Google Voice + Family & Friends = Unlimited Cell Phone Minutes

 Technology  No Responses »
Aug 052010
 

Google Voice has opened the flood gates to the public. I signed up for an account since my new consulting job with SNC-Services and Service-Now.com allows me to work from anywhere in the world as long as I have decent Internet connectivity and phone service.

Google Voice allows you to configure a single phone number to route phone calls to multiple phones and/or change these phones on the fly. This is great because when I’m visiting family, I can route calls to their home phone if my cell phone battery dies and I forgot my charger. You can also dial your Google Voice number and then dial calls such that the receiver sees your Google Voice on their caller ID. I have also re-routed my cell phone to use Google Voice for voice-mail instead of the Verizon Wireless. There is a help article on this with a list of currently supported carriers. So, I have centralized my business phone number and voicemail into Google Voice.

I realized that I my Verizon Wireless plan offers unlimited voice minutes to Family & Friends (taken from Alltel upon acquisition by VZW). So, I placed my Google Voice number in this list thinking that I would be able to check my Voicemail without using my minutes. I inadvertently discovered that all outbound calls via Google Voice are now captured by VZW as a Family & Friends call. Thus, free minutes on outbound calls. Then, it hit me that I can also set my Google Voice account settings to send my Google Voice number as the caller ID instead of the caller’s number. I have hit the jackpot for unlimited minutes during peak and off-peak times with my cell phone on Verizon Wireless! Any cell phone carrier that allows you to choose numbers that are free/unlimited minutes will work with this strategy.

Be sure to add the Google Voice Mobile App for Android and BlackBerry or the Mobile Website for all other mobile devices. When placing calls from the Google Voice Mobile App, be sure to find the phone number that it is using to place the phone call. In my case, I found that outgoing calls are routed through 678-208-9474, but this could change at anytime.

Pros

  • Unlimited cell phone minutes
  • Callers always see and use your Google Voice number
  • Privatization of your mobile number, but still available for business use
  • Google Voice allows you to set Do Not Disturb and other settings to keep pesky callers away
  • Centralized voice-mail
  • Centralized call logs

Cons

  • You cannot see who is calling you when they dial your Google Voice number
  • Issues with older, AT&T based conference calls where it does not detect your access code properly or it rejects you altogether
  • There may be other conference calling technologies, automated menu systems or IVR systems that fail or are highly unpredictable
  • Call quality could suffer since it is technically routing the call to Google then to the receiver. I have not experienced this yet (1 month).
 Posted by at 10:58 am

CakePHP Sessions in Applications

 CakePHP  No Responses »
May 122010
 

Preface

I have yet to run across anyone in the Google search result world that is running a CakePHP application that contains multiple sub-applications. I have been developing multiple web-based applications in CakePHP that all reside in a single virtual host. The “master” application controls access to these applications. Each application is a sub-directory of the master APP/webroot (actually contains symlinks pointing back to the applications’ APP/webroot and Apache +FollowSymLinks).

Problem

My Session->flash notices do not work when I call a redirect within these sub-applications. If I do NOT redirect, then the flash appears as expected. The moment I redirect, it’s gone. Continue reading »

CakePHP Custom Queries and Concatenate

 CakePHP  No Responses »
May 112010
 

Problem

I recently ran into an issue where I found it much more efficient to write a custom query to gather the data I needed to perform some processing than it was to utilize CakePHP’s model/controller normal data accessing functionality.

At first, I wanted to make sure that all of my related tables gathered all of the data from each other. This created numerous objects filled with data that I may or may not use. It also resulted in the need to loop through every array multiple times to gather the final data required.

So, I decided to make a custom query  in the model that would handle joining all the tables into one array. I ran into trouble where fields were being grouped into their respective models as expected by CakePHP’s model class. This caused a headache to access the data properly again. Continue reading »

Wireless Networking with Directional Antennas

 Technology  No Responses »
Feb 232009
 

Over the weekend, I helped install and configure a wireless network for James, my soon to be brother-in-law. The task was to connect the Internet service from his office at the back of his property to his house at the front of his property. We incorporated some “Aggie engineering” as James, an NMSU Alumnus,  called it. It wasn’t the cleanest of jobs, but it works!

Continue reading »

LogMeIn Interface v0.1

 Technology  No Responses »
Feb 112009
 

I’ve been using LogMeIn.com‘s LogMeIn Pro for about a year now and it is great for accessing my desktops and laptops at home from anywhere. With most people carrying laptops these days it seems useless as one would have his/her computer along for the ride. However, when I am at work and there is a website blocked by WebSense or some other limitation that slows me down, I can jump onto my desktop at home and get something done without hassle. It also provides IT shops with the ability to manage hundreds of clients’ PCs from the office. This can be extremely helpful!

One annoyance I have though is with the ActiveX based remote desktop. Unfortunately, I am stuck with IE6 at work. I am not allowed to install IE7, Firefox, Chrome or any other browser than IE6. I also prefer not to run the ActiveX plugin in full-screen mode. I like to be able to quickly and efficiently tab to another window on my local desktop. Running it from the browser requires me to hide/un-hide the address bar and standard buttons though. I have Visual Studio 2005 though. So, I made a very quick little tool that allows me to maximize the space in which the browser sits. It is a Windows application but has nothing except a web browser object that fills the entire window. The default URL is http://www.logmein.com. It allows me to save my IE6 toolbar settings and maximize the space for my remote desktop!

I know, I know the tool is really simple and lame, but I figured not everyone has access to the development tools to make something like this. So, for the non-developers out there, I present FuGeRTech’s LogMeIn Interface v0.1.

Code is released under the MIT License.

SharePoint Log Files

 SharePoint  No Responses »
Jan 262009
 

I am willing to bet that not too many people run into this issue, but it is still good to know. On, my client’s web server began to stall due to a full C: drive. Their server is an economy model and the C: drive is only 16GB. After some quick investigation, I found that 3.5GB were being used in the C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12LOGS folder. This is the default location for the trace log. The path must exist on all servers in the farm, too. I decided to turn down the logging, at least temporarily, to get the server running again. To complete this task, I took the following steps:

  1. Navigate to SharePoint Central Administration
  2. Click Operations
  3. Click Diagnostic Logging
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Trace Log section
  5. Change Number of log files to 1
  6. Change Number of minutes to use a log file to 5

My client’s server is back up and running again, and I should not have to worry about the Trace Log getting out of control again.

The downside is that my Trace Log only goes back to the last 5 minutes of work on the server. I am researching my options here. It may not be important enough though.

SQL Server 2005 and NTFS Compressed Folders

 Database Administration  No Responses »
Jan 082009
 

Summary: SQL Server 2005 does not support compressed folders. Don’t use them for database storage or backups.

I had a backup process running at work that would back up my server’s databases into a compressed folder. Everything was fine until my SharePoint database and another database grew larger than 32GB. My backups began to fail with an error that read:

The process cannot access the file
because another process has locked
a portion of the file.

I was stumped! I contacted a colleague that is a SQL Server expert, and she suggested using FileMon to watch for intruding processes. It may be the anti-virus software requesting the file in the middle of backing up. At that time, I ran my backups manually singling out the two that were failing to backup. I noticed that they would consistently fail at the 32GB mark. That drew my suspicion, and I did some googling to find that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 does NOT support compressed folders!

So, I moved my backups to a regular folder and all is well again. Even my expert colleague did not know of this problem. Luckily, I have read that SQL Server 2008 will support compressed folders.

I hope this information gets grabbed by the web crawlers as finding this information was NOT as easy as it should be.

Here’s another blogger that found this problem a year earlier than me!

http://clay.lenharts.net/blog/2008/01/28/backing-up-to-a-ntfs-compressed-folder/

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