Fixing slow ringtones on Android phones

I've been playing around recently witht he new Android phones, and have been generally very impressed with them. They still have a few rough edges though, and my HTC Magic has been exhibiting some strange behaviour...

The first thing I do on any new phone, is copy over my ringtone. Honestly, if it doesn't use that ringtone I'll tune it out and never answer it. So I copied over my MP3 file and set it up as the default ringtone.

Imagine my surprise when I called myself, and the phone vibrated, the screen flashed, but the ringtone didn't fire up for a good 10 seconds, then after another 5 seconds it went to voicemail.

Initially I thought this was the fault of the MP3 being too big and was taking up too much memory, so I chopped it down to 236kb, and tried it again... with the same results.

I then fired up a file manager on the Android phone and saw that all the built in ringtones were in OGG format.

On a hunch, I fired up Mediacoder and converted my MP3 to OGG Vorbis using the settings below:

Set the Encoder to Vorbis

Set the Container to OGG

Once I had generated the OGG file, I copied it onto m sdcard, and set it as the default ringtone, and now my phone flashes, vibrates and rings all at the same time :)

I hope this helps you out if you are having the same problem. If so, please show your thanks by clicking on one of the adverts on this page... you don't have to buy anything ;-)

Windows 2008 Remote Desktop Gateway Woes (but finally fixed)

Windows 2008 Remote Desktop gateway is a great idea.

Instead of opening up multiple machines on your firewall to allow users to remote dektop in, RD gateway allows you to open up a single IP which then tunnels through to RDP servers inside of your network.

RDG uses a combnation of RDRAP and RDCAP to verify who is allowed to use the gateway, and what servers they can connect to.

I had a situation were we needed to grant business Partners access to one of our servers bu I didn't want them to be able to access any other network resources.

So I created a new user and put him in his own group. I also clicked the "Logon to" button and gave him access to the targer server: TARGET

Then I granted that group access to TARGET with RDRAP.

I also added the user into the "Administrators" group on the TARGET machine.

But...

Something didn't work...

I could connect using RDP in the office with that username to the TARGET machine but not through the RD gateway. I kept getting logon error messages and asked to re enter the password.

After much headscratching it was found that it was the "Logon to" setting that was causing the problem.

RD Gateway will not work with a user with "Logon to" set. You can either delete the setting OR add in the client machine name.. yes.. really... the name of the PC you wil be running the Remote Desktop Client from!It sounds crazy, but it definitely works, so hopefully you don't have to go throught the same hoops I did to work it out.

Thanks go to the guys on the Windows Server Forums for helping me work this out.

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