Howard Development Tech Tips

Saturday, October 31, 2009

New iTunes agreement?

Now I can't buy my song until I read the 60 screens of legal junk. Why not just agree to take my money and I agree to listen to the music. I'm not buying a house here.

Sent from my iPhone

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Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Yahoo Mail Outage October 27th 2009

This was from Monday.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354774,00.asp

But now, Tuesday night, I can log into my free account, but I also have yahoo hosting and business email, so when I switch to that account it asks me to log-in, but then I'm stuck.

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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Yelp Advertising Information

http://www.raymondfong.net/misc/a-candid-yelp-advertising-review-is-yelp-ripping-people-off/

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Friday, October 2, 2009

Very Nice Web 3.0 Web Site - Complete Border Package.

http://www.dlink.com

The new d-link.com is a great site to navigate and a great example of Web 3.0 or maybe 4.0. It's nice how it avoids scrolling and keeps everything consise.. and QUICK drill downs and tabs when appropriate.

It fits great on a wide screen and almost behaves like a Software program. Top Nav, Bottom Nav, Tabs, Settings, Cookie Settings and Preferences.

Ony drawback might be SEO .. but with the number of hits the TLD gets I'm sure it won't kill them. Also thier link structure is super simple so this is a huge bonus over other Content Managment Systems and database driven websites. They probably feed a site index of all key words matching the PID of the page. http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=430

Looks. like it uses everything available. Flash keeps alot of things in the right borders.

Only a few things, like search results, are framed.

Only found a few times where the naviagation took me out of the main site. (ie. places that should have opened in a new window .. or at least a frame.

Overall this site is very impressive

Also, good use of Social networking and website evangalism. It has the Shareit (Addthis.com) button in a great place and it's Facebook, Twitter and Youtube connection in a great spot. Almost too good, because it temps you to forget about shopping and look at the external content.

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

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Friday, September 25, 2009

AT&T picture and video messaging MMS

Just got a text about this feature. I read about it before but I think it was backlogged becuase of some 3GS problems. Some people couldn't enter a text phone number or access thier address book. They could only respond to a text. I will test it later.

Sent from my iPhone

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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Online Credit Card Processing - Intuit Payment Solutions

Monthly Fee .. but no minimum transactions.

Posts transactions into QuickBooks. Don't wast paper or supplies. Don't need an external terminal.

Online Credit Card Processing | Intuit Payment Solutions

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency - Parking Ticket Data over a 1 month period.

As one who is always concerned about how many digits to make a Unique ID number, it seems that the SFMTA Parking Ticket numbers are getting used up at a super fast rate.

I got 4 tickets over a 1 mont period.. so I wanted to use the data for something.

At this rate they use up over 700,000 numbers in a month.

Citation Payment Data (San Francisco)

Outstanding citations for License plate:CA XXTFX999 as of 09/17/2009 07:19:18 PM
Pay Citation Number Amount

Sept. 15th, 2009:   771,159,999              $53.00
:                            771,028,888              $53.00
:                            770,697,777              $53.00
Aug. 24th, 2009:     770,436,666              $53.00

Note: I altered the last 4 digits. Also .. I'm assuming they use a check digit and skip numbers in the sequence to avoid input errors.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Casa Buena Rooms

Hotel Luxury in a private home.

Must consider staying here if your planning on visiting San Francisco.

http://rooms.casabuenavistarental.com/manse.html

Hotel style rooms in Presidio Heights San Fancisco.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Seagate Replica 500GB Backup Drive - First Backup Super Slow - but Otherwise Drive Does the Job

I bought the Seagate Replica backup to get distaster recovery for my Sony (Vista Home Premium) Laptop.

It took about 2 days to backup 133GB of Data but it only used 80GB of space on the drive. At least this drive won't fill up for a long time, and I can put other computers on the drive without worry of over filling the drive.

I tried to change the cache file to local, but it didn't speed up the backup. Also tried to turn off Antivirus, but still nothing noticable.

I am assuming the slow speed of the backup is due to the compression of the files backed up. It probably has an extra hard time trying to compress very large files that are already compressed. (like outlook ..pst files and MPEG files.).

Now that the initial backup is done it can sync changed file more quickly, but it seems to have an something that is waiting for an idle processor or available resources, since it still will do backups in bursts. It would be nice to have a feature to not compress files, or to use all resources to do a quicker backup.

I often need to do a quick backup (or in best case a clone of the drive) before working on it, or making major changes to the software.

On the other hand this drive is great because a user can't accidentally change or stop the backup. It always picks up where it left off. It also seems easy to recovery, no software needed, it looks like you exploring your original drive and it keeps deleted files for recovery and accidental deletions. Nice that you don't need an external power supply too.

Got mine on sale at Best Buy.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=PersonalStorage&thread.id=1236

http://shopper.cnet.com/laptop-hard-drives/seagate-replica-multi-pc/4014-9997_9-33645343.html?info=user#info-3

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Saturday, September 5, 2009

0 Traffic on the SF Bay Bridge on Labor Day Weekend 2009

The live traffic map shows no activity on the Bay Bridge on Sat. 9/5/09.

Sent from my iPhone

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Thursday, September 3, 2009

Hp Photosmart c4700 series .. Install froze

Rebooted and then watched this "installer is gathering failure info for over 30 minutes. It's a 1 year old vista computer. 2gb memory. P dual core. I deactivated Avast.

Sent from my iPhone

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Saturday, August 29, 2009

iPhone App - warning

When installed the new Ebay App I got this warning. "this product contains material that may be objectionalble to children under 17."

Sent from my iPhone

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Saturday, August 22, 2009

La Cocina Food Fest August 22 2009

On Folsom - between 26th & 25th

Sent from my iPhone

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Can export a group of MobileMe contacts on a mac but not windows xp.

This is a mac screenshot Selected big group of contacts and then exported vcards. On windows xpI tried it in win safari and froze the browser.

Sent from my iPhone

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Backup MobileMe Contacts without syncing

Login to Mobile Me Website Worked on mac --- Shift Click a group of contacts (you can try all at once) Then on the gear icon choose export Vcard (but it will do cards if selected) Then on mac it puts them into Address Book