Extend the Life of Your Car

I just purchased an ElmScan 5 OBD II wireless scan tool to peek into the dynamics of my engine. That tool, coupled with my Nokia N800 and some cool software called CarMan sent my mind wandering.

I am able to capture the engine load at a point in time. What if I calculate an average load for a commonly traveled route? I can then take variations of that route and determine which path minimizes the impact to the car. I could factor a lot of variables including time, distance, average engine load, gas consumption, frustration, etc. I could then determine a set of heuristics that could suggest the optimal path.

This could be useful for frequently traveled routes like to and from work daily. Or any other profession that does a fair amount of repetitive automobile travel. I believe the software could just sit there gathering information with little input from the user. This would allow it to collect a vast amunt of info and make decent determintions based on user preferences.

Share Your Phone Service between Two Homes

Many of us with vacation homes don’t need to have full-time phone service at the second location. In fact, typically we only need it in one location at once. It would be great to have a little appliance that would allow us to share the service between the two locations.

If I have high-speed Internet access between the two homes this problem should be trivial to solve. All it takes is tunneling the dial tone across the Internet. How awesome it would be to have a box that I could plug in at home and connect my phone line and a network connection. Then, in the vacation home, I can take a sister appliance and plug into it a phone line and network connection. Even better would be some type of proximity configuration so the two appliances could discover and validate each other. The only task left after that is the tunneling of the dial tone and possibly dealing with being behind a NAT router, both of which are not difficult problems to solve.

The Cyclic Nature of Software

I repeatedly see many examples of aspects of software making full 360° cycles over time. Recently surfacing is the command line interface and it is coming back. I’ve always been a fan of command line; it lends itself well to repetitive and programmatic practices and has excellent ability to maintain history and promote process improvement (if used correctly).

I’m often seen reverting to a Cygwin prompt (typically in an XTerm Window - another technology that has made a reappearance in the shape of AJAX) to get stuff done. Repeatable. Reusable. Reliable. Command line: It’s the new black. (The last sentence borrowed from the Information Week article).

Apple iPhone and Exchange E-mail

I purchased and activated my iPhone without incident Friday (unlike a lot of others) but have not been very successful at getting some items to work the way I would prefer. One example is access to email. I’m hesitant to open the secure IMAP port (IMAPS, tcp port 993) and would never open IMAP (tcp port 143); I would prefer to connect at a port greater than 1024 but can’t seem to find any settings on my iPhone that permit this configuration. So, I obliged the iPhone and opened port 993 and could not get it to work. Looking at my application event log revealed the culprit: a bunch of errors for Source IMAP4SVC, Event ID 1051 - Unexpected error condition: call to function CEncryptCtx::CheckServerCert() resulted in error code 0×800cc801.

Turns out this is an easy fix; I didn’t have the certificate installed on my Exchange server (as I never configured IMAP or IMAPS for use). Right-clicking on the IMAP4 Virtual Server, clicking on the Certificate button on the Access tab and installing a Web Server certificate fixed the issue right away. Now I get to enjoy more functionality on the iPhone.

Advisors, Mentors, and Inspiration

I believe maintaining a philosophy of self-awareness and self-improvement not only significantly contributes to one’s quality of life but also greatly enhances work-product. Having one or more sources of advisors, mentors, and inspiration is a key ingredient.

One of the many benefits I’ve received through marriage to my lovely wife is the opportunity to form an intimate relationship with fabulous people I would most likely not have met otherwise. One such person is Oma - my wife’s grandmother who also is a valued source of inspiration.

Every time I talk with her (thank goodness for Skype and email as she lives in the Netherlands) I am truly amazed and inspired. She is a 96 year old woman who is more active and vibrant that I am at times. In spite of the recent challenges she has had recently, she has remained focused, determined, and passionate about achieving her goals and has been successful. Her powerful examples are truly inspiring and have given me hope: not in the sense that life can be rewarding and invigorating no matter what age, but what is possible to achieve in spite of certain limitations.

Oma is obviously limited by her age but her process works well. She defines the desire, contemplates the process, determines the ability based on current factors and executes successfully, with fallback plans and flexibility. She lives outside the city limits of Amsterdam but regularly goes into the city to attend exhibitions and generally partake of the city life. Today we chatted about her visit to a Turkish exhibit at an old cathedral on the Dam and then she was describing her plans to visit a Sotheby’s Modern Art Charity Auction. Recently (in terms of a few months) she was asked to be in a Dutch TV movie called “Oma and Her Scooter.” (BTW, she doesn’t need one nor any other walking device!)

Oma, you inspire me.