Tom’s Two Cents

I have decided to take the router back and use a regular land line for now. I still can’t pinpoint the problem, but I have found that re-flashing the firmware is a temporary fix. For some reason this works, but simply restarting the router doesn’t. So that’s what I have done every other morning for a week: Wake up… no blue light (no phone service)… “upgrade” firmware (for the n-th time)… blue light comes back on (phone works again)… then I just wonder how many calls I missed. This is one of those times when being an early adopter can bite you in the butt. At least I was able to talk T-Mobile into taking it back outside of the 14 day “buyer’s remorse” window. The whole idea that I would have to pay a $200 “early termination fee” is just silly. If a product doesn’t work after a few weeks I should be able to take it back for a refund. Period. 14 days is *barely* enough time to switch your number to T-Mobile and back, so you might want to test out your service with a number you don’t care about first. I know this has worked for others very well, but for some reason the Comcast + T-Mobile combination was a non-starter for me. Anyway, I’ll try VOIP again someday — in a year or so maybe.

If you get cankers easily you should avoid the ingredient sodium laurylin sulphate. This substance is in many mouthwashes and almost every toothpaste (to make it foam). But sodium laurylin sulphate can cause cankers, especially if you are already prone to them. The only toothpaste I have found that doesn’t contain this substance is Rembrandt, but I’m sure there are others.

If you are trying out T-mobile’s HotSpot@Home VOIP home phone service, there is a setting you may need to change. T-mobile is still figuring this out so their technicians will invariably blame it on your ISP to get you to hang up and go away. I usually like T-mobile, but they have had this VOIP service out long enough to have figured out these types of issues. By the way, this article is only useful if they gave you the Linksys WRTU54G-TM router (this is the model they are currently handing out with this service).

I have Comcast as my ISP, and I was having the same problem others were having (no blue light — no phone service). I also got the same error message as others (W006.1 ISP Error. Retry.) I have found that the default firewall settings on the WRTU54G-TM router are too strict. I am not an expert so there may be a less drastic fix, but turning off firewall rules solves the problem. To do this, log in to your router via a computer connected to it (type http://192.168.0.1 in your browser to access it). As has been mentioned before, the default user name and password for the router are both “admin” (without the quotes). You can change this later. Once you have logged in, click on “Security” and then “Firewall.” Change “Enable” to “Disable” and click “Save.” You may need to restart your router (just unplug it, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in). Once it has time to start up the error message should be gone now and the blue light that indicates a phone connection should be back on. (To check, log back into your router and click “Status” –> “Voice” –> “Error List.”) You should be in business!

Here is a link to the Linksys forums where I posted this as well:

http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=VoIP_Routers&message.id=2931

If you want to check for firmware updates, here is the place (although currently there is only Version 1).

I have been a resident of Utah for 3 years now, and I am FINALLY being allowed to apply for resident tuition. The form I had to fill out asks for details about every aspect of my life. Let me tell you, the Department of Homeland Security has nothing on the Utah State University residency folks. They want to know where I have lived, worked, and traveled in the past three years. Every trip greater than 15 days has to be documented. They want copies of my taxes, my vehicle and voter registrations, my mortgage statements, as well as information about my wife and my parents. While I am grateful to pay less tuition starting next semester, I am amazed by how much information is required to establish residency. So I wrote my own version of an employment verification letter to make life easier on my supervisor:

To whom it may concern,

Tom Caswell has been an employee of Utah State University since September 2005. He has put up with your tuition residency requirements for 3 years now. He has paid the higher out-of-state tuition rates during this time — even though he has been paying Utah property, income, and sales taxes since the first day he set foot in Utah back in August 2005. Please stop being a bunch of freaking morons and realize that he is now eligible for in-state tuition. Thank you.

I just returned from a nice family trip in Southern California. There is definitely a difference between vacations and family trips. A true vacation, as in a rest or a break, would probably not involve kids. I enjoyed reading Justin’s take on The Happiest Place On Earth. It was fun spending time in the sun with Justin and Marion and Dave and their families. We played at the beach/pool and spent a few days at the Disneyland. Legoland was fun too. This time the kids had earned their own money, although somehow it all still came out of my bank account. Anyway, enjoy the photos…
http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/sets/72157605456925458/

Recently, I wrote a post called Letting your Flickr photos wander. Someone saw this post on reddit and asked me if I had a trick to detecting when people reuse my photos on Flickr. The truth is that many people are good enough to send me a note on Flickr to let me know they used my photo. I also set up a Google alert for my flickr username: caswell_tom. That way if someone gives me attribution I get an alert. Here is another case of reuse I found via a Google alert. I’m not a pro, but it’s always fun to see where my photos end up.

I think I have been a really good sport. Two weddings in two months! Luckily all of my brothers and sisters are married now, so I am hoping to not have to attend any more weddings for a while. I’ll defer to Justin’s rant on weddings so I don’t have to write one.

I have decided to move my main blog over to tomcaswell.com/blog. That means everyone who has been following my blog may want to change your feed readers to point the new blog location. All three of you. Part of the reason is because I want to use WordPress so I can have a bit more control over my blog. The other reason is that I was starting to get some Google pagerank on this blog and frankly, I would rather keep my blog obscure so I don’t have to worry as much about anyone reading what I write

From the FamilySearch Conference:
(but it deserves its own post)
Matt Misbach (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

• https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
• The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
• No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
• The IDE will always be free to developers
• Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
  
• Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he’ll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
• treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
• WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.

I’ll be adding some notes throughout the day…

Keynote
Ransom Love: “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”
http://devnet.familysearch.org/support/roadmap-for-new-developers (It’s nice to see that FamilySearch is using plone)

Duane Kuehne: API Overview
They do not yet have load metrics on any of the API calls they outlined. They expect to have an SLA (service level agreement) with this information at some point. One thing that surprised the API dev team was the large size of individual records once you combine all the duplicates into a central location. Some individuals can be on the order of a hundred MB or more.

Ryan Heaton: Family Tree Read
REST-enabled
Resource Types: XML, JSON, can be gzipped
Resource Locations: Via ID or Identifying parameters
You can read a person/place by ID, name, etc, etc, etc.

Data Definition
XML Schema Location:
“{module}/{version}/schema”
https://api.familysearch.org/familytree/v1/schema

persons - contains data about a person
searches - contains data about searches
users - contains data about users
matches - contains data about matches
personas - contains data about a persona

person (nested in familytree/persons)

• information (ids, gender, etc)
• assertions (the data that makes up the person (names, events, facts,relationships, etc)
• summary (most relevant name, gender, birth, death, spouse, and parents)
• values (grouping assertions by value)
• composition (a view of what persona make up this person)

search (nested in familytree/search)

• this is different from the person data above
• score (relative to other search elements)
• ref (the id of the person)
• person/parent/spouse

authorities

• places
• dates
• names

Testing it out (you need to have an API key first):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/login?key=TEST_KEY

Get all data on a particular person using their id:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?sessionId=…

Query for values and summary:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=values&view=summary&sessionId=…

Get user data on a particular person:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/user/KWCD-QBC&sessionId=…

Get summary view of 2 generations of ancestors for a particular person
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&ancestors=2&sessionId=…

Get JSON data for a particular person (not sure if I got this one right):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&dataFormat=application=json&sessionId=…

Matt Misbach (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

• https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
• The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
• No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
• The IDE will always be free to developers
• Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
  
• Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he’ll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
• treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
• WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.
  

Rob Lyon: FamilyTree Combine/Separate
Tree cleaning (removing duplicates) - someone needs to develop an app to handle this better.