GetUserAvailability Throws InvalidTimeIntervalException

I followed the examples by MS regarding Exchange Web Services and initially the program worked fine. Then, the next morning it trew a InvalidTimeIntervalException!

I hadn’t changed a thing!

After some trial and error I found the culprit: the time portion of the TimeWindow passed to GetUserAvalability is completely ignored! So for the service the TimeWindow had a length of zero, as the start and end dates were the same. The reason why it had worked the day before was that the 8 hours I had added to the start time resulted in the next day during the afternoon :-)

So always make sure to work with full days here, and also expect full day results to be retuned – you always work in 24-hour-chunks starting at 0:00 hrs.

There is no documentation on this yet, but at least I found a statement from MS that supports my findings here.

Android APN Einstellungen für Maxxim friends4free

This post is in German as it will apply to German users only.

Die folgenden Einstellungen funktionieren bei mir bestens, sowohl für Internet wir auch MMS:

Name: frei wählbar

APN: internet.telco

Proxy: leer

Port: leer

Nutzername: leer

Passwort: leer

Server: leer

MMSC: http://10.81.0.7:8002

MMS-Proxy: 82.113.100.38

MMS-Port: 8080

MCC: 262

MNC: 07

APN-Typ: leer

Um die MMS-Nutzung zu aktivieren (vor dem Empfang der ersten MMS), muß man evtl. selbst erst eine verschicken!

Ich hoffe, das bewahrt jemanden davor, so lange suchen zu müssen wie ich :-)

Thunderbird and Hotmail (Live Mail)

My Hotmail email account was recently hacked, so I changed the password. Of course, you want a strong, long password, so I had KeePass generate one for me.

Well, it turned out that this was the source of the problem I got after changing my password: Thunderbird was not able to authenticate with Hotmail any longer.

I tried to use less and then no special characters at all, to no avail. Finally, I changed the length of my password to 10, it had been 20 before. And this did the trick! I went back to using special characters, and these also worked fine, as long as the password was “short”.

This seems to be a bug in Thunderbird – further research has led me to this forum entry: https://windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?threadid=1cc813b6-6b5c-4aba-a560-e4a89c4deea1

[Addition on 21-DEC-10]:

I think the analysis under the above link is wrong, this is not a bug in Thunderbird: I had the same problem with K-9 Mail on my Android phone. So my guess is that the root cause is on the MS side (now, how would have expected that? Really?), but who cares as long as you know how to avoid it.

Die Bahn und der Konjunktiv

Falsch: “Der Regionalexpress XXX nach YYY, Abfahrt um 7:30, erhält 20 Minuten Verspätung”

Richtig: “Der Regionalexpress XXX nach YYY, dessen Abfahrt um 7:30 gewesen wäre, erhält 20 Minuten Verspätung”

Überkorrekt: “Der Regionalexpress XXX nach YYY, dessen Abfahrt laut Fahrplan (aber selten im wirklichen Leben) um 7:30 gewesen wäre, erhält 20 Minuten Verspätung”

Converting Videos for the HTC Wildfire

I had thought it would be easier, but it actually took me half a day to figure out how to convert videos so they would play on my Wildfire! I compared codecs, resolution, frame rate of videos that would and would not play on it and sometimes there was no apparent difference – other than that one would play and the other would not!

I tried using FormatFactory but to no avail, even after having tested all kinds of settings.

I then tested “Videora Android Converter”, which did its job, but it is loaded with ads, so I wanted to avoid it.

Finally I tried Handbrake – successfully. You can just use the iPod preset and make sure you uncheck “iPod 5G support”.

So for those out there still researching: you don’t need to purchase any software, just get Handbrake (free) and use the above configuration.