I have always been a huge fan of Windows Mobile.  It is (was?) literally a computer in my pocket.  A barrage of  less-than-spectacular devices combined with long periods between (small) updates left the platform behind its newer competitors -- the iPhone and Android.  Now, I won't get into a deep discussion of what happened in the past, but let's just say that thanks to the efforts of HTC, Windows Mobile/Phone stayed fairly competitive, all things considered.

Now Microsoft has introduced Windows Phone 7 Series.  They want to get back into the game big time.  What initially looked so freaking awesome has turned out to be Microsoft's version of the iPhone -- a heavily locked down device with a supposed "focus on consumers."  Apparently a focus on consumers means telling consumers how they are supposed to enjoy their devices and maybe cutting them a break and giving them some third party apps that absolutely cannot run in the background.  That's the straw that broke the camel's back for me.  As a developer and power user, I can't buy a Windows Phone 7 Series device if I can't tweak the hell out of it like I can my current device, a HTC Touch Pro 2, running Windows Phone 6.5.

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Eureka Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight, Young Lovers is a fast-paced action-packed love story. It has a very different plot from the original Eureka Seven series, so don't expect a sequel!

That said, the plot does parallel the series in several ways. The basic premise of aliens attacking the Earth and humans fighting back remains. Where the series portrayed the aliens as basically misunderstood and unintentionally damaging, the movie portrays them as more generically malicious, even though they did shoehorn some more 'innocent misguided intentions' stuff later in the plot.

Eureka has changed a lot. She's more of a fusion of Eureka and Anenome in the series, including frequently yelling "idiot" at Renton. That took a lot of getting used to for me. Interestingly, Novak and Anenome basically replaced Norb and Sakuya's roles in the story. It will raise a few eyebrows at first, but it worked.

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There is basically no information on Teh Googlez (or Teh Bing!) on this error, so I hope this helps somebody out there.

I was trying to install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in our beta environment, which is in its own forest.  Every time I installed it, no matter what settings or tricks I tried, I would get the following error:

For the search engines and those who can't read text in pictures, it says…

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.AddIncomingServerToPrivUserGroup Action failed.  There is no such object on the server.

If you click Retry, it won't work.  If you click Ignore, you get a few more errors and then the installation fails at the end.  If you click Abort, you save yourself some time and it just quits right there.  At this point you may have to manually undo parts of the CRM installation.  Start with running the uninstaller, of course.  Then check to make sure the CRM databases are deleted off your SQL server and the Active Directory objects got deleted as well.

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So is Cincinnati really overrated or is the SEC just that damn good?  The Gators destroyed the Bearcats tonight in the Sugar Bowl.  I'm a Gator fan so I'm happy!  I did not understand the BCS rating the Gators #5 after losing to Alabama in the SEC championship.  And tonight I was vindicated.  The Gators should have been the #3 team in the polls.  Just because you are undefeated does not mean you are that good. 

Not that it matters much because the net result would have been the same (Sugar Bowl invitation).  It's just another example of how the Bowl system is broken and we need a playoff system in I-A college football!  If we had a playoff system, I bet you anything it would have been an Alabama / Florida rematch.

And finally, I have to give a big thumbs down to the Fox game commentators.  There was about a total of 12 minutes where they actually called the game.  The rest of the time they spent talking about football inside drama and politics.  They spent about an entire quarter talking about whether or not Tim Tebow will be any good in the NFL (my prediction: he will become a dominant QB after a few years when he finally gets a chance).  It was the worst called bowl game I've ever watched!

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AT&T sure hates the fact that their 3G coverage sucks and Verizon is pointing it out.  The latest ad (been out for a while, actually) says that only AT&T allows you to talk and download at the same time.  Big deal if you can't get 3G service!

I hate AT&T.  I have to have them for local phone service because I use DSL and their monopoly makes them the only game in town -- and a very expensive option at that.  Cable is better for internet, but Time Warner is even lower on the scale of "good companies" in my book.  Better of the two evils -- so AT&T wins.  Thankfully, my actual DSL provider is a local company (Portbridge) and they are very good.  It's still AT&T's loop and I have to have local phone service, but at least AT&T is getting the least money possible from me.  I hate monopolies. 

I thought deregulation was supposed to fix all this?

Of course not!  Deregulation never helps the consumer.  Well I've derailed from my original point.  So, in conclusion, fuck AT&T and fuck Time Warner!

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As usual, The Rude Pundit is right.  President Obama never promised to not escalate the war/occupation in Afghanistan.  I knew this voting for him.  And yes, Rude is also right that I made that little platform negotiation in my head (I'll trade war for health care, etc.).  However, one point I think Rude is a bit wrong on is on how Obama's liberal plans are panning out.  Aside from Gitmo, I think he's done a good job advocating liberally.  It's not that he's just waffling on liberal issues because he doesn't believe strongly in them.  He's doing it because he has absolutely no choice. 

The fact is, despite an overwhelming majority of Democrats, we do not have a liberal -- let alone socialist (I LOL every time I hear a winger say that) congress.  We have a center-right congress.  For every Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, and Brad Miller, we have nearly as many Blue Dogs, Republicans, and Conservadems.  That's not even including the truly "moderate" Democrats (conservative Democrats are not moderate, by definition).  That makes it very difficult for a progressive agenda.  But if there is one thing the majority of congress agrees on, it's killing foreigners!  Especially if they have brown skin or happen to be of the Islamic faith.  Show me any federal politician (except a very small handful) and I'll show you a war hawk!  So when Obama proposes his Afghan strategy, expect much rejoicing at our country's ability to wag its gigantic military penis at everybody else.  Oh, sure, Republicans will whine about how they don't like it.  But it won't be because they are anti-war.  Hell to the no!  It will be because it's not hawkish enough!

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I had a need to directly manipulate the bytes in a bitmap for my VB.Net app for Windows Phone.  I found quite a few articles with The Google on how to do this in C#, using the unsafe keyword.  That's a perfectly fine way of doing it for C# users.  However, VB.Net does not have anything like the unsafe keyword, so there is no way to run unsafe (unmanaged) code blocks.  Philosophically, this might be a "good" thing to Managed Code purists.  I'm actually neutral on the issue.  Still, just because you can't do arbitrary pointer and memory manipulation in VB.Net does not mean you can't do this very simple thing (dimming the color brightness of each byte of a bitmap).  It's pretty easy and I can't believe nobody out there has posted how to do it this way VB.Net or C#.  I came up with this code for the Compact Framework for Windows Phone specifically, but it will also work in the big Framework for big Windows.  It will work in both VB.Net and C# just fine.

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I love science!  NASA has confirmed that the projectile launched into the moon's surface that offered a less than Hollywood spectacular boom uncovered 24 gallons of water.  That is so awesome!  Water on the moon has many benefits.  First, astronauts can drink it.  They can also breath the oxygen, once the water molecule is broken apart.  Finally, the hydrogen can be used for rocket fuel.  Since all these essential resources do not need to be taken to the hypothetical future moon base, a ton of money can be saved!

But with every bit of good news, seems to come a lot of bad, these days.  NASA's Ares rocket system (part of the Constellation program) is apparently over budget and the Obama administration is trying to figure out what to do about this.  This is sad.  After health care and jobs, science is a top priority in my book.  And highly visible, highly inspirational science like the space program should be a huge priority.

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If you tried to visit the Avian Waves website in the last 24 hours, you may have noticed that a spam page (with an embedded virus download) came up instead.  My site, itself, was not hacked.  No, it was much worse.  The DNS provider at Enom (the company the registrar I use, Arbor Domains, is a reseller for) was hacked.  A very large number of sites had their DNS redirected.

Time to switch to GoDaddy.  They are cheaper anyway.  Enom has proven they cannot be trusted with security.  Sorry, Arbor.  It's been a great ten plus year run.  But your DNS and registration tools haven't been updated since the early 2000s.  Plus, I need DNS service I can trust to not be hacked.  And if it is hacked, it needs to be fixed ASAP.

Wow!  This is shaping up to be  a good season for teevee science fiction!  First, we get a remade V (which didn't disappoint, although the first episode wasn't as strong as the original, IMHO), now I see that The Prisoner (an absolutely iconic science fiction series from the 60s) is being remade for AMC.  Go AMC!  Go teevee!