Rants and Raves

One of well known slogans from Fry’s Electronics… but from what I’ve seen over the past 25 years all you’re really likely to find at Fry’s is pathetic customer service (maybe that’s the “it” they’re talking about).

Sure, Fry’s tends to have good prices on their lost leaders (their normal prices are just retail)… and if they put it in their ad you can get it from any one of a number of other retailers at the same price (or better) by exercising a competitor’s price match policies and not have to deal with the horrendously bad experience of walking through the doors of a Bay Area Fry’s (Fry’s in other parts of the country actually have reasonable customer service… though I’m still not sure I would want to reward a company that trusts it’s employees almost as little as it trusts it’s customers and locks up completely random selections of items in order to force you to get a “quote” and have to deal with  even more incompetent employees).

For me I’ve decided I just will not buy at Fry’s… and when more people reach the same conclusion that if you stop supporting businesses that don’t deserve customers businesses with have to care about consumers and won’t do what ever they feel they can get away with.

After all… I’ve had to sue Fry’s a number of times in small claims court (and won); and they’ve lost a number of much larger law suits.  Is that the kind of business you want to encourage?

Tags: Computers, Mac, Software, Technology by roger
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For many a computer hooked up to their TV is going to become more and more common place over the next few years… and certainly Vista Media Center does a great deal to close the gap between consumer electronics and computers; but for those who want more it falls short.

One of the biggest failings of Vista Media Center is that it doesn’t support H.264 natively as a video recording type… and many of the external HD recorders transmit their stream in H.264 (not MPEG-2 like ATSC/DVB systems do).

There are, of course, a host of for pay media programs for your PC you could look at — things like Beyond TV and Sage TV have been around for years… but the new kid on the block is a freeware project called GB-PVR.

GB-PVR is fairly full featured, and it’s likely that it will work with your hardware provided you have drivers, and it’s a reasonable fully featured media program.  You can get a copy and try it out from the link below, as well as read up on it.

http://www.gbpvr.com/

Tags: Computers, Software, Technology, Windows by roger
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I’ve been listing to “Internet radio” some on my computer while I work; but the only utility I had loaded on my computer that handled .pls files was Nero Showtime… and I preferred to have Windows Media Player handle it.

So I created a little Windows program in C# (it would be trivial to do in any language, but that’s my preference at the moment) and associated it with .pls files that does nothing but take file1 out of the play list and url-ize it in a format that Windows Media Player likes and pass it on to Windows Media Player.

Give it a try!

Installer: WinAMP Play List for Windows Media Player Installer

Playlists: http://www.di.fm/

You can save the MP3 play list to your computer and you need not visit the web site again.

Tags: Computers, Software, Technology, ► Downloads by roger
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Ever go to a web site to enter your email address and find that it wouldn’t fit in the field they provided?

It’s amazing in a world of standards that companies (and individuals) continually ignore them and decide for themselves what’s acceptable.

HELLO!

User names (or local part of the address) can be 64 characters long, and domain names can be 255 characters long.

Here is an example of a reasonable well written validation for email addresses — if you want to see poorly done ones in action it doesn’t take too much effort to find ones that limit the entire email address to less than 30 characters!

<?php function isValidAddress( $email, $check = false )
{
##############################
# PHP Email Address Validator
# (C) Derrick Pallas
#
# Authors: Derrick Pallas
# Website: http://derrick.pallas.us/email-validator/
# License: Academic Free License 2.1
# Version: 2006-12-01a
if (!ereg(”
. ‘^’
. ‘[-!#$%&\'*+/0-9=?A-Z^_a-z{|}~]‘
. ‘(\\.?[-!#$%&\'*+/0-9=?A-Z^_a-z{|}~])*’
. ‘@’
. ‘[a-zA-Z](-?[a-zA-Z0-9])*’
. ‘(\\.[a-zA-Z](-?[a-zA-Z0-9])*)+’
. ‘$’
, $email
) ) return false;
list( $local, $domain ) = split( “@”, $email, 2 );
if ( strlen($local) > 64 || strlen($domain) > 255 ) return false;
if ( $check && !gethostbynamel( $domain ) ) return false;
return true;
# END
######
}

RFC822 superseded by RFC2822.

User names (for email) may contain:

• A to Z letters, upper and lower case.
• 0 through 9 digits
• . (fullstop, period) but not as the first or last character
• ! # $ % & ‘ * + – / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~ – all are permitted.

The maximum length of the user is 64 characters; the domain is 255 characters; so with the @ a valid address could be up to 320 characters.

Further, did you know that user names are case sensitive (but domain names are not).  Of course many email systems treat user names as case insensitive.

For information on domain name limitation you should see IANA.

Now you know more than most developers who write code that accepts or uses email addresses!

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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The last two iterations of computers I build were intended to be quiet and cool…

Like so many things about computers, keeping them quiet and cool requires maintenance.

Remember that saying “Cleanliness is next to godliness”?  Well — cleanliness definitely determines how quiet and cool your computer will be!

Dust and particulates are everywhere; and while a whole house air filter will help reduce the amount in the air, pets and open windows are going to increase it.  And unfortunately, dust restricts airflow and is a fair thermal insulator.

I recommend that twice a year you open up your computer and “dust” the inside — that can be done very carefully with a flux brush (or art type brush with natural fiber bristles) and a vacuum cleaner.  The insides of your computer are delicate, but certainly it’s fine to clean them.  Any fine fins or grates you can use the brush to break the dust free, and the vacuum to get it away from the inside of the computer.

After you clean your computer you will probably notice that the fans make a lot less noise, which means your computer is running quieter and cooler.

Tags: Computers, Hardware, Technology by roger
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If you’re a Windows user, IE 7 does a great job of displaying XML files, but unless you have Visual Studio or Expression Web you don’t really have a decent XML editor (and those really aren’t designed to do XML edits).

Microsoft, though has XML Notepad 2007, a free download that runs on 32 and 64 bit Windows — and it’s a great editor for XML and supports XLST — here’s an excerpt from the download page:

Overview

Handy features include:

• Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
• Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
• Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
• Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
• Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
• In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
• Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
• Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
• Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
• Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
• Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
• Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
• Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
• Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
• Built-in XML Diff tool.
• Support for XInclude
• Dynamic help from XSD annotations.
• Goto definition to navigate includes and XSD schema information.

 

You can download version 2.5 from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72D6AA49-787D-4118-BA5F-4F30FE913628&displaylang=en

Tags: Computers, Software, Technology by roger
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If you have your own domain and you really don’t need web hosting you might want to consider hosted email servers from Microsoft or Google.

Both of them provide free hosted email services; limited to 500 accounts (which can actually be increased — but for free hosted email that’s probably fine).

I generally recommend that you consider just getting a hosting package that gives you a free domains, web space, and email — often on the order of $1.99 per month.

Microsoft Live Hosted Email (Free):  http://domains.live.com/

Goolge GMail Hosted Email (Free):  http://www.google.com/a/

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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Virtual credit card numbers are numbers that you generate (through your credit card issuer) to use for purchases on line.

Most of the companies that support these allow you to set time and amount limits for charges against the cards, and allow you to terminate the card at will (you cannot prevent a charge that has already been authorized, but you can prevent any future charge).

These financial institutions support virtual cards:

• Bank of America (acquired from MBNA)
• Citi Bank
• Discover

These financial institutions do not support virtual cards:

• Chase
• Most credit union issued cards

Citi Bank and Bank of America have very similar systems; the each allow you to set limits and the card immediately binds to the merchant who first authorizes a charge against the number (no other merchant can use the number, which can create issues on PayPal, Yahoo Shops, Google Checkout, and Price Grabber to name a few — the solution is create a new card each time you want to buy something on those sites and destroy the old one).

Citi Bank and Discover have an applet you can download to your PC which will create numbers and auto-fill web forms.

Virtual credit cards give you a great deal of control over your finances, you set the limits of who much a vendor can charge and for how long they can access your credit card account.  While your liability is always limited (zero liability with VISA, Mastercard, and Discover) virtual cards help you avoid hassles.

When you say NO MORE, you end it… you can’t be caught by surprise by horrendous shipping and handling charges, you can’t be over-billed… and you don’t have to worry about recurring charges.

I use virtual card numbers to pay my utilities (electric, water, gas, cable, telephone, cellular); tolls (FastTrak); purchases on line; basically any time I give someone a credit card number via phone, mail, or internet… and I encourage you to do the same.

For one time purchases, terminate the card immediately after the charge is authorized, and THAT IS THAT… for recurring charges, re-authorize the new amount a little before the charge, or go ahead and setup for a year at a time (you can always terminate the card before an authorization).

Tags: Credit Cards, Finance by roger
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I’m not a huge fan of eBay (and certainly not a fan of PayPal); I consider them just another big company that does what they want with as much disregard for the law and consumers as possible.

That said, if you’re a savvy consumer you can get some good deals on eBay (and other auction sites).

As a buyer, one of the best ways to maximize your benefit (and minimize the price you pay) is to use a sniping tool (that’s a tool that places your bid at the very last moment).

Two reasonable tools are:

JBidwatcher, a totally free Java application that runs on your PC (there’s a new version in beta, stick with the older version until there’s a release); and

AuctionStealer.com, a for pay (but gives you some free credits) server based solution.

You can even use the two together.

JBidwatcher is really easy to use; just search items out on eBay, put them on your watch list, and then sync them to JBidwatcher — then use JBidwatcher to snipe your bids in.  It really does a great job managing all the items you’re watching, buying, won, etc.  It’s very big on function, a little light on form.  You will have leave you computer on, but if you have a machine that stays on all the time, it’s the perfect place to build a Virtual Machine that runs JBidwatcher.

AuctionStealer you have to log into their web sit and then enter the item number against your free or paid for credits.

There are a few other sniping tools you can use… I didn’t care for any of them (and most of them were really crap).

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/

http://www.auctionstealer.com/

Tags: Computers, Deals, Internet, Shopping, Software, Technology by roger
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