A Few Tips on Avoiding Online Scams
This may be a little out of the norm for the dev blog but I think it's worth mentioning.
I got a call from a cousin of mine today asking me about a work from home website she was considering. She wanted me to look into it for her, so she emailed me the link. When I clicked on the link my browser couldn't find the url. I tried again, nothing. Again only this time I removed all query strings and went to just the home link of the url...still nothing. So I waited an hour or so, only to come back and get nothing. The following is my email response to my cousin.
I still can't get a page to load from this link, and googles link doesn't work either. That makes me a little nervous about this one, it's not uncommon to have a website up to take credit card transactions and then down a day or two later like it never existed. Only instead of $98 they got away with your credit card info. A few things to look for when paying online:
1) is the site secure? you can tell this by looking for an https in the address bar of the browser (i.e. https://www.site.com) the 's' is the important part, it literally means secure. But just because the 's' is there doesn't mean it's really secure. look for a padlock type image in the bottom right corner of your browser or sometimes it appears in the url bar as well (I think Internet Explorer puts it in the bottom right corner but I could be wrong) if the lock is unlocked or broken your connection is not secure. DO NOT process an account transaction over an unsecured line even if you trust the company. The reason is your information is sent over the internet in plain text and vulnerable to any sniffer out there. A secure line will encrypt your data and decrypt it when it arrives at it's destination.
2) Only shop at well known trusted sites. if you are not familiar with a particular site it's a good idea to Google it, check bbb.com for info on them and if your gut tells you "bad idea" follow it.
3) Never respond to Phishing emails, these are emails designed to get you to give up personal information. An example is something from a bank maybe you have an account and maybe you don't but they'll ask you to verify your account number via email. NEVER communicate with any financial institution through email if you are sending sensitive data. If you get this type of email from an institution you have a relationship with, call them first using a number from their website (Google it) or on your checkbook or credit card.
When it comes to work at home jobs I'm not really an expert but I do know there are a lot of scams out there. Some are just after $100 a person and there are a lot of people who will risk that, but more than likely if this site isn't up again by tomorrow (and my bet is it won't be) they were trying to harvest credit card numbers. Generally speaking, if it's something as easy as copy and paste links, or stuffing envelopes, or comes with a guarantee or promises instant wealth it's a scam. A monkey can be taught to copy and paste, and nobody can guarantee a job, even the top colleges don't claim that.
As far as certifications go, there are a lot out there, the best approach would be to do some research on the certification, is it legitimate? Is there a market for it? Most Certifications are printed on an 8x11 piece of card-stock paper, anyone can fake one on almost any printer, they might even have you print it yourself (which tells me they don't take their own certification seriously).
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Happy 3rd Birthday DevBlog!
As of last week it has been 3 years since Dustin and I opened the doors, and while life has taken us different directions we keep on posting.
It's true, it really has been 3 years and to tell the truth we've gone a bit farther than I even thought we would. When we started this blog it was a place for us to drop notes and help us help others with learning code, programming, and even do a little off-topic random posts. I flooded the devblog with posts I'd grabbed from other resources, and Dustin threw in some fantastic PHP and jQuery work. Here's to another year and hoping that we continue to get bigger and better.
And now some interesting/boring facts about the DevBlog:
Our most popular post is "PhoneGap - The missing android/windows guide"
While the United States is the country that visits us the most, we have far more visitors outside The States than in them.
Visitors from the United States make up 24% of our traffic, while Germany makes up 13% and India makes 12%
Australia spends the most time on the site, followed closely by our United Kingdom visitors.
This post makes 123 posts on the DevBlog.
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Notepad++ the New IDE
So, as Phil mentioned I did move across the country, and for no reason other than to get out of surviving another Idaho/Utah winter...and a pretty amazing job opportunity. Which is what brings me to the dev blog today.
Since I got here I'd been using Aptana as my IDE, and generally speaking I love the Aptana/Eclipse IDE's mostly because of the tools that they have that make writing code so easy. However I've become a little frustrated with Aptana as of late because it seems to chew and chew and chew on the memory. And I noticed that at least once a day I was killing it and restarting it just to get some measurable performance back.
Anyhow one fine day about a week ago I was trying to view an .sql file in notepad++ (which I've always kept around as a quick editor) and noticed that the escaping of quotes was not quite rendering in the editor. I mentioned this to the author of said file and he mentioned I should try the "bespin" theme in n++ which I promptly did and thoroughly enjoyed. This lead me to investigate the plug-ins that notepad++ has, like I said I've always used notepad++ to some extent, I've just never paid much attention to the many plug-ins available to it (and there are many).
To make a long story short I've effectively replaced my Aptana IDE with Notepad++ and it's various useful plug-ins. At the onset I knew there were a few things notepad++ would have to have in order to make the switch and not hate it, they are as follows:
1. an Explorer view - I hate doing File->open and browsing, an explorer view is much more efficient
2. an Outline view - I've become addicted to the ability of Eclipse based IDE's to click on a method name in the outline and go directly to that method.
3. Debugger - this one is a big one, in my opinion debuggers cut troubleshooting time down by more than 50%
Nice to haves:
1. ctrl + click - It's always nice to be able to jump directly to a declaration with this simple combination
2. intellisense/auto-complete
3. SVN - I currently don't use SVN but it's nice know there's a plugin available.
In my quest I promptly found that I already had the Explorer plug-in installed (and it's simply called Explorer). And while the look and feel of the view is a little different than Eclipse, it gets the job done and I have no qualms with it.
I was also able to find an Outline plug-in called "Function List". It's a little rugged in appearance but nonetheless gets the job done and the best part is it's not attached to the main view and therefore not making viewing the code a pain.
I thought there would be no way a debugger plug-in would be as effective as the Xdebug setup for Aptana/Eclipse. I was wrong. DBGp is everything I hoped I would find in a debugger (and it uses xdebug, how awesome is that?), like the others it lacks some in the aesthetic department but it is simple to set up, easy to navigate and it works. I did have a little trouble getting it working at first but then I found this Tutorial and I was off and running.
As for the "nice to haves" since Notepad++ 5.0 you can turn on auto-complete from the settings->preferences->Backup/Auto-Completion menu, simply check "Enable auto-completion" and if you'd like check "Function parameters hint on input" to enable hints to the parameters a method expects.
I haven't found a great ctrl+click plug-in but I'm hoping one will come soon. There have been some attempts but they pale in comparison to what Eclipse has done.
As mentioned SVN is available (I believe there is more than one plug-in for it) but I haven't tried it. Another one that get's honorable mention is "Falling Bricks" it's just like Tetris, and handy on days you've got nothing else to do for staying awake while your code is compiling.
Once the plug-ins were installed I decided to give my new N++ IDE a spin for a full day. I have to admit I felt a bit naked at first, but it's been almost a week now and I've gotten to where I enjoy the draft.
Just for comparison I fired up all of my new plug-ins at one time and checked the memory consumption of notepad++, a mere 35M compared to the 235M Aptana gobbles up immediately after startup (and without being in Debug mode). I'll probably keep Aptana around for a while (at least until a satisfactory ctrl+click comes along for notepad++) but I've been using notepad++ for a few days now and haven't missed the bulkiness of Aptana one bit.
EDIT (2011.02.15): I'd like to point out that when I wrote this post I was at work on two (2) 17" monitors (no not even widescreen, but who wants 17" widescreen anymore?). However a few days ago I set this up on my home PC with a single 20" widescreen monitor (and much much better resolution options) and Oh my Giddy Aunt! I couldn't believe how Eclipse® like it looks, I almost wept.
EDIT (2011.11.03): I recently revisited the plugins department and I have some more goodness.
#1 while Explorer is handy I find Light Explorer much more to my liking. it uses one window instead of two and seems to be much quicker at launch.
#2 Xbrackets Light - automatically closes a bracket pair when the opening bracket is typed. I had been missing this more than I knew.
#3 Window Manager / File Switcher - both accomplish the same goal, which is to provide a quick way to switch between open files, but File Switcher uses an always detached frame, whereas Window Managers frame can either be detached or attached to the main npp frame. Window Manager allows you to turn off the tab bar which also could be useful. So pick your poison, or do what I do and use both until you can commit to one.
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Long time, no posts
Wow, it's been nearly 4 months since the last post and well, I suppose I'm mostly to blame for that. Dustin moved across the country so he has been understandably too busy to post. I've been crazy-busy at work (Q4 and Q1 are my busy times) and well I've totally let the ball slip.
Having said that, there are some new posts in the works and I'll outline them below just to get you excited about the things to come.
- I've nixed the LinkPosts (too much time, didn't feel they were adding value to the site)
- I'm writing a little post on the CR-48 (yes I have one, thanks Google!)
- Ever wanted to enable cart persistence on Websphere Commerce Enterprise 6.0 and found the help from IC and the PMR you submitted not work in your favor? Yeah me too, but I'll save you 3 weeks and 4 different techs working on the problem with just 3ish simple things to check for total cart persistencery (if your customers don't wipe out their cookies like I do everytime I close Chrome-Fox).
- Instead of LinkPosts I think I'll just write quick little posts on the things I find that could be useful.
As always drop a comment with suggestions, greets, or questions.
~Phil
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WIndows 7 Upgrade Family Pack from Deals.woot
I noticed this a while back and have been trying to remember it for later. apparently windows is offering a 3 license family pack upgrade for $150. So for those of you who are not yet on the latest windows and wanna be, or for those like me who know that it's eminent that we'll have to be there someday (or go *gulp* MAC, or Linux) and figure you might as well do it as inexpesively as possible, check out the link and mark your calendar for Oct. 3
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Quick and Painless file conversion
It's pretty rare that a person needs to convert one file type to another (especially since programs like OpenOffice.org will open just about anything). However today I got a file with a .wps extension, my first thought was 'maybe that's a word perfect' so I tried to open in w/ OpenOffice writer which gave it it's best shot only to come up way short by opening a blank page.
I promptly went to google to find out what extension that is and not only did I find it's an old Microsoft Works file that is no longer used/supported, but I also found a handy website for converting such files (among others) to more user friendly formats.
The site is called zamzar.com, all you do is point your browser there (or click on the link) upload a file and within a few minutes you have an email with a download link to your new file, it's easy, fast and best of all free. You don't even have to create an account, although there is that option. I was so impressed with it I decided to post it here on my favorite tech blog.
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EASEUS, Free Partition Magic-esque tool.
So very recently I had a need for a partition editing tool, and being the tightwad that I am I was looking for a free util that would handle such a task. I decided to give GParted a shot, not because I've been successful with it before but because it seems to be everyone's favorite free partition tool. So I downloaded the ISO and burned the image to a cd, and rebooted to the cd and nothing happened. So I burned the image to a cd with a different image burning util and rebooted the system to the cd... again nothing. So I decided, there has got to be something else that will do this.
Hence I went to my old friend Google, which in a round about way came up with this little pearl, it's called EASEUS Partition Master and it's free for home use. I decided I'd give it a shot figuring I have nothing left to lose ('specially since it was my moms computer not mine 
. Turns out the tool works fantastically. It's been a while since I've used Partition Magic (Magik?) but the interface is much like I remember Partion Magi_ being.
So far I haven't seen any side effects but it's only been 15 min. if any come up I'll post them. If you didn't get that link the first few times here it is again
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The economy tanked and Team Awesome was destroyed
Yesterday we recieved shocking, horrible, soul-destroying news. Team Awesome would be broken apart and fed to the wolves. I am sure this was not an easy decision, and the hours of sleep that were (and are) missed are but a small tribute to the pain that our department now feels. Our company decided that we all needed to cut spending, so four people from our department were shown the hatch. Of the four, we lost Dustin and Ninja effectivly cutting Team Awesome in half. Two others were thrown into the fray, Branden from Ryan's Team, and Ben... our 'one man island party planning genius with flair' (although our customer service dept hired him as an email tech).
We recieved more company emails and heard stories from the other departments (the other MIS team lost 6 people), but some of us are still here, it's just colder and lonelier.
Anyway, here's to Dustin,Ninja, Branden, and Ben. May some karma kick in and get you guys something nice (sound of a lid opening), here's one for me (swig), and four for my homies...
(As a side note, I hope that Dustin, Ninja, Ben, and Branden will continue to post here, because you guys will always be welcome here)
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Songza and it’s alternate friends
So I think I may have posted about Songza here before, and if I haven't, I think I meant to. You see sometimes you're working and thinking to yourself, 'man I really want to hear that song, if only I had it in my extensive mp3/aac collection'. Well Songza is the website for you, as it fills the gaps in your music collection. It's a music search engine so you just type in the band or song name you want to hear and by using some ajax'ery, a list shows up on the page and you can listen to your requested song (it streams through flash, so you need that installed). It is good to point out that Songza does search through YouTube, Google-Video, and the like, so some of the songs will be either live or crappy (read low-bit rate) versions of what you are looking for, but it's great to find that song that you don't have but would really like to listen to.
What makes me post about Songza today? Well this morning I had some Monty Python stuck in my head and I really wanted to hear it ('the bright side of life'). So I tried to go to songza, and it was down! It's back up now, but I really needed to hear that song, so a quick trip to google gave me two alternative sites (the funny thing about this is that songza has merged with both of these sites in its search results, so if songza is down you can get roughly the same selection by visiting these other two sites).
SeeqPod - Pretty much like songza, only I like the light-colors and flash implementation of the player is by far better than songza, and did I mention the lighter colors? I suppose white and orange (heavy on the orange) can grate the nerves every once in a while.
SkreemR - Again pretty much the same thing, only it claims to only carry only non-copyrighted materials... so I suppose you *should* use that one only. I did notice that they employed pop-unders (dirty!) and have quite a few ads. But it's a fairly decent set up, each song result is in its own container with links to find the song on amazon, youtube, etc. The player is a built-in flash player (similar to the one employed here on this site), with a play and mute button.
Of course it's enough for another post, but I highly recommend Pandora and last.fm (not from work, of course, as both sites destroy bandwidth, and IT will cut you off - they had pandora disabled a few months ago) as they will play pretty much what you want to hear (you pick a song/band, then it plays similar songs/bands) or are in the mood for.
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Bendito Techno Remix
Alright, those of us in the office know that when Ben walks in it's time to sing the Bendito song. Well I actually finished this on Monday, but was waiting to clean it up (the song hasn't been mastered yet so it's in a very raw pre-production format). I still need to change some of the levels and do some other audio trickery on it, but since everyone wanted to hear the song, I thought I'd post what I have done now 
.
Bendito - Techno Remix (mixdown - not Mastered):
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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