Tyler Montgomery’s blog

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!

Let me give you some background information–starting about 4 months ago (Feb 2008), I have been unable to text message anyone on the Verizon network from my Cingular (now AT&T) phone.I do in fact have the 200 message plan for my phone (a SMT5600 or HTC Typhoon depending on what carrier you use), and this began to annoy me. Here I was, paying for a service that I could not use.

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
Read more »

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to reinstall windows for a client of mine and reinstall all of the applications that she used. One of the applications in the list was AOL 9.0 - I cringed at that thought, but the client asked for it.

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. Read more »

SPAM! That’s what!

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!

Well, once again, you might have noticed that I haven’t really had time to update my blog for a while– but I do have an interesting story to tell ya.

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… Read more »

Hi there!

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.

Welcome to my latest project- a Linux 24×2 charactor LCD.

This project is part of a much larger project, called the Skorpix Video Streamer.
The aim of the Skorpix Video Streamer is to provide an easy-to-use video broadcaster for churches without costing an arm and a leg for a dedicated commercial machine.
If you’ve ever been inside a chuch audio/video room, you know that space is a premium, and heat is another huge issue. Skorpix will be a free Linux distribution based on Knoppix, with a low hardware requirement– a mere Celeron 300MHz with 128MB RAM will run perfectly.

More information after the jump! Read more »

FreeFormCMS aims to be the newest easy-to-use PHP/MySQL content management system ever.

Finished:

• Website Layout

Unfinished:

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

To check the project page out, click here

You might be wondering– “what is the projects category?”, or you might not be.

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.