Upgrading to a Samsung Galaxy Note II "Phablet"

After owning my Motorola Photo 4G for about a year, it started to inexplicably slow down.  Even the dialer would take 15 seconds to launch after tapping the icon.  A moderate amount of diagnosis turned up no causes.  Additionally, as a photographer, I've always despised the Photon's poor-quality camera.  The the opportunity presented itself to upgrade, I spent some time researching options and eventually decided on the Samsung Galaxy Note II.  At 5.5", it's the biggest phone out there, but is still enough smaller than a tablet that it remains pocketable.

Resetting a Samsung Transform Ultra

My son's Samsung Transform Ultra (M930) cell phone was acting up.  It started force-closing nearly every game he tried to run.  It had gotten to the point where it was basically unusable.  The "battery usage" screen under the system settings showed that "Android OS" (Gingerbread 2.3.6) was using 94% of the battery, which is a Bad Thing.  Several online sources said it was time to do a factory reset.  Not wanting this to be any more disruptive than necessary, I jumped through a lot of hoops to get things working again.

SNMP, DNS, DHCP and Ubuntu 12.10

I love rabbit trails... or maybe not.  I just spent a couple days trying to track down a problem that first showed up as a sporadic SNMP failure after I upgraded my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) computer to 64-bit 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal).  The root cause turned out to be the way the DNS resolver handled being given multiple DNS servers by DHCP.  Additionally, the problem only showed up because I was trying to resolve the name of my firewall, which uses the same name but different IP addresses for the internal and external networks.  Read on for more details.