Welcome to the official TheCubed blog!

One thing you may notice now is that the blog is named separately from the rest of my website–
That’s because I want it to feel separate from the professional realm of things, and to be more relaxed in style, because that’s just how I am.

Right now, there may not be much to see, but soon– it will be a ‘rolling portfolio’ for me, and an interesting read for others.

Check back often!

I could send text messages from my Windows Mobile phone to AT&T customers, and it would also appear that my text messages to Verizon customers would send also, but the customer would never actually receive the message. The odd thing was that I could receive messages from other carriers too–I just couldn’t respond.

I checked the ‘net and found that there were some issues ‘replying’ to messages in Windows Mobile 2003, but even by typing in the number in a new message didn’t fix the problem.
Puzzled by this development, I decided to call AT&T customer support, and after an approximate wait time of 30-45 minutes (my fault, because I called at 7:00PM–the highest traffic time of the day for support call centers) I was greeted by someone who promptly asked me to reboot my phone. I complied and then was instructed to send a SMS to a Verizon customer. I did, and the message ‘went’ through on my phone, and the AT&T tech verified that it did indeed pass through their 3rd party SMS routing vendor (Verisign), but I never received a response from my friend on Verizon. The tech then decided to put in a support ticket and I was told it would be fixed in 3-5 days.

…More after the jump

3-5 Days later, still no text messaging. Keep in mind that I have the 200 SMS-to-other-carriers-plan and I have been testing my phone daily. I’m paying for it to not work… still. I tried my SIM card in another phone, and still no joy.

4 Months later, I now realize that it’s time to call AT&T again. I call as soon as I get to school and am prompted that I am required to ‘verify’ the last four digits of the account-holder’s SSN. Great. I’m not the account-holder… I don’t know who is. The customer support rep said “For security, please verify the last four digits of the account-holder’s SSN”, and I said, “For security, I cannot give that information out at this time”, all I heard was a “CLICK!”. They hung up on me.

I called at lunchtime after getting the SSN from the proper person, and was immediately (nice, eh?) greeted with a tech (not a CSR) who promptly agreed that there was a problem– but she couldn’t see where. To her computer, it showed that the SMS got through AT&T fine and was handed off to Verizon fine also. She said to submit a support ticket, so we did.

I got a call later on that day stating something to the effect of “we really don’t believe there is an issue with our network, have your friend call Verizon– your support ticket has been canceled”. Hmm, that’s odd, I seem to remember that the law of probability states that since I cannot send messages to ANY Verizon customer, the probability of it being a problem with Verizon is very low.

I called when I got home and finally got someone to put in another support ticket with AT&T, and this time the ticket went through (yesterday).

This morning, I was perusing the intewebs and stumbled upon this– http://www.modmyifone.com/forums/t/13991-cant-send-unicode-sms-other-network.html after searching Google for “windows mobile unicode”.

What I found was someone with (almost) the same issue as me, except they were on an iPhone. SMS goes through fine, but the receiver never gets the message.

Now, to make a (really) long story short, I fixed it myself! The whole problem lied in my signature.

[»TylerFixer«]

used to be my signature on my phone, and apparently the » and « were being sent as unicode, which Verizon does not support.

Here’s my fix:

1. Open ‘Messaging’ on your Windows Mobile phone
2. Go to your ‘Text Messages’ folder
3. Press ‘Menu->Options’ then to go ‘Sending’
   
4. Uncheck ‘Use Unicode when necessary’
5. Press ‘Done’
6. Go to ‘Signatures’ and change your text message signature.

That seemed to fix it for me! Huzzah!

So, thus ends my saga of trying to fix my SMS problem to Verizon.

If this helps anyone, please let me know in the comments box below

UPDATE: Almost right after I finished writing this, I received a call from a very polite AT&T CSR to inform me that they would be more than happy to give me a $5 refund for my trouble. Not a large amount of money, but I really do appreciate the gesture. She also stated that since I only had a few messages left outgoing, she could automatically use that $5 to go towards my 200 message counter. Huzzah!

Keywords: sms to verizon problem cingular at&t att text message to verizon unicode utf-8 utf-7

I thought, this should be easy, just go to AOL.com and click download. Not so.
Every where I turned, I was asked for a username and password (which I did not have) and could not proceed before supplying one. When I found the link for downloading AOL, I noticed that it was only 300k– pretty small for AOL, eh? It turns out that the file AOLDNLD.exe is only a downloader program that requires an active internet connection to install. Fine, this should still be easy- just connect the client’s computer to my Ethernet network and download the software from there. One trouble was that my client’s computer did not have an Ethernet card.

I finally called AOL technical support and was greeted by this nice-sounding robot voice asking me again for my AOL username (which I still did not have). After saying ‘I do not have one’ about 10 times, I was finally transferred to customer support, but they did not have an answer to my question- they just suggested that I go out and get an AOL CD from my local Target or other retail store. That’s not good- I’d much rather not go trapse down to Target just for an AOL CD.

So, I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine on my computer and sniffed the traffic going to and from the machine using WireShark . Finally after a few minutes of sniffing, I had the files I needed- in total about 52mb!

Hopefully to save anyone the trouble of having to go to Target or purchase another Ethernet card for your computer, I have saved the AOL 9.0 VR installer files and provided them for download.

Download AOL 9.0 VR ‘Offline’ Installer

Note to any AOL representitives: if there is any problem with me providing this installer, please contact me and provide proper identification.

Just for some publicity, I figured I’d post a growing list of IP addresses that try to violate my anti-spam policy for my blog here…

Every night, my server runs a script that checks a MySQL table for abuse IPs and echoes them to this file,
Have at it!

It all started when I tried to add a USB cable to my CVS-Cam for downloading the videos from the camera.
I had wanted to attach this camera to a kite or a tethered balloon to get some aerial photography, but it all went horribly awry.

[7:30 AM]
Okay, so I’ve just gotten up from a good night’s rest, and I thought that I’d try my aerial camera today, but I first need to make a cable for my camera…
After some Google-ing, I found this link on Make:Blog which detailed how to build a cable for the CVS Camera, and all I needed to do was to find a cable somewhere that I could use.

[8:00 AM]
After scouring my room for a cable that would work for this project, I found nothing to my liking. I then set search for an old USB cable that I could cut up and dissect to use for the camera… and 3 minutes later I had found the perfect match.

Click to read more…

[8:15 AM]
I had just finished reading the Make:Blog article for hacking the camera, and I decided to heat up the old trusty soldering iron to begin crafting my cable. Five minutes later, my soldering iron was heated up and ready for action.

[8:45 AM]
I had just finished soldering my connections to the pads on the camera’s circuit board, and I started to check my connections… okay, they looked fine, no solder bridges or bad solder joints, so off to my room to test the camera.

[8:50 AM - The final hour]
Now was the moment of truth, as I was about to plug the camera into my computer and test it, when a thought crossed my mind… “mabye I should use a cheapo USB hub to test this… … naah, it’ll be fine“, so I plugged in the USB cable and…. nothing. Uh-oh better try again… nothing on my other front USB port either. Okay, this computer is known to sometimes need a restart before it’ll see a USB device, so I told Windows (yeah, I know) to reboot, and I proceeded to try my other computer.
Right after I hit the restart button on my computer, I smelled something, kinda like burnt rubber, but it was kind of sweet smelling- I thought it was just me smelling the solder still from the cable I had just made… I walked over to my other computer (which was my server that hosts this site) and plugged the USB cable into one of the back USB ports (bad idea). POP!! That was the sound of doom.

My server’s screen immediately went blank, and I heard my other computer beeping at me too… oh no, I’ve killed them!

I hurriedly went to check out why my main system was beeping at me, and to my horror, Windows was stating to me “Windows has recovered from a serious error!”.

I shut off both computers and proceeded to check my wiring– did I short two wires together? did I not solder something right? what would do this??

Well, looking closely at the Make:Blog instructions, I discovered that I had wired the +5v from the USB plug and the GND together by soldering to the wrong pins.

The order that I had my USB wires in was as follows: (don’t use these– there’ wrong)

• Pin 10 on camera to the black USB wire (GND)
• Pin 9 on camera to the white USB wire (USB data)
• Pin 8 on camera to the green USB wire (USB data)
• Pin 7 on camera to the red USB wire (+5v) — wrong.

My problem is that the red USB wire (+5v) was connected to pin 7 on the camera, which is a GND pin.
I had shorted 5v to GND with no resistance and fried my motherboard, or so I thought…

Here are some photos of the aftermath of the CVS Cam incident…

What had happened was the +5v trace on the front USB board of my desktop (in a Cooler Master Centurion 532 case) had basically lifted off of the board and became a fuse!
If you look closely at the bottom of the board, and in the left-middle of it also, you will see burn marks and a lifted trace!

Too bad was the fact that I couldn’t take pictures after this, as my camera battery died- so I couldn’t show how I fixed it.

[Edited on Aug 27, 2006 to include photos]

If you’re wondering …”why hasn’t there been any new posts for awhile”, here’s your answer.

I’m currently working on many a project- all at once!

• Parallel port keyboard
• Rigging a keyboard to accept external input from itself.
  The purpose is to control Need For Speed Most Wanted to pause and restart the game after 60 seconds.
• TCP/IP Silent Packet
• Send a TCP/IP packet to a host when a specific button is pressed on a Logitech MOMO game wheel.
• Websites…
• Designing a website for Anchorpoint Christian Schools
• Designing a website for a Guild Wars guild called “One In Christ [oic]”
• Finishing my Skorpix project
• Still need to finish loads of stuff for this one…
  Need to find an open-source video streaming software that will work on a 300mhz computer…
• GPS Serial Cable
• Building a serial cable for a Magellan GPS 315 reciever… (done)

So, as you can see- I’m actually pretty busy… but don’t worry- I’ll have some pretty cool stuff soon.

Finished:

• Website Layout

Unfinished:

• Page edit function
• MySQL integration
• Firefox compatibility
• …much more.

To check the project page out, click here

The Projects category of my blog is where things that I really haven’t finished, but are still a work-in-progress.

This category will be filled with many of my things from the magical test.thecubed.com part of TheCubed– where many of my projects live until they are ready to be released.