Tired of the McCain Spam
October 17, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Marketing, Puter Stuff, Religion, Squirrels, gnash-teeth
Tags: Marketing, McCain, NOSPAM, Obama, porn, spamming
I’ve been receiving many unsolicited emails (spam) from the McCain camp spammers. First a bit of background so you can really appreciate this as much as I do.
Years ago I created NOSPAM@mydomain.org as an account that obviously was meant for spamming. I only used it once to register for a respected site. Girl on girl porn I think… In any case as a mockery the account is clearly called NOSPAM and was entered in capital letters.
- Obviously the McCain camp has purchased email addresses to spam… or “market to”. Now some of you might not think that’s a big deal. I think, like most intelligent people, that’s not an appropriate method of marketing. Certainly not for a governmental job candidate. Well here is where it gets worse.
- They’re sending spam to someone who isn’t registered to vote. It’s not like they got my name and email address from a valid voter registration list and are reminding me to vote. You still think it’s okay to send me this unsolicited email?
- They’re sending spam to someone who can not vote. That’s right, I’m not allowed to vote. (Weird rules about killing a roomful of Nuns making me a felon or some such nonsense.)
There’s only one job I’ve been at where the marketing was done this poorly. Why bother to actually know your customer base when you can use the buckshot-spaghetti method. Shoot often and see what sticks.
Well in this case it’s not sticking no matter how many emails you send me.
Note: This post wasn’t an endorsement for either presidential candidate nor does it reflect anything other than my contempt for people that fancy themselves as “marketers” and for those that hire them in the private and non-private sectors.
Wordpress iPhone App
October 12, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: Puter Stuff, Techy, Web Design & Dev, iPhone
Tags: iPhone Apps
Just installed the Wordpress iPhone application, free via the App Store.
Configuration was straight forward - URL, username & password. It allows me to select my categories, enter tags, add photos, and preview the post. Not too shabby.
The menu functions at the bottom of the screen disappeared and the buttons at the top of the screen to save didn’t appear. Which prevented me from saving this post. I exited and then restarted the application, the app had saved/recovered the post for me and now the appropriate buttons are displaying. Well done.
Trying to upload a picture from my iPhone timed out, second time the app became unresponsive and I had to restart it. This however appears to have been caused by my wifi connection being dropped.
[this is a picture of two sign letters from a previous company I hung on the wall of my office]
And there you go, my first post with this app.
I’m Advertisment For Macworld Expo
October 8, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
6comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Marketing, OSX, Picture of the Day, Puter Stuff, Travel, Web Design & Dev, iPhone
Tags: Advertisement, Macworld Expo
A friend of mine pointed out that the latest Macworld Conference & Expo emails being sent out showcase a dashing Latino. Second from left (is me) and a friend of mine (far right) along with two guys I met there. See my Macworld post from last year when this photo was taken. I believe I was demonstrating to the lads how to circumvent some sort of authentication or security, who can remember such details.
[Click on the image to see the full size image]
Obviously Steve Jobs is trying to appease the Castle in the hopes I’ll accept a job offer. Keep at it Steve, you’re not there yet.
Every Business Needs A Website
August 17, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: Marketing, Puter Stuff, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
Tags: Business Websites, getting online, its not the 70s anymore, the pain
I’m incredibly tense, my shoulder feels like its trying to secede from my body. So here I am searching for massage places in Whatcom County. There’s a ton of smaller businesses (no doubt one person operations), that have no website. At this point I just want to find who’s open on a Sunday, price and driving distance are not concerns right now. I’ve already called a few places, had to listen to their stupid answer machines for a few minutes until they get to the part about what days and hours they’re open. Completely and utterly a waste of my time. Bastards.
Their website only needs a few pieces of information and then I wouldn’t be more tense.
- Hours of operation.
- Address
- Phone number
- Name of business
- Misc fluff - rates, credentials, pictures, blah blah.
A domain can be purchased for about $10 at godaddy.com Bluehost can provide web hosting for $6.95/month. Almost any word processor can save as HTML. Hell write it in plain text for all I care. You publish in the phone book so why not online? Trade a massage for help from one of the geeks or friends, or a family member if you’re too cheap.
Sigh. I’m seriously tense.
Twas the night before iXmas
July 11, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, Friends, OSX, Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, iPhone
Tags: 2.0, hacked, IM, iPhone, itunes, jailbreak, jivetalk, remote, social networking
About half an hour ago (current time 12:53 AM), mi amigo David McInnis sent me a link with instructions on how to upgrade the first generation iPhone to iPhone 2.0 software. Of course being on the cutting edge is what we do; so having read his email from my iPhone I quickly powered up the laptop and had at it. Last thing he said before signing off iChat was he hoped his phone rebooted. His Mac may have crashed too, who knows. The iPhone 3G will be going on sale in a few short hours around the U.S. and I know David is going to head down early to grab one. I’m afraid getting up early is out of the question for me, since I tend to not be able to fall asleep until the wee hours, so with any luck he’ll buy an extra one for me.
Earlier today I installed the latest iTunes update. Now after downloading the 2.0 iPhone software and installing it on my iPhone I’m waiting for the 8GB of content to re-sync. This is going to take awhile.
iTunes has the App Store up and running and as mentioned in the above linked article from Wired, there’s already more than 550 apps and of those 135 free ones. I took a quick peek at what’s being offered that’s free and I’m not impressed. Several of the applications have been out for months if you had a hacked iPhone.
- The AIM app doesn’t seem that impressive, regardless I’m not interested in having multiple instant messaging applications. A single multi-protocol application is what I need. So it looks like for the mean time I’m going to keep using JiveTalk (from BeeJive) even though it’s web based.
- Checking out the Social Networking category - nothing off hand that’s lifting my skirt up. A Facebook app? Their iPhone version of the website is pretty good as is. MySpace - not interested. Several Twitter apps, but again the Twitter iPhone page I find sufficient (though I tend to tweet via SMS anyways) assuming they’ve managed to keep their site up.
- Under the Productivity category there looks like one or two (just looking at the names, too lazy to really investigate) that might be worth checking out. Prices are ranging here from 0.99 - 9.99 - one of the apps for 0.99 cents I already have for free - Voice Recorder.
- In the Entertainment section, a free app called Remote sounds nifty. It alledgedly allows you to control iTunes on your computer or on your AppleTV from your phone. That’s worth checking out. The free Movies app also looks promising, I use the iPhone site of Fandango a lot, so I’m expecting similar functionality. Or perhaps a tie in like the Movies Widget on my laptops dashboard which allows me to watch the previews and trailers right there as well as find and purchase tickets via Fandango.
I’m sure future offerings will become more diverse and useful once developers have more time to develop applications. My initial reaction to the apps available is a resounding “meh”. I’ll post more once I’ve had time to check some of the out, but I’m not paying for anything on here unless it makes my Jesus Phone speak in tongues or something.
Update: 1:38am - All my icons are messed up and out of order. I just tried the App Store…app from my iPhone and a couple issues.
- Remote - the app I mentioned previously. There’s no obvious download button. There was the word Free, which I tapped on, but my initial reaction was to search the page for a “download” or “install” link of some kind.
- The App Store asked for my iTunes password, all the letters are rendered as ***** like most people expect. However, the last letter of my password was not rendered as a *.
This Remote app is sweet. Easy setup, can browse my iTunes library on this laptop, control the volume, shuffle songs all the usual features. Very cool. Can’t wait to try it on my AppleTV. (That would mean getting up and I’m too tired for that.)
trinity too skinny
June 21, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Picture of the Day, Puter Stuff, Squirrels
Tags: matrix, trinity
Heee. This squirrel is awesome.
iPhone Scratches
June 17, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
3comments Categories: Castle, gnash-teeth, iPhone
Tags: iPhone, scratched screen
Grrr. I’ve dropped my iPhone many times, broken a few cases too. Yesterday though, I was butter fingers Supremo and it landed face down. There’s now a few little scratches, right in the middle of the screen. It’s so annoying. I think I’m going to give the toothpaste trick a try or maybe take it to a glass shop to see if they can buff it out. Bastards.
Cross Over Cable Cheat Sheet
June 14, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Picture of the Day, Puter Stuff
Tags: cheat sheet, cross over, ethernet
For the techies like me that never can seem to remember in what order the wires go in when crimping your own Ethernet cables, here’s a handy cheat sheet.
The New Leaf
June 9, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, Fitness, Puter Stuff
Tags: fat, fire, gym, happiness here i come, sleepless & worrying, tanning
So this morning I did something really different. I actually got up. As in out of bed. Then it was into the shower, got dressed, then got my coffee. I haven’t done that in a loooong time. And I actually sat at my desk today instead of geeking from my bed. I also refrained from answering emails from my iPhone while still under the covers. My morning emails tend to be more incoherent than normal when I only have one eye open. I can’t say I was anymore productive, but the shower definitely woke me up.
Around 1pm today a small “mall” (a large building with shops, bank & a restaurant) in downtown Lynden caught fire (pictures are here). Several blocks were cordoned off, at least six different fire departments were on hand, it was pretty intense. So much so that the power was cut off for the surrounding blocks, including mine. Which meant no Internet.
I took this opportunity to head to the gym. I threw myself in the microwave for another 7 minutes and got all toasty. Then it was off to this peddle machine-thingy. I worked out on the machine for 60 minutes and went an estimated 20+ miles. I burned 266 calories and it kept my heart rate above 121, according to the built in monitor. My legs were shaking after that. The first thing I wanted afterward was a McDonalds cheeseburger. Instead I headed to the deli and had them make me a healthier sandwich with some water.
It’s now about 8:40pm and I’m completely exhausted, hopefully I’ll crash soon and get an early start on my morning. It’s been pouring rain, a gray sky eyes kinda day. But I’ve managed to stay positive despite this and one way or another I’m going to stay this way.
Update 4am: Going to bed at 9pm with worries on your mind makes sleeping pretty hard. I passed out for a few hours, but had weird dreams that kept waking me up. Life at 4am sucks. I don’t think I’ve ever had a good time at this hour. When I used to stay up till this time, I was always feeling exhausted and sick from drinking too much. Or getting up this early to make it to the airport to catch a flight was never fun either. I don’t think my ability to pretend everything is alright in the world starts until much later in the day. Of course that’s many a sleepless hour from now. 
Zend Framework: No File Upload
June 8, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
5comments Categories: Puter Stuff, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
Tags: forms, frameworks, php, zend
My latest realization is that even though Zend Framework is version 1.5, it has absolutely no support in Zend_Form for file uploads.
Again, this seems to be a very common requirement for a web application which is not included. This limitation does not appear to be mentioned in the documentation either. I ended up searching through some forums to discover that it’s not implemented yet.
WTF?
Version 1.5 - Framework. Yeah.
Update:
Wil Sinclair of the Zend Framework responded in the comments about the necessity and difficulty of balancing what to include within the framework and the ability to keep it flexible. While I can appreciate this, I have to wonder why include input type password, or what about textarea instead of input type file. Why even create Zend_Form then?
To be clear I am not suggesting that a class be built to support file uploading, processing, saving, renaming and such. Simply that I am surprised that Zend_From does not appear to have support for input type=’file’ in the version 1.0-1.5 release. A web development framework should include the basics at least - Password, Text, Checkbox, Radio, File, Textarea, Submit.
Zend Framework includes plenty of classes for extraneous things like -
Zend_Service: Akismet, Amazon, Audioscrobbler, Delicious, Flickr, Nirvanix, Simpy, StrikeIron and Yahoo!
While I appreciate that these (and others) are included, and will no doubt make use of them as time goes on, surely those should all be secondary to some basics. To me, even (Zend_)PDF creation and (Zend_)Feed processing would be secondary to something as rudimentary as Zend_Form with the ability to select a file by version 1.0.
Not to say I’m not appreciative of the work that’s been done and the flexibility it provides me, I did after all choose it over the other frameworks I’ve mentioned in a previous post. It’s not as if I can’t write my own either, but simply that I find the absence of full disclosure in the documentation as well as the absence of this seemingly basic thing to make me say, WTF?
If I’ve missed it and it’s in a 14pt, bold font, blinking, marquee on the documentation page, then I humbly apologize. If it’s on a wiki or roadmap somewhere then I suggest you move it on over to the documentation pages where I’m looking at usage examples.
I’ll continue to post my grievances and no doubt eventually praise as I muddle through learning how to use this framework, so stay with me.
