Connecting Samsung Corby SGH-T566 to a Windows XP PC

My employer just go several of us onto a new provider, Rogers, and therefore a new mobile phone. We got a Samsung Corby SGH-T566. Not a smart-phone, but actually quite a nice device, works really well. Unfortunately we don’t get a data plan from our employer so I can only use the phone and SMS features, though it has quite comprehensive support for many web-based applications.

One of the things it does very well is take good pictures and record audio. But how to get those to a PC? Took me quite a while to get this to work:

On my Windows XP SP3 laptop, I don’t have builtin bluetooth; I have a USB Bluetooth antenna which works well, but the only option I could find when right-clicking on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, was “Receive a file…”. Once I turned on Bluetooth on my Corby, I was able to pair the phone and the PC, so I tried the “receive a file”. I worked: once clicked, the PC was in “wait” mode; as soon as I clicked on a photo on the phone and clicked on “send via bluetooth”, it would get sent to PC. Not bad: I could send one file at a time. But not great either: I already had 20 files to send, I needed mass transfer!!

I looked for a while for a program to connect to the Corby. I found PC Studio v3 on the Net but once installed, it could not detect my phone (which is crazy because the bare bluetooth radio had even been paired with it!). Tried changing various settings in phone, on PC related to bluetooth, nothing helped. I eventually found out that you’re supposed to use New PC Studio, available on the Samsung website. Now transfers work great!

I have not tried using the USB cable, as I get the impression that it is more difficult to use. Such as, your phone’s bluetooth must be off in order to connect to the PC’s USB.

URL rewriting and HTML forms

Apache’s mod_rewrite is powerful! But I couldn’t get it to work with POST requests, which the redmine CMS uses for its forms submissions. See the thread on Apache users group.  I was able to get our WAN HTTP server to cause requests to http://foo.bar.com to pass through to our LAN HTTP server http://192.168.2.7/redmine/, and redirect client to use the former when client used http://bar.com/redmine/. I was also able to do it with straightforward ProxyPass module of Apache.

Note also that for stylesheets and javascript, a client redirect is wasted effort since client browser never displays such URL in Location field. More rule conditions might be required where [R] is not present in rule transform, for stylesheets and javascript.

In looking at form submission issues related to mod-rewrite, I cam across the post JavaScript Form Handling which offers valuable info to use more sophisticated forms using javascript.

But still no solution.

Network Notepad: for small network diagrams

I could see this being useful for small network diagrams so you don’t have to get full-fledged COTS program or use buggy one like Dia:

Network Notepad Homepage.

Types of network connections and speeds

Taken from Tolis Group KB:

Dial-up – Analog modem using twisted pair (phone) copper lines.
	56k	56.0 Kbps
	ISDN	128.0 Kbps
Cable – Uses coaxial copper cable
	Average	3.0 Mbps
	Max	15.0 Mbps
	Upload Average	750.0 Kbps
DSL – Uses twisted pair copper phone lines
	IDSL	128.0 Kbps
	UADSL	1.50 Mbps
	UADSL upload	512.0 Kbps
	HDSL	1.50 Mbps
	SDSL	2.0 Mbps
	RADSL	7.0 Mbps
	RADSL upload	1.0 Mbps
	ADSL	8.0 Mbps
	ADSL upload	1.0 Mbps
Trunk – Usually delivered by fiber optic, microwave, or HDSL
	T-1	1.54 Mbps
	T-3	44.74 Mbps
Optical Carrier – Fiber optic backbone
	OC-3	155.52 Mbps
	OC-12	622.08 Mbps
	OC-48	2,488.32 Mbps
	OC-96	4,976.64 Mbps
	OC-192	9,953.28 Mbps
	OC-255	13,219.20 Mbps
Ethernet – Used for LAN’s
	10	10.0 Mbps
	100	100.0 Mbps
	1,000 (Gigabit)	1,000.0 Mbps
Wireless – May be mobile (cellular) telephones or fixed routers
	HomeRF	1.20 Mbps
	802.11a	54.0 Mbps
	802.11b	11.0 Mbps
	802.11g	54.0 Mbps
	802.11n	100.0 Mbps

Home Automation Software

From the CocconTech wiki, the most promising are

• J9: www.johnynine.com
• EHome Digital Tools: www.ehomecreations.com
• vCrib: www.thevirtualcrib.com

and to a lesser extent

• EventGhost: www.eventghost.org

Those are the ones that seem actively maintained.

The most mentioned are PowerHome and HomeSeer but several others are mentioned on the CocoonTech wiki, such as Minerva, HouseBot, HAL, Adaptive Home Logic and CQC.

Security system SDK and HDK

In our previous house we had a home security system (HSS) that was connected to a monitoring station. It was a COTS system that worked well but it did cost ca. $40/month for the first two years and then $20/month after that (basically the monitoring). There were some things that really bothered me about it:

• I couldn’t easily extend it: I needed to call the installer for any additional sensors
• I couldn’t make it do stuff like call my mobile phone or send email
• I couldn’t connect it to a video camera
• I couldn’t log events

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could install some battery and/or solar powered sensors that connect wirelessly to a central control box that is connected to my PC… from which I could program all sorts of things: if motion is detected, turn on the appropriate webcam, take a snapshot and email it, then start recording for N minutes… then call my cell phone and transfer the audio over speaker so I can speak in the house.  And turn some lights on or some panel that indicates “we know you are there” (in case the intruder is just a hooligan looking at stealing stuff in the backyard or vandalizing).

Until now I’ve never considered X10 to be worth my time and money: why would I want to control my lights centrally, it’s way easier with the wall switch; have the lights turn on when I enter? dont’ need X10 for that, nowadays a $30 motion-based light-switch will do; “program” the lighting? not interested.

But I could see it being really useful for a home security system, since X10 was designed to allow the connection of sensors to your computer and you use your favorite programming language (assuming an X10 SDK is available for it) to create the system response and behavior.

I was looking at ActiveHomePro’s SDK and control unit CM15A but a friend of mine from ProjectWorkshop suggested that INSTEON is more reliable and supports X10. Both over wireless and wire, the latter using the AC powerlines in your home as the carrier so rarely need new wiring.

So basically I’m looking for good off-the-shelf wireless X10 or INSTEON components, an associated SDK (preferably for Windows, don’t care what language), and something that will allow the system to use phone (voip? modem?). Re the phone, if there is a device that can connect to a 3G network so the system can use wireless mobile phone network (for a monthly price), that would be awesome, so that the HSS is not dependent on your land phone line.

X10:

• Recommended X10 kit: ActiveHome Professional: SDK, Software Development Kit, with CM15A controller.
• Recommended eBay seller: x10-warehouse; how about (in Canada) x10-express?
• Many posts on web indicate that X10 is seen as flaky and unreliable. Newer technologies such as INSTEON and Z-Wave are favored.
• However ok for home automation in many cases.

INSTEON:

• Recommended INSTEON source: SmartHome comes highly recommended by a buddy who has been using X10 and INSTEON for two decades. However, INSTEON SDK by SmartHome is $200!
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/shnutilitysuite/files/ is an opensource project by SimpleHomeNet that provides some code that can be used instead of the SDK, for free. However I believe it is not complete. And the utility suite “only works with a PLC via Smarthome’s SDM or the EZBridge / EZSrve, not the PLM”.
• efundies.com is a hacker site for INSTEON.

Z-Wave:

• Seems to come with a free SDK based on .NET
• Charles Stacy Harris III uses Microsoft Robotics SDK to control a z-wave system

Software:

• Powerhome seems to be a software tools that is compatible with all four protocols except for zwave (in the works) and allows socket-based and plugin-based extensions to the tool, a very interesting option.
• HomeSeer is similar to Powerhome but not clear if allows plugins or sockets.

Comparisons:

• Good discussion on zwave, x10, insteon and UPB
• One poster who seems quite knowledgeable about the technologies points to cocoontech as the place to go for figuring out what is best for your needs

DropBox now limits undo history to 30 days

I’ve used DropBox for a few weeks and it works nicely. Until recently, DropBox used to keep all versions of all files, even deleted ones. So if you deleted a file a couple of months ago and realized you needed it, you could find it in your DropBox’s history.

But now, to “help” us keep our DropBox history uncluttered, DropBox says they will limit the undo history to 30 days, after which the deleted file, and all its older versions, will be deleted. Interestingly, we can upgrade to the paid plan to get the unlimited history! Like having to pay for the unlimited undo history will make it more usable that if it’s free.

Nice try to cover up your real intentions DropBox! If you are short on cash and feel this feature is the one that is most costly to you, then just say so, and say that therefore it will only be part of paid plan. Rather than trying to sugarcoat it and make us believe you are really concerned about our ability to use your tool for free.

Of course, the great advantage of free tool offerings is that users can’t outright complain, rather they can voice their problem and hope a solution fits within the strategic plan of how the free tool can generate increased sales.

Thanks for a great free tool DropBox, but please don’t think your end-users can’t see through your marketing schemes so be honest, that’s all, we understand that you have to do what you have to do to survive, we all do!

Wired Home – Distribution Hubs, CAT5 Cable, Keystone Inserts

WiredHome.com has some neat devices to help distribute audio, video, phone, network and IR signals throughout the home via cat5e and coax cables.

Designed for standard enclosures, making them very easy to mount. With new homes being wired with cat5e cable, this means that two phone lines and 100 MB/s data lines can be configured out of the box.

Zenoss Core Product Overview – Commercial Open Source Application, Systems and Network Monitoring – Zenoss

Found Zenoss Core on SF.net, a network monitoring tool whose core component seems quite capable yet is free. From Zenoss website:

Zenoss Core is an award-winning open source IT monitoring product that effectively manages the configuration, health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package.

This is a bit like Dude by MicroTik: it is free and seems quite capable. But does it do as much as Dude? For instance, Dude does email notification when services go down/up. And Dude does a coarse mapping of the devices and services and allows you to easily layout the network diagram, and will always use that layout. Many NM tools (such as the very capable PRTG monitor) impose limits on number of devices, Zenoss doesn’t seem to. 

I need to try this out.

Python packages for network monitoring

No std lib module for ping in Python. There are a couple of options:

• There is a recipe on Cookbook: icmplib by Brett Cannon, Aug 2007, but not clear if would work on Windows
• There is some old code, ping.tar.gz by Hylton (ca. Python 1.4!) but it apparently has problems on Windows XP: in XP, access to the raw sockets functionality has been disabled, but would have to try to really clarify what the limitations are.
• There is a ping function in the impacket package by Core Security Technologies: seems promising, standalone, cross-platform, need to try.(Also look at MSyslog which is a Python syslog daemon, can receive over UDP etc
• There is scapy, which is low-level package creator; as such, a huge canon for this small task:

There are also some system tools that could potentially be called from Python, see http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/internet/tools.html, such as TPing which can ping a list of hosts (though users who have used native system ping tool e.g. on Windows, say it is very slow to use because it only does one host and you have to parse the output), so this option remains to be tested.