Ryan Homan

Well I was able to get a Nintendo Wii last week. I knew a guy that worked at Best Buy and he told me they had shipments come in and I had him pick me one up. I just got it hooked up this weekend, but only had a chance to create a Mii and play a game or 2 of tennis. I still need to buy a 2nd controller set, the HD cable, and a game or too. I’m also debating with my conscience whether I was to mod it and just make copies of games that I rent. I’m also tossing around the idea of getting a gamefly account and doing it that way. I’ll probably use the Wii for about a month before I decide what I’m gonna do about the games.

Well let me first start off and say that I almost forgot how much fun it is getting parts and working on a laptop. I will probably never replace a backlight on a laptop for anyone else ever again after this experience though. Not only did I have to replace the backlight but I also had a bad invertor so I replaced that as well. It took over 3 weeks to get the 2 parts I needed. I ordered the backlight from ccfldirect.com and got the inverter off of ebay.

My advice to anyone who wants to replace a backlight is to have lots of patience. I, myself, do not have much patience so this was quite a task to put together. First off, the backlight is very fragile and great care must be taken when soldering the wires onto the end. Also, before soldering, make sure you know how much clearance there is for the solder. The space I was working with was so small I could barely get enough solder on it to hold it on. After many tries, it stuck and I started the reassembly process. The backlight has a small spot at the bottom of the LCD that it must reside but also has a reflector that must be along the backside to prevent light loss. It is very difficult to get all these parts back into their spot while also be very careful not to break the bulb. Once you get the backlight assembly installed, it is now just lots of pieces and very small screws to complete the process.

So after about 3 hours of working with this, the moment of truth was waiting. Would the panel still light up? I had been trying it often while installing the bulb in the backlight assembly, but I was worried I might have knocked the solder joints loose was trying to fit everything back together, but fortunately it worked when I turned it on. It was a great success to complete the project, but not that worthwhile for business work especially when the customer wants it back ASAP. Hope this information may be of use to any of you would wants to replace a backlight. It is not an impossible task, but just takes time and patience.

I just learned this week how to change the default login page to a custom page that you can design. The instructions are as follows.
Open domcfg.nsf on the server you want to change the login page on. Edit the document and point it to the database that will contain the new login page (it can be in domcfg.nsf as well). Specify the form name that will be the login page and it should now take affect. Make sure you leave the fields username and password on the new form, but other than that use whatever customizations you want. If you have questions, let me know.

I just finished getting dompdf setup and working to convert html docs from Lotus Domino into usuable pdfs. I did run along a few roadblocks along the way though. First off though, I’d like to say that installing and setting it up was a piece of cake. All it required was putting the files on the php server and changing a few parameters in the config. Then I call the script from a url such as
/dompdf/dompdf.php?input_file=test1.html
where the input file is the html that needs to become a pdf. One snag that held me up for a little while was that I was getting a fatal error like this:
Call to a member function get_cellmap() on a non-object table_cell_frame_reflower.cls.php
This was caused by poorly constructed html and after cleaning up the html a little, it processed the file correctly. It appears to mostly support the CSS 2.1 standard and as long as the formatting of the html is in good shape you should have no problems.

Heres a link to the project so Rich Waters is happy. sourceforge.net/projects/dompdf/

I was able to convince my new employer to let me try out connecting my home asterisk phone system to an extension at the office so people can dial my house direct as if it was an extension. I will have an extension that will ring though my asterisk system and to my home phones. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works and will let you know what I think once I get it all setup.