Blog: General

iMessage is a new feature allowing users to send messages over wireless across Apple devices beginning with iOS 5.  When I upgrade my iPad to iOS 5, I tried out the new iMessage feature & sent a message to a friend with an iOS 5 device.  He received the message and later replied, but his reply only went to my iPad, not my iPhone.  I found you can turn on the iMessage feature on your iOS 5 iPhone (to receive messages across multiple devices) by going to Settings, Messages, and turning on iMessage.  After you do this, messages (text) will be sent as follows:

• If is being sent to another iOS 5 device, it will try to send over wireless or 3G as an “iMessage” message and will show in a blue “bubble” (note: you will not be charged as a text for iMessages)
• If it is going to a non iOS 5 device, then it will go out as a “text” message in the traditional green “bubble”.

iMessage by default is linked to your Apple ID, so if you have multiple people using the same Apple ID (for example a family member), then when you turn on iMessage, all of the people using the Apple ID will begin to receive iMessage on all of the devices.  You can go into Settings, Messages, Receive At, and add additional emails (beyond the Apple ID) that you want to receive messages from.
Another cool feature of iMessage, if someone is responding to a message, a speech bubble with “…” will appear indicating they are in the middle of typing out a reply…

Many of us are getting systems with SSD disks. Defragmentation is not really an issue with this type of disk drive because of the technology. However, the technology has limitations in that there are wear considerations. A typical SSD drive (using the MLC technology that is prevalent in our laptops) are only good for 3,000 to 10,000 write cycles. The drives have compensating “wear leveling” algorithms built into the controller to mitigate this.  However, using a defrag tool will cause excessive writes to the disk and will decrease the life of the disk drive.
 
Windows 7 is supposed to detect that a drive is an SSD and turn off the defragmentation tool… however it seems that this is not always the case, so we should look at the Task Scheduler (not Task Manager) and disable the task that periodically runs the defragmentation tool. [more]
 
Now this also raises additional questions which are interesting!
 
1)      What about VM’s running as guest on SSD’s http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/should-i-defrag-my-guest-os.html

2)      What about Readyboost, Prefetch and SuperPerfetch capabilities of Windows 7

UPDATE:  I am beginning to believe that Windows 7 might actually be detecting the SSD drives and disabling Defrag, Readyboost, etc on these drives. In my case, I can check the task scheduler and Defrag has run as scheduled. HOWEVER, I have another non-SSD drive on my eSATA port (for backup).  This may be confusing the Task Scheduler.

There is still a lot of misinformation associated with charging Lithium-ion batteries.  Some people are still being told the batteries in their phones, tablets, laptops, etc. have a finite number of charge cycles and it takes from a cycle whether the battery is almost full or empty.  This would be true for some older types of batteries but not for Li-ion batteries.  Some systems will want you to cycle batteries (full to empty to full, etc.) in order to calibrate the power management software but not for battery life management. [more]

One battery resource says:

The smaller the depth of discharge, the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid frequent full discharges and charge more often between uses. If full discharges cannot be avoided, try utilizing a larger battery. Partial discharge on Li-ion is fine; there is no memory and the battery does not need periodic full discharge cycles other than to calibrate the fuel gauge on a smart battery.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

The exception to this is Li-ion batteries don't store as well if they're topped off.  That is, if you plan to leave one in storage without using it for an extended period of time, it's best to store it about half charged rather than completely charged.

Recently, a large audit required the use of a spare laptop to help with the scanning. We decided to use a quad-core laptop because CPU utilization is one of the bottlenecks for our LanGuard scans. While prepping the laptop, I wanted to make sure the quad cores were being utilized, but instead found out that two of the cores were “parked” and sitting idle. It turns out this is a feature built into Windows in order to conserve power and extend battery life. Windows can dynamically park CPUs when the system load is light and bring them back on line when the system load increases. If you have a quad-core processor, you can test this by opening Resource Monitor (open Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, click on the Resource Monitor button), clicking on the CPU tab, and looking at the individual cores on right hand side of the screen. If you don’t have anything running, you should see one or two cores go into a “parked” state and be greyed out. As you open applications, they will be reactivated. The feature also works with dual-core CPUs, but the system load doesn’t have to be as high to bring both cores online. [more]
 
During the audit we were preparing for, performance was much more of a concern than battery life, so I wanted all four cores to be active all the time. To accomplish this, you have to edit the registry using the following steps:

• Open regedit and search for  0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583
• Everywhere you find that key (there will likely be more than one instance), change the ValueMin and ValueMax keys to ‘0’
• Reboot the system

You can’t always go off of only the browser version when troubleshooting problems in newer versions of Internet Explorer.  We all know that unfortunately, different browser versions interpret the code for websites differently in some way or another.  When troubleshooting end user problems the first thing I always try to find out is the name of the web browser and the version number being used by the user.  That used to be all you needed to know for Internet Explorer until Microsoft added the option to view web sites in “Compatibility View” to recent versions of IE.

Compatibility View is a cool feature that allows users to view content designed for older web browsers in their newer version of Internet Explorer.  What it basically does is render the web pages as if you were using an older browser.  This works great if you’re having trouble viewing a site in a new browser that worked before you upgraded.  However, “Compatibility View” can turn into “Incompatibility View” if a website was only designed for newer browsers and you turn that feature on. [more]

I’ve seen users accidently and unknowingly turn on the Compatibility View.  After doing that they start having problems with a website that supports their browser version and used to work fine for them.  It’s easy to do since the button is right next to the page refresh button in the address bar.  I’ve also ran into users that have had to use the Compatibility View with other websites in the past so when they run into a problem on a different website they try turning it on and then forget to turn it off when it doesn’t fix their problem.  IE remembers which sites you turned that view on for, so it automatically turns it on the next time you visit the site.

In my opinion the easiest way to view which version your browser is behaving as is to press F12 to open the developer tools window and look for the “Browser Mode” and “Document Mode” settings.  You can click those options to change them.

From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
 
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) also currently has the following second level domain names reserved which can be used as examples.
        example.com
        example.net
        example.org
 
From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5737
 
The blocks 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3) are provided for use in documentation.
 
From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3849
 
The prefix allocated for documentation purposes is 2001:DB8::/32

For several years I have used a single iTunes account for purchases for my entire family.  This has worked fine, but with the introduction of iCloud and iMessage it's now much "cloudier".  If you don't set up separate iCloud accounts for each user/device it can introduce unintended sharing of contacts, bookmarks etc.  Here are several links to sites that explain this in more detail: [more]

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/10/how-to-use-icloud-in-a-family-setting-share-apps-but-not-contacts

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1248112

UEFI problems:  I have found that Bitlocker will not be able to use the enhanced PIN as specified in our GPO on the Thinkpad T420 when using UEFI.  The problem lies in the BIOS (yes, it is still called the BIOS, even though it is UFEI) and it requires an updated version so that the keyboard keys are represented properly (alpha characters) during the boot phase of the startup. My T420 had version 1.24 of the BIOS, and version 1.25 seems to fix this issue. Here is a snippet of the Release Notes for 1.25: [more]

I received some scanned PDF documents from a customer who had scanned them at high resolution. When I tried to use Acrobat to OCR the files, I got an error message stating the pages were larger than the 45" maximum. I was able to OCR the files once I printed them to individual PDFs (which put them into 8.5X11 pages).