Not Bad, not the twenty Mps I want, but not bad

Testing my cable internet connection.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1728614444.png

Jan25 snap of the front page

I’m working on an ecommerce site for a nursery in Grand Forks. It has been quite a challenge so far, going through all the spaghetti code and determining what everything is meant to do. Scoping out the project has been, both fun and aggravating. Should I use a framework? should I write it all myself? Should I use a different language? It is enough to set a persons head to spinning.

The choices so far…

• PHP with mysql.
• Procedural over OO
• custom over framework

I am under a time crunch now, and hope to have this whole thing done in the next month. I know… famous last words! On the next iteration I want to use codeignitor, but so far my experiments with it have been failures. When I have more time to learn it I’ll revisit the framework.

That’s it for now, gotta do some work!!

I’ve recently started using Google+ and after a couple weeks, I’ve come to really like it.

So far I’m very impressed with the clean design of Google+, the other sites are too cluttered and trying too hard to get my attention. I appreciate being able to clarify my thinking and take my time to digest the stream rather than rush through as it scrolls past. This is further enhanced by judicious use of the circles.

Sharing pictures is a slam dunk, straight from my phone to picassa and bingo we are here. I can do the same with facebook, but google seems to do it a little faster (I didn’t measure, so just a feeling). I also like the ability to share or not as the images go up, for me that is the game changer.

I certainly hope that this gains the traction that it deserves unlike wave(too isolated) and buzz(too noisy).

ok that’s about it for now.

Dear Telus Customer

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To ensure that your service is not interrupted, Please Update Your Billing Information Today by Clicking on the link below:

Update Billing Information Now! <- – I’ve deleted the link, but it definitely was not a link to Telus.

Copyright © 2011. TELUS Communications Company

I use my macbook to develop using php and mysql. I had it all set up when I had osx 10.5 and it all worked great. Once I upgraded to 10.6 things changed for the worse. A couple months after the upgrade, I noticed that mysqld  was crashing or refusing to start altogether. I thought that perhaps it just needed and upgrade and so I installed mysql 5.5.09 32 bit for osx 10.6 in hopes of fixing the problem. Result…. NADA! couldn’t get it to go. Had the security warning come up saying that it didn’t have privileges and the osx was disabling it. A hunt on the net revealed several others having the same problem. I tried all the hacks: Chown the mysql dir, changed my.cnf, changed mysql.server, etc…. Still couldn’t get mysqld to establish a PID. Several uninstalls and reinstalls later, and I was totally defeated. The easy built in solution is now unworkable, but all is not lost.

Enter MAMP!! short for Mac, Apache, Mysql and PHP. The solution is so simple and easy. Download the package, install and bam! I now have a working dev environment again. I has an easy to use web based interface and comes complete with phpMyadmin and several other tools that make configuration very easy. For anyone having the same issues, I hardily recommend this solution. Oh did I forget to mention that its free?

Have a nice day

Paypal will NEVER send you an email like this. NEVER click on a link in one of these emails. If you have doubt, login to your account the normal way and check it out.

HTC Desire from Telus

I’ve always seen the pod people poking at their phones in a seemingly blissful state. I admit to being envious, for they seem to get way more out of their devices than I could ever wring out of mine. Most of my problem came from bad timing ie: the iPhone came to Telus three months after I locked into the LG Dare. I normally surf the back side of the bleeding edge, but now I’m getting closer to the edge.

I’ve had this phone for 6 days now, and I must say that I am infatuated. The ability to effortlessly access all my social stuff and shoot and share pictures to various places, like FaceBook, Evernote, and Dropbox is beyond compare. I’ve spent several hours trolling for apps in the market and elsewhere, and I’ve even caught myself fondling it with a strange affection. There is a lot of fun inside this device, but I don’t want that to be the “be all and end all” of it. I bought this phone to increase my productivity and improve the service I provide to my clients.

The killer app on this phone is the mobile hot spot. I can now connect easily to the internet with my laptop and get stuff done when I’m not near an open wifi. If you’ve read my earlier posts about the Huawei internet stick, you know that I’ve had some problems with this sort of thing, so it’s really refreshing when I can get things to connect with no problems!  I can now be more flexible in my business. There will still be balance issues between life and work, but I think I have that figured out.

Anyways, I’ll write more about these adventures as I go along.

CAMERAS TO CUT DRIVER ASSAULTS

More cameras are coming to TransLink’s bus fleet. The first $3-million phase of the installation had cameras installed on most trolley buses in 2009.

In the next $6-million phase, 600 cameras will be installed on the rest of the trolleys and some diesels, compressed natural gas and hybrid buses bought since 2006. Assaults on trolley drivers dropped to 20 in 2010 from 40 in 2009 on a year to date comparison.

Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/people+killed/3686794/story.html#ixzz13DpYV9Yg

Now, a lot of people might just skim over this and carry on, but the numbers caught my eye immediately. $6 MILLION!!! for 600 cameras, that is $10,000.00 per camera installed. How on earth can these numbers make sense. $3 million has already been spent on the project, so I assume that the data collection network has already been built, so all that is needed is to tie the new cameras into it and maybe increase data capacity.

The questions I want answered are: Who is running this project? and where did they source the cameras? and what planet are they living on?

There has to be a problem here, care to weigh in on this?

The worst Internet stick for the Mac

The Huawei E182E 3G internet stick DOES NOT work with Mac OSX. The hardware is fine, but the drivers are horrible! I was able to get it to work on my pc, and it worked fine. On my intel mac book it would crach if I went anywhere close to gmail. It also threw so many errors that my system log ballooned to a gigabyte within minutes of connecting, one of the processors goes from 35% to 100% and stays there fore the duration.

Talking to the rep at my local telus store reveals that he has heard reports of the same problem from all his clients that have macs. Hmmm, can this be a trend? Talk to Telus tech support, on the otherhand, and there is nothing wrong, and I must be crazy. All I can get from tech support is the script and corporate line. They are no help. Huawei is no better, claiming that the issue is NOT known. They are going to put out an upgrade, for what exactly? and when?

Well, I’ve finally received the antenna that I ordered for the huawei E182E 3g internet stick.  I’m hoping that it will solve the nasty crash issue that this modem has when I’m on the edge of the network range. Sitting at Home I’ve found the connection to be strong. I’ll test it at work tonight to see what gives.  IT Didn’t work. In fact the antenna port broke soon after trying it.

This was tested from my home in Gibsons

I’m still having problems with the log files. The software is throwing Java exceptions like crazy, and can’t write to its log files correctly. This causes a flood of console messages on my mac. I’ haven’t found any real references to this problem on the net, I hope this post will spur some one to comment on their similar problems.

I had to replace my first key as, it was defective. It kept crashing my macbook… I know! hard to do, but it was doing it. This second one has crashed me twice now, but has been a trooper for about twenty minutes so far. we’ll see.

I’ll keep you posted.