tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1504314128775250812026-03-21T11:42:13.485-07:00Yet another blog on Technogadgetry and Programming. In other words, another nerd's blog.Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-53036058157964334222015-01-30T19:32:00.001-08:002015-01-30T19:32:59.888-08:00

I've used a handful of banking/credit card websites, and I have to say of them all, Citibank's by far the worst of them all. They are the Comcast of banking websites. I logged into my business credit card account to try and get the yearly total interest. I can not find this information anywhere on the website. So I am guessing it might be included on the statements. Unlike every other website

Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-3711383492683502172014-07-19T16:24:00.000-07:002014-07-19T16:24:45.685-07:00

I have Verizon FiOS at home. I have the 50/25 package, which means I should get roughly 5 megs a second download and 2.5 megs a second upload. I don't normally have too much need for the upload, but I do download quite a bit and I have to say for the most part I pretty much get what I pay for. When I'm downloading from someplace that has the bandwidth to support my max speeds, I usually get my

Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-42621368094999387362013-10-31T12:45:00.000-07:002013-10-31T12:45:23.090-07:00

I registered a new domain the other day, and literally within 24 hours I was receiving emails from people offering to help me build a website. That should probably be your first and last clue not to do business with them if they are spamming you within 24 hours of registering a domain name. But in case you are tempted, or maybe they contact you several weeks or months after you register a domain

Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-27387971900174723172013-03-12T11:51:00.000-07:002014-10-15T16:24:35.023-07:00

Here are some general security tips to keep your email account safe. 1. Use a unique password for your email that you do not use anywhere else. The reason for this is pretty simple. Most websites when you register on them ask you to give them your email address. If you give that website your email address AND you use the same password that you used on your email login, you've just given that

Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-66696886489479319932013-03-06T11:46:00.001-08:002013-12-03T12:11:32.071-08:00

I started using Crashplan for my backup needs back when Mozy switched away from doing an unlimited backup.  Initially I was very happy with their service. However, since at least June of 2012 when I first noticed it, Crashplan has had horribly slow upload speeds. Many people are getting much less then 1mb uploads even though their internet connection supports speeds many times faster

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-79437616944195662992012-04-15T12:28:00.000-07:002012-04-15T12:28:38.454-07:00

I'm really getting tired of what I consider to be deceptive advertising with cable companies and the internet service they provide people. Used to be when they said you would get 'up to' a certain speed, it was an honest statement since you don't always get the maximum speed of your internet connection due to technical issues beyond their control. Now 'up to' basically means they can give you

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-42130269451246271392011-03-23T12:25:00.000-07:002011-03-23T12:25:20.219-07:00

http://sourceforge.net/projects/addtorun/ A cool little program called AddToRun will let you specify any program you want with any name you want, and add it to the run menu (windows key + R). If you don't want to clutter up your desktop with shortcuts and don't want to dig through the start menu, this could be a convenient little tool to have. All you do is pick the program you want to

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-64324045450107193052011-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:002011-02-15T16:04:14.936-08:00

Given my last post about mozy doing away with their unlimited plan, and seeing all the reactions from people, some of which seemed to be in a panic at the thought of possibly not having a full complete backup for a few weeks, I thought it would be good to make a few suggestions about backing up data. The first thing to realize is your backup is exactly what it says - a backup. It should be a

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-25236148128260155082011-02-01T11:57:00.000-08:002011-03-04T14:15:04.383-08:00

Mozy sent out an email to (most) of their customers last night announcing they would be dropping their unlimited backup plan in favor of a tiered pricing plan. Mozy has offered their unlimited plan since 2006, so to be fair this isn't a bait and switch type scenario. And I can understand prices increase over time and they may need to adjust their pricing to stay in business. But I think they went

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-37239823897785454212010-09-16T15:39:00.000-07:002014-10-15T16:27:32.795-07:00

One of the websites I host used register.com to register their domain name. I wanted to ask them to allow me to transfer their domain name over to my godaddy account because it makes things easier for me if everything is in one location. Plus if I have admin access to the domain name it makes things easier if I need to make any updates - I don't have to bother them to do it or try to figure out

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-80302644168913273112009-12-17T12:05:00.000-08:002009-12-17T12:12:42.798-08:00

http://blog.apparentsoft.com/business/124/is-paypal-good-for-your-microisv-business-a-short-paypal-horror-story/I've had this same experience with paypal several years ago. They closed my account because they thought some transactions violated their terms of use. They would not tell me which specific transactions. They gave me conflicting information when i called them. And they also sat on the

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-2825972939175977572009-05-13T13:43:00.000-07:002009-05-13T14:15:27.372-07:00

Sorry, but as a trek fan, i have to vent. (some spoilers if you care)The new movie is a good scifi movie, but barely an ok trek movie. The plot though was just really stupid. A giant mining ship from the future comes back and is able to destroy an entire fleet of ships, but the enterprise by itself was able to destroy an entire salvo of the same torpedoes that destroyed an entire fleet. And the

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-11189005658600266572009-02-04T10:42:00.000-08:002009-02-04T11:13:29.217-08:00

Googles moto says not to be evil. But a change to their search page is going to be very evil for a lot of web site owners.Normally when someone searches on google and clicks a link in the search results, the website owner can determine what you searched for that brought you to their site. This is very useful since it makes it easy to figure out what people are interested in and can be extremely

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-6896954874089482882009-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:002009-02-01T00:51:32.301-08:00

I've used partition magic in the past, and it's a great tool. But it does cost money, and being able to do the same thing for free is always nice :)It's called gparted. It's free and open source and runs on top of linux (don't worry it works with windows, and you don't need to install anything).gparted.sourceforge.netYou can download it from there. Download the stable cd ISO image. At this point

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-9817860771800212642009-01-12T12:56:00.000-08:002009-01-12T13:02:47.329-08:00

So just in case anyone is curious, the next version of windows after vista is called Windows 7. Microsoft decided to go back to just numbering them instead of giving them names.Anyhow, I've been beta testing it for the last week or so. I have to say so far i am impressed. This is the first beta release and so far I've found no major bugs and only some very minor ones. I even pushed my luck and

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-67786948426511443222008-12-11T13:38:00.000-08:002008-12-11T13:42:55.837-08:00

Just ran into this problem today. I had a page which was running under .net 1.1This page had a textbox which was set in the aspx page to readonly=true. there was a 2nd page which was changing the value of the text using some javascript. This all worked. When i upgraded to .net 2.0 though i ran into problems. The text of the box would appear to change, but the value that actually came through was

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-23900896267096483272008-09-05T13:58:00.000-07:002008-09-05T14:00:42.694-07:00

I'd say this is a good commercial for vista - it leaves me with the same feeling i get when thinking about vista - *shrug* eh.

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-53784985620511724332008-09-02T17:12:00.000-07:002008-09-02T17:20:09.116-07:00

I discovered a cool little service that you can use to test how your websites behave on many different browsers and several operating systems. It's called CrossBrowserTesting.com. The service starts off free, limiting you to 5 minutes each session but unlimited sessions. This is usually good enough to give a website a quick once over or to test some specific functionality of a site.  You log into

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-89686969664964602392008-09-02T17:01:00.001-07:002008-09-05T13:40:14.282-07:00

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-15552552718560571132008-07-28T10:45:00.001-07:002008-07-28T11:09:49.964-07:00

I heard them mention on the radio today some new search engine called cool, although it's spelled cuil. They boast that they have indexed 3x as much content as google has.I've tried 2 searches on them so far and I'm not impressed. Search results took a while to show up on my first search, which was for the maximum memory card size for my camera. It returned just 3 results. The #1 result was for a

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-81522421837051327872008-07-23T14:20:00.000-07:002008-07-23T14:43:16.936-07:00

Just a quick little note regarding empty strings and null values.If you are using a sql or object data source you have the option on the paramters to set convertemptystringtonull to true or false. If set to true, then a blank form field will be treated as a null value. Which means that db column has to accept null otherwise the insert will fail.I was running into an issue where the insert was

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-55210640689755107202008-07-22T15:54:00.001-07:002008-07-22T16:19:24.577-07:00

Ok Google. I generally love all your products. Heck even this blog is done using google. But I have to be honest and say that I think Microsoft has got you beat with their latest version of Live Search for mobile devices.I just discovered this a few days ago after installing a new rom update on my Mogul. Prior to this I've used google maps and goog411 and I was happy with both. But the map on the

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150431412877525081.post-76729973226101313832008-07-22T13:24:00.000-07:002008-07-22T14:17:05.354-07:00

I admit I'm one of those people who loves his cell phone. I'm old enough to remember when cell phones were a luxury item. But I'm not so old that I've forgotten when I bought my first cell phone. I was amazed by it at the time. Here's this device that's small enough to fit in a (large) coat pocket and yet with it i can talk to just about anyone, anywhere. And that was about all I could do with it

Ian Lipskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11719448956487540853noreply@blogger.com0