Archive for July, 2007

On the fly wav to mp3 saving

Published
by
Keith Garner
on July 24, 2007
in Tools
. 0 Comments

images.jpegWarning: Totally geeky and non-iPhone related post!

With our move to VOIP phones last year, our e-mail and our voice mail became integrated. For most of NAR, this means in their Lotus Notes INBOX they see their voice mail as just another e-mail message with a wav attached. They can listen to the e-mail via their phone, or from their desktop computer.

For various reasons CRT runs its own mail server, and my e-mail is on that server. The nice part is I still get my voice mail as an e-mail with a wav attached. I just lose the ability to listen to my voice mail via a phone. With the way I am from a personality standpoint, even if I could do it via phone, I’d still listen via a computing device.

The wavs are uncompressed so they can get quit large depending on the length of the voice mail left. While disk space on the mail server isn’t really a concern, I’d still like the files to be smaller. The biggest win will be for when I’m on the road for NAR and in a hotel who’s net connection isn’t that hot. (It happens more often than not, sadly.) Also, when checking voice mail on a mobile device a smaller download in a well supported wouldn’t hurt either.

I decided that I’d write a script to convert the wavs in the e-mail to mp3s on the fly. Since I’m using procmail on our mail server to do server-side sorting, its really easy to write a program/script to act as a filter to work with procmail. With what I know about procmail, having done similar things in the past, I knew that I’d receive the mail in raw format via STDIN and that I’d want to write my filtered mail out STDOUT in a similar fashion. Since my current scripting love is ruby, I thought I’d start there.

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Bruce Wolf on the the iPhone

Published
by
Keith Garner
on July 23, 2007
in Gadgets
. 7 Comments

Summer is traditionally a quiet time here at CRT, so we haven’t had a lot to report on via the blog. Yes, this will be the forth or fifth apple related post this week. It just seems to be that sort of summer. I promise I’ll have something non-iPhone related by the end of the week. Anyway…

Bruce Wolf, NAR’s current treasurer, sent me this to post on the blog as a follow up. As Bruce is a real estate practitioner, he has more of an “on the ground” review than mine. This might also be notable as I believe that Bruce is officially our first guest blogger. Bruce’s review after the jump.

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How do you measure support?

Published
by
Mark Lesswing
on July 20, 2007
in General and Reviews
. 3 Comments

I wanted to share a tale of customer support that I think all of you will appreciate because all of us support someone. Let me start with a little background first.

At work, there is a support group that takes care of my hardware and from the software perspective, I support myself. At home it is a different situation, I have built four of my computers (I have a sound studio and a train layout) except for one that is a shiny new iMac. OK, I forgot my son at college who has a MacBook Pro. My experience with support is the kind that involves returning failed components for replacement. I did have one experience with a major printer manufacturer that became frustrating and time consuming. This and other experiences (friends and families) is how I formed my low opinion of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) support. Now on with my tale.

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iPhone: 5 days later

Published
by
Keith Garner
on July 12, 2007
in Gadgets and Reviews
. 7 Comments

Image used without permission from AppleLast Friday July 6th at about 1 I picked up my iPhone. I wanted to give it a serious couple of days of use before I posted about it. I also wanted to make sure I did a few things that NAR’s members would do on a day to day basis.

We all heard and read about the activation problems in the first 24 hours or so. I’m happy to report that those issues were non-existent when I went to activate. Almost everything you do with the phone starts with iTunes, and activation is no different. I fired up iTunes, plugged the phone into the USB port and just started answering the questions. The activation went very smooth and I was mostly using my phone within 15 minutes of getting back from the Apple store. The snag I had though was in transferring my number from my old carrier. It took them 24 hours to give up the number to AT&T. During that time I could make calls and do network functions like e-mail and web surfing, but I couldn’t receive calls. Once that was done, it went like a shot.

Synchronization is also done via iTunes. On my OS X based MacBook Pro, this provides for a very tight integration with tools that Apple ships with OS X. The good side is much like an iPod sync, things just go when you cradle your device. The down side is that you’re tied to using iTunes. If you’re on OS X or Windows this isn’t really an issue. For those on other platforms, this could be a limiting issue. I haven’t tried syncing the phone with Windows so I can’t comment on what you can and cannot do via iTunes on the Windows and how well it integrates other than knowing what tools Apple says is supported on the stats page.

The rest of this will really focus on the parts of the phone I really interact with. If I don’t mention an app or don’t really talk about it, I haven’t used it much yet.
Continue reading ‘iPhone: 5 days later’

iPhone

Published
by
Keith Garner
on July 5, 2007
in Gadgets
. 3 Comments

Now that the hype has died down a bit, Chad and I walked over to the Apple store to play with the demo model.  That was a mistake, now I have the shakes and some mad desire.  I’ll be getting one tomorrow or so and I start to post updates and the like.  As we go forward  I will post thoughts and amusements and the like.