The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Tag: Tech

  • Bye Bye SWREG

    A little over a year ago I posted about Payment Processors for taking payment for Chef. Shortly thereafter I went ahead and signed up and integrated with SWREG.  Over the past year I have been pretty happy with them regarding the capabilities they provided, as well as their prices – I’ve been able to accept payments for Chef licenses and successfully ship new customers their registration keys without any intervention on my part.

    So why Bye Bye SWREG?  It has come to my attention that they have started doing some shady (at best) things.  In short, they try to upsell my new customers into buying something unrelated to my software – that charges a $9-$10/month recurring fee.  And they make it look like it’s me doing the selling.  I’m ashamed to say that I learned of this just a few months ago but hadn’t gotten around to switching everything out to a competing service.

    Well that changed this weekend.  After some shopping around and some coding, I am now a (trial) user of E-Junkie and have accounts setup and working with both PayPal and Google Checkout.  I hope that I’ve tested everything as thoroughly as I feel like I have and don’t delay getting any new Chef customers their registration keys!

    SWREG and Digital River – goodbye and good riddance.  You’ll be getting no more commission fees from me.   To anyone using Digital River for eCommerce – I urge you to take your money elsewhere.

  • Unit Testing

    I would love some input on this from you fellow developers out there, as this is something I continue to try and improve on… WARNING, CODE BELOW THE BREAK!

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  • Tools of the trade.

    Shoo tossed up a photo of his tools of the trade. Here are mine. The Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (4000!). Best. Keyboard. Ever.

    And the sidekick Dwight.

  • Laptop Woes

    The laptop I bought a year and a half ago is having a display problem. Any video output that’s supposed to be black is actually a bright, vivid green. While it might be pretty, it’s gotta get fixed. When I purchased it, I was offered the 3 year service plan and it was a lot cheaper than expected (80 bucks) so I went ahead and bought it. Hopefully it won’t turn out to be as crappy as Circuit City’s support. Here’s where I hope I don’t regret buying it from Sams Club.

    This afternoon I went online and “registered” my service plan and opened a service claim. Here’s to hoping it won’t take too long to get resolved.

  • Google + Medical Records

    It looks like we’re one step closer to Google being able to search your genes and offer targeted online ads for medicines for your deficiencies!

    Umm, no thanks.

  • We’ve been assimilated

    I was online for the last moment of our Insight Communications internet connection.  At 12:05am we lost connectivity, and as of this morning we are now on the Comcast network: c-98-215-177-37.hsd1.il.comcast.net

  • Vista System Restore

    I know a lot of people that disable the System Restore feature of Windows (XP and Vista), and I just don’t get it.  Whenever an update is applied to the system, a checkpoint is created of the system configuration (some registry keys, services, system dlls, etc.) and if something goes wrong with the update you can quickly rollback to a checkpoint.

    This has saved me on more than one occasion from an errant Windows Update and even regular software install.  Case in point, this morning I went to upgrade my copy of VMWare Workstation 6 from 6.01 to 6.0.2 and the install sat there for 30 minutes before I had to kill it.  That left VMWare in a completely toasted state and wouldn’t start.  Greaaaat.

    After looking around my system, I saw that none of the app’s files had been removed.  It just looked like one (at least) of the services that it depends on was removed from the system (just a registry entries).   Whew, a system restore to a checkpoint of just an hour earlier (due to a Windows Update) fixed the problem and I’m back up and running.

    I highly recommend leaving the System Restore feature turned on.

  • Chef 1.3

    Chef version 1.3 is released!

    The big change in this release was the conversion over to a tag-based system for Categories (both Recipe Categories and Ingredient Categories).  So now instead of going to a separate tab and drag-dropping a recipe into categories, you just type the categries in as a comma-separated list.  For example: “eric’s favorites, desserts, chocolate” will put that recipe into 3 categories that you can then search by.

    The recipe slide show was also updated to make it more usable.  The ingredients are now shown all of the time alongside the directions, with the applicable ingredients highlighted for the current step.

    And as usual there were bug fixes and other small changes here and there.

  • Launchy

    A few days ago Brian introduced me to a little piece of software called Launchy that has quickly displaced my Windows Vista Start Menu Search. It is much quicker than searching with the Vista start menu and has a lot more features.

    It’s like a smart Run window (you know, the window that pops up when you click Start…Run in Windows), where you can do a bunch of different things with it depending on what plugins you have installed. For instance, if I want to quickly check the Weather:

    Alt+Space (to bring up Launchy), type “weather <tab> 62712” to go to weather.com for the 62712 zip code.

    Ever need to do some simple arithmetic, but are annoyed by having to open Calculator?

    Alt+Space (to bring up Launchy), just type in the math you want to do and the calculator plugin will give you the answer.

    It’s also great for opening programs, just start typing the application name. It’ll also learn what you launch most so it’ll take less and less typing as time goes on. It’s even pretty looking, and stays out of your way:

    Launchy

    It’s Open Source and available free of charge, check it out!  It was designed for XP and makes no mention on the website about Vista, but works as designed.

  • Visual Studio 2008 Setup Projects

    This is going to be fairly heavy on the tech side, so you’ve been warned…

    A couple weeks ago I converted the Chef code to Visual Studio 2008 – not a new .net version, just upgraded the solution and project files to the new format so I could start using the new IDE. I ran into just one small problem that was easily fixed when the conversion ran, that being a namespace getting mangled in one of the .designer.cs files that kept the code from compiling clean. Like I said, no biggie.

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