Singapore Web Design Company - SixteenThree

How to Wind Down Your Magazine Business the Cook's Source Way

Dinu — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +800

When Domino's suffered the wrath of the interwebs because two of their staff uploaded videos of them layering snut over pizzas, their president came out and apologized on YouTube to set things straight again.

However, when a small-town magazine invoked the wrath of the interwebs, it not only took almost a week to react, but only put out a self-pitying half-hearted apology of sorts. After three paragraphs rambling about how hurt they were with the online harassement, they said:

Last month an article, “American as Apple Pie -- Isn’t,” was placed in error in Cooks Source, without the approval of the writer, Monica Gaudio. We sincerely wish to apologize to her for this error, it was an oversight of a small, overworked staff.

The staff member in question probably wasn't very small, and also probably wasn't so overworked judging from the length of the email conversations she had with Ms. Gaudio. Half-hearted.

Now someone has hacked their Facebook account, created fake Twitter profiles (yeah, more than one) and their website has been taken down.

Moral of the story? Do not invoke the wrath of the interwebs. But if you, by some series of unfortunate events manage to do so, take the bull by the horns and turn the angry mob in the opposite direction. After Domino's apology, inerweb fury turned on the 2 isolated staff members who did the original offense, instead of on the company.

How I Manged to Reduce the Clutter in My Inbox

Dinu — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +800

A forever-full inbox is the ugly cousin of the internet. Add to that the fact that we have so many apps and devices notifying us whenever a new email arrives, the noise can be deafening. Most times, 90%^[1] of the email I recieved in my inbox was junk. There's no secret ninja trick to getting rid of this. You just have to do some plain old house-keeping.

Step 1:
Filter the heck out of it

I use Google Apps (or Gmail) for email. If you are not you are really missing out. Anyways, Gmail provides the ability to apply rules to incoming email via something called "filters". It may be called different names in other mail clients. So set some rules to automatically delete (or archive) message that you know you don't read (e.g. notification emails that you must recieve).

One filter that will be sure to be of use is this: delete all email which has '‹ADV›' in the subject line.

Step 2:
Unsubscribe Dilligently

Some of the mail I recieve are because I blindly clicked on the "send me your newsletter" checkboxes while signing up on websites, thinking that somehow the barrage of ads would be useful to me (they do a good job of convincing me of that at signup). These sites send email because I opted in, so instead of possibly adding the site to a blacklist by reporting it as spam, and thereby causing some poor marketer misery, I unsubscribe. However, if the email says something like "please reply to this email address with a subject like saying 'I want to unsubscribe'", or if they ask me to login to a site where I have to update my profile settings to unsubscribe, I just skip ahead to step 3.

Step 3:
Report Spam

Yup, use that "Report Spam" button well and often. I find Gmail does a pretty good job of recognizing which emails are spam and which ones are not.

There you go! That's all I did to reduce my inbox clutter by about 80%^[1].

92.5% of all the statistics on this post are made up on the spot.

Hello World!

Dinu — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +800

Woo! This site is so new we're still cutting off the shrink-wrap. Give us some time to flesh it out.

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The task completed with an exit code of (1)

Dinu — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:16:19 +800

In the Installer of one of my applications, I created a a batch file with an AT command to add a task to the Windows Task Scheduler. It all installed fine, but the scheduled task never ran. The error message the task log gave was:

The task completed with an exit code of (1)

After a little bit of frustration, I managed to find the error code definitions for the task scheduler. From the page:

0x0: The operation completed successfully.
0x1: An incorrect function was called or an unknown function was called.
0xa: The environment is incorrect.

To uncover the root of the problem I just ran the command in the task directly in DOS. Problem solved.

The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool

Dinu — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:58:34 +800

This big bad error message kept propping up in the event log. I didn't pay it much attention until an ASP site on the server crashed.

The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool 'App Pool Name' because of the following error: Could not create a Disk Cache Sub-directory for the Application Pool. The data may have additional error codes..

Apparently this turned out to be a permissions problem common to machines that run both a domain controller and an IIS, w-hich is typically what SBS machines do. The solution can be found here

Performance Drop After "Compact and Repair" in Access

Dinu — Thu, 17 May 2007 10:05:24 +800

After doing some modifications to an MS Access accounting system used by a client, the users were complaining that the application had become excruciatingly slow.

After spending some time going through my code, server event logs, and application error logs, I came up empty handed. It was only after reverting back to a backup and retracing my steps that I found the problem started after a "compact and repair" was done on the back-end. Logic seemed to state that doing a compact and repair would boost performance. But in life, all is not as it seems.

This discussion seems to shed some light on the issue. It might have been caused by indexes being reset, or queries having to be recompiled. I still haven't figured out the exact reason for it. But reverting back to the "uncompacted" and "unrepaired" version of the back-end helped to bring performance back to the way it was. So I guess a moral of the story would be "don't fix it if it's not broken."

Please wait while document is prepared for reading

Dinu — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:36:10 +800

Adobe Acrobat Reader is slow enough as it is. Recently it started being slower by showing me this message every time I opened a PDF file: "Please wait while the document is being prepared for reading".

So if my PDF had a lot of pages, it turned out to be an excruciating wait. Especially when I had to close the file and open it again when I needed to check back on it. It'll just repeat the preparation process.

The source of this "not so minor" annoyance is the accessibility plug-in. It prepares the document for screen readers, which most of us never use. Why was this forced on all users I have no idea.

The good news is that you can just move a file named "Accessibility.api" in your plug-ins folder C:Program FilesAdobe[your version]Readerplug_ins to a folder named "Optional" C:Program FilesAdobe[your version]ReaderOptional, and this will all be over with. This folder is the dumping ground for annoying plug-ins like this one.

Where did I find this info? Content Preparation Progress-Adobe Reader (dead link)

Singapore Web Design Company - SixteenThree

How to Wind Down Your Magazine Business the Cook's Source Way

How I Manged to Reduce the Clutter in My Inbox

Step 1:Filter the heck out of it

Step 2:Unsubscribe Dilligently

Step 3:Report Spam

Hello World!

The task completed with an exit code of (1)

The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool

Performance Drop After "Compact and Repair" in Access

Please wait while document is prepared for reading

Step 1:
Filter the heck out of it

Step 2:
Unsubscribe Dilligently

Step 3:
Report Spam