the flashing folder and a question mark again. This time I went and reformated the hard disk and reinstalled the OS X. At this point all I wanted was the PB to go back into a bad state, so I could call AppleCare again, and it happen a week after: the PB refused to start and this time, not even the flashing folder showed up. I called AppleCare and they didn’t ask many questions. Very quickly they told me that they were going to send me a box for me to ship the PB to their repair center. I was happy to finally be able to send them the PB but I’m worried that all they are going to do is verify the disk (which probably will succeed) and reinstall the OS, and a few weeks later I’m going to be calling them again.

I shipped my PB yesterday and today I looked at Apple’s website and it says that they already got it and FIXED it. That makes me think that they might have done very little on it. But I’ll wait and see what happens once I get it back.

[Update - April 27th, 2006]
It only took AppleCare a few hours to repair my PowerBook. They got it yesterday morning, repaired it and shipped it back to me that afternoon. I got an email notification this morning with the tracking number and picked up my laptop from a DHL location this afternoon. They finally replaced my hard disk, so I hope that will finally fix the problem. Kuddos to AppleCare for the super fast service.

I highly recommend paying the extra couple of hundreds to get the AppleCare extended warranty, specially for laptops.

Chichipanguanorrea ranks again #1 in Google for ‘daniel jaramillo’!

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Daniel Jaramillo #1 in Google ranking!

Almost a year ago I posted in this blog that if you search my name on Google, Chichipanguanorrea was the first hit.

Back then I was using HostRave as my host provider and SimplePHPBlog. I also mentioned that I wanted to add a counter to my website to monitor traffic. I installed BBClone and it works great. So far Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 has been visited by 5638 unique visitors.

Then I switched to a different host (DreamHost) and blog freamework (WordPress). When I did this, my website fell down from the top position of the Google ranking. The first hit (ranked 16th or something worse) was not even from my own site, but instead it was from Marcos’ blog.

I read once that one of the criterias for Google to rank a website, is by looking at how recent is the domain. If a domain is younger than 1 year, the site will have less weight. That kind of makes sense, because you should trust older websites more than new ones. But in my case, it wasn’t really a new website. It was an old website being moved to a new domain.

By the way, I just found this article that I could have used in the past: Switching to a New Domain Without Losing Your Google Rankings

Anyway, I was sad to see that I was no longer the coolest Daniel Jaramillo on the web! It really hurted my ego! :)

But no worries people! Google has now put me back on #1!

Powerbook + Coffee = Not good!

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Yesterday I had an accident with my PowerBook: I was having coffee for breakfast and spilled some of it over my PowerBook keyboard. I immediately shut it down and turned the laptop upside down, and used a towel to clean it. Since I had to go to work, I left it upside down all day.

When I got back home I felt some keys were sticky, so I did some research on Google and found out that I had to clean the keyboard under the keys.

I found this great website PB Fix it that sells PowerBook parts, but also provides detailed manuals that tell you step-by-step how to install different parts.

These are the steps to clean your laptop keyboard
- Remove keyboard from laptop
- Draw your keyboard configuration, since you are going to remove all the keys. I used my digital camera to take a few pictures
- Remove every key (except from the big ones like space bar, Enter…)
- Clean the keys in water and let them dry completely
- Use several cotton puffs with alcohol to clean your keyboard. Discard a cotton puff if its leaving pieces of cotton behind.
- Put your keyboard together and you are done.

Review of Motorola V330 and T-Mobile

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About two months ago, I decided that it was time to give my old Nokia cellphone a break. I had it for about 2.5 years and it always worked very well. My original carrier was AT&T and then they merged with Cingular. The service with AT&T was always very good. I always had excellent signal reception in Austin, and when I traveled to other cities (Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, NY, Boston, Washington…) it always seemed to work just fine.

Since I was content with AT&T, I tried to see my options for upgrading the phone. I was willing to sign another 2 year contract with them, in exchange for a free phone (and retaining my phone number). But unfortunately, they only offer those options to new or switching customers. I find that bussiness practice totally absurd. Why give a free phone to a new customer, but not to an existing loyal one?

So after calling them a couple of times and visiting stores like Best Buy, I understood that my best option was to switch carrier.

So I call a friend who uses T-Mobile and asked him about it and he told me that T-Mobile was a good carrier. So I went ahead and bought a T-Mobile plan.

Motorola V330

The plan included the Motorola V330 which is a bluetooth camera phone supported by iSync.

I’ve been using this phone + plan for two months and I’m really dissapointed. In other words: T-Mobile sucks!

My phone is always searching for signal. The reception sucks. I don’t receive phone calls all the time. I get text messages 30 minutes after they were sent. I would rank AT&T service with 10 and T-Mobile with 4. So if you live in Texas, don’t sign with T-Mobile!

Regarding the phone, I’m not very happy either. I’m sure that part of the bad reception is caused by the phone, because otherwise I’m sure my friend would never had recommended me T-Mobile. I also like the simple Nokia style better; I don’t like opening an closing a clam-type phone all the time.

I must say that phone integration with iSync worked very well. I was also able to use bluetooth to copy MP3 soundtracks to my phone and use them as ring tones. That is actually really cool. I converted the MP3 song to WAV, croped it to 30 seconds, changed it from stereo to mono, converted it back to MP3 and uploaded it to the phone. Now Connection from Elastica plays everytime the “…vital connection is made”.

Flickr integration

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I decided to give Flickr a try and created an account and installed a WordPress plugin in my site to support it. I need to say that the integration was very easy and I like the results. I also installed a plugin to export my pictures directly from iPhoto to Flickr.

Flick has some constrains on free accounts:
- Only 20 MB can be uploaded each month
- Only 200 pictures will be hosted by Flickr. They say that after 200, you can still access your pictures, but I’m not sure if this works with WordPress.

I decided that I can live with those constrains if I use Flickr only to upload the pictures that I like the most. So let’s see how this new experiment of becoming a professional photographer works!

NI Week – Day Three

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Sorry for not posting sooner about the last NI Week day. I didn’t really spent much time there, since I only attended the morning keynote. It was given by Jeff Clarke, Senior Vice President of Dell Computer Corporation.

The main point in the keynote was ‘Standardisation’. When a technology becomes a standard, its cost drops significantly, the performance improves and more choices are available. At the end everyone benefits from standard technology.

A mouse that years ago was a revolutionary device is now a days a standard technology.

Unfortunately, there are many examples that show that not always the best technology available becomes the standard.

You can watch the three keynotes here.

NI Week – Day two!

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Yesterday the Robolab mentoring went pretty well. I was assigned to a group of guys from an Ohio company called Inoveris that produces digital media (CDs, DVDs, …) and a professor. They were the Robolab challenge champions at NIWeek 2004, so I thought that they were not going to need much help from me. But since the laptops we got to build our programs were iBooks I got in charge of writting the software because I was familiar with the OS. Out of 6 missions, we were able to complete 4 in the 3 hour time slot we got. We picked the easiest missions and our software and hardware was actually very simple. We didn’t use touch or light sensors, only the motors and timing. Let’s see how things work out tonight.

This morning I went to Las Manitas again and then headed to the convention center for the keynote. Later I attended to a session called ‘Extreme Home Automation’ which made me think about doing some cool ‘home improvements‘ and then attended to a session showing how LabVIEW was taking advantage of three of the main features in Tiger OS X: Spotlight, Dashboard and Automator. I can see the Spotlight integration very useful, to quickly find VIs.

Now I’m back at work, but I’ll go to the convention center again this afternoon to cheer for my team in the Robolab challenge.

Update:
The Robolab contest was very fun and my team did very well. We ended up in 5th position.

Tomorrow is the last NI Week day and I think I’m only going to attend to the keynote.

NI Week – Day One

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I always thought it was very cool when people go to a conference and daily log their activities. So I’m going to try to do the same.

I woke up early today and went with my sister, Marcos, Alejandro, Andres and Raffaele to Las Manitas Mexican restaurant to have breakfast. Then we headed to the convention center and got good seats to see the keynote.

The keynote was very cool with very nice demos. The one I liked the most where a Compact Fielpoint system controlling 3 inverted pendulums. Another very cool one was a bearing sorting machine using Vision and Motion products.

Then I went to a presentation from the OpenG.org and they got me really interested into open source development. Perhaps I could try to create a LabVIEW based application, and put it out there as an open source project.

I had lunch with the Integration Services group at PF Changs, and now I’m here waiting to hear a presentation called: Designing Plug-in User Interface Modules in LabVIEW.

Later at 4pm my group will be giving a presentation so I’ll be there as backup.

And at 5:30pm I’m going to be working as a RoboLab mentor for the RoboLab challenge. I hope that works fine.