The Ramblings of Ken

Our family has grown to a considerable size of five. We decided that our little Saturn SL1 just wasn't cutting it anymore. Back in December we got a 2011 Dodge Grand Caravan.

I've been doing some reading on the technology in this vehicle and in other newer cars. I am very intrigued by the fact that newer cars actually have software updates. I found that there were several versions of the software that runs the head unit in my van that had been released in the past couple of years. I couldn't allow something I own to not be running the latest and greatest software available!

The process was pretty painless. I downloaded the firmware files and copied them to an empty FAT formatted USB stick. Then I stuck it in the radio's USB port, held down the phone button, and a prompt came up asking if I wanted to upgrade the software. In about five minutes it was done.

Honestly, there are only difference I have noticed so far. First, the interface changed from a blue color to a black color. I like this change because it matches the color of the radio itself. Second, there is now an option for a camera delay. This causes the rear backup camera to stay on for a few seconds after you put the car into drive.

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that our cars are now in line with our computers. It's time that we keep them up to date just like we do with our computers.

With the shutdown of Aereo, which I blogged about earlier, I decided that I needed to come up with a quick solution to fill my TV needs. I've never had a DVR before, but I became hooked on Aereo's DVR feature. It was very nice to be able to record NFL and MLS games and other TV shows to watch them later.

My needs aren't very big. My family hardly watches any TV. There are a couple of shows that we watch regularly, though. One of them is on ABC. We used to watch on ABC's own website, but ABC started making us wait at least a week to watch because we don't have cable TV anymore. This really is aggravating! I'm sure that this trend will only continue as people continue to "cut the cord." Thus, I decided that I needed a DVR.

First, however, I needed a working TV signal. There was a Real Salt Lake game on later in the day and I needed to watch it! I double checked Aereo and it really was dead. I needed an antenna to receive over the air TV signals. I know that installing an antenna outside will always give the best results, but I decided to see what I could do with an indoor antenna. I found that the Winegard Flatwave Razor Thin antenna was getting some good reviews. There were other antennas getting good reviews too, but I needed something I could get locally. Time was not on my side and game time was quickly approaching. I ran into town and purchased the antenna. Before going home I tried out the antenna at my grandmother's house and I was not pleased with the results. I was tempted to return it, but decided to try it at home first.

I fought with the antenna for several hours. I still don't know why I struggled so much with it. My Vizio TV kept giving me a generic "Scan Error" message as I tried to search for channels. I finally found a spot in my living room window where I could at least get it to scan enough to get signal from a few channels. After playing with it for quite some time, I found that if I unplugged the antenna from the TV before starting a scan I could get better results. I finally got a scan to complete and I had a working TV signal, but I still needed a DVR.

Thanks to my good brother-in-law, I had a digital ATSC TV tuner card lying around not being used. I decided to throw this into my Windows 8.1 machine and see what I could do. I paid the $10 for Windows Media Center and I was off and running. It was a pretty simple process except for the fact that it messed up a few channels with incorrect frequencies. I used the software that came with the TV card to scan for channels and compared with what Windows Media Center found. It was easy to correct the problems in Windows Media Center's lineup this way.

I am quite pleased with the results. To watch TV, we hit the power button on the media center remote that came with the TV card, and the computer comes out of sleep and automatically turns on the TV within a couple of seconds. It really does feel like a real TV experience without the fuss of logging in to a website to watch TV which we were experiencing before. I think we are much better off now. We might not be using Aereo if they are able to restore service to us in Utah.

I know that I could have accomplished good results with free software, like Myth TV, but I needed things to work quickly without fussing with config files and package dependencies that come with Linux distributions. I would love to experiment with Myth TV, though, when I have some free time.

I'm not usually one to write about court decisions. They usually don't directly effect me, at least noticeably. However, I am quite upset about a ruling by US District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball. He ruled that Aereo should be shut down while we wait to hear what the Supreme Court will rule on the matter this summer.

Are you kidding me? The Supreme Court will hear the case, but he enforced a preliminary injunction in the tenth circuit states? Does this sound reasonable at all? Every other case against Aereo has been ruled in favor of Aereo. In the good old tenth circuit, however, we go our own way, I guess.

I am extremely disappointed in this ruling. I have grown quite fond of Aereo's service. Having over the air TV signals available via the internet is completely awesome. Their cloud DVR absolutely rules too. I loved being able to record NFL games this season and watch them later from any of my devices. I'm really going to miss this service. I don't anticipate it being turned back on any time soon. These battles tend to drag out for a long time.

More reading on this court case can be found here: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/57570124-79/aereo-court-service-utah.html.csp

Recently I have been trying to help someone at work with a broken Samsung Galaxy S3. The device will not power on whatsoever. After doing some research I discovered that the S3, like most Android phones, will not power on the screen if the boot loader has become corrupted.

I started looking into the possibility of recovering the boot loader. It turns out that there is a boot image you can load onto an SD card that will boot the phone and attempt to recovery the boot loader. I wrote the image to an SD card, popped it in, and the LCD turned on. Some text then showed up on the screen. Here's what it does:

After doing more research, my conclusion is that the flash memory on this phone became corrupted. There is no way to read or write an image to this phone anymore.

This is not the first time I have seen similar problems with Android hardware. I have never seen an iPhone do anything like this. I need a phone that I can depend on that won't randomly decide that its flash memory is suddenly corrupted.

That's my rant for the day.

I think it is time for my yearly blog post. I've been meaning to post something about Microsoft Hyper-v for quite some time now.
When I started at my current position we were running mostly physical servers, but we had a couple of virtual servers running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. One of the first things I helped with was to get those virtual servers migrated to VMware Server 2.0. After running on VMware Server for a year or so, we realized that it just wasn't going to fill our needs. It had not been updated for a very long time and it appeared that VMware was going to drop support for it. We then decided to migrate to VMware ESXi. It was a very good product for us. The performance of our virtual machines definitely improved significantly. However, just after getting everything migrated over and running smoothly, the state of Utah dropped their contract with VMware. We made the decision to migrate to Hyper-V.
In all honesty, we struggled in our test conversions from ESXi to Hyper-V. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 looked to have all of the functionality we needed to perform the conversions built in to it. In all of our test conversions the process would make it to 90% or so and then fail with a cryptic error message.
Finally, we decided to give up on the built-in functionality and use VMware Converter. We shut down the virtual machine we were trying to convert and exported the ESXi VM to a VMware Workstation VM. After that it wasn't a problem at all to import the VMware Workstation VM into System Center Virtual Machine Manager and get it up and running. The process was very smooth once we followed the VMware Converter workflow. Every VM converted and imported just fine.
I was reluctant to move to Hyper-V, but we are very pleased with it. The one item that completely blew me away is how much better Microsoft's backup solution is. We were using the built-in VMware Data Protection product before. It was very unreliable for us. The worst part is that restore operations would take hours. Now we are using Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager. It is much more intuitive and restoring a complete VM takes only a matter of minutes.
Microsoft, you've earned one more fan here with Hyper-V.