Scrollin' On Dubs

Oct 07

Working remotely from Cabo and using Skype as a phone

Nerd, Travels, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

So on my never-ending quest for total mobility and agility as an independent consultant, I’ve figured out how to cut the phone tether for working down in Mexico. Thanks to Skype’s phone bridge service, I’m in Cabo San Lucas right now conducting business as usual, taking phone calls and checking voicemail over a wifi connection on my laptop. The connection here is surprisingly quick and reliable (75kb/sec). Basically, I had some frequent flyer miles saved up and an offer from a buddy to stay at his hotel for $20/night. My laptop has a fully self-contained development environment via Virtual PC and I’ve got all the materials I need to build the extranet for AZ Behavioral Health and all the physical meetings archived as voicememos on my iPod. For a total cost of $50 a day to be able to work from a palapa, I figured I’d be an idiot not to go.

The phone setup is pretty sweet- Skype is voice chat service recently acquired by ebay and it let’s you talk to other people free over the internet. They have a service you can pay for that bridges their system to the public switched telephone network and let’s you handle inbound and outbound phonecalls. I purchased 600min of the skypein/skypeout service for $13 and I now have my Cingular Treo 650 forwarding all my calls to my skype number (a very simple thing to change yourself if you happen to have cingular). If I’m online, the phone rings through skype, I answer it and (other than a minor latency which you’d probably experience anyways on an international call) the caller has no idea I’m talking via my laptop. The call quality is excellent and what’s nice is voicemails show up as timestamped events in skype and you listen to them and can even save them as mp3’s. I did hear a rumor that it’s illegal in Mexico to circumvent their telecommunications system for voice traffic – I have no idea if there’s any truth to that and I’m sure as heck not going to ask a Federale. I could see this phone forwarding technique affording one the ability to backpack around Europe and work just as effectively from the road. Hrmm….

Oct 03

Workaround for IIS 405 error when using dummy form controls for a prototype

Nerd, Uncategorized 5 Comments »

For anyone who uses a software lifecycle process like FLiP to make clickable prototypes and hash out web applications with their clients, I ran into an interesting and frustrating problem today that you might be interested in. I have been using FLiP and specifically Adalon to generate a wireframe and ultimately a clickable prototype of a monsterous extranet application I’m building for Arizona Behavioral Health Corporation. FLiP involves more work up front but it’s really paying dividends in terms of helping us to unearth requirements that we missed in the brainstorm and wireframe phases. I made a mock application that consisted of static HTML pages that will look exactly how the screens appear in the app itself, only all the form controls are dummy controls simply linked to other static pages and don’t actually send any dyamic data. I did this by just href’ing the buttons to the target result pages and it worked great in both IE and Firefox when browsing the files on my laptop’s filesystem (not on a webserver), however when I posted the mock to my production server to demo to the client, I failed to retest the prototype in both IE and FF and only checked FF. Since it had already worked in both on my laptop it seemed like a fair assumption that just checking in one was adequate on the webserver. Apparently IIS 6.0 has this great ummmm error checking feature (ahem, annoyance) that disallows sending form data to staic pages and instead throws the following error:

HTTP Error 405 – The HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed

The confusing thing is that it only throws this error for IE. I would think an error generated on the server-side would display regardless of the browser and I have no idea why Firefox works fine and IE doesn’t. If it were a real live application I would welcome this type of error since obviously it does no good to send form data to a static page. But for the purposes of my prototype this caused major pain today. It would be nice if there were a setting I could choose in IIS to the effect of “thanks for your concern IIS, but really, just serve my pages and don’t tell me how to write them” but alas, IIS insists on enforcing this error checking. I do know that this is the workaround that finally solved the problem: I had to manually go through each page that had a form on it and do two things:

Change all method=”post” tags to method=”get”
Specify the desired linked page under the form action tag as action=”blahBlahResults.htm”

Unfortunately I had arrived today at ABC to meet with the entire staff and get feedback on the prototype. After I went through it in FF with the CEO, he sent out a staff email and told everyone to check it out. Of course everyone else was on IE and the phone started ringing off the hook with people who couldn’t get in and it took me an hour battling this issue along with learning how to rollback revisions in the Subversion repository using the “reverse merge” technique. Once I wiped the egg off my face though, we made some great progress today and got a lot of good feedback from the actual people that will be using the app. I definitely see the advantage now of using a software lifecycle process like FLiP to uncover features and usability issues before ever writing a line of application code or modeling a database.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Sep 27

A quick way to do reverse IP lookup and find out what sites are hosted on a machine

Nerd 1 Comment »

Here’s a quick way to enumerate all the sites hosted from a specific IP address. You are probably aware of the reverse phone lookup which allows you to look up the address associated with a phone number (scary I know, try it on your home line). Well the same type of reverse lookup exists for domain names and IP addresses and it’s called Reverse IP Lookup. It’s generally run from the command line but there are sites that offer a web interface to run the same query.. Using a free service like this one recently mentioned on AZIPA you can feed in a domain name and find the IP and other sites hosted from that same IP. As a complete tangent- before the web-based reverse phone lookup service existed, we would use Pizza Hut of all sources to get an address from a phone number. Believe it or not when you gave them your number in ordering a pizza they would read back your address to verify it! I have no idea if they still do this, but I digress…

A cool trick you can use along with this to simplify a common search such as a whois lookup if you happen to be using the Firefox web browser: add it as a quicksearch. NOTE: the search must work by putting the search terms in the querystring in order for this to work. There are a handful of search services I use regularly and I generally add them to the quicksearches bookmarks folder in Firefox. This saves you the step of actually going to the site to execute the search. These are the steps:

Run a search query
Bookmark the results page (you should see the search terms in the URL)
In Firefox under Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks – Drag your bookmarked page to the QuickSearches folder
Right-click on it and do Properties
This is the magic : in the Location field, replace the querystring with the search terms with “%s” and choose a keyword that you can use to trigger this search
Close the bookmark manager and try running your search. I chose the keyword “whois” for this one so in the FF address bar I type “whois 140.99.14.114” and I get back a listing of all my domains. Pretty sweet.

Here’s a screenshot of my quicksearches to show you what it looks like:

Sep 14

lifehack: using your car alarm panic button to locate a lost vehicle

Lifehacks, Uncategorized 10 Comments »

I guess I just took this tactic for granted: you lose your car in the parking garage but you know you’re within 50yards horizontally or vertically where you parked- hit your panic button on your remote and follow the alarm sound. I thought everyone used this method when they lose their car but yesterday a frantic lady approached me in a parking garage. She was beside herself because she had lost her car, didn’t know what to do and wanted me to help her track it down. I took her remote, hit the button and pointed upwards. Sure enough she was off by one level and she thanked me profusely awestruck by such a simple, readily-available method to locate her car. It’s even more effective at night in big parking lots because the flashing lights allow you to immediately spot it.

As a little bonus tidbit- you can extend your range on your remote by holding it to your chin. The human body is about 70% water and becomes an enormous antenna for the radio signal when you do this. Try it next time when you’re approaching your car, find the range at which you’re just beyond where your remote will work and then try again holding it to your chin. I guarantee you get better range using the chin method. And, no, I’m not sure why it works with your chin and not by virtue of the fact you’re holding it with your hand… that’s a Mr. Wizard question right there.

Aug 31

CF_FlashIfYouCan custom tag available and Greg Rewis Breezo

Nerd, Uncategorized No Comments »

I’ve looked through a lot of flash detection scripts and have found none that allow you to do inline flash detection (ie. test the browser and display either a piece of flash or a substitute graphic on the same page without redirecting the user). Flash 8 will supposedly come bundled with scripts to do this but in the meantime I found some javascript code that did the trick. I’ve finally got around to cleaning it up and wrapping the whole thing in a simple custom tag I call FlashIfYouCan. If you want to see it in action you can check my company homepage here (note that it only plays on the first visit and you’ll have to use the replay button after that). Unfortunately I don’t remember where I got the original javascript from or who the author was (it looks like it might have been generated from Dreamweaver because it uses the “MM_” prefix). There were no copyright notices so hopefully it’s cool to pass it along. Big thanks to whoever it was the created the original source. This is the syntax for calling the custom tag:

It lets you specify the minimum version of Flash you require and will allow you to have an imagemap on the static graphic to emulate the flash controls. The only problem I can see with using this method w/ js is that in the unlikely event that the viewer has flash but has disabled javascript, this tag will display a placeholder graphic instead of the swf which the user COULD play. The likeliehood of this scenario seems pretty rare to me though and the value of not having to do the wacky redirect technique outweighs the downside of having a few people that will falsely fail the flash detection.

On another note, the Arizona CFUG had Greg Rewis from Macromedia at Monday’s meeting talking about Studio 8. We had about 75 people attend in person and another 50 via breeze. The archived meeting is here if you missed it- it was a three hour tour of the features in the new Studio. Flash 8 looks promising, they really improved the video codec and the enhancements for doing encoding from within Flash are nice. Honestly, I don’t get very excited about the alphachannels, live dropshadows via actionscript, and designer-centric enhancements. The most powerful addition to me seems like the CSS support in Dreamweaver. Supposedly MACR had a dedicated team working just to ensure that CSS renders correctly in all browsers and in Dreamweaver and the demo proved that they nailed it. I just hope that team got a fat Maui vacation at the end of that process because that sounds like gruelling work. Apparently MACR is en fuego sales-wise w/ Studio 8- they beat their stated goal within 4 days of accepting preorders. Way to go out w/ bang guys!

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Aug 28

MyFax equivalent for snail mail?

Ponderings, Uncategorized 7 Comments »

So my creosote bush in my front yard is out of control. Apparently it’s found some untapped source of groundwater and doubled in size enveloping my mailbox. The postman is not happy with this situation and seems to be in silent protest of my shrubbery encroachment because about a week ago he stopped delivering snail mail (no explanation of any kind for the cesation of mail delivery, just an empty mailbox for the past week). The funny thing is, what surprises me most about this incident is not the postman’s silent protest nor the failure to leave notice about the but… the fact it’s had exactly zero impact on my daily life- the only thing that’s really changed is that now I don’t have to stroll to the end of the driveway when I get home to clear out the coupons and creditcard offers to make room for tomorrow’s batch (and the junkmail I get now is still a fraction of what I received before doing the NewDream.org postcards). If it wasn’t for the fact that the new WIRED just came out, I wouldn’t be cutting back my shrub this morning. This little mishap w/ the bush actually IMPROVED the quality of life both for myself and my postman this past week.

So I got to thinking more about this situation. A few months ago I ditched my physical fax machine in favor of using MyFax.com for all fax transmissions. It’s great because in keeping with my desire to be entirely mobile as a consultant, I am now no longer leashed to a physical fax machine – I can go in over a web interface from anywhere and send, receive or call up an old fax. Having this kind of flexibility along with a digital timestamped archive of all fax correspondence is priceless to me – $13/mo is a no-brainer (not to mention I have one less communication device to check since I get faxes emailed as pdf to my gmail and simplicity is always a good thing). My question is this: "Does the equivalent of MyFax exist for snail mail" Please tell me somebody has developed a service where I can get a PO Box w/ Virtual SnailMail of Arizona and direct all my paper crap there. They scan it and give me an RSS feed of what’s clogging my inbox (now their physical inbox). I can setup intelligent SPAM filters (since it’s just another message to me at this point) and minimize the white noise I deal with daily. Does exist, and if not, ummm hello-potential-business-idea…