2009 has been a crazy year for me. At work we have been implementing a PeopleSoft ERP project, that seems to have taken up a lot of my time. As a side result of this, I seem to not have been updating my blog as much as I have in the past. This is something that I have enjoyed doing, and am going to make it a priority in 2010.

My goal is to put out a new blog entry at least once a week, for the entire year of 2010. This is what I am going to shoot for, lets see how quickly I slack off again.

I currently had a issue with Windows 7 that was just driving me crazy. I had my systems power profile setup to put my computer into SLEEP mode whenever I shut the laptop lid. This use to work great in Windows 7, but for some reason that stopped working for me. Every time I would close the lid to put the computer into sleep, it would shut down, then restart right back up and come out of sleep.

I did a little research on the internet and found that this could be cause because a device I have connected to my PC is waking the computer. To figure out which devices have this property setup for them you can run this command from the command prompt.

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

This will list the devices that are allowed to wake your computer from sleep. I found that my USB mouse was setup this way. To fix the issue you can go to your Device Manager, right click on the device that is waking your computer and select Properties. Next you will select the Power Management tab and uncheck “Allow this device to wake up ... ”.

I have recently upgraded my laptop to run Windows 7 64 bit Edition. I have been really impressed with this installation and the upgrade in software. What I have had some difficulty with is getting CYGWIN installed on my machine.

The issue I have been having is that every time I would try load up a configured fvwm2 XSession I would get a fault in the code. I did a lot of searching on the internet and what seems to help fix most issues with this is running the rebaseall command.

Documentation for this can be hard to find on the internet. There is currently no man page for this command. To find more information about it go to /usr/share/doc/Cygwin and read the rebase-3.0.1.README file.

According to the documentation

" The rebaseall utility is a convenient way for users that suffer from the
Cygwin rebase problem to rebase their entire system (i.e., all of their
DLLs) ..."

To run the rebaseall command you need to be in a ash shell. To get there do the following from a Windows Command Prompt (cmd).

c:> cd c:\cygwin\bin
c:\cygwin\bin> ash.exe
$ ./rebaseall -v

After I did this, I was able to run startx and everything worked great. What I did find interesting is that the installation seemed to run very slow after I did this. After installing and reinstalling over and over again I said to hell with it and left things alone. What I found that after leaving my computer running and working in cygwin fora little while, things seemed to get faster.

I hope that this helps out. I have read online where people do a rebase after every cygwin installation.

During my search I decided that I really did not have a clue as to what brand of phone I wanted. Since I had no brand in mind I started to think about what functions that I would like to have. I found out that all I really wanted to be able to do was SMS Text Messaging, Surf the Web, Check Email, and tether my phone to my laptop. Since all I was worried about was the pretty standard features on any smart phone, I really did not care which one I got.

So one day I just went onto Craigslist and did a search for the cellphones that were being sold today. I then just emailed everyone and took the first one that I came across. I ended up with a nice, and hardly even used, Motorola Q9C. I was really happy to get this one because my brother has the same model and loves it. I only had to pay $60 for the phone so that was a deal in my opinion, especially when Verizon was selling refurbished ones for $50 when you sign up for a two year contract.

Now that I have my phone, I would not trade it for anything in the world. I also decided to go ahead and unlock the phone. This allowed me to modify the registry setting in Windows Mobile 6.1 to adjust some power settings, and also increase my internet speed. I also can easily tether my phone to my Windows Laptop and get all of my information in sync. The internet speed when using the cellphone as a modem is pretty nice too.

I am still pretty amazed that I could go and buy a phone on Craigslist and take it into the store and activate it. The price was great, the quality is really great too. I don’t think that I will ever buy a phone under contract again. There are so many used phones floating around out there, that I will just pick up someone’s leftovers.

I was looking though my blog archives to see how much I have been posting recently, and noticed that it has not been much at all. I have been so busy at work, that I have not had time to do anything else but work on that. That is not a bad thing, since it is good to be busy and I know that I have a job, but I would like to try and make some more time to update the content of my blog.

At work we have been right at the end of the 1st phase of implementing a PeopleSoft ERP system. This has been a crazy thing and has required many long hours of work to get things done. I work in the Identity Management Systems, and we have had to change some process to get data from the new system, along with adding some new and interesting pieces to support Guest Accounts, Test Environments, Integration Environments, User Impersonation Environments, and Single Sign-On.

I have mainly been in charge of working with different groups to Implement Shibboleth Single Sign-On for these applications. This has been a challenging thing for me in general. I am required to not only work with many different teams, but educate them about Single Sign-On, provide guidence on how to implement it into there applications, and make sure that things get done with resources that I have no control over.

Now that we have completed the 1st Phase it seems like they want to jump right into the next phase of the project. I hope that things go easier with this and I can start posting some new things to my site. The one good thing about being this busy is that I have learned a lot of new and interesting things along the way.