Board Elections & VCS Enthusiasts

The problem with campaign promises is that some people expect you to live up to them. Anyone familiar with U.S. politics knows that campaign promises are what you say to get elected, not what you actually intend to do in office. I guess we hold ourselves to higher standards in Eclipse. So back to my (shameless) "Can we deploy git? Yes We Can!" initiative.

Scott Rosenbaum (EclipseCon 2009 Program Chair) asked for a volunteer to organize a panel on VCS technologies. I've volunteered, and I'm calling all VCS/DVCS enthusiasts interested in this panel. I already have a pretty good list of potential panelists, but if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

And yes, I am running for my 2nd term on the Eclipse Board of Directors. Truthfully, all of the candidates are great, so please vote! (You should have an email in your inbox with instructions.)

Eclipse Board of Directors

After attending an all hands meeting with my Board of Directors Exploratory Committee, I'm pleased to announce my candidacy for the 2009 election.

My first order of business will be a Committer Stimulus Package, the details of which will be fleshed out after I announce my Committer Czar. In the meantime, you can influence my position with the purchase of foamy beverages. Hey, I'm in open source, and I was promised Free Beer. Where is the beer? Oh wait…I just reread that article. It's says "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." Dammit! Anyway, I'd like to announce my campaign slogan (and the subsequent loss of Denis and Karl's votes):

Can we deploy git at the Foundation? Yes We Can!

In all seriousness, I have actually accomplished a few things this year on the Board, and I'd like to continue to represent you. I'd appreciate your vote when the virtual polls open on Feb 23.

E6500 Suspend Problem Solved

I've had a breakthrough on my suspend issues. It seems that the Dell Connection Manager Service was causing the suspend problem. As a reminder, I have the 5530 HSPA AT&T card. When you install Dell Control Point (DCP) and the associated drivers, you get Dell Connection Manager, which is supposed to help manage all of your network devices. Mostly it's redundant with the Network Center in Vista, but you do need it to connect to the Internet over the WWAN card.

As I've complained before, I don't like DCP. It's Dell QuickSet gone horribly wrong. So I've been actively trying to replace it. In my searching for something else to manage the WWAN card, I found an alternative utility called Dell Wireless Manager. It's bundled with the 5530 drivers, but if you poke around on Dell's FTP site, maybe you can find it for the other WWAN cards, too. It's a nice little app for enabling/disabling the card, connecting, looking at bandwidth usage (very important now that AT&T's data plan is 5GB / month), etc. It doesn't work right away when you install it, though, saying that it can't detect a WWAN card.

Quite by accident I got it to work by uninstalling "Dell WWAN ???" (can't remember the exact title) using CCleaner. I was trying to remove this utility since it wasn't working, but instead I uninstalled something from Connection Manager. Suddenly this nice little app found the my WWAN card and connected to AT&T. The Dell Connection Manager service stopped working, and Suspend has been flawless ever since. I guess I killed two birds with one stone.

Here are some tips if you go this route. In BIOS, set the Wireless Switch to not control the WWAN card. The Dell Wireless Manager turns the card on when you start the utility and off when you close it. Also remove "DellConnectionManager" from startup (via msconfig or WinPatrol). It won't start up correctly anymore, and you won't miss it anyway. BTW, the rest of DCP is still working. DCP only gives you an error when you click Connection Manager. Perhaps next I'll try getting QuickSet to work and then blow away DCP for good.