August 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from TechToolBlog written in the month of August 2007.
Phone Number Checker - Put in a phone number and it tells you if it is part of the Verizon IN network. A great tool to see if your friends are free calls or not. Psss, here is the Cingular/AT&T version.
Verizon Minutes Used Firefox Extension - This tool is really sweet, a firefox plugin that looks at your Verizon account and displays how many minutes you have used, text usage, how many minutes left, next billing cycle and more at the bottom of your FireFox browser.
5135555555@vtext.com - This is your verizon email address (replace with your area code phone number of course).
Who Called Us - Not a verizon tool but a still good to know. Plug in the phone number and see who really called you from that 1800 number.
Written by Tim on August 31st, 2007 with 4 comments.
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So now I’m running with a Blackberry 8830, carried by Verizon. Verizon stripped out the GPS in this phone & a bunch of people are more then upset (see class action lawsuit). Hopefully they will get the picture soon & release a firmware update to un-disable their feature.
Applications I’m running
- Gmail - A must have if you are running a gmail email account.
- Google Maps - I find it better then Blackberry’s Maps, plus the ability to search for local business and get directions is too easy. Google Maps mobile is a must have.
- Opera 4 mini beta - It gives you that iPhone feeling browsing the web. It’s the not the greatest but the best small phone browser I’ve found
- Berry Bloglines - A Bloglines rss reader that works very nicely. It only pulls down unread entries and allows you to read post there and not have to
- JiveTalk - Verizon won’t let you run the Blackberry native AIM client (http://www.blackberry/aim), Jive Talk gives you multiple IM clients (AIM, Yahoo, Live). I’m running the 30 day eval, if I end up buying it, it’ll cost me $19.95. Pretty sweet.
Written by Tim on August 31st, 2007 with no comments.
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It looks like the Interspire folks are going to be releasing a new PHP/MySQL e-commerce solution named StoreSuite in the 4th quarter 2007. I’m really excited about a new player in this space. Like all of the tools you’ll get the source code when you purchase. I already use their SendStudio product for mass mailing and definitely dig it so I’m hoping for a similar experience with StoreSuit. Interspire is doing some great thing in the php/mysql commercial web application space.
Features that I like:
- Payment gateway configurations
- Built in SendStudio Integration
- Ajax Interface
- Product Comparison Built in
- Shop By Price
- Shop By Brand
- Drag & Drop Design Mode
- Real Time Recommendations (see Chris Smith post about the tech side of doing this, a great read for php/mysql developers.)
New technology makes
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Written by Tim on August 27th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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I don’t do RoR….yet, I hear the good things about it so I’m really close into diving into it. Before I do I want to make sure RoR is going to be something I can use professionally too. Here is a 30 minute research into the jobs out there for RoR compared to Asp.Net & PHP. I searched for the phrases “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET” and radius of 100 miles from the zip code. There is no doubt some overlap of job posting but this is pretty clear indication of where things are.
8/25/2008
Where I live - Cincinnati Ohio, Midwest
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
45102 |
4 |
35 |
114 |
| Career Builder |
45102 |
1 |
36 |
89 |
| Hot Jobs |
45102 |
1 |
12 |
7 |
| Total |
|
6 |
83 |
210 |
Second up New York City, East Coast
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
10270 |
29 |
357 |
621 |
| Career Builder |
10270 |
8 |
184 |
356 |
| Hot Jobs |
10270 |
18 |
176 |
180 |
| Total |
|
55 |
717 |
1157 |
And now for the West Coast - San Francisco
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
94130 |
23 |
216 |
135 |
| Career Builder |
94130 |
17 |
123 |
67 |
| Hot Jobs |
94130 |
31 |
521 |
107 |
| Total |
|
71 |
860 |
309 |
So for me ASP.NET makes the most sense by far (almost 4x that of PHP). A surprise to me is on the West Coast, were it looks like ASP.NET is much smaller then else where. It seems that Ruby on Rails is very much in the incubator stage still, I guess I’m not turning on RoR anytime soon after all.
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Written by Tim on August 26th, 2007 with 64 comments.
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Scott released his 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. Scott’s the man. especially for tools so I’ll be checking into his suggestions over the next months for sure & giving a little write up on some of the finer tools I discover.
First one up is Terminals. An open source multi tab remote desktop client.
Why it Rocks
- Multiple TS connections on one screen, managed thru tabs just like FireFox
- Saved connections. Very similar to a smart SSH client like SSH Tectia Client.
- Saved Passwords. Encrypted of course.
- Change Environment Variables. You can set connections to use variable screen resolution, no wallpaper etc…
- Log into a group of server at once. No need to log into individual servers at a time with this thing.
Written by Tim on August 24th, 2007 with no comments.
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I had a vision today when signing up for Amazon S3. Here is the background: Amazon s3 is great, cheap storage, API, scalable, reliable, accessible from anywhere (Internet capable), etc… I plan on using it for my personal backup center putting things like my personal source code library, photos, & important documents. I get everything a enterprise company gets but at my rate. Great.
The one thing I’m dreading is maintaining folders. Lets be frank, directories/folders are anything but proficient compared to say search. That’s why Google beat Yahoo!. Yahoo! was a directory, you had to drill down to find results where as for Google you searched for them. Yahoo! later changed to be a search engine but people are starting to forget the thing was directory of links, users would submit links and Yahoo! people would categorize (not so automated would you say?)
So for Amazon S3, I’m going to have act like I work at Yahoo! back in the day, this is going to suck big time. That’s when the revelation hit me.
What if I could point Google or even better Koders/Krugle at my directory and search it? That would rock except some things I don’t want public BUT I still want it searchable just by me.
I already have my personal backup center in Amazon S3 now I need my personal search engine. I could easily write something that populates a simple html page with a directory listing of all the files I have stored/want indexed. I would then want to login to koders to search for code/files/documents etc….
Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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I’m really looking forward to Google’s version of S3, Google tends to do things better plus free ;). Until then I’m going with Amazon S3 for my personal backup strategy. Right now I have a media PC with a 100 Gig hard drive, that is mirrored that serves this purpose but we really don’t use it enough to justifying it running all the time. Plus in the bigger picture of things, this just fills my life with more work that I don’t want to do.
Links
- A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools - Mostly these are tools that work via Linux/OS X
- elastic8 - A nice list of these tools
- S3Fox - Firefox plugin - I’m probably going to be using this for my ad hoc client
- S3Drive - Provides a drive on your my computer that is your Amazon storage
- S3Browse - Uses a web interface to interact with your S3 storage.
- PutPlace - Promises to publish to S3, Flicker, etc… Still in beta
- Jungle Disk - Looks to be the premier paid software to give WebDAV support.
- I really like http://filicio.us ideas with tagging but it looks to new for me to rely on.
My Setup
I’m looking for a way to automate backups of certain folders at certain times, tag folders so I can search later on, an ad hoc way to get files. I’m looking to backup source code files, pictures, and important documents. For now I think I’m going with S3Fox until I find something more automated and with tagging/searching.
Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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If you have a dual monitor setup do yourself a favor, walk, no run to Jon Aguino’s blog to download JumpWin. It lets you hit WinKey + Enter to move a windows from 1 windows to the next. It was part of the power tools collection on GotDotNet. - This was via www.ayende.com
Written by Tim on August 17th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Yahoo! came out with a FireBug addon - YSlow, that takes a look at your web page and offers a score on performance. Most of the recommendations are easy enough to follow, below are 3 that take some Apache httpd.conf hacking to get working:
1) Configure ETags
Add this to your httpd.conf
2) Turn on Expiration Headers
# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A7200
# Set up caching on media files for 1 year
<FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>
ExpiresDefault A29030400
</FilesMatch>
# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”>
ExpiresDefault A604800
</FilesMatch>
# Set up 24 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|txt|html|php|js|css)$”>
ExpiresDefault A86400
</FilesMatch>
3) Add Gzip compression
Install mod_gzip for Apache, add this to your httpd.conf to configure mod_gzip to handle files/settings
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_command_version ‘/mod_gzip_status’
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No
mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 512
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 1048576
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_min_http 1000
mod_gzip_handle_methods GET POST
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^httpd/unix-directory$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.shtml$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.js$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.css$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-httpd-php$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.php$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
# DO NOT WASTE TIME COMPRESSING IMAGES
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.$
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader Content-Type:image/*
</IfModule>
That’s it, those 3 changes improved my score from F (60) to a respectable B (81).
Written by Tim on August 16th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Recently I had a bit of trouble getting the HyperLink control to push out a mailto link in a Details View.
<asp:HyperLink NavigateUrl=’mailto:’ Text=’<%# Bind(”Email”) %>‘ runat=”server” ID=”hlEmail”></asp:HyperLink>
This leaves a hyperlink but with a blank mailto - i.e. test@techtoolblog.com
So I assume if I stick in the bind (or eval) text to the Navigate URL we should be good to go:
<asp:HyperLink NavigateUrl=’mailto:<%# Bind(”Email”) %>‘ Text=’<%# Bind(”Email”) %>‘ runat=”server” ID=”hlEmail”></asp:HyperLink>
This gives me a link that is NOT clickable - If I view the source I see
My next guess is that this has something to do with formatting string, sure enough it is: This is the solution that ended up working for me:
<asp:HyperLink NavigateUrl=’<%# Bind(”Email”, “mailto:{0}”) %>‘ Text=’<%# Bind(”Email”) %>‘ runat=”server” ID=”hlEmail”></asp:HyperLink>
Written by Tim on August 15th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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