Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the internet archive and folks can send me money when they want to license my invention.
The idea is pretty simple and shown in this picture:

The idea is to make a simple cord – on one end is a female MagSafe adaptor and on the other end is a male MagSafe adaptor.
It allows old power supplies to be used with new computers – it keeps folks from buying too many double power supplies – such as for home and work. One power supply can be used for many computers.

My iPhone has become increasingly less stable when it comes to taking pictures – I found an Apple discussion a while back that suggested a reset to factory settings and then taking one picture before doing the restore – that seemed to work – but the problem keeps coming back.

So more surgery seems necessary. I did some more digging and came up with this discussion:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1183455

This adds some good hacking to the reset pattern – you go into a weird directory and delete a weirdly named file – this sounds like the kind of stuff that will work.

I really don’t want to jailbreak my phone for the sole purpose of working around a bug that Apple could fix with one hand tied behind its back!

The trick is to delete a file that configures the “next photo number”. Interestingly in the file that I deleted and in the file mentioned in the above it has moved beyond taking 1023 or 1024 pictures. Hmm – something crapping out when it is near a power of two.

My hypothesis is that this problem is probably a combination of iPhoto and iPhone and when we delete the file – we avoid the problem for the next 1024 pictures… Hmmm.

The cool thing about this is that once you perform this – you can once again go into iPhoto – import all, and then delete all – and your iPhone camera is not bricked! Also you can manually delete all the photos on the iPhone and the camera is not bricked.

So it seems as though you just need to backup your iPhone, Restore it to factory settings, remove this file than Restore the iPhone from backup and you have another 1024 worry-free pictures! Only time will tell. In a funny irony, one of the blog posts was titled “My iPhone ran out of film!” – in a way – this is true – because of the bug, some iPhones only have 1024 pictures in them when they come from the factory – so it did run out of film. OK – perhaps that was only funny to me.

The nice thing is that now that I have a workaround for the bug, I don’t need to buy a 3G phone quite so soon – a phone without a camera – really makes me unhappy.

At some point I got so mad that I went into conspiracy mode and suspected Apple of introducing this bug – just to get me to buy a 3G phone – because I never saw it until the 1.1.4 update – but if it is just a 1024 issue – the more rational explanation is that it just took me that long to get to 1024 pictures.

It would be good if folks who find their iPhone camera messed up to look at the contents of the file and see if the 1024 (or 1023) pattern holds.

My instructions are below.

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Update: Photo added and Driver’s license obtained.
With the rising prices of gas – and because I hang out with John King and John Merlin-Williams a lot – and because I have a credit for some riding gear at www.ridersdiscount.com – I decided to get a motorcycle.
I took driver’s training Saturday at Alpha Training (http://www.alphatrainingcenter.com/) and got a perfect on the driving test and perfect on the written test. Jerry taught the class and he was *excellent* I rented a Suzuki GZ 250 from them since I do not own a bike – I loved the bike and it probably would get 70 miles per gallon.
So right after training I went to full Throttle Motorsports (http://www.fullthrottlemotorsports.com/) and they had a GZ 250 *in stock* – it lists for $3200 but all included would be over $4000 – and with a windshield, bags, etc – I figured it would take 400 trips to work and back to make it worth my while. So I did not have a “buy” case in hand.
I looked on Ebay and all over for online used bikes for sale – generally I found nothing – kind of because I did not know what I was looking for. So in desperation I grabbed the Sunday paper and read through the classified ads – I found a bike for $1300 and called – turns out the guy lives about two miles from my house.
So I went over and took a test drive – this is an older bike but it is a Honda and Michael (the owner) was meticulous about its maintenance. After a test drive I liked it a lot. It is a Honda 450 twin so it can handle freeway driving in bits – unlike a 250 single cylinder. Also it already had a windshield and box for my gear driving to work. It was all figured out and debugged. It has a lot of miles on it – that is my only worry.
Now my payback is 120 trips to and from work – and when I want to buy that new bike – I can probably sell this for almost what I paid for it as long as I keep it in good shape.
So I now own a bike – this morning I will get my insurance and cycle permit. For the first time in my life I will be legally riding a road bike – it is a good feeling. I might be off line for an hour or so just to get the feel of the open road.
This is *not* even close to a crotch-rocket – it looks like a grandpa bike – with a windshield and bags – its cool factor is about zero. And when you see my bright-yellow jacket – the cool factor continues to drop down. But its comfort factor and safety factor should be pretty good – a tradeoff I am willing to make.
Insurance was pretty cheap – AAA did it for $220 per year – the bike was below the 750CC limit where they need a picture to prove it is not a crotch-rocket before they will insure it. Being old-school has its atvantages sometimes.
I went to the Secretary of State – passed their written – with two wrong – one was a dumb question and the other had two equally correct answers. I sprung for the extra $35.00 and got the vanity license plate “csev”.
Too bad I don’t have to go down to Ann Arbor until Thursday!
Now I need to buy all my protective gear – no need to get scratched up in an accident – off to John Merlin Williams for some advice.
Initially it will cost me gas money because I will be looking for any excuse to drive around. I put 20 miles on it just for yucks – some back road driving and some highway driving – it is amazing how much the training helps me to think properly on the bike. Oh yeah and even though I have not been on a street bike in close to 30 years – fellow bikers still wave to each other as they pass by. Some things should never change.

I got a question about whether or not to use Ajax in a new project from a former student. Here is my answer.

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Michael made a nice post about my SimpleLTI effort – here are some of my clarifications as well as comments on one of his previous posts. Michael’s post about SimpleLTI:
http://mfeldstein.com/secret-society-maybe-not-so-secret/
Michael’s earlier post about IMS needing to open up:
http://mfeldstein.com/opening-up-the-ims/
I also can fix the typos I made in Michael’s entry :)

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It is late so I will keep it short. I just launched my Simple Learning Tool Interoperability stuff. It is all up on the Google App Engine at:
http://simplelti.appspot.com/
It includes a test harness, developer documentation, and sample code in Java, php, perl, ruby, and python.
I also have a fully functional Sakai Tool that fully supports the Simple LTI protocol.
Probably the best place to start is the developer documentation.
This is kind of the kick off for the IMS/Sakai Google Summer of code stuff – I tried to get a head start.

Even though the last day of class was April 15 – it has not felt like summer until today. I had travel upon travel and lots of little things that kept me really busy. And we went to Summer Circle on Saturday (Free outdoor theater on the Red Cedar River) – so that means it must be summer. This week – I have no where to go (except a quick day trip on Thursday to DC) and nothing to do. So it is “productivity time” – and I get to work on the stuff that I like to work on.

I am cranking on a new thing called Simple Learning Tool Interoperability. This is derived from draft work in process in IMS right now (and yes I checked with Rob before talking about this). The LMS LTI 2 stuff is really taking off with leadership from Wimba, Blackboard, and Microsoft – they are building some pretty cool stuff that will take a few months to sort out.

In the interim, because I have this Google Summer of Code thing and because I have committed to have two tools integrated into Sakai at University of Michigan this Fall, I cannot wait a “few months”. I need to start now – or I will look bad to Google and to UM – and my Google Students (Katherine and Jordi) will look bad as well – we cannot let that happen.

So I extracted a few tasty bits of the IMS LTI 2.0 spec and have written up my own spec which is not identical to IMS LTI 2.0 – but pays major homage to IMS LTI 2.0. Last week, IMS LTI 2.0 made a bit of a shift in direction – in a very good direction in my opinion – and my Simple LTI was rewritten completely since last Wednesday to reflect the new change in direction – and it is aligned with what I believe (this is Chuck talking and not IMS) will be closely aligned with the final IMS LTI spec.

My spec is finished and I have a bunch of test code in place (it has been a fun week and weekend). I will publish this in a few days – my next step is to take the code in SVN and build a solid Sakai implementation of the newly minted spec.

By implementing the spec and using my own testing environment, I make sure that I catch little stupidness in the spec. Also it makes it so I have more sample code to share with others to make it easier to update the spec.

If you really want to watch what s going on – be like Seth and just watch SVN – I just made a tag to keep the Wimba-inspired version of LTI 2.0 in hand because SiteMaker has programmed to that old draft of the spec.

Make a copy of the final version of the Wimba-inspired version of the
LTI portlet - this is what works with Sitemaker 4.6 for now.
From this point forward, the trunk will be stripped down to only
support the new Simple LTI specification.  I will publish the spec
after the code works as a way to review the spec carefully.
--This line, and those below, will be ignored--
A    https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/sakai-portlets/tags/sitemmaker-002

I will try to bring SiteMaker forward to the new spec – but their release process may have “left the port”. I will switch SAMS (Physics grading, assessment and homework system at UM) to the new spec.

I should be announcing the new document in a few days. Watch this space.

I wanted to get a simple home page on Google App Engine – I may someday migrate a version of www.dr-chuck.com to Google App Engine because I am a firm believer in things that are free :)

So my new really light home page is http://dr-chuck.appspot.com/. For now it is just some static HTML with some links.

But I wanted to make it an expandable application so I made it do a simple template and use the pattern where the program becomes an application server. So here is the code:

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I was having some problems with Google App Engine’s Template – I kept getting the following message:
global TemplateDoesNotExist

I have had both cable modem and DSL now for a long time and intend to keep both. I do so much work from home – that I cannot afford the 2-3% outage that my cable modem seems to have. So I added the second cheapest DSL from ATT as a backup. It does give me free ATT WiFi in a few airports for free.
Up til now, I have been just going downstairs and switching cables when one r the other service went down – or just used the slower DSL all the time.
But thanks to Bryan Holland I found a LinkSys RV042 router that does a dual network connection for the home.
It installs pretty easily. Initially it only uses one link and uses the other as backup. SO I switched it to load balancing – this was very cool – except little things did not work. Mostly YouTube messes up – my guess is that it gets two IPs on successive requests and decides a session has been stolen and zaps you :( My guess is that hyper sensitive software will do the same.
So I go back to the failover mode by default – at least my family does not have to switch the wires while I am traveling. It is simple enough to switch back and forth.
If I am going to do a lot of uploads or downloads, I temporarily turn on load balancing and then turn it back off when my need for bandwidth is back to normal.
It was pretty reasonably priced.
Review: LinkSys RV042
P.S. I typed this entire post waiting for my fresh checkout of Sakai’s trunk to recompile. Actually while waiting for the compile – I went to get a cup of coffee, talked to my daughter for a few minutes – and *then* typed this blog post. Well – got to run – the compile is *almost* done – it is compiling sakai-reset-pass