Last week on January 7th, Cork’d was hacked. The owner of it, Gary Vaynerchuk, took this huge negative and turned it into a positive. Here you can watch the video he made for yourself.
After watching the video you are pretty much like, wow! You own a main stream site and the day it gets hacked you make a video responding to it and address your customers. If you own a business this is the level of transparency you need to be at. In the same week Microsoft failed where they could have shined if it was handled like Gary Vaynerchuk.
Microsoft was set to release Windows 7 beta to the public on Friday, January 9th. They built this up pretty well and there was a lot of buzz on the internet about it. Fans of Windows were ready for this. On their website it said to come back the afternoon of Friday, January 9th to be one of 2.5 million people to download the beta. The afternoon came and went. The servers were slow, people were posting like crazy at tech sites all over the internet, “When can we download it? What is wrong?” Later that day Microsoft puts up a one line, Windows 7 Beta is coming soon. Really that is all? You have thousands of people sitting their trying to get the beta and that is all you can tell everyone? For the bad image Microsoft received for Vista, this only feed the fire more.
Now imagine if Microsoft had someone create a video like Gary Vaynerchuk or even just a post and explain what was going on and when it would be back up. That could have headed off a lot of the negative they were getting because of this and turned it into a positive.
Transparency between a business and their customer keeps the business in check and the customer satisfied. A small business can practice this right away where a larger business like Microsoft has a lot of corporate red tape to cut through. Either way this is where the world is going and the quicker you jump on, the more satisfied customers you will get and retain. Agree?
I recently upgraded my Vista installation to the new Windows 7 beta. The install went smoothly and everything converted over nicely except my sound card. My previous post was on the Sound Blaster X-Fi on Ubuntu not working and now Windows 7. Sound Blaster seems to have some issues with this set of cards and keeping them up to date.
I thought this was going to turn into a disaster, but after many tries at installing the driver I finally got it and it is very simple. All you will need to do is download the most recent drive from Creative’s website. After you download it and if you try and run it, it will not work and say operating system not supported. All you have to do is right click on the .exe file and click on Properties at the very bottom. There will be a tab for “Compatibility”, go there. In the “Compatibility Mode” drop down select “Windows Vista” and hit “OK”. Now you can run it and it will install and you will have sound again.
I have always been interested in trying out Ubuntu and I did once. The only problem was I could not get my sound card to work with it, so that ended that. Now that about 6 months have passed I decided to give it another go and this time I was successful.
I asked the question on the Ubuntu irc channel, not expecting any response or help. I was wrong someone did help me right away and gave me the instructions to do it and to my surprise it actually worked. I will list those steps below just in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar setup.
Then I went to System->Preferences->Sound and set it up like the image below.
After I did this I had sound. Amazing what sound can do to make Ubuntu so much more usable. Is this the best way to do it? I have no idea, but it works for me and gets me using Ubuntu.
This past week at work I began building a very basic Intranet site. I started out building it on PHP, as that is what I am most familiar with and could have had something up and running fairly quickly. A couple road blocks stopped this from happening in the middle of the week. If I wanted to build the Intranet site it would have to be built on Microsoft technology. I was okay with this as it was something new for me to learn. More skills the better, especially in the current economy. So it is settled, ASP.NET with C# it is.
The first thing I come to realize is most of the tutorials I find are all based off the WYSIWYG features of Visual Studio. Coming from PHP this is a huge difference. The features are great and all, but I want to know what is going on behind the scenes before I begin rapidly developing all the time in the WYSIWYG editor.
With the start of this project at work, I hope to begin a new chapter with my personal site here. I will be posting tips, tricks and any other stumbling blocks I come across as I learn ASP.NET and C# coming from a PHP background. Hopefully this will help someone out there and speed up their development time when learning this technology. I know this will help me learn it and keep a nice reference for later use. If there are any expert programmers in this area reading this I ask you to help along the way. If I post something and there is an easier way of doing it or I am just completely wrong let me know. Learning is good and benefits everyone.
As a lot of people know a new search engine arrived this week named, Cuil. I decided to go see what it is all about. This is from their website:
Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.
Relevant not so much. Let me explain.
When you search on Cuil it returns a page that is three columns and some of these results have thumbnail images with them. See photo to right.
If you view the full size of that image the result at the bottom in the middle column has incorrect info. That image is from a site I did. It does not exist anywhere on the site it shows. The site that image belongs to is not listed on that page anywhere. It would be nice if you click on that image it gave you the site it came from, but that is not the case. When you view the source of the image it gives you this: http://www.cuilimg.com/imgsrv?i=020112:1343055842847354.
I am not a fan of this at all. When you view the search page it looks like that image is credited to that site. Then no one will ever know the source of the image since it is being pulled from the Cuil Image server. These are not practices of a search engine I want to use.
One thing I noticed a lot of people ask for on Facebook applications is a way to have users invite friends. I will post the code below I use on my applications to let users invite friends. Below is an image showing you what it looks like in the application. Where the question marks are is where the friend’s face would be and then the friend’s name would be in place of where it says friend’s name.
Here is the code used to produce this with PHP. [ Download Here ]
You will need to look the code over and put your correct web addresses in for your application. I also named this page invite.php on my server. If you have any questions or suggestions just let me know. I am sure I will be tweaking this code from here on out.
converted over nicely except my sound card. My previous post was on the Sound Blaster X-Fi on Ubuntu not working and now Windows 7. Sound Blaster seems to have some issues with this set of cards and keeping them up to date.
