Blog

During the course of the day I encounter lots of challenges, some of which take minutes to solve and others that take much longer. My goal for this section is to keep track of these challenges and their solutions. I will turn the longer ones into articles, while the shorter ones will stay as blog entries. You can expect topics to range from very specific programming challenges to broader topics like life.

Below is a list of the recent blog entries. You can also browse the blog by using the tags on the right side, or if you know what you are looking for then you can use the search box at the top right.

The guy who reads your fortune was fired.

I was a little bored so I decided to checkout orkut and saw the following fortune.

Fortune for today :)

Why? I am guessing that because he was fired (as opposed to quitting), he was probably not good at his job? 🙂

Business Cards

First version of our business cards 🙂 What do you think?

My ShopFiber business card :)

Why .7?

Is it just me or Windows is confused when I ping 192.168.6.11 and it complains about 192.168.6.7 not being reachable? (see screenshot below)

Why complain about 192.168.6.7 when I try to ping 192.168.6.11?

No SharedView for you!

I am loving Windows 7 so far, but, unfortunately, SharedView refuses to install. I even tried it under “Windows Vista” compatibility, but no luck.

SharedView installer saying no :(

“This program is not support on this version of Windows.”

How to turn off Secure Desktop in Windows 7

To disable the Secure Desktop in UAC elevation prompts in Windows Vista you had to go through group policy editor and dig into several nodes to find it, Windows 7 changes this by making it part of the UAC settings. In Windows 7 you can get to it by…

  • Start > type in “UAC”
  • Select “Change User Account Control settings
  • By default the slider would be at “Default – Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer”

Default UAC setting

  • To disable the Secure Desktop for elevation prompts move this slider down one so you see “Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer (do not dim my computer)”

Move the slider down to disable the Secure Desktop on elevation prompts

Getting TweetDeck 0.21 to install

If you are installing the latest version (0.21) version of TweetDeck and keep getting the following message…

The application could not be installed because the AIR file is damaged. Try obtaining a new AIR file from the application author.

Make sure that you have at least Adobe Air 1.5 installed. After installing AIR 1.5 if TweetDeck installation still gives you the above error then first install TweetDeck 0.20. Afterwards when you run it, it will tell you that an upgrade is available, go ahead and install. The upgrade should work now. Congratulations, you are on the latest version! 🙂

Windows 7 Available for Download on January 9

Windows 7 Beta will be available for public download on January 9th on the Windows 7 website. Interestingly, it will only be available to the first 2.5 million people. Let’s see if I will be one of them 🙂 For more information checkout Brandon’s post on the Windows blog.

Slicehost vs. Linode? Or x86-64 vs x86-32?

Reading this post by David Welton it seems that Slicehost’s choice of x86-64 architecture wasn’t a good choice. x86-64 is supposed to have performance advantages, but David’s results are not showing any (in fact it seems proportionally slower). I am interested to see what Slicehost says about these results.

It is official

Today I informed my remaining customer that I am departing from Epic. This marks the start of my official departure from Epic and the start of my journey as an entrepreneur. What’s next for me, you ask. I am going to be concentrating my energy on ShopFiber. ShopFiber is an exciting new service that will help you be a better online shopper and allow you to easily connect with your friends. For more information about ShopFiber make sure to checkout our blog. I will continue to blog on this site, but most of my energy will be focused on ShopFiber.

Oh, and by the way, I will be attending the Future of Web Apps conference in February. I am excitedly looking forward to that conference because I finally get to see and possibly meet some of the people that are the “voice of internet” (Michael Arrington, Joel Spolsky, etc.). Hope to see you there!

svn status -u

This is a very useful command if you are using subversion for version tracking. I just found out about the -u flag last week and I am loving it. It tells you exactly how an svn update would affect your working copy. This way you can decide whether you want to update to trunk with confidence. Previously there were times when I would update to the latest version only to realize that merging my code would take a little time, now I run this beforehand and decide whether to proceed right now or wait till I have more time. Enjoy 🙂