Big-O

Top 10 Snarky Apple Predictions for 2010

Well, it’s a new year, a new decade (according to some), and that means it’s time for the pointless predictions about what’s going to happen this year! Being a cranky Apple fan as I am, I present my list of Apple predictions for 2010.

1. Apple will reveal a new award-winning ad campaign…Microsoft will copy it and embarrass themselves.
2. Phil Schiller will have more face-time during keynote presentations than we want him to.
3. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that changes the world
4. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that confuses everyone and is quietly ignored or removed before the year is over.
5. Apple will update various product lines in ways that make them harder to mod. The Mac Moders will mod them anyway.
6. The Wall Street analysts will be wrong about Apple sales estimates and earnings.
7. Apple will wait until a lawsuit hits class action status to issue a product recall.
8. Kevin Rose will make press with an Apple rumor, and we’ll find out later that he was completely wrong.
9. Apple will charge iPod Touch owners money for something iPhone owners get for free and claim that ‘the accountants made us do it’.
10. Steve-Jobs will non-ironically use the term “greenest” in a keynote.

Come to think of it, I can probably recycle this same exact list next year as well

That’s right, I’m an iPhone developer too!

It’s been a long process, but today my first iPhone app has officially gone on sale. This has been keeping me very busy and up late nights for a while now, and I couldn’t be happier to finally have one live! If you have iTunes you can download the app here:

http://bit.ly/bomtrivia

The app is a basic trivia game, and the topic is the Book of Mormon. I realize that that’s a rather niche market for a first app, but I’m proud of it! I’ve formed a new company for my iPhone efforts, and you can check the web site there for any new LDS games we release.

Want more Big-O?

If you haven’t noticed already, there’s a links section over on the right that will point you to some of my other sites online. I’ve got a food blog that I write with a friend, a couple of podcasts, and I also post videos on YouTube from time to time. I’ll try to post here as well when I put something up, but if you really want to stay up to date, you should go to the other sites and subscribe there.

…And You Suck

What started as an inside joke turned into a nearly all-night code run, and the birth of a new web site! Presenting http://www.AndYouSuck.com.

Need a snarky response for a stupid coworker? Dealing with idiots online with stupid questions? No worries! You can type anything you want in front of the first dot and will change the page accordingly. Right now you can only have one subdomain, text is all lower case, and it will replace underscores with spaces. Also, it must conform to normal URL standards which means that only numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores are allowed, and the total length of the whole url must be less than 255 characters.

I’m still adding features, but in the mean time check out this important swine flu update: http://tinyurl.com/dkat69

Enjoy

UPDATE: The rules for text replacement have changed since I wrote this post. Just visit the site to get the complete details of how to craft the insult that you’re looking for.

Mobile O

This is my first post written on my new iPod touch. Isn’t as hard to type on this thing as I thought it might be and the official Wordpress app is great. Still, I think I’ll stick to my keyboard for now.

Worthless SMO

I listened to a webinar today on the topic of Social Media Optimization (SMO). I’d tell you who produced it, but there was a “private and confidential” notice at the bottom of the slide deck…despite the fact that it was free and anyone could register. Go figure.

The person doing the presentation, who works for a marketing firm, had a VERY negative view of SMO and concluded with saying that it should be the very last thing you spend your marketing dollars on, after you’ve done everything else. I couldn’t disagree more strongly, but before I explain why, I want to clarify that the term SMO strikes me as a hollow industry buzz word and makes me feel dirty even typing it.

Now that that’s out of the way, the thing that I really took issue with is they spoke as if the only worthwhile goal for a business in this space would be to try to increase sales, or to improve search engine ranks to, wait for it, increase sales. This is ENTIRELY the wrong kind of thinking, in my view.

While social media certainly CAN be used to increase sales, in the vast majority of cases I think business would be better off to aproach it as either an extension of their customer service department, OR as part of their PR efforts.

Note that I said PR and NOT marketing. Though often tossed together and handled by the same people, Marketing and PR are two VERY different things, and business would do well to remember that. Social Media will allow you to do things like strengthen your branding, get customer feedback quickly, and rapidly respond to public criticism of your products.

If you step into the Social Media space with the intent to sell something to people you will FAIL. Think 1) Brand 2) PR 3) Customer Service (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps even 4) Recruiting. All of these are a vital part of business and improving them WILL increase your sales, but it is NOT a marketing effort. Remember that.

Does Your Job Suck?

I received the news today that a former boss of mine (the only sane manager in that place) has been fired. I had the good sense to get out of that place a while ago, but I feel bad for them. That department has had more than 100% turnover in the last two years so I’m not particularly surprised, but a lot of people have been caught up for the worse with the corporate politics and red tape and found themselves turned out to the streets in this horrible economy.

I present to you a list of warning signs that might help you know in advance that it’s time to spread your resume around, or if you are considering a new job these might be good questions to ask during your interview:

• Are you the last one standing? Take a look at the turnover rate. If the company is well established and your department has been around a while yet everyone there has been there less than a year, there is a good reason for it. There’s only so many people they can fire before it becomes obvious that the problem is NOT the employees.
• How red is the tape? If a task that takes you 30 minutes of actual work takes 4 hours to complete because of the paper work, then you should have alarm bells sounding in your head. It’s not even that bad in the health industry, and they are KNOWN for paperwork!
• Are you qualified to think? If you are not considered qualified enough to think or have ideas, then you need to get out of there. Any organization that has a hostile reaction to new ideas is bound for finantial ruin anyway. Besides, ANYONE can have a good idea, no matter what your pay rate is.
• How many layers to this Fail Cake? The more management layers there are, the harder it is for anything to get done, and the harder it is to get recognition for your hard work. If there used to be only one manager between you and the CEO, but now there’s more bosses than you can shake a stick at then RUN! They are compensating for incompetence by hiring more people, and when they find that the incompetence is still there they fire the little guy, and that’s YOU!
• Shouldn’t this task be outsourced? If you have been in the job market a while and are making significantly more than you did when you were flipping burgers at McD’s, but STILL find yourself being given mindless repetitive work that is not only below your job description but would be better off given to someone working in a Bangladesh call center, then get the crap out of there! Seriously. That kind of ridiculous waste can only turn out bad. It not only shows that they don’t value you or their OWN money, but that will bite you in the butt later when your reviews come up and you didn’t work on anything important.
• How much am I worth again? If you put in notice that you are getting a new job and they offer you a HUGE salary increase to stay put, don’t fall for it! This is bad. If your best hope of getting a good raise is to actually quit and get hired again then there is a SERIOUS problem with this company and you’re better off somewhere else.
• Can we have a meeting to talk about the meeting we had because of that other meeting? Some jobs, especially management, require a lot of meetings. Sad, but true. But if you are NOT in management, and instead have deadlines and tasks to complete, and yet you find that having ONLY 3 meetings in one day to be an improvement…well, there’s no hope. Get out now while you can still get a good reference.

I could write more, but this is too depressing. So, go think hard about your job, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Stoopid Spammers

My blogs have been hit with a new wave of spam this week. In itself that isn’t anything unusual, spam is just the nature of things these days, but there’s something notably different this time.

The links are all broken!

I’ve had 8 or 9 of these get through my spam filters so far this week with the same issue. They include a link to their site to try to collect your money, but the link that they use is not even a valid URL! This gives the user no possible way to get back to them to give them money even if they wanted to.

What a waste of bits. Stoopid Spammers.

Zzzz…*snurk* Huh? You’re still here?!

So I’m tired of getting crap from my friends making fun of me for not updating this site for over a year, so I’ve FINALLY gotten around to it. There’s a new template that *finally* has some color in it, and in addition to that, I’ve also hooked it up to ping.fm so all my micro-status updates that I post throught the day will be posted on here also.

Enjoy!

Getting Firefox to zero out the margins…like for realz this time.

This problem can hit anyone working with Firefox, but especially ASP.NET developers. The old-school html way of making sure that you don’t have an ugly space on the top or sides of your page was to specify zeros in the body tag like so:

<body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″>

The problem is that all four of those are not valid in XHTML 1.0 Trasitional, and if you are using Visual Studio you will most likely get warnings or errors because if it.

The proper way to do this is using CSS, like so:

BODY {margin:0px; padding: 0px;}

The problem that I had was that this worked fine in IE, but still had the margins in Firefox! Grrr. After googleing and bashing my head on the desk for a while, I finally came up with the answer. Most browsers set some default css values for certain elements if none is specified in your code. Even though I had set the body to have zero padding and zero margins, there was still an element that was getting a default margin by Firefox. It turned out to be the FORM tag. If you create a new aspx page with Visual Studio, it will automatically put a form tag as the first thing inside the body of the page. You also have to set the margins here to get rid of that space, and fortunately that is very simple once you know what the problem is. Just add one more line to your css. Both of them together will look like this:

BODY {margin:0px; padding: 0px;}
BODY FORM {margin:0px; padding: 0px;}

Poof! The annoying space goes away. This same issue can crop up if anytime a margin hasn’t been set for whatever element is at the top of your page, a <p> tag, an <h1>, <h2> or <h3>, or pretty much anything else as well.

Keyboard Shortcut for Visual Studio 2005

This is a stupid little thing that I should have figured out a long time ago, but I am VERY excited about it!

I love keyboard shortcuts. I especially love being able to do things without using the mouse. Today I discovered that in Visual Studio 2005 (this might work in other versions too, I haven’t tried it) there is a great keyboard shortcut that lets you switch between the files you have open for edit. To use it just hold down Ctrl and press Tab. It pulls up a little box in the middle of the screen that is simmilar to what you see when you use Alt+Tab, but instead of a list of open programs it has two columns, one with a list of the files you have open for edit, and one with a list of available windows such as your toolbox or the Solution Explorer.

This also works in Firefox for Windows. Enjoy!

How to bounce (restart) IIS

When I first started using IIS, the only way that I knew how to restart it was going to the services control panel, finding the IIS admin service and restarting it that way. That method was annoying on a number of levels, one of which is that for whatever reason, it takes for ever. That might be because it also restarts the ftp and smtp services if you have those running.

There are two other methods that I use on a regular basis.

1) From the command line. Just open a cmd window and type in IISreset (and like normal, that’s not case sensitive. Doing it that way takes a noticably shorter amount of time than from the command line. You can also do IISreset /stop or IISreset /start. I use that if there is something I’m doing that I need IIS off for.

2) From the IIS management snap in. Anyone who works with IIS a lot will probably already be familiar with this tool, but a lot of people don’t realize that you can also use it to restart IIS. When can find a shortcut to the Internet Information Services Management snap-in in the administrator tools folder. In the tree view on the left, the top node is called Internet Information Services. Right under that should be the node representing your local computer (or whatever computer you have connected to). Right click on that, go to All Tasks, and then click on Reset IIS. It’s that easy!

Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Import Breaks Inventory

I have noticed this annoying problem with the Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Manager tool. I have to admit that I haven’t done a lot of research on this topic, so I don’t know what the root cause is, or what fixes there might be available.

We have a staging area that the business folks use to massage data before getting released to production. To get our dev area in sync with stage we can use the Commerce Server Catalog Manager to export the product catalog from our staging server, which creates an xml file, and then use that to import the more up to date catalog on our dev box.

The problem is that when we do the import to the dev box the inventory catalog gets corrupted. I get arround this annoyance by doing a backup export of the dev inventory catalog first, then importing the stage product catalog, and then importing the inventory catalog back again to fix the corruption.

If anyone knows how to fix this little annoyance, please email me.

Apple iPhone to use GPS?

During Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote speach today, a new ipod iphone device was accounced. Part of the demo included integrated use of Google Maps to connect you with local retail stores. The phone seemes to know where you are, so does this mean integrated GPS? If so, this could be the ultimate Geochaching device. I’m hoping they expose an api for the GPS so that I can start developing geocaching widgets for it.

[EDIT]: Sadly, it turns out this is not the case. No GPS for the iPhone. In fact, there is question now weather or not we will be able to write custom widgets of any kind for it! That would majorly suck.

ASP:Menu control broken in Safari Browser in ASP 2.0

I recently built a shiny new web site using ASP.NET 2.0 and thought it was all finished until I looked at the home page in the Safari browser from an Apple Mac computer. The site uses the new asp:menu control and it looked horrid in Safari. There were actually bare html tags showing up on the top of the page!

At first I thought it had to either be my code or the data populating the menu that wasn’t compatible with Safari, but when I viewed the source of the page from within Safari I noticed that the html was totally different than the code that IE was getting. I knew that it wasn’t my code doing any kind of browser detection, so that meant that ASP.NET was dynamically generating incompatible code at run time. There was a lot more to the asp:menu control than I thought.

It turns out the asp:menu control is designed to be able to gracefully handle older browsers for you and do things like detect if the browser can’t support JavaScript and if so it will only generate html menus. So, that means that ASP.NET incorrectly thinks that Safari can’t handle the dynamic menus and is sending it downgraded code that renders like crap.

To fix this you are going to have to get your admin hat on because you need to edit some files in your %system% directory. Your web.config and machine.config files have sections called “Browser Caps” that define for it what browsers can do what. Starting with ASP.NET 2.0 the settings are also contained within files with the .browser extension that you can find at:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Browsers

The browser caps sections are still supported for backward compatibility. The sections that affect the display of the asp:menu control for Safari are found in the mozilla.browser file in that directory. When looking through there I was confused at first because everything seemed to have sensible settings, but I finally found the culprit. Underneath this section:

<browser id=”Safari” parentID=”Gecko”>

You will find this little guy:

<controlAdapters>
    <adapter controlType=”System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu” adapterType=”System.Web.UI.WebControls.Adapters.MenuAdapter” />
</controlAdapters>

Apparently the ASP.NET 2.0 menu control has a system of “adapters” that do the generation of the back-versioned code. I’m sure you can access and modify those adapters or create your own, but I haven’t bothered to research how to do it because I knew that the menu worked fine in Firefox and should be working fine in Safari, so I just removed the controlAdapter section from the Safari browser section of the config file. This will cause the behavior to be inherited from the parent, which in this case is Gecko which happens to be the same parent that Firefox inherits from in that file.

After removing that section there is one last step. Unlike the web.config, ASP.NET will not automatically read the changes to the .browser files and change the behavior of your web site. I tried bouncing IIS, as well as rebooting before doing a bit more research and finding out that there is an ASP utility called Aspnet_regbrowsers.exe that you need to run that will take those .browser files and compile them into a dll called ASP.BrowserCapsFactory.dll that gets placed in the same directory as the .browser files. The information also gets placed in the global assembly cache so you don’t have to bounce IIS in order to get the changes to take affect after running the tool. To compile the files issue the following command from a command prompt:

c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regbrowsers.exe -i

If you take another look in the Browsers folder you will see the addition of three files. BrowserCapsFactory.cs, ASP.BrowserCapsFactory.dll, and browserCaps.token. If you now try your page again in Safari you should see better results. Or at least I did.

This problem is a classic example of the hidden costs associated with developing with Microsoft software, and also a perfect example of the advantages of an open source community model. This whole system was designed by Microsoft so that developers could keep up with the mobile market that is rapidly changing and becoming increasingly online. At first they were going to keep the .browser files up to date but eventually didn’t want to keep up with all the changes so they just dropped it. The .browser files are sitting dormant, and if you are just now making the switch to ASP 2.0 from 1.1, the settings for Safari (and probably a lot of the other ones) are out of date before you even install the software. If this was an open source project, the community would be keeping them up to date. As soon as a new device or browser hit the market, the developers that had to code for it would be submitting the correct browser definition file for it.

Here is an official Microsoft statement about this:

Q: Why will Microsoft not provide device specific updates?

A: Our original plan was to provide regular updates, however, based on the evolution of the market we needed to change our approach in order to better address the rapid proliferation of different kinds of devices around the world…If customers would like assistance with building support we can put them in touch with 3rd party companies who specialize in mobile development with ASP.NET, or with Microsoft PSS.

Or in other words, do it yourself or pay someone else to do it. I bet your CTO didn’t cover that in his budget proposal!