David Oshiro's Blog

I Am Against SOPA and PIPA

davidoshiro — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:53:30 +0000

SOPA and PIPA are communistic proposals that protects only a few at the expense of the whole and cannot succeed at it’s mission to prevent piracy. The only thing it will succeed in doing is allow a select group of people to legally censor what is on the Internet thereby violating the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.

For more information about SOPA and PIPA go to the link below.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Corrupted Sessions Table

davidoshiro — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:31:23 +0000

Just had an issue where our server crashed and upon restoring the server, our users were unable to log into the site. We checked the files and nothing was changed. We checked the data and everything looked fine.

Finally, after doing some research on the Internet we found something that looked like a possible solution. Upon checking our logs and verifying the state of our database, it was confirmed that the sessions table was corrupted. A simple “mysqlcheck -rev” was all we needed to do to get our site back up and running.

Special thanks to FreelancerDrupal.com for posting such details and useful information.

http://www.freelancerdrupal.com/drupal-development/blogs/unable-login-drupal-site

Review: Terra Nova

davidoshiro — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:50:08 +0000

Last night, I watched the highly anticipated Steven Spielberg television show Terra Nova. The big budget 2-hour premiere focused on a family who is selected to go back through time some 45 million years and start a new life.

The premise for the show is that in the 22nd century the Earth has become so polluted that the sky is blocked by smog and so over populated that only two children are allowed per family. The solution to these problems is a wormhole that scientists discovered that allows people to go on a one-way trip back through time to live with dinosaurs.

Ok, so the production value of the show was good. Lots of special effects and action scenes. The acting and characters were good. But the writing was pretty weak. Watching Terra Nova, I got the feeling that I had seen the show before. It was like watching Lost In Space and Jurassic Park, as well as any other lost family television show.

But, I am not the target audience. Certainly, the target audience for Terra Nova include kids and teens. The show has the 7pm timeslot so it is not too late for the kiddies, and though people were bloody from attacking dinos, no one dies.

Not sure if this show will go past 3 seasons, since the cost of production is so high, but here are my predictions for the show’s storyline:

- They are not in the past, they are in the future or on a different planet.
- The commander’s son knows this secret and is trying to find a way back home. The drawings on the rocks are astrological diagrams.
- There will be aliens introduced at some point.
- Finally, there will be a big catastrophe that will wipe out the dinos and humans. Most likely it will be caused by the humans.

iPad Safari White Screen of Death

davidoshiro — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:59:42 +0000

I have been using my iPad2 for about 6months now and am loving it. I love the games and apps and most of all Safari. I use my iPad to browse the web as I leisurely kick back on my sofa or as I lay in bed. Although apps are the true power behind the iPad, the web brower is what I use the most.

So, it was frustrating when I opened up Safari on my iPad2 to check on my YouTube subscriptions and all I got was the white screen of death! No error message, no spinning wheel. The page appeared to have loaded just fine, but nothing was being displayed. I closed out Safari and restarted it several times and still the white screen persisted. I shutdown the iPad2 and restarted it but still no YouTube. I could browse other web sites just fine, just YouTube would not display.

I know the iPad2 has a YouTube app, but it really sucks. I cannot see all of my subscription channels and cannot switch between low and high resolution video. I rarely use the YouTube app because of it’s lack of features and because the web version works just great!

Anyways, I did finally fix the issue which required me to open up the iPad Settings app, go to the Safari settings and clear my cookies and cache files. Once I did that, voila! YouTube displayed just fine. The down side is that since all of my cookies were deleted I had to sign in to all of my web sites again. Oh well, at least I am back to my blissfull state and enjoying my iPad once again.

Taming my iPad’s Flaky WiFi

davidoshiro — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 02:29:40 +0000

When I received my new iPad2 in the mail I was ecstatic. Dreams of playing Angry Birds on a larger screen were about to be fulfilled. I quickly unboxed the device, registered it and updated the iOS. Next, I downloaded iPad versions of my favorite iPod Touch games and apps and was truly content. The amazing device was truly “magical”. But the “magic” quickly turned into madness when my iPad would drop the WiFi connection and not reconnect.

I first noticed the dropped connections while upstairs in my bedroom while browsing the web. I noticed that the signal strength was at 2 of 3 bars. My fiancee’s iPad never had any WiFi problems upstairs, nor did my iPod Touch. I went into the Settings app on my iPad and turned off the WiFi and turned it back on. My connection was reestablished. Then a few minutes later the connection was lost again. Grrrr!

I went downstairs to check my router and see if the signal strength was the issue. I hit up YouTube and caught up on my subscriptions and sure enough, the WiFi connection dropped! “Uh oh!” I thought, “Did I get a faulty iPad?” I put my iPad down, hit the web and searched for any explanation for what was happening. In the Apple discussion groups I came across a thread that sounded exactly like what I was experiencing. It was a long thread and there were a lot of angry and frustrated sounding people. I would fit in fine with these people. I then saw a post that mentioned the possibility of the router configuration being the culprit. It mentioned that today’s router’s support different speeds and that it could affect the iPad’s WiFi connection.

So, I logged into my router and changed my router’s configuration to support a single speed. I have several devices that support 802.11b, g, and n. My Apple products support 802.11n but my desktop PC only supports 802.11g. So, I stepped down my router to support only 802.11g and voila! My iPad’s WiFi connection is now rock solid and has not dropped since. The “magic” has been restored.

I suppose I will have to get another router for the 802.11n devices and use my old router for my slower devices. I use apps such as AirVideo and AirDisplay that use a lot of bandwidth only on my local network so having 802.11n is much better than 802.11g.

iPad 2 Tethering

davidoshiro — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:01:05 +0000

Yesterday my iPad2 arrived in the mail and after setting it up and downloading a couple of new apps, I setup tethering just as I did for my iPod Touch. My 16gb WiFi only iPad2 is now fully capable of accessing the Internet wherever I have Verizon 3G access!

Simply awesome!

Apple’s HDMI cable for iPhone, iPod and iPad

davidoshiro — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:47:23 +0000

When I ordered my iPad2, I also ordered the iPad Camera Kit and the HDMI cable because I was planning on making full use of the iPad in my daily life. The accessories came within a week, but my iPad won’t ship for another 3 weeks. So, I decided to play around with my accessories with my iPod Touch and here is what I discovered:

The iPad Camera Kit does not work with anything other than the iPad. I tried plugging both the SD card reader and the USB reader into my iPod Touch and the device displayed an error that it could not recognize the readers. Bummer! Not that big of a deal since my iPod Touch has a camera built into it, but would have been nice to use the USB reader to attach USB devices that have been reported to work with the iPad.

The HDMI cable, on the other hand, worked like a charm! I was able to watch movies and PodCasts on my television that were on my iPod Touch. The nice thing about the HDMI cable is that video and audio are all transferred over the HDMI cable, unlike component or VGA cables that have separate video and audio. The iPad2 allows for mirroring via the HDMI cable, which is the main reason I ordered the cable. But, for earlier devices, only video and photos get sent over the HDMI cable. So no mirroring for my iPod Touch.

In the past, I have been using my laptop to watch YouTube and movies on my LCD television, but now that I am able to plug my iPod Touch into my television it is sooooo much simpler and because the HDMI cable has a port for the charging cable, I do not need to worry about the battery dying in the middle of a movie.

I would definitely recommend getting on of these HDMI cables if you own an iPhone, iPod or iPad.

iOS Tethering Updates

davidoshiro — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:32:29 +0000

A friend of mine tried to tether his Virgin Mobile LG Optimus phone (running Android Froyo) to his iPod Touch using the instructions on my previous post and was unsuccessful. I tried tethering my Droid2 to his iPod and it worked. But tethering his phone to my iPod Touch was unsuccessful. It appears that the bluetooth on his phone is unable to pair with the iPod.

I will have to research this, but it may be that his LG phone may be using an older bluetooth chipset or driver than my Droid2. While this does suck, it does illustrate the main problem with the Android ecosphere, which is the lack of standards for hardware configurations. I surmise that this will also be an issue with Windows Phones as well.

Also, another friend of mine has a TMobile Cliq running Android 1.5 and she can not run a bunch of Android apps, including PDANet.

No Tethering for Verizon iPhone

davidoshiro — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 06:45:31 +0000

In my last post, I discussed how I was able to tether my Verizon Droid2 phone to my iPod Touch 4g using PDANet. While successful, my real goal was to enable my fiancee to tether her iPhone to her wifi iPad so she could access the Internet while away from home. While it is possible to tether her iPad, it is not possible to tether it to her iPhone.

Let me start off first by saying that the wifi-only iPad is capable of being tethered to a mobile phone for 3G Internet access. I was able to do this by upgrading the iPad to the latest iOS 4.3.1. Like my iPod Touch, the latest 4.3.1 includes a Bluetooth Dial Up Networking client that, when coupled with PDANet, allows the iOS device to use the 3G network. I simply activated Bluetooth on the iPad and paired it with my Droid2. I then fired up PDANet on the Droid2 and everything worked!

The problem with using a Verizon iPhone4 is that iOS 4.3.1 is not available. The latest iOS version for Verizon’s iPhone is 4.2.6! AT&T’s iPhone can be upgraded to 4.3.1 so I would guess that tethering is possible. It is strange that the iPhone for Verizon is being held back from the latest iOS updates and had I known that would have advised my fiancee to not get the iPhone4.

While jailbreaking the iPhone is an option, I normally advise against it since, Apple is constantly updating the iOS and whatever benefits gained from jailbreaking is usually very minimal. I suppose we’ll just have to wait for Apple and Verizon to release an update in the future. I personally believe that Verizon is the cause for iOS being held back. It seems that even the 3G Verizon iPads are not able to be upgraded.

This is a great example of the benefits of having competing products. Who would have guessed that my Android/iOS combo works better than iOS/iOS combo?

Tethering My iPod Touch 4g to my Verizon Droid2

davidoshiro — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 01:03:04 +0000

While I’ve been very happy with my iPod Touch 4g, I’ve always been disappointed that I was unable to connect to the Internet away from home or the office. Being tied to wifi is pretty limited considering the capabilities of the device. I’ve been a user of PDANet by JuneFabrics for several years when I had a Windows Mobile phone. PDANet allowed me to access the Internet on my laptop computer wherever I may be as long as I had Verizon 3G access. Alas, my poor iPod Touch was not compatible with PDANet.

I recently updated the iOS software on my iPod to 4.3 and lo and behold, I am now able to establish a Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Networking) connection with my Verizon Droid2 running PDANet! It can get tricky to set up due to the whole Bluetooth “pairing” process, but all I needed to do was run PDANet on my Droid2, turn on Bluetooth on my iPod Touch, and finally pair the two devices together. For some reason, PDANet will not work if my Droid2 has wifi turned on. Once the two devices are paired up and PDANet is running on my Droid2, the iPod is able to access the Internet via the Droid2′s 3G connection!

Being able to access the Internet from my iPod Touch over Verizon’s 3G network is fantastic and while I will use my Droid2 for most of my mobile Internet tasks there are some apps that I have on my iPod that have not made it to Android yet. I am hoping to test this out with my fiancee’s iPhone and iPad. She has the wifi-only iPad and would be extremely happy if she is able to tether her iPad to her iPhone.