RobPlatt.com

The guys over at Droid-Life have been a riot today. I had to post these…

“Steve… Can you hear me now?”

“No… You’re still holding it wrong.”

–EC8CH

There once was a man named Steve
“Magical” status his phone did achieve
Then a Droid set us free
Apps approved no Third Degree
On a network that’s NOT AT&T’s

–EC8CH

If your iPhone is letting you down
Dropped calls are making you frown
Then give Android a try
Get a deal at Wirefly
Their prices will truely astound

–EC8CH

There was an old man named Jobs
His shiny phones were perfect for snobs
Then a Droid came along
Mulitasking all day long
With a glowing eye that pulses and throbs

–EC8CH

There once was a phone from Cupertino
It’s screen a grid of blocks like in Keno
But then Android arrived
Running Widgets in stride
Now the Iphone looks dated as Devo

–EC8CH

In a black turtleneck & blue jeans
He says “check out the res of my screens”
But we are Droids & of course
We prefer opensource
And avoid his walled garden by all means

–EC8CH

I actually tried out an iphone 4 the other day while perusing things I won’t buy at the mall (well, I did end up getting a burger and fries). It was the first iphone I’ve ever used.

My impressions? Nice screen, but not any tangibly nicer than my Droid’s. The hardware itself looks nice enough; sleek, compact, and all that. But the real meat and taters was the UI. I have to say, it was, well . . . crap. Sure, it scrolls and such nicely, but it’s just a bunch of screens with apps! I asked my buddy who was with me (a devout Apple acolyte) how I could access the apps, and he was like, “you just scroll through the screens and they’re all there.”

For serious? This is the vaunted UI that all the Apple fanbois go ga-ga over? It’s a freakin’ app drawer! Here’s how to make your Android device an iphone: open the app drawer whenever you start up. Don’t use widgets, live wallpaper, shortcuts, etc. Do everything from your app drawer. Done. You’ll be all like, “OMG it’s so teh fastar! Scrolling is sooo smooth! Bestest UI EVAR!!!!1”

Sorry for the rant; I’m just a bit less than whelmed after hearing so much about how iphone’s UI is sooo much better than Android’s. Believe it or not, I entered into the demo with an open mind and the expectation to be truly impressed. All that was really impressed upon me, though, is that the blinders on Apple fanbois are more like eyepatches with pinholes. –Droidzilla

Thanks guys… That made my day =)

Source: Droid-Life

I accidentally added files to a git project that I didn’t want to.

git rm –cached filename

or

git rm –cached directory -r

cleared me right up.

(please note, that is two dashes in front of cached)

We used to use Adobe FlashPaper to embed pdfs into our site. This made viewing a pdf  easy, most people have flash installed, right?

No… and chances are, if they don’t have adobe reader, they probably don’t have flash.

A better/free solution would be Google Docs Viewer.

Use Google Docs to quickly view documents online without leaving your browser.

Embedding Docs Viewer into your page, gives you the same usability as FlashPaper, but without Flash needing to be installed. Now we can give our users the ability to view our pdfs, directly in our browser, without any third-party dependencies. (You may also provide a non-embedded url, to open in full screen)

We did run into one problem. We received this error on one of our pdfs:

Sorry we are unable to generate a view of the document at this time

Replacing the spaces in the filename with %2520 solved the issue. %20 and + did not.

Using SQL Server to store ASP.Net session state has it’s advantages. It was time for us to switch from InProc to SQL, but we ran into some problems getting the configuration right.

The SELECT permission was denied on the object ‘sysobjects’, database ‘mssqlsystemresource’, schema ‘sys’.]

Unable to use SQL Server because ASP.NET version 2.0 Session State is not installed on the SQL server. Please install ASP.NET Session State SQL Server version 2.0 or above.

These two pages got me going in the end.

http://idunno.org/articles/277.aspx

http://cherupally.blogspot.com/2009/08/problems-in-configuring-sql-server-for.html

Now watch your session states survive an iisreset, or even server reboot! You can also load balance your requests over multiple web servers now too.

UPX does a fantastic job at compressing executables. However, it does not support .NET.

MPRESS does.

MPRESS makes programs and libraries smaller, and decrease start time when the application loaded from a slow removable media or from the network. It uses in-place decompression technique, which allows to decompress the executable without memory overhead or other drawbacks; it also protects programs against reverse engineering by non-professional hackers. Programs compressed with MPRESS run exactly as before, with no runtime performance penalties.
MPRESS is absolutely free of charge software.

I’ve been using this for awhile now, and have to say its great. Many of my .NET apps are cut down by 50% or more.

Check it out!

For some reason, I lost the ability to auto-complete in the command prompt, using the TAB key.

Setting the following registry key to 0x9 solved the problem. How it got changed in the first place is beyond me.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
“CompletionChar”=0x9

I had a client that accidentally installed Incredimail. After awhile of using it, he decided he didn’t like it. Who can blame him right?

I looked around online for various ways to export his mail out of Incredimail, so he could use it in Outlook, Outlook Express, or now, Windows Live Mail. No such luck. He didn’t think it was right to have the shell out money for products that may or may not work, the free options didn’t work on the newer version of Incredimail, and of course – Incredimail won’t give you that option. So he stuck with it in hopes that some way would surface… He didn’t want to lose the email that had built up in the client.

This has been an on going problem for almost a year. Every few months we’ve checked to see if someone came up with a solution. Finally, someone did.

Thank you ReynardWare for making incredimail-converter!

Running the converter couldn’t be easier. It took about 20 minutes to export all of his email and attachments from Incredimail, into the Microsoft .eml format. Which we simply drug into Windows Live Mail.

Visit his blog and show him support!

Had this happen at a clients today…

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed.

I tried “net use * /d”… I checked DNS settings… that didn’t help.

In my case, my client had the same administrator:password login, both on the local machine, and as the domain account. So, even while the computer was disjoined from the domain, the local admin account had rights to the server. This defeated using the server credentials when trying to add the computer to the domain. Changing the local administrator password to something else solved the problem.

Having trouble logging into a new account, from XP, over wireless? Did you make sure the wireless zero config was controlling the wireless connection? Can you ping the computer from a remote desktop while it’s at the login screen?

Try this…

Log on with an already trusted account. Lock the computer. Try to unlock the computer with the new account. It should cache the login credentials and let you log in. Read on for more help with this problem.

I used to encode my videos with Flix Pro, using the VP6 codec. While this worked, it wasn’t easy to batch process

I hunted all over the web for a perfect solution for what I wanted to do. What many people wanted to do. Now I can easily convert my videos to h.264 in a flv or mp4 container using only ffmpeg. If I use flv, I can inject the metadata to produce seekable media files, and stream with xmoov/jwplayer. All from the command line. My batch file is easily enough to understand. It creates a high quality flv file, injects metadata, and produces a single frame thumbnail. Adjust the dimensions, framerate, audio/video bitrates for your needs.

… and I’m going to share it with you. Here you go.