moars is designed to be used with students. This is not an iPhone app — the students use mobile web-based browsers to take quizzes and surveys. Even though the system is designed to be used with Safari on iPod Touch or iPhone, students have accessed the system from other mobile browsers.

Click here to check out MOARS (Mobile Audience Response System)

Another site teachers might find helpful is “captur.me” which is more low tech.

PaddleCaptur is a simple tool that teachers can use in their classrooms to help them capture the class’ understanding or opinions in an instant. Each students has a paddle-shaped flash card. When the teacher asks a question, she also provides up to four options for the answers. Students all use their Captur paddle to give their answers…

Check out the Captur website here.

Free iPhone in Japan

White Plan : 980 Yen
You can call anybody on the Softbank network for free between 1AM and 9PM. If it’s after 9PM, or if you’re calling a non-Softbank phone, the cost is 21 every 30 seconds. (I currently have this.)

White Plan Family Discount : Free
This is an add on of the white plan. You can call family members for free if they have a White Plan and are under your account. (I currently have this, it comes in handy and it’s free.)

S! Basic : 315 Yen
This is like an Internet connection fee. You have to have it if you want to 1) Use the Internet and 2) Want to have an e-mail address for sending MMS/Text. It’s important because you can’t send a normal SMS to non-Softbank users. (I have this too.)

Packet Flat-rate Full : 1029-4410 Yen
I spoke to a guy at Softbank and he said you can use unlimited Internet for up to 4410 a month. If you use less than 4410 Yen a month, you’re charged less. But if you have an iPhone, I bet you’ll be using the packet plan a lot.

Handset Cost : 1280-1760 Yen
This is a monthly fee for 24 months. The 8GB is 1280, the 16GB iPhone is 1760 a month. “But Steve, you said FREE!?” Well, they don’t want you to run off with the iPhone, so to make the iPhone free Softbank applies a discount.

Monthly Discount : 1280 Yen
This is for 24 months. You are actually paying full price for the phone, but this discount cancels out that price, making it free. It brings the 8GB 1280 Yen cost to 0, and it makes the 16GB only 480 Yen per month.

Tricky monthly phone charge and discount.
It’s tricky because even though it’s a 2 year contact, they don’t start billing you for the physical phone until the 3rd month. This makes it 26 months total until you’re done paying off the phone.

The final price estimate
8GB : 2324 – 5705+ Yen per month
16GB : 2804 – 6185+ Yen per month

In the end it costs more than the price estimate because you’ll probably call more than just Softbank users, but this gives you an idea of the price. If you cancel, you are charged a cancel fee of 9975 Yen and you must pay for the remainder of the phone. So if you get the free 8GB iPhone and you cancel on month 12, you owe for the remaining 12 months + 2 months (because they didn’t charge you the first 2 months). So you owe 1280 x 14, or 17920 Yen in addition to the 9975 cancel fee. OUCH!

I thought about getting the iPhone, but I already have a phone which I’d have to pay the remaining 9 months on. Lame. I already have a 16GB iPod Touch. It’s nice, and with all of the Apps available I’ve completely replaced my Palm PDA. I think I’ll just stick with the iPod Touch for now.

For anybody curious, here are some Softbank iPhone commercials.

Check out this screenshot. NTVDM.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created. Doh!

Oh yeah, let me just start NTVDM back up Mr. Windows…. like I know what the hell that is? I did some research on this and found out that NTVDM.exe is. It basically allows you to run Dos programs on Windows NT or XP successfully. It emulates the old school DOS/16-bit operating system to allow older programs to run, such as the command prompt eh?

After driving me nuts for a day I found a solution to this problem. I found it at the webuser forum, credit goes to bricat.

1. Download Killbox from here and save it to your computer. (KillBox is a tool to delete in-use files, if the file is running, KillBox will attempt to end the process (close the running file) and delete it.)
2. Locate the downloaded Killbox and double click killbox.exe
3. Click on Tools, click Delete Temp Files, and click ok.
4. Select the option “Delete on reboot”
5. Now highlight and copy this entire list of file paths below
   • C:\Program Files\MsConfigs\MsConfigs.exe
     C:\Windows\system32\p2pnetwork.exe
     C:\Windows\system32\CMD.COM
     C:\Windows\system32\netstat.com
     C:\Windows\system32\ping.com
     C:\Windows\system32\regedit.com
     C:\Windows\system32\tasklist.com
     C:\Windows\system32\taskkill.com
     C:\Windows\system32\taskmgr.com
     C:\Windows\system32\tracert.com
     C:\Windows\system32\bt.exe
     C:\Windows\system32\z.tmp
     C:\Windows\system32\bszip.dll
6. Go back to Killbox and click “File” on the killbox menu at the top
7. Choose “Paste from clipboard”
8. The entire file path list should now be in the “Full Path of File to Delete” field. To check to see if it’s there you can click on the drop down arrow next to that field and then when you expand it all of the paths above should be listed.
9. Click on the red button with a white X in it. Killbox will now tell you that all listed files will be deleted on next reboot.
10. Click Yes
11. When it asks if you would like to reboot now, click Yes
12. If you get a message that says “PendingFileRenameOperations Registry Data has been Removed by External Process!” you should go ahead and reboot your computer manually.

And that’s it! After you reboot your computer the command prompt should start working as normal.

If you are running into the same problem with iTunes sucking balls then here are a few solutions that might work for you.

iTunes Skipping on Windows XP Solution 1:

1. Exit iTunes
2. Upgrade your sound card drivers (just to eliminate that as an issue)
3. Upgrade to latest Microsoft direct X version:
4. Click the Start Button, then click the Run button
5. Type: dxdiag and then hit enter
6. Click “sound 1″ or similarly named tab
7. Slide the bar to “basic acceleration”
8. Exit
9. Restart iTunes

iTunes Skipping on Windows XP Solution 2:

1. Close iTunes and Quicktime
2. Click the start button
   
3. Go to the control panel
4. Click on Quick Time
5. Select the Audio tab
6. Click on “˜Safe mode (waveOut only)’
7. Click okay. Relaunch iTunes.

If this doesn’t work you can either hit up the Apple Support Forums, or you can wait for the next official iTunes update from Apple and while you’re waiting you could try an alternative player such as Windows Media Player or Winamp. I know it’s frustrating and sucks.

Winamp for Windows
http://winamp.com/
Winamp for Mac
http://www.tucows.com/preview/206623

Good news for iPod owners – Since version 5.2 Winamp has had iPod support built in and it supports almost all other portable media players too.

You receive the “Interface not registered” error message when you try to send or to save an e-mail message to the Drafts folder in Outlook 2002

SYMPTOMS
If you use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor in Microsoft Office Outlook 2002, and you try to send e-mail messages or to save e-mail messages to the Drafts folder, you may receive the following error message:

Interface not registered

Or, you may experience the following symptoms:

• You receive an error message.
• The e-mail message is not sent.
• The e-mail message is not saved to the Drafts folder.

CAUSE
This behavior occurs if the Ole32.dll file that is located in the %Windir%\System32 folder is not registered correctly in the registry.

RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, register the Ole32.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type the following command in the Open box, and then click OK:
2. Regsvr32.exe %Windir%\System32\Ole32.dll
3. In the RegSvr32 dialog box, click OK.

This solution was taken from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base

How to decide what data to back up
Norton Ghost – Cool software… I think…
How-To: Automatically back up your computer
Automatically back up your hard drive

Answer: The best way to check how much free disk space your FreeBSD server has available is by using the df command. This works on linux/unix servers, not just FreeBSD. After you SSH into your server you can either type “df” (df means disk free) which will show you the raw numbers or you can type “df -h” which means human readable and makes the output easier to read by displaying it in kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes instead of the default kilobytes.

Here’s how it looks like in action. The first section I typed df and hit enter, the second section I typed df -h and hit enter.

$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a 128990 60892 57780 51% /
/dev/ad0s1f 257998 1440 235920 1% /tmp
/dev/ad0s1g 155014798 126948208 15665408 89% /usr
/dev/ad0s1e 257998 10454 226906 4% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
/dev/ad3s1c 384602638 13645514 340188914 4% /usr/www/virtual/yyy/drive2
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a 126M 59M 56M 51% /
/dev/ad0s1f 252M 1.4M 230M 1% /tmp
/dev/ad0s1g 148G 121G 15G 89% /usr
/dev/ad0s1e 252M 10M 222M 4% /var
procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /proc
/dev/ad3s1c 367G 13G 324G 4% /usr/www/virtual/yyy/drive2
$

Some commands explained
There are two ways to check space on your drive. One is the df (disk free) command which tells you how much free disk space is available for each mount you have and the other is the du (disk usage) command which reports the sizes of directory trees, their contents, and the sizes of individual files. The du command is helpful when you are trying to find files that take up a lot of space.

A recently installed program has disabled the Welcome screen and Fast User Switching. To restore these features, you must uninstall the program. The following file name might help you identify the program that made the change: C:\WINDOWS\system32\BCMLogon.dll

I tried but I wasn’t able to switch to the logon screen. I couldn’t access the Internet either no matter what I tried. I had to go to another PC to figure out a solution to this BCMLogon.dll issue.

Here’s what I did to resolve the BCMLogon.dll headache and get my computer back up and running. If you follow the steps I provide, you’re going to be editing your registry so do this at your own risk! I highly recommend that you back up your registry before making any changes!

Update: There are two solutions that other people with this problem have shared in the comments section. It seems much easier than what I did so I’ll share them first.

Here’s a solution shared by Pdunn56:

1. To restore the fast user switching:
2. Go into the Windows control panel. Choose the ‘wireless configuration utility’
3. Uncheck the first box that says “Let this tool manager your wireless networks”
4. Hit okay.
5. I’m not sure if you need to reboot or not, but that should be it.

The solution that annnnnnnnnnt shared sounds a bit confusing, but if it makes sense to you then go for it. Here’s the solution which I’ll directly quote: all you had to do is in “run” type “msconfig” temporarily disable your wireless card”¦ restart/reboot, enable the “Fast User Switching Feature”, restart/reboot, re-enable your wireless (msconfig) resart/reboot. Done

I hope that works. If not you should check out my solution below. If you have another solution not posted please leave a comment and share what you’ve done.

First step is to back up your registry. I’m using Windows XP so I did it this way

1. Click Start, click Run, type %SystemRoot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe, and then click OK.
2. On the Welcome to System Restore page, click Create a restore point, and then click Next .
3. On the Create a Restore Point page, type a name for the restore point and then click Create
4. After the restore point has been created, click Close.

If System Restore is turned off, you receive a message that asks whether you want to turn on System Restore now. Click Yes. Then, in the System Properties dialog box, click to clear the Turn off System Restore check box, click OK, and then repeat this step.

Click this to visit Microsoft.com and read about backing up your registry if using Windows XP or Vista.

Once you’ve backed up your registry it’s time to restore the Welcome Screen and Fast User Switching. To do this you will need to reset the GinaDLL entry which can be doing using these steps:

1. Click the Start Button, click Run, then type REGEDIT and hit enter. This will bring up your registry.
2. Navigate to the Winlogon key. It’s located down the registry tree here:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon
3. For an extra safety step you should backup the key by selecting it followed by clicking FILE and EXPORT
4. You’ll see two window panes in the registry. The left side you have Winlogon selected. In the right pane you’ll see GinaDLL. Right-click GinaDLL and then click Delete. (You need to remove the whole value, not just its Value Data)
5. Close the Registry Editor

Your problem should be fixed now! If you see no difference you could reboot and then it should be good to go. You can read more about this at the Microsoft Knowledge Base under How To Use the Fast User Switching Feature in Windows XP

I was trying to figure out how to write in Japanese on my WordPress blog. All Japanese characters were coming up as question marks, appearing like “????? ? ?? ???” instead of characters. I searched for a solution to this and found a few plugins that did a ton of unnecessary things, and some didn’t work. I tried out Gengo but I didn’t like it very much. However if you’re reading this for a solution on how to write Japanese and English or translate your page it might work well for you! Here’s the link to Gengo.

If you’re running WordPress 2.2 or higher, then the Collation should be set correctly. Here’s a link to their documentation, and here’s an excerpt.

As of WordPress Version 2.2, DB_COLLATE was made available to allow designation of the database collation (i.e. the sort order of the character set). In most cases, this value should be left blank (null) so the database collation will be automatically assigned by MySQL based on the database character set (i.e. DB_CHARSET). Set DB_COLLATE to one of the UTF-8 values defined in Unicode character sets (utf8 section) (see dev.mysql.com) for most Western European languages.

Now if you are running an older version, or you upgraded from an older version, or for some reason things aren’t working out I’ll post my solution below.

Solution: EASY! First backup your database in case you mess this up. Next use phpMyAdmin and choose a table (wp_posts) and then select the field you want to edit or show Japanese. Let’s say you want your posts to display Japanese, you would edit “post_content” and change the Collation to utf8_unicode_ci. It might have latin1_swedish_ci as the default. You can do this to any field. Posts, comments, categories, etc. Now you can Japanese it up! You can write in Chinese, Korean, whatever character set you’re using most likely. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

If this doesn’t make sense to you then I’ll give you a step by step break down.

1. Back up your database. Not sure how? Check out this wordpress database plugin called WP-DBManager.
2. Log into your phpMyAdmin
3. Choose your database on the left
4. Under your database on the left, click on wp_comments
5. On the right you’ll see Field, Type, Collation, Attributes, etc.
6. For the Fields that have Collation set as something other than utf8_unicode_ci you should tick the check box.
7. After you ticked all check boxes in that table, click the pencil icon at the bottom. When you mouse over it there should be a tool tip that says “change”. When you click this you can edit those fields.
8. Using the drop down box on each field you can now change the Collation from whatever it is (example latin1_swedish_ci) to the bottom selection in the drop down box which is utf8_unicode_ci.
9. Hit Save
10. Now click on the next table on the left hand side which should be called wp_links.
11. Repeat these steps for each table.

I also found this solution from the wordpress support area.
2.2 update Japanese character problem (“?”)

WordPressを使って、日本語でも英語でもブログを書く事が出来るようになったよ！

Let’s face it, the majority of business use some form or Outlook for the email client. And the two latest versions show the on behalf message which can look either suspicious or unprofessional. I did some looking into this and I found this

How do I customize the ‘From:’ address on outgoing mail?

Note: your Gmail address will still be included in your email headers in the sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display “From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com.”

This will be resolved only if Gmail provides an option to remove the Sender: header, or replace it with X-Sender. I don’t think there’s a security issue here because Gmail already verifies your new email address when you add to your Gmail account. Hopefully they’ll change this in the future. I’d even upgrade my hosted domain email to the paid version if they’d remove it. That’s how much I like Gmail. Until then… grrrrr…

BestBuy has the Hitachi 1TB DeskStar SATA Hard Drive with 32MB cache, retail box, $279.99, and free shipping. Nice. Here’s the link.

This script should not remove anything it should not remove, and it should clear all e-mail from your qmail queue safely so you can start sending mail normally again. (This is for qmail only and not a solution for any other mail programs.) You’re going to need ssh access and an ssh program like putty or putty portable.

Let’s get busy with the Qmail Clear script:

1. Log into your server through ssh
2. type this:
   su -
3. type this:
   wget http://japanitup.com/scripts/qmailclear.sh
4. type this:
   sh qmailclear.sh or sh ./qmailclear.sh
5. done.

You can download it and view it yourself, but just as a quick summary so you know what it’s doing, the Qmail Clear script looks like this:

echo Cleaning Queue
mv /var/qmail/queue/lock /root/
cd /var/qmail/queue; find . -type f -exec rm -f ‘{}’ \;
mv /root/lock /var/qmail/queue/
echo Queue is now Clean

If this didn’t do the trick and you’re receiving oversized file truncating errors (or “Argument list too long”) then you should use this more intense script. It will take longer but it will get the job done.

Let’s get busy with the Qmail Clean script:

1. Log into your server through ssh
2. type this:
   su -
3. type this:
   wget http://japanitup.com/scripts/qmailclean.sh
4. type this:
   sh qmailclean.sh or sh ./qmailclean.sh
5. done.

DO NOT restart any process. DO NOT reboot the server. DO NOT do anything until the script says it is done. If you restart a process, etc, it will break qmail and that’s no fun. Just run the script until it’s complete.

You can download the script and view all of the code yourself, but here’s a quick summary of the main lines of code so you know what’s taking place when running the Qmail Clean script:

echo “Stopping Qmail”
/etc/init.d/qmail stop
echo “Clearing the Mail Queue”
cd /var/qmail/queue/info
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Info folder clean, clearing mess folder”
cd /var/qmail/queue/mess
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Mess folder clean, clearing remote folder”
cd /var/qmail/queue/remote
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Remote folder clean, clearing intd folder”
cd /var/qmail/queue/intd
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Intd folder clean, clearing local folder”
cd /var/qmail/queue/local
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Local folder clean, clearing todo folder”
cd /var/qmail/queue/todo
rm -rf blah blah blah
echo “Mail queue cleaned”
echo “Restarting Qmail Now”
/etc/init.d/qmail start
echo “Qmail Started!”
echo “Done!”

If you’re interested in reading more about Qmail you can check out these links:
A reference for qmail users – qmail.org
A qmail tutorial site – Life With Qmail