Archive for December, 2008

Down with Happy Holidays, up with Happy New Year!

December 27th, 2008

In the business world it is always tough around the holiday season when wishing someone a happy season.  Which holiday should you choose?  Should you go with the boring happy holidays?  What about people who aren’t celebrating anything, or just hate the entire season like Ebenezer Scrooge?

There is one day that is indifferent to cultural or religious beliefs that everyone celebrates and that day is the New Years.

Unless you know the person to be using a calendar other than the Gregorian calendar, stop sending them “Happy Holidays” cards and start sending them Happy New Year cards.

Not only will you not run the risk of offending someone but you will also stand out from the crowd of Happy Holiday cards that everyone gets these days.

Down with the “Holidays” and up with the New Year!

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Posted in General, Politics

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Facelift update: New version due out after new year

December 18th, 2008

It has been a while since the last post about Facelift and I wanted to let everyone know that Facelift is still very much an active project.

The next version will be v1.3 and contain a handful of updates and fixes.  I’m don’t have an exact date when it will be released but it should be sometime after the new year.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the project and as always, you can visit the forums for help, comments, or suggestions!

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Posted in facelift

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The problem with working with api’s from video sites…

December 18th, 2008

I’m working on some random thingy in PHP to find videos from a handful of video sites and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is nearly an impossible feat.

When you’re doing test searches you will inevitably stumble across a video like this video of cars trying to make it up an icy hill…

…and, of course you have to watch it.  And what’s this?  A related video?  Click.  An hour later and you finally get back to programming….

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Posted in Web Development

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3 minute web design/seo tutorial – pay attention

December 18th, 2008

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Posted in Entertainment, SEO, Uncategorized, Web Development

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Verizon XV6800 to get official GPS firmware upgrade?

December 15th, 2008

From time to time I search to see if Verizon has gotten the sand out of their vag when it comes to locking down the GPS features in their phones.  They haven’t–or so I thought.

I did reread the threads on hacking GPS into your XV6800 and again decided against it because I’m too lazy.

Instead of giving up, I started up a chat session with Verizon’s online support to see if they had any answers.  Well the planets must be aligned because it turns out they did.

This is probably old news to some, but I stopped checking after the first page of results for “xv6800 gps”.

According to Verizon’s online support, they will be unlocking GPS via a firmware update due out in January of 2009–so… next month! Woo.

Here is part of the transcript:

cory: I own the XV6800 and know that it contains some GPS functionality. Sprint has released a firmware update to enable this functionality. Does vzw have plans to open up GPS in the future? If so, when?
Latavious: Thanks for holding Cory. In January 2009 all window mobile phones will be entitled to the firmware. Including our choices of the window mobile phones.
cory: Does that mean the firmware will exist for all phones but vzw will choose which ones it wants to make available?
Latavious: Correct. The window mobile phones.

If this is true, I will be a much happier Verizon customer… which still isn’t very happy.  Unlock my damn phone entirely you d-bags!

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Posted in Gadgets, Windows Mobile

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Who throws a shoe?

December 15th, 2008

Iraqi journalists.  That’s who.

Yesterday, an Iraqi journalist who I didn’t bother to research threw both of his shoes at El Presidente Bush.  Hilarious.

In the olden days they used to throw pie and eggs, but this Iraqi spin on American political activism and theater is a welcomed change.

I was inspired to write about it when I discovered a short clip being looped on bugmenot.com‘s home page.  Awesome.

For those that want to read more the Huffington Post has video and a slideshow of the shoe flinging.

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Posted in Politics

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9 things credit card companies have in common with Nigerian 419 criminals

December 12th, 2008

What do credit card companies and criminals have in common?  Much more than you’d think…

  1. Corporate fronts. Both setup their business in the United States in a state that is a corporate tax haven.
  2. No physical location. Neither have a physical address that you could actually visit.  Usually, their address is a PO Box or a virtual mailbox.
  3. Impossible to contact. The contact numbers are all shells and aren’t tied to a physical location.  Usually, they are forwarded out of the country if they work at all.
  4. Loopholes. Both banks and criminals comb through US law looking for the littlest loophole that they can take advantage of.
  5. Ignore the law. The difference here is that criminals don’t care if they break the law and banks hire attorneys.
  6. Profit off the misery of others. (Maybe a comparison list of banks and war lords would be more appropriate?)
  7. Will do whatever it takes to get your money.
  8. Ponzi schemes. Stock market anyone?
  9. Arrogance.

Can you think of anything else that credit card companies (or banks in general) have in common with scammers, crooks, criminals or scallywags? Leave it in a comment below!

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Posted in General

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Keyboards and drum machines at the keyboard museum

December 11th, 2008

I recently discovered the Keyboard Museum which is a collection of flash versions of drum machines and keyboards.  It looks like the site hasn’t been updated in forever but it is still pretty cool and fun to play with all the drum machines and keyboards.

I think my favorite is the “Virtual BeeGee’s Rhythm Machine” by Mattel

We’ve come along way since Kraftwerk.

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Posted in Entertainment

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Google’s plans for world domination became clear to me today

December 10th, 2008

After reading Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google’s Native Client plugin from ArsTechnica I finally understand where Google is headed and how they plan on taking over the world.

From the article…

The Native Client framework consists of trusted and untrusted modules that run in their own individual processes and communicate through an RPC system. Third-party untrusted modules contain application-specific programming and leverage the Native Client container to interact with trusted modules that perform any activities which impact the underlying platform, including networking operations and file system access. The container will impose security constraints on the behavior of the third-party code and will also give users granular control over the permissions granted to third-party code.

[...]

Google supplies a customized GCC build toolchain that can be used to compile portable binaries that are compatible with the Native Client infrastructure. This makes it extremely easy to port existing code. As a test, Google ported an H.264 encoder that is about 11,000 lines of conventional C code. To get the encoder to compile and run in Native Client, they only had to add approximately 20 lines of code and modify the Makefile. The resulting binaries are completely portable and can run without requiring recompilation on any operating system supported by the Native Client.

» Read more: Google’s plans for world domination became clear to me today

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Posted in Internet, Operating Systems, Web Development

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Bob Ross is my hero

December 10th, 2008

I just watched the late Bob Ross paint a happy little bush on PBS.  The guy was a genius.  I watched him when I was younger and it never ceases to amaze me how you can watch his paintings come alive before your eyes.

Right now, you can buy the complete Bob Ross show collection on eBay–90 DVDs, 360 episodes, 180 hours!

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Posted in General

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Kop Busters fighting back against the corrupt police

December 8th, 2008

I just learned about a reality (internet) TV show called Kop Busters.  In this episode, a house is setup to grow christmas trees and the police come kicking down the door 24 hours later only to learn that they’ve been busted.

Visit the Kop Buster post at NeverGetBusted.com and watch the two videos.  My favorite part is when all the cops take pictures of the poster on the wall telling them they’re morons… in much kinder words.  In the words of the late J Dilla, a local Detroit rapper, “fuck the [crooked] police.”

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Posted in General

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The ubiquitous square blog ad and Project Wonderful

December 6th, 2008

I was doing some research for a future blog project and was trying to find out if there is a single source for all those 125×125 pixel blog ads that I see all over the place. There isn’t.

My searches did lead me to a company called Project Wonderful, though, that allows people to bid on blog advertising space on a per day basis.

With prices as low as $0.20/day for a site that is reported to have 20,000 unique visiotrs/day it sounds like a bargain for advertisers.  However, on the flip side, as a publisher I’d be reluctant to give away my traffic at that price. With that kind of traffic you are almost certain to get better returns from ::gulp:: AdSense.

I searched around for reviews and posts about PW and found a bunch raving about the service and how great it is.  But… the one thing I noticed is that of all these sites that had positive things to say, 0 used PW for their blog ads that appeared along side the post.  In addition to that, PW volunteers up tons of information about your blog–a competitors dream.

Unless someone out there can convince me otherwise, I’d say PW is great for people trying to advertise, but not so much for individuals trying to monetize.  Wow… that was catachy…

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Posted in Web Development

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Summing up the auto companies

December 6th, 2008

The article, Detroit Rarely Misses a Chance to Miss a Chance, from Wired sums up the auto companies.

From the article…

5. The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles – Back in 1993, the federal government invested over a billion dollars in this program, which was a partnership with the Big Three to develop cars that could deliver up to 80 mpg. They did it, too. Each of the Big Three developed concept cars that topped 70 mpg. None of them were cheap, and none of them would have been easy to manufacture. But they showed what was possible. Who knows where they might have led us had the Bush Administration not killed the program in 2001 — at the request of the Big Three.

» Read more: Summing up the auto companies

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Posted in General

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Anyone else notice misbehaving ads?

December 2nd, 2008

For months now I’ve occasionaly come across some advertisements that misbehave.  Typically, it unfolds like this…  I visit a page on a news site only to have the news site content removed from view and replaced with a blank page containing only the advertisement.  It seems like an innocent bug–but an annoying one.

I’ve noticed the problem on multiple sites and have had to resort to disabling Javascript in a lot of the cases to be able to get around it. It might be a problem with FF, who knows.

Anyway, it just happened to again and I snagged a screen recording of it in action. You’ll also notice that the page never finishes loading. No matter how long I leave it, it will continue “loading” from .mdn.net. MDN.net is owned by Hearst media but I see no mention of an advertising platform on that page.

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Posted in General

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Online sales up, Brick and mortar sales down

December 1st, 2008

I was reading this post from ArsTechnica about how real, live stores aren’t doing so hot this season while online sales are continuing to grow.

There are two things that this article makes me think about: What are we going to do with all the empty space? And, why close a perfectly good company?
» Read more: Online sales up, Brick and mortar sales down

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Posted in General

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