Author Archives: Laz

Awesome Source Code Library

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OK, boys and girls, I have a really cool treat for you.  For a long time now I have been looking for the right application to use as a source code library.  I say application because I have been trying to be open minded about what to use.  I have tried Wiki’s (which actually aren’t too bad), note taking programs, and a great many other tools, including a couple that were specifically written to be source code libraries … but in the end fell quite short of my expectations.  Also, when I say source code library, I am not and have not been looking for tons of canned code to take advantage of, that’s the problem I have now, 20+ years in IT and I already have tons of code, I just need a way to store it, sort it, search it, export it, back it up, and anything else I can think of!  I’d like to note too that in addition to all of the other features I may list here, this tool does a superb job at syntax highlighting as well.

Let me digress for a moment to mention a site called Donation Coder (www.donationcoder.com), these guys are great!  Lots of free software from some really talented developers.  There are some apps there that beat their commercial competition by a country mile, hands down.  That’s one reason why I like to hang out there, in the forums for example, these guys write software because they enjoy writing software.  Therefore they create some wicked cool stuff.

How does this pertain to the issue at hand?  Well, it was in the forums there that I ran across a thread where people were talking about their own search for a source code library much like my own search.  I found one post among others recommending different things that mentioned a free tool called “Developer’s Tips & Tricks (DTT)” from Freesoftland.  I had never heard of this group before, but I liked what I had seen posted in the Donation Coder forums, plus I really liked what I saw when reading up on their DTT tool.

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Visual Basic dot NET – Making a button the form default

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Here is a quick tip for any and all of you VB slimming pills that work.NET heads out there.  Need to make a button on your form the default one to fire off when you hit the enter key (while that form has focus naturally)?  In the old days, it was a button property, and now it has become a form property.  It actually kind of makes sense when you think about it.  I mean, you can only have one default button on a form, right?  Anyway, go to the properties of the form in question and look for an option called “AcceptButton”.  This will be a drop down list comprised of all the buttons that have been placed on the form.  Pick the one you want as the default and there you have it, your button is ready to go!  Hope that helps …

Love the iPhone, but not the battery life?

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That’s me!  I love my iPhone, but I don’t consider myself to be one of those blinder wearing fanbois either.  I have had various and sundry mobile phones over the years, with one of the best being my Motorola Timeport.  That thing lasted me five years and could still get better reception than anything else around it.  To bad it finally came apart one too many times for me to put back together, gravity is a bitch lemme tell ya.  Anyway, I made the move into “smart” phones with a Blackberry (didn’t everyone else when they came out? LOL).  I had, had PDAs before, but this was my first adventure with a PDA/phone combination and I was hooked, I mean I loved it.  I went through several Blackberry models both at work and with my personal ones.  Including a stint with a Blackberry storm at work, man did that thing suck, it was awful.  I had wanted an iPhone and had almost gotten one back in my Blackberry days, but I really figured that they were all pretty much the same.  Boy was I wrong!  I finally switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone (3GS) and I am never going back.  It is an amazing work of art, both the hardware and the software that goes with it, although I am not a big fan of iTunes (not on a PC anyway).  Even when I compare it to the Droid side by side, I just don’t see the iPhone killer that everyone talks about.  However, that discussion is for another day.

I said all that to say this, the one thing that does bring me down a bit about the iPhone is the battery life.  I know, you thought I was gonna say AT&T but that’s not a bad thing either, I already had AT&T and the service is great, way better than Verizon, and the prices are nice too.  No, the only thing weak on my iPhone is the maybe 24 hour lifespan of the battery.  My Blackberry Curve that I had could go a freakin’ week on a charge, it was awesome!  So, to help this, I just ordered a nifty little product called a Mophie Juice Pack Air.  It’s essentially a hard shell case for the iPhone with a battery incorporated inside that is supposed to double my battery life.  While not a week, I’ll take 48 versus 24 hours any day.  Once I get the little rascal, I’ll put up a proper review for anyone who might be interested.  If you have one, or have used one, drop a comment and let me know what you thing about it.  There are a few options available nowadays, but this one seemed like the best fit for me, and the prices have come down a lot compared to when they first hit the street.

So, check back in a  few days, and hopefully I’ll have a cool review and maybe some pics too for ya.  Later …

Beware World of Warcraft Cataclysm Beta Opt In Scam

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In yet another new and trendy spammer and phishing ploy, I have been getting a few copies of a message claiming to be from Blizzard regarding Beta access to the Cataclysm expansion coming out soon.  This one did give me pause at first because I am signed up for the Beta, waiting to see if I get in.  Luckily, I noticed some blatant signs when I inspected the message.  The biggest thing was not only the Cataclysm website they wanted to send you to for account information harvesting being wrong, as in the wrong URL (not even close LOL), but I received several of these and they had different URLs between them.  One other thing was that I received this to several email addresses, none of which were the one actually associated with my WoW account.  Obviously these guys (or gals?) are carpet bombing and hoping they snag a few of the 10 or 12 million or so WoW players.  Just wanted to pass this on, be on the lookout if this fits you in any way!  In the words of Mad Eye Moody “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!”

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Don’t count on Corel for support

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Thought I would pass this along for anyone wishing to part with some of their hard earned duckets for some software and expected some type of semblance of support from the company that makes it.  I purchased a product for video editing from Corel called Ulead Video Studio (I guess they bought Ulead like they bought Jasc with Paint Shop Pro).  Now, the product is pretty nice when it works, I say when it works because it’s always been fairly buggy but reliable enough that I didn’t complain.  At the very least it always installed fine when I had to rebuild my machine after Windows decided eating itself was a good idea or something of that nature.  That is until today … when the actual install completes, but it will not accept my product key saying that it is incorrect.  At first I thought it was just one of those situations where I have installed it enough times that I have to have a counter reset somewhere before it will activate again or something like that.  I noticed also though, that no patches would install either, saying that it couldn’t find the product installed on my system anywhere.  That was pretty odd I thought, maybe it’s a Windows 7 thing, who knows.  Either way, even though my product is a couple years old, it wasn’t cheap and we aren’t talking in depth support here (at least on the surface), I just need to activate the thing.  So, I go to Corel’s web site and log in, go to the support section, fill out the long ass form with technical details, hardware specs, screen shots, and lots of other stuff.  It was a pretty involved form, but that’s OK, it will help get the problem resolved right?  Wrong.  I couldn’t even submit the form to get an email to the support staff, I was instead immediately presented with a message that any product that is too old, which they define as more than two versions back, cannot be supported.  That’s it, zip, nada, nil, nothing.  I can’t even ask the damn question.  All I want to do is activate my software that I bought and paid for, and instead I get snubbed and told to go away.  I can tell you one thing for sure, aside from the fact that I will figure this out on my own, and that is I won’t be purchasing any more products that have anything to do with Corel again.  They put out new versions at a frenetic pace, and now I know why.  I had wondered in the past why they released new versions of their software with only seemingly minor changes at the rate of one to three per year.  I think I have my answer you could check here.  That being said, beware you don’t get stuck like I did.

Watch out for SPAM and PHISH(ing)

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I have written before about spam and phishing attacks, but I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit this topic since there seems to be a concerted effort by senders out there to blast our collective Inboxes with not only hideous amounts of spam (which is bad enough), but also with a whole new class of phishing emails.  I get tons of them “from” Amazon (that’s where the phrase Spamazon came from!), Newegg, Bank Of America, PayPal, and eBay just to name a few.  Basically, they are likely to send one of these phishing emails from pretty much any online e-commerce type of store that they think the can trick someone with.  That’s why you have to be careful and check these messages out thoroughly!  Because the ones I have been getting lately have been really, really well done.  They have been pretty hard to tell from the real thing.

The idea here is that the phisher will send you something from … let’s use Amazon, saying that your order went through successfully and your credit card was charged X amount of dollars.  Well, you look at that and right away know you didn’t order anything recently (or maybe you did, but the amount charged shows different from what you just ordered) and it makes you think that someone maybe got into your credit card account or your Amazon account maybe.  You feel that rush of excitement and fear as your mind starts doing the mental tally of how much money you are losing for every second that ticks off.  So you immediately click the link in the email so you can log into your account at Amazon and see just what the heck is going on.  Only, that link you just clicked isn’t taking you to Amazon, the phisher sends you to his own web page that looks like Amazon and is counting on that excited fear feeling to get you to rush into action without thinking.  Once you are on the version of Amazon that the phisher sends you to, you try to log in.  You might get an error or the phisher might go ahead and re-direct you to the real Amazon now, it doesn’t really matter because he has what he wants.  He now actually does have your username and password that he just snagged from you attempting to log in at the fake site.  Plus, if you use the same password for a bunch of different sites, he now has your password and probably username for those as well!!!

In a case like I described above, be sure to take a deep breath and act calmly.  Even if you are sure that the email really is from Amazon, open up your web browser and go to Amazon directly and then log in there to check your account, where you can be sure that it really is the correct site.  When you get these suspect emails, check them out closely because as good as I have seen them, there is always something that isn’t exactly right.  For example, when I get a legitimate email from Amazon it will start with a greeting that includes my name.  In the fake but really good one, one thing that stood out was the greeting was to my email address and not my name.  Another was that there was a total dollar amount for the order, but no itemized list.  The real ones from Amazon always have an itemized list.  So, keep an eye out and use your head and you’ll be just fine.  Be safe!!