Category: Technology

All things geeky.

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AT&T – I offer you some free consulting

First, let’s begin with emailing from your phones. It’s a simple process and should never see an error like:

Your MSG could not be DELIVERED because InvalidPduContent

Soon we will discuss daylight savings time, servers and time stamping. And radiowave propagation.

Update: So far, it would appear that any SMS message over 160 characters causes this problem. Now, the thing is, the phone (a Motorola RAZR v3xx) is supposed to be able to send email as well as SMS. I believe it uses the same interface. So 160 characters doesn’t fly. Plus, the interface is supposed to take anything over 160 characters and automatically break it into multiple messages. Hmm. I wonder if that’s it. Perhaps it sends the first 160 characters successfully but fails to put the correct header on the next message so the later part of the email doesn’t get sent successfully.

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Has FireFox forgotten you?

Many sites have the option to log in and remember you for a time period, usually a couple of weeks. For instance, Delicious, GMail, and Twitter all remember that I’ve logged in and only make me log back in after a couple of weeks even if Firefox is shutdown, crashed, or the computer is rebooted. That is, until last week when I noticed that every time I went to one of the sites I had to log in again even if I’d checked the "remember me" box. Naturally, I assumed a cookie problem.

As it turns out, if this is happening to you, a file called cookies.sqlite is damaged. Close Firefox! Right click on the START menu and open Explore. You may be navigating to some hidden directories so once Windows Explorer opens, go to the Tools menu and choose Folder Options. Go to the View tab. Make sure the bullet is on "Show hidden files and folders" instead of "Do not show hidden files and folders" Personally, I would recommend removing the check from "Hide extensions for known file types" Now navigate to this directory: C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ Note that C will be the letter of your drive where windows is installed and it may not necessarily be C. {username} will be the name you use when logging into windows. Once in that directory, find your profile directory. It will probably be the only subdirectory and most likely will be a bunch of random numbers and letters dot default like 2fwe34ccc.default. Go into that directory. Find the file cookies.sqlite and delete it. Restart Firefox and your problem should be solved.

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The Joy of Software

I’ve written this PHP application. I work on a development server. Then I move code to a staging server for preliminary testing and client approvals. When the code is ready, it gets moved to a production server. In an ideal world, dev, staging, and production would all be configured identically. In the real world, you get different operating systems, different versions of the middleware application software (PHP, ColdFusion, .NET, etc.), different version of the databases, drivers don’t match, security patches are applied on one server but not another, and so forth.

So, this PHP application has a calendar piece for associating a date with a form collecting data. When adding a new thing, the form should have certain default values and the date should automagically show today’s date at 00:00 hours for the starting date and today’s date at 00:14 hours for the ending date. This works great on the development server. This works great on the staging server. But on staging, the date defaults to December 31, 2008 at 19:00 hours for the first date (the beginning date) and December 31, 2008 at 00:14 hours for the second date (the ending date).

It’s the little that make life so interesting and keep the padded rooms booked up.

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On Failed Communications

I just realized I have spent the entire day with my phone on silent. Wow! And what productive day it has been! But I’ve missed calls and text messages. For that, I apologize.

Also, yesterday I became away that I forgot to renew my CFNinja.com domain name last week. Fortunately there is a grace period for renewals but any mail sent to my cfninja.com email address on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday bounced. Several people let me know this last night. Again, my apologies and if you sent me an email over the past 4 days, please resend it. Thanks!

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jQuery’s datepicker driving me nuts

I love jQuery! And its UI library. But I’m having difficult implementing a simple date picker. The datepicker method is throwing an error for me: "inst is undefined datepicker" The solution of adding "{onSelect: function() {}}" did not work. I’m at the point of no return. Choosing a different calendar application.

Update: Solved! I had an artifact left over from trying to implement the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library‘s calendar. jQuery’s UI datepicker conflict’s with YUI’s datepicker.

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Code Buzz

Runners get a runner’s high. I’ve got a coder’s high. My head is buzzing as I’ve been hitting the keys hard. My current PHP application has dynamic content loaded via AJAX but when the user navigates with the browser’s forward or back buttons the state is lost, that is, all the dynamic content disappears. Also if the natural navigation of the application takes the user away from the dynamically generated content, when they return the content is lost and the user frustratingly has to drill down, dynamically loading more content, to get back to where they were. Using jQuery, some custom JavaScript, and some fandangled PHP, I have overcome this obstacle and created a state engine that remembers which content was loaded and re-presents it on the screen whenever the user navigates with the browser’s forward or back buttons or the applications natural navigation. I’ve just finished the behind the scenes mechanics of this code and now have to fix the presentation level (after a 10 minute break). Whew! This was fun!

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Who quit following you on Twitter?

Qwitter and Twitterless are two new services which alert you when followers quit.

Do you use Twitter? Or do you still wonder why people Twitter? I use Twitter to follow the pulse for things that interest me, in particular, I follow:

  1. friends and family
  2. people in Knoxville
  3. some breaking news sources
  4. the movers and shakers in the technology world
  5. ColdFusion and PHP developers (yeah yeah…some of you .NET guys too)

You should be using Twitter to be in the global conversation. Twitter serves everyone differently depending on how you use the service which may be one or more of the following:

  1. Exhibitionists, Voyeurs, Gossips – These are the folks that will send/read a stream of messages about the minutia of daily life
  2. News feeds – These are the folks alerting the world about their experiences with the California fires, or the next big event. These are the newspapers getting the headlines out. These are people like myself alerting others that the Interstate is at a stand still.
  3. Topic Specific – These would be people sharing information about a particular subject. Unlike news feeds these will often include back and forth discussions about the topic.
  4. Spammers – People taking advantage of the tendency to follow those who follow you simply to draw attention to a product or website. The Twitter staff and others are trying to minimize the ability for people to spam through Twitter.
  5. Utility – such as how The RedCross has used Twitter to make accessing the Safe and Well database easier.

Twitter is quick to alert you when you have new followers. If someone decides they want to see your messages, you get an email giving you the opportunity to follow them back. However, when someone decides that you send too many messages, your messages are not interesting, or they are tired of hearing that you had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch again, they quit following you and you never know. Perhaps you notice your numbers have changed and all you can do is wonder if you offended someone. Until now! Two services now tell you when someone quits following your Twitter stream. Qwitter will send you an email whenever someone quits following and simply needs your Twitter username and email address. Twitterless is in beta and requires an invite code. By entering your Twitter username and password, Twitterless will notify you when followers quit. Get an invite code by following @tless. Twitterless has a blog and is developed by Mark Nutter who you can follow on Twitter @marknutter.

Be sure to follow my ramblings on Twitter @djuggler. My Tweets are very stream of consciousness and vary from Knoxville traffic/gas reports, to family happenings, to interesting sightings, some audio or pictorial commentary linked from Utterli in a Tweet, to politics, to tech, and just plain nonsensical babble.

See also: Put @RedCross in your Twitter and Did Chris Brogan just steal my PULSE?!

Update 9Aug2009: @followermonitor has joined the ranks of @tless and Qwitter. Twitterless is working great for me. I have not had a message from Qwitter since like December.

Update 24-Nov-2010: A list of seven such services.

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With due apologies for the Twitter flood

Rumor has it that outside a this valley thar be other states beyond just Tennersee. Nows I can vouch for that cus I done traveled a bit in my life and seen me those other states. That is til I ran into da Mississip out there to the West. Head South an’ it gets hot inside an out! The weather and food is spicy! And thar’s that Gulf of Mexco. Lota water an nothing else. Head East an tis the same thang. Ocean of water and far da eye cn see. Taint nothing else.

Now, it been told that beyond all da water thar’s other lands. Some says we came from there. Some says all the land was squished t’gether an it drifted apart like Billy’s raft done in the river current las sumner. Ifn ya ask me, I gots to say what’s it matter. Sholy a Twitter message caint reach dem other lands. It’d fly straight off da Earth befo’ ev’r reachin them lands.

Ahem! Sorries.

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And Mariner 1 nosed dived into the ground…

Yup. I’m that guy. The one responsible for the missing hyphen. I’ve been debugging my code. I have a relatively simple action in front of me that is misbehaving. Turns out, I was missing a closing parenthesis. Like Mariner 1, it was a simple mistake with a catastrophic impact…well, nothing blew up on me. I’m just behind schedule for what I wanted to accomplish today.

I’ve always cited the period instead of a comma as causing a space probe to miss its mark but apparently the typo never caused any dreadful results.

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Dear Open Source Community

If you write code to make my life better, once you release it into the wild, an example does not count as documentation! If I have to spend as much time deciphering your code as it would have taken for me to write it in the first place, you have failed the community. As an open source developer, 1) test your code, 2) show working example, and 3) document it thoroughly!

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Early Birding It

Productive day ahead! My simple goal today is show results to my client. One of the challenges of freelancing or working remotely is showing results. Sometimes a developer’s time is spent behind the scenes or working through an issue in test files that are isolated from your application. That is how I spent my day yesterday. So at the end of the day, there is nothing to show and if your boss is not in a possible to peek in on you or look over your shoulder than not showing anything is comparable to not working.

Today I rose at 4am, in a jolt. I sprang from bed, sat in the cool air of the morning for a little chanting, bathed and dressed, ate a banana, and got to work. What a great way to start the day!

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This will make you feel small

Last year I helped Noah use string to show the scale of distances between planets. I had never conceptualized it before and I was blown away. When people speak of "space" they really mean space. There is a lot of it out there. After watching this video, I feel tiny and wonder why we don’t have space ships of humans spreading throughout the universe on great explores.

How – Click here for more home videos

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Is 9V too much for a 6V device?

If I have a device that requests 6V input and I have an a/c adapter that outputs 9V, will the device draw only the 6V it needs or will it try to take all 9V and burn itself out? In this case the circuit is simply a light. It has the switch and the bulb with an optio of being powered by 4 AA batteries or 6V input. No amp requirement specified.

Watt’s it matter?