I love to see a great 404 page when things go wrong.  The twitter fail whale has become a great example of how to make a statement  on an error or 404 page.   It has become an art of both design and communication when you do something like a 404 page.

Here is a great list of interesting and great 404 error pages.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-really-cool-and-creative-error-404-pages/

The fact that the Huffington post wrote an article on this topic means that the common non-technical person also understands what a 404 (page not found) error is. Or at least they know what it means to them

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/best-404-error-pages-ever_n_456767.html

Unfortunately I’m not that up on design and will have to update jimiz.net 404 error page.

Hanselman has published his most recent Ultimate Developer and power tools. I’ve been a follower of this list for a long. I realize that I have a lot of these tools. I found a few gems in here that I need to check out.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2011UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

One of my favorite tools builtwith.com was out of commission today. It was showing a 503 error Service Unavailable.
The builtwith blog mentioned that they were working on the issue. It looks like they are back and running now. I feel for the team, I’ve been there. It’s not fun. Their twitter post explained it: https://twitter.com/builtwith.

Another cool thing about builtwith.com is that it is written in C#. http://blog.builtwith.com/2011/12/15/what-is-builtwith-built-with/

I recently took a trip to Las Vegas for a conference. I took my ipad for both note taking and also to do work. It performed perfectly. I have to say that the majority of people at this conference had tablets and the clear winner in shear numbers was the iPad.

To prepare for the trip I loaded a few magazines, books, and movies on my iPad. To do this here are the top apps that I used:

1. Zinio – A e-magazine application (read my previous post on this) Great application to purchase magazines for the airplane trip.

2. VLC- Video Lan Client. I used this to watch a movie. Since I use windows media center at home. I just moved an .AVI to the VLC application and watched a movie while in the flight. (I would recommend better headphones or noise canceling)

3. Built in iBook reader : I read the last chapters of the recent james bond novel
(Close second is Kindle)

4. Business week : if you have a subscription

5. iSSH - Remote access to any of my servers while traveling

6. PPTP – Built in vpn. If you are traveling and not using a vpn be warned. You will have your packets watched or stolen. I suggest using a personal vpn if you don’t have access to one from work. Try wifi-vpn.com only $4 per week (or $9 a month)

7. Remote Desktop lite – Remote access to your desktop.

I’ve been cleaning up my work  area.  Not only my real desktop at work but also my computer desktop.  To help keep a cleanly system I decided to try Fences.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

Nice little gem of an application.  Give it a try. It neatly organizes your icons or files on your desktop into specific areas.

I am a huge fan of the iPad, as you can see by my recent posts.  I find myself reading more and more on my iPad and iPhone.  One of the best things about the iPad is you can get magazine subscriptions using Zinio.

I can’t say enough good words about the software.  I love to get a magazine quickly and before trips it can’t be beat.    However, recently I noticed that if you purchase a magazine while on the iPad it is a bit more expensive.    I am heading out for a trip and wanted to pick up a few items for reading.  Note the price for the in app purchase of FourFourTwo ($5.99).  But if you purchase through their web site it’s only $3.99.  I did not realize the price difference.  It is interesting that in application purchases are more expensive.  I don’t mind for the convenience but I would rather know the difference between the two prices.

Every year I take the opportunity to do some winter cleaning on my computer systems.  Clean up directories, remove unused applications, and backup.   I typically choose Black Friday for this event because I can run out and get cheap storage (Hard Drives).   Last year I purchased 2 portable drives and an internal drive.

This year, I did not want to go out early.  So I spent the morning cleaning our computer systems and then headed out and purchased a few High Capacity SD cards.  I got 8, 16 and 32 gig cards.  Different manufacturers.   The 16 I intend to use in our camera so it was the higher speed.  The other 2 I plan on using for an “ON PC” backup.

I have many backup strategies for our home documents and photos, but I am adding a new one this year.   I have done this in the past at work with my personal documents but not at home.

Since we are almost exclusively laptops at our house I setup jobs to backup the home directory documents to the SD cards.  This does a sync that makes it easy to store on the SD card.   The actual directory and photos are sync’d every night to our backup server, but this is just a quick fail-safe.   I’m not sure how well it’s going to work, but the intent is to have a quick copy to pull back from of critical documents.

On my SD card I used truecrypt to create a volume and store information encrypted.  Overall it is working OK.  I will have to update this post as I progress.

While starting to  write an android application I had to re-install the Android SDK on my new system.  When I did this and tried to execute the Emulator I go the following error:

"invalid command-line parameter: Files.

Hint: use '@foo' to launch a virtual device named 'foo'. please use -help for more information"

After some google searches and some testing I finally found a fix.  The issue it appears is the referenced path that Android is using.  Since I have an x64 system, the location that the default android install is : C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk

One of the posts and install documents I read was to add that directory to your “Path” in windows.  I made that change and still had the same issue.  After some more digging I found that the issue is related to the spaces in the folder path.   To solve this issue I added the “SFN” directory location into the PATH variables.

Short File name is sometimes called 8.3 file name.   Because it envokes a limit on the filename and extension length (wikipedia)

Since x64 machines place files that are 32bit into a different Program files directory the install location is : C:\Program Files (x86)\android\android-sdk

SO THE FIX IS:

Add the location sfn name into the path.  My 8.3 file location for the sdk is:

C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk

This will remove the spaces from the path.  To add a folder location in your path on windows 7 you need to:

• go to control panel
• 
• System | Edit the System Environment Variables
• Click the Environment Variables button
• 
• Scroll Down under “system Variables” until you find path
• 
• Place a “;” before you add the path to the sdk folder (C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk)
• 

I just had to re-install windows phone 7 sdk.  I wanted the features for Mango 7.5.  However to get the install I had to uninstall the previous version (beta) I had.

Now 3 reboots later  I’m ready to role.

I often find myself following a link from a twitter post or some other blog.  Not having the time to read it immediatly I either add it to Readitlater or I email myself.  I normally don’t add any comments just the link.   What often happens is a few weeks / days / months later I get to reading these links I sent myself.  Sometimes, I get to them right away but most of the time I find a neat little article or site of interest a few days later and don’t remember the context of why I sent myself this link.

I decided that I should just include a few here for everyone’s enjoyment (the comments in front is where I think I got the link):

Person I follow on G+: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-your-co-workers-killing-you/

Twitter: http://geekli.st

Blog Post (aspx) https://github.com/robconery/Manatee

twitter: http://knockoutjs.com

As you can see this is just a random mix. But there are some goodies involved.  A mvvm js tool kit, an asp.net deployment tool, and a geek site.

Enjoy.