Posts

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Super Talent 4GB Flash Drive

About a week ago I decided that my 256mb flash drive wasn’t cutting it anymore. I got myself a Super Talent 4GB for $18 off of supermediastore.com.

The Drive was as promised and the reviews were fairly accurate. But…

1) the darn thing is too small, it really doesn’t hit you that it is too small and hard to keep track of until after you get it in your hands
2) the shiny outer sleeve fits rather loosely so the plastic gets exposed frequently straight out of the box
3) the plastic casing should actually be metal because its obvious it can be broke if handled wrong or from a serious drop to a hard surface
4) it’s write speed is super, super slow; this is especially true for folders with many small files

I’d have to say my biggest complaint is the write speed on it. It takes me 1-2 hours to write about a 1GB of data onto it. Other than that, I partially alleviated all the minor design problems with a paper clip and some shrink tubing.

Review Thoughts: Rating (3/5), that means don’t buy it. Super Talent offers a more stable looking metal drive… but the speeds are the same… 😡

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Get Connected with Trillian

For years now, I have been plugged into the net. Through out my college years I have always stayed connected with friends and colleagues using an alternative other than a phone. You guessed it, I used an instant messenger. Up to this day, I have been puzzled to no end as to why people (friends and family mostly) only use one messenger type.

For example they would either use:

Yahoo Messenger,
AIM, or
LIVE (former MSN) Messenger.

Using only one limited their “friends” base because some people will have only AIM, etc. So they either had to convince everyone they knew to sign up with their messenger of choice or not chat with them at all.

Reason for my babbling?… Don’t limit yourselves, use a multiple protocols chat client. Something like Trillian from CERULEAN STUDIOS, its my chat client of choice. Trust me, it’ll do you more good than anything. And its free. Link? Click Here.

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Zonealarm Blocking ALL Websites

Yesterday, one of my computers couldn’t access the internet. The weird thing was, I had done nothing to it and all my other computers we still able to access the net. So after half an hour of troubleshooting, I decided to wait things out.

Today, July 9, 2008, I still couldn’t get to any websites with it. So, I did a little more trouble shooting and found that the culprit was my firewall, ZONEALARM. It was blocking all my internet connections.
I search the web for a while using these sets of keywords and found nothing:

zonealarm blocking all websites
zonealarm blocking internet connection
zonealarm block all sites

Until I used these keywords:

zonealarm no internet access

And found a post which helped me temporarily resolve my connection issues, click here.

As explained in the thread: the problem was a mix of a Microsoft Update (KB951748) and Zonealarm. So if you are using Zonealarm Free per my suggestion, temporarily set your Zonealarm internet security to “Medium” until Zonealarm fixes this issue. Oh, and the reason it was only one of my computers experiencing the issue is because it was the only one I set to “Automatically update Microsoft Updates”.

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Recipient Name

Well, I just released a new contribution that I think everyone needs…

Its an extension to the /admin/orders.php page in osCommerce. It needed yet more useful information. What more do you want?

The recipient name (in the osCommerce DB its aka delivery_name) was a recent necessity for a client because he couldn’t find an order. The recipient knew who sent it but the sender [customer] also sent to many other persons. The only way to find that specific order was by looking into each order the sender made.

This contribution was a work-a-round for that type of dilemma, but again it seemed useful so I released it as a contribution, click here.

Oh, it’s easy install. all you have to do is edit a few lines in /admin/orders.php

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Finding/Editing BOX_WIDTH

I spent some time looking for BOX_WIDTH because I needed to change the width of my admin boxes. It’s where you’d expect it but it isn’t so obvious…

Public viewable boxes…

/includes/application_top.php
~line 61

Admin boxes…

/admin/includes/application_top.php
~line 52

BTW, your lines might be different depending on your version of osCommerce.

Happy Coding,
Thuan

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Bad Godaddy Customer Service Again

The theme seems to be consistent and not changing any time soon: Godaddy has bad customer service. Just today May 5, 2008, I messed up and deleted my one and only hosting account from Godaddy. What? Yeah, I read too fast. 🙁 Anyways, luckily it was an account that had not been fully setup and in it’s developmental stage. It would have been nice to get the all the files (I had some) back but not all.

Forget asking Godaddy for any help, it would’ve cost me $150 for Godaddy to recover the files for me! So, I quickly declined the offer and was asked by the Godaddy Rep, “Is there any else he can help with?” I said yes, “The cancel items button shouldn’t be readily available through your credit-card screen (where I messed up). Because I thought I was canceling renewal of the items.”

But before I could finish, Moses started to point out how stupid I was. Lets just say before I ask to speak to he’s manager, we were literally yelling at each other. I am sorry, but it doesn’t really matter how stupid a customer is, YOU DON’T YELL AT THEM!

This is the type of reason other slightly more expensive hosts still exist. I hate the fact that they are so cheap, I can’t help but use some of their services. Well, I have finally excepted that their customer service is mediocre at best and only use them when necessary. Be careful, be very very careful.

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Estimated Shipping Before Signup/Checkout

With today’s technology, it’s really sad that “big” companies are still having a hard time estimating shipping cost before signup/checkout. I mean even if its not accurate, a reasonable estimate should suffice.

I know I am not alone on this…

When you are shopping at a new “site” and found one of their products to be exceptionally priced and want to see the total (product+shippping)…

Do you sign up or just drop the cart in all?

I personally have dropped the cart over half the time. Have any thoughts on this? Drop a comment. Oh, what company am I ranting about? GNC. 😡

-Thuan

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Agree to Terms then Confirm

I couldn’t find a “Agree To Terms” module that was really simple to set up so I made one. There are a few out there but they required changing the database and/or javascript and/or the osCommerce checkout process.

My contribution only edits the checkout_confirmation.php page but doesn’t change the checkout process at all. It simply takes the user to conditions.php so he/she can read it or redirects him/her back to the homepage.

Sounds interesting? Click Here, to download it. Enjoy…

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osCommerce and OpenSSL

How does one get OpenSSL to work after you have enabled osCommerce’s “PayPal Website Payments Standard” module? That is actually a very hard question to answer even with my IT knowledge. But with a lot of research and the piecing together of two articles, I was able to get everything working…

My primary challenge was I couldn’t figure out, “how to generate the encryption keys on my shared hosting Linux server”… necessary for OpenSSL to work. I eventually learned that the keys are not generated from the servers, you only upload the keys to the server. Just as you would with standard html files.

osCommerce OpenSSL

As you can see the module calls for: 2 keys generated by you, and the only way I was able to generate “both” keys was by following a post by Martin Hughes-Jones, click here.

For the remainder of the field items asked by the module I followed a Lunarpages post, click here.

A few notes:

  • Your file paths will not match mine.
  • The keys should be in a password protected folder, e.g. I put mine in a folder called openssl in my admin folder.
  • Don’t forget to create the “working directory” folder… or you will get an error as I did.

Well, that’s it, your osCommerce “PayPal Website Payments Standard” web payments are now encrypted.