So I’m replying to a post over on OpenXMLDeveloper.org and the file upload feature isn’t working. So I thought I’d just upload the file here.

So one cool thing I’ve noticed on my morning walks/runs is they’ve started putting biciyle compatible cattle stops on the Skyline walkway. These allow bikes to pass, but stop stock moving between paddocks. Thus far I’ve seen one on the actual Skyline track and one where the track drops down into Karori Cemetary via the new track that’s been built.

So I’ve ‘gone native’ with Windows 7 and it’s now my primary OS.

If you want the answer without reading all the crap I went through- scroll down to the heading.

I got my Thinkpad x61t up and running with most of the drivers just using the Lenovo Updater utility.

The ones I’ve struggled with are the UMTS Cellular card and my fingerprint scanner. This post is about how I solved the UMTS card issue.

1. Unpack the MSI file you download from Lenovo at C:\DRIVERS\WIN\WWANUMTS\Driver\MC877xx.msi by using something like
   msiexec /a MC87xx.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp"
2. Ensure that all your other drivers are up to date: I needed to install the various Intel AMT drivers from here first because it just wasn’t even detecting that I had a mini PCI card without these.
3. Browse to the Minicard device in Other Devices in Device Manager, right click, update driver software and browse to the Vista x64 folder that you unpacked in step one.
4. You may need to go back to Other Devices a few times to install the Modem Driver, Serial Port Driver(s) and Network Adapter Driver in that order
5. Eventually you’ll be able to open the Sierra Wireless 3G Watcher and get a signal for your carrier
   
6. From there it’s plain sailing

So Angus the dodgy Aussie blogs about his “techniques for ensuring the guy in the seat in front can’t stop you from using your laptop”

I found that the ‘tap the touch screen entertainment system really hard’ approach worked wonders on my AC flight YC-YVR on Friday night.

Aussie ingenuity indeed. Of course, kiwi ingenuity would require we used No8. Fencing Wire… and I just can’t image that would be at all pleasant.

So I’ve done about 43,000km of travel so far this year….. YIKES! probably another 30,000 this month too.

I’ve decided to use Tripit to track my travel stats this year.

So I watched a few Snowsports videos while I was skiing in Banff last week. There is an increasing focus on avalanche education which is a good thing I think. I watched the Biography flick on Craig Kelly called Let it Ride and The Fine Line which is a sort of Hybrid action+education flick on Avalanches in the back country.

All go through the big three avy safety tools you should never be without:

1. Beacon/Transceiver. With fresh batteries and a user who knows how to use it. I’ve got one of the older model Barryvox beacons.
2. A probe- that’s long enough for the sort of locations you’re hitting. I have a 300cm G3 probe.
3. A shovel. I’m personally not a big fan of polycarbonate shovels, they may be lighter, but the wet snow here in NZ is just too likely to break them… You want a nice big alloy shovel for digging your friends out pronto like!

Something that a bunch of them missed was helmets. Back when I was a ‘grom’ skier Helmets were totally ‘uncool’… but that’s all changed, I wouldn’t be without mine. Several of the case studies in The Fine Line talked about severe head and facial injuries so a good Helmet is number 4 for me.

Check out this email that the guys from Shred Ready received about how one of their helmets helped in an avalanche situation.

http://shredready.com/team/2009/02/we-are-happy-our-friend-eric-zuaro.html

Whoops! Got to Xero this morning and got this.

Looking at the address bar it appears that it’s sent me to the custom error page. And then the custom error page has thrown an unhandled exception which has been bubbled to the default error handler.

If ever there was a case for using ‘On Error Resume Next’ then Custom ASP.NET Error pages are it . Throwing an unhandled exceptin from your nice Custom Error page gives bad UX.

On the plus side, the Xero support people are just super and the actual application really rocks too.

So you may find yourself having issues calling into the development fabric web roles. The error message will be something like ‘te server actively refused the connection’. There are some issues with IPv6. The development fabric will only listen on open host and I think what was happening is that the requests appear to be coming from the IPv6 address rather than the IPv4 one3.

Anyway, I disabled IPv6 and commented the IPv6 localhost entry from the *.hosts file. All worked after this.

The last Labour government passed a particularly insidious piece of legislation (well actually they passed a few).

So the first 23 days of my 365 Days of Crocs Charity Challenge have been pretty exciting.

The Crocs have been to a bunch of new places that I’ve never taken them before…. and indeed a few places I’ve never been before. They’ve survived the sweltering heat of Mumbai, the cold conditions of Beijing, a day around the Microsoft Campus in Redmond and I just arrived in Calgary where there were icicles inside the air-bridge! In summary… Crocs are the perfect choice for International travel across a variety of in-temperate climates- if you take just one pair of shoes, make it a pair of Crocs*.

*I do have my ski boots with me also, and a pair of trail runners…. but they’re really just for the gym.

So I’ve been using the internet for a long time. I remember when Windows 3.1 never used to come with a browser. In most cases I’d use a copy of the browser from a 3.5” floppy disk and I’d install it with that. Sometimes I’d install a command line FTP client or Cute FTP from my floppy disk and use that.

Eventually Microsoft and the OEMs started shipping Windows with a browser. This meant that no matter what browser I actually wanted to use… I didn’t have to find my floppy disks because I could just boot up the browser and browse to Netscape.com and download my preferred browser. This was a marvellous advance.

The DUMB folks at Opera think this was some sort of retrograde step. The even DUMBER folks at the European Union are listening to them. Microsoft may have to ship a special European version, especially crippled to not have a browser.

Maybe DUMB and DUMBER haven’t thought about it yet… but, how the $%*&! do you download a competitors browser if you don’t have a browser to download it with in the first place! How many of the ‘late comers’ to the web have any idea where to find a browser DVD/CD/Floppy disk. How many have the foggiest flue how to login to their ISPs FTP server to download it? They expect to buy their PC from the department store (noticed how few ‘computer stores’ are left) and they expect to take it home and it just plugs into ADSL and works.

This is the most completely stupid idea I have ever heard of!

I hate Competition law at the best of times. It’s a nasty retrospective “don’t know you’ve broken the the law until you’re actually prosecuted because we changed what it meant half way along the way” piece of shit public policy. But, I hate DUMB and DUMBER even more.