/usr/local.com

Marketing Campaigns

February 26th, 2009 | by | spam

Feb
26

Two days ago, I received a call wanting to take 40 seconds of my time to tell me about a great movie and that this was not a sales call.

Several things pissed me off about this one.

  1. If you are taking the time to focus marketing at me, you’re selling to me. Just cut the BS and move on.
  2. This was my cell phone which is used for work. My company pays for it, its a business line. Luckily, the poor schmuck on the other end of the line decided to end the call after I stated it was a business line. Because I was going to state after that, “This is a business line and you’re 5 seconds away from an ass chewing.” At which point I would teach him words he had never heard of while threatening to do things that I’m pretty sure are illegal in this country as well as most of the Northern Hemisphere.
  3. Do you honestly think I’m going to go to your movie after this “marketing” tactic? I used to fight email spam, the last thing I’m going to do is go to a movie that is promoted through phone spamming.
  4. What the heck happened to the do not call list? My cell number IS on there. Yes, yes, I need to report it for it to do anything, but why haven’t others so these assholes get shutdown

Luckily, Verizon is laying the legal smack down on these jackasses. Thank you Verizon!!!

Comments Closed

Safari 4 Beta – First Impressions

February 24th, 2009 | by | apple

Feb
24

I’ve been messing around with the new Safari 4 Beta release and so far I’m pretty pleased with the browser. There is a bit getting use to some of the new features but overall, I think that they have made some changes for the better.

Here is a run down of the big features:
Top Sites – This is a nice feature that gives you a nice display of the top sites that you visit on a regular basis. You can easily make this your home page by setting your home page preference to topsites://. I know that many of the Mac fanboys are thinking that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I agree it is pretty cool. But I hate to break it to you, Apple copied this one. See Google Chrome

apple's topsites

Cover Flow – The cover flow feature is kind of cool. Its a neat way to go through your history and kind of reminds me of the interface of difference pages on the iPhone. Cover Flow is infecting just about every application on the Mac, whether it really needs it or not.
coverflow

Nitro Engine – Yes, the web engine seems to be faster to me. I’ll be interested to see how the browser handles after running for a week. In the past, Safari has been a memory hog for me. I’m a bit abusive on my web browsers so I’m probably not the “normal” user.

Tabs on Top – This one might take some getting use to. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of having them up there yet. I kind of liked them where they were before. But we’ll give it a week and see what shakes out.
Tabs

Conclusion – I think that the browser is worth taking a look. The interface seems more responsive, it is Acid3 compliant and supports the latest web standards.

1 Comment »

7 things you didn’t know you could do with OpenOffice 3

February 24th, 2009 | by | devdog, rants

Feb
24

Recently, PC Mag ran an article titled OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do. I’ve always been a big fan of Open Office and have found it a nice alternative to shelling out the major bucks for the Office suite from Microsoft.

Here’s the run down of the list.

  1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
  2. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
  3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
  4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
  5. Save files in Office formats by default.
  6. Automate actions easily.
  7. Fix those single quotes.

Looking through the list, #1 seems like a good one, #2 is very useful when digging through old files, #3 wait…what the f*ck?!?

Why is #3 there? Why is that released code? I know that some developers think it is cute to hide easter eggs in their code. I’m not one of them. I believe that code should be lightening fast and this extra crap just annoys the crap out of me. You’re taking up hard drive space and resources. Oh sure, everyone has several terabytes of data on their PCs…not true jackass!

OpenOffice needs to be a serious tool and start leading the word processing, excel, presentation fight. Apple is making a good stab at the Microsoft juggernaut. But the OpenOffice developers need to cut out the crap, optimize the hell out of their code and start kicking ass and taking names!

Comments Closed

Ugly Code

February 14th, 2009 | by | devdog, dumb people, rants

Feb
14

With my recent project, I had to do some research for the bits that make up the msRTCSIP-OptionFlags field in Active Directory for OCS users. There were certain operations that are not 100% supported by HMC so often times you have to fill in the gaps. The definition of this field is as follows:

This attribute specifies the different options that are enabled for the user or contact object. This attribute is a bit-mask value of type integer. Each option is represented by a bit. This attribute is marked for Global Catalog replication.

source

Unfortunately, in my searching I found not only the technet article, but I also found this

Here a sample of some of the code that you’ll find….

if strOptionFlag = "" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "16"

else

‘If user not enabled then do not enable OCS
if strOptionFlag = "0" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "0"
‘If user is enabled for Public IM then keep Public IM enabled and enable RCC
elseif strOptionFlag = "1" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "257"
‘If user is enabled for RCC then keep RCC enabled and enable Enhanced Presence
elseif strOptionFlag = "16" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "272"
‘If user is enabled for RCC and Public IM then keep RCC & PIM enabled and enable Enhanced Presence
elseif strOptionFlag = "17" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "273"
‘If user is already enabled for RCC and Enhanced Presence then keep settings
elseif strOptionFlag = "272" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "272"
‘If user is already enabled for RCC, PIM and Enhanced Presence then keep settings
elseif strOptionFlag = "273" then
objUser.Put "msRTCSIP-OptionFlags", "273"
end if
end if

All I have to say is wow! You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. Are there programmers out there that don’t understand what a bitfield is supposed to be or how to do bitwise operations? That’s like the first freaking class in a Computer Science degree. This is where you learn about Big 0, Binary numbers, loops, variables. If you are a programmer reading this blog and you don’t know what a bit field is and how to us it. Google it, read up, and rid the world of ugly ass code like what I found above.

Now technically what this person is doing would “work” since it is setting the integer with an appropriate number. But wow is this the WRONG way to do it. I’m afraid to see this persons code for when they need to check and see if the RCC bit is set for the user. Technically, they should be able to do a simple bitwise operation and check it something along the lines of:

if(($msRTCSIP-OptionFlags & 0x0010) != 0)
{
// RCC is set
}

I have a feeling that this person is doing for the following:

if(value == 273)
{
X is set
Y is set
Z is set
}
else if(value == 257)
{
Y is set
Z is set
}

This is a very simplistic psuedo-code example. But wow…I’m still in shock that this type of code is out there…and posted somewhat recently in October of 2008!

I really hope I run into this guy some day so I can beat him with the clue-by-4.

Comments Closed

First!

February 10th, 2009 | by | in the news, micro$oft

Feb
10

There are very few times that a company gets to claim that they are first to do something. But today, my project is launching and LightEdge Solutions gets to claim that we are the first service provider to provide this integration. Today we are announcing that we are rolling out our Hosted Office Communication Server 2007 service. The real kicker for this is that we have been able to successfully tie together the hosted OCS system with our hosted Broadsoft phone system. So now when you are on a call, it automatically updates your status so everyone in your company will know not to bother you at that time. This is taking the presence integration to that next level.

I’m pretty proud of my team and the work that we have put in. We had a few obstacles in the road that we had to deal with but the guys came through in a huge way. It wasn’t easy, but the good stuff never is.

Links:
Full Press Release

1 Comment »

Older Posts