The great mobile phone quest - Blackberry Storm and Curve ruled out.

I'm in the market for a new mobile phone. There are a couple of sites I want to access via the phone:

• I teach an online course using the ecollege platform
• Go2mypc
• The google adsense and adwords control panel

From what I could tell, it appears that the Storm and Curve will not let me access any of these sites. The problem with the course is that it doesn't support the blackberry browser. I dont' think ecollege is preventing access but the front end of the school is. Go2mypc requires Java and the adwords control panel requires javascript. None of these appear to be available on the Blackberry platform.

So, now we are looking at some of the phones that use the Windows OS such as the Samsung Saga. I'm not sure if they will work or not but we are going to do some testing and I'll update this post. I spoke with the tech support at go2mypc and they believe it will work.

What we are going to do is change our passwords, then go to the verizon store and try logging into the three sites I mentioned above. Once we confirm or deny compatability, then I'll go outside, fire up the laptop , and change the passwords.

So, as a word of caution, if you are using a smartphone for basic browsing, you will probably be OK. If you are planning to use it for access to specific sites, then you need to make absolutely sure that the phone has the capability to access those sites. Keep in mind that the sites may make changes that will make your phone incompatable with their site.

word couldn't send email because of MAPI failure - FIXED

We have a client running office 97 and outlook 2003. We recently had some problems and reinstalled office 97.

Everything looked ok until they tried to send a word doc as an email. They got a "word couldn't send email because of MAPI failure" message.

A quick search suggested checking the win.ini file and the registry entries. We found a registry entry file that could be imported into regedit. The problem was still there.

We then went into Outlook 2003 and ran a Detect and Repair. That resolved the problem.

HP Pavillion DX6000 webcam and facebook

I was trying out the video messaging in Facebook with the integrated webcam on my HP Pavillion DX6000 laptop. It looks like it works easily enough once you give the Adobe Flash Player access.

BUT......

The dang blue light stayed on after I was finished with the message. That makes me a little nervous in that I'm not sure if I'm doing a live video feed or not... I tried closing the Facebook tab but that didn't work.

I finally got the little blue light to go out by closing the window that had the facebook tab in it. I actually killed the entire process using task manager. (End Process tree)

I'll have to play with this a little more.

Instant Cafe Feeder and Google Base

We have a couple of Cafepress stores. One of the ways to drive traffic to the stores is to use Google Base. Google Base allows you to submit a feed of your items that will then show up in the Google Shopping search.

The problem is building the feed. One store has about 60 items and the other has about 20 or so. You could build the feed by hand but that would take a good bit of effort. There is an application that is currently donateware called the Instant Cafe Feeder. You can find it at http://feeder.instant-cafe.com/ It's a nice little app that will generate a feed for you. It can be a little tricky to set up but once you figure it out, it's great. There is also some limited support for it to be found in the cafepress forums.

We used it for a couple of months and everything was great. About 2 months ago, we started getting failures when trying to upload to google. I didn't have time to sort it out until recently.

When I looked at the errors it was telling me (1) that the expiration date was too far in advance and (2) my URL wasn't registered properly in the settings.

When I looked at the text file, I could see that the expiration dates were about 45 days out, which is too far for Google Base. That was easily fixed with a simple search and repalce.

As far as the URL, I simply went into the settings for Google Base and added http://www.cafepress.com/mystore (where mystore is the name of my store)

That worked well. The feed succeeded. I'm not sure why the instant cafe dates are wrong but it's easy enough to fix now that I know the situation.

GOdaddy hosting and coreftp

I was working on a clients site where I was using Coreftp to update their Godaddy hosted site. I was getting timed out every 2 minutes or so.

I thought I checked the timeout. What i didnt realize is it was grey check box. I clicked the box until I got a non grey checkbox with a check in it. Success!!. Now i was getting a reasonable timeout period of more than 10 minutes or so.

So, if you are using CoreFTP Pro and Godaddy, check the timeout settings by the following:

• Go into the site manager
• Select your site
• Click the advanced button
• Choose CONNECTIONS
• Make sure that the Keepalive has a check in it and it isn't greyed
• I also did the same thing with AUTORECONNECT

That solved the timeout issue

I heard a radio advertisor telling people to email their credit card info to him

I was listening to home improvement show on the radio today. The guest told customers that they could purchase his priducts by emailing their name address and complete credit card information including their ccv. He was using a verizon email address.

If this isn't a disaster waiting to happen, I don't know what is. I'm sure that the guest was legitimate and was not running a scam. However, email is horribly unsecure.

There are a couple of issues here.

1. The merchant is most likely violating the terms of his merchant account by collecting credit card information via unsecured email. This can result in termination of your merchant account or penalties from your merchant account provider.
2. As far as I know, you are never allowed to store the customer's ccv with their account data. Emails sent this way are causing the ccv to be stored. Even if the emails are deleted, you need to make sure that they are not being stored on your email server, that the deleted itmes folder is emptied and that no backups are being kept of your emails. Missing any of those would open the merchant up to liability.
3. Email is susceptable to compromise via packet sniffing at various levels.
4. Consumers should NEVER, EVER send credit card information via email. There are just too many ways it can be compromised.

The merchant in this case is running a lot of risks. In addition to the penalties from the mechant account provider, he could also find himself liable for damages if it can be proven that his negligence caused a compromise of credit card information.

If you want to collect credit card information from customers, there are a number of options that are secure and easy to set up. Paypal offers the ability to put payment buttons on a web page. You can also look at Google Checkout. Both are easy to set up and the fees are in line with that of a regular merchant account. True, it might cost a few bucks to have a web designer add the functionality, but the peace of mind would be well worth the investment.

Some Fun USB gizmos

Here are a couple of fun USB gizmos for your favorite Geek.

First of all, would you believe a vacuum cleaner powered by your USB port??? OK, so you can't clean the house with it... or a room, or your car... or much of anything. However, you can clean up a couple of dust bunnies on your desk or some crumbs from your scone.

If that is too clean for you, why not try a bikini clad USB pole dancer??? Yep, this will bring on a sexual harrasment lawsuit at your workplace before you can say Misogyny. ... But the laughs should be worth it.

And, last but not least, a USB Travel Toaster... If you are on the road and your cheapo hotel doesn't have toast in the morning, just plug this toaster into your USB port, and..... well, the box says it's a USB toaster... We all know there is no such thing.. It's just a fancy box that you can put some other gift inside and see if the recipient falls fr the gag.

Heart devices and anti cell phone devices

I was listening to an ad on the radio today about a local hospital, Saint Mary's Medical Center. They were talking about a new heart device. One thing they mentioned was that it will immediately notify your cardiologist when there is a problem.

That got me to thinking about locations where either active or passive cell phone shielding is in effect. I would suspect that would block the signal from the heart device. Just something to keep in mind.

blogger publishing via a verizon lg envy

it is possible to blog via an lg envy on verizon.

There are a few issues. First of all, the connection is probably not as secure as a regular web connection.

The second issue is that the navigation is difficult at best

The way i got in was to search for blogger through google. You get a message that the site will be optimized for wap. The hard part is getting to the dashboard where you can see your blogs. I'll post an update when I have more detailed instructions as to how to find the 'create post' pages.

Right now, I've been finding it by a mostly random navigation through the pages. It seems that the "add" button leads you to a list of your blogs in your dashboard but I haven't been able to reliably replicate that.

Another dying Actiontec Router from Verizon Fios

I was going crazy with my verizon fios service. The router would keep locking up resulting in a need to reboot. Even after rebooting, we had to fiddle with the laptops and desktops to get everything reconnected.

We noticed that when my son tried to upload a 40MB file to Youtube, the router would definitely crash. This was repeatable.

The other thing that was odd was that it would prompt for a password reset every so often and the parental control rules would disappear. (I'm sure it wasn't our son doing it).

Verizon shipped a replacement router. The install was a little flakier than I would have liked. First of all, I saved the config from the old router. When I tried to load it on the new router, I got a message that the config file was corrupt. I had to manually reconfigure the router which wasn't that big of a deal.

The other thing that was weird was that I noticed that the router had the SSID of a neighbor's router in the config. However, when I looked at my connection on my laptop, I was connected properly to my ssid. That makes no sense at all. The new router properly shows my SSID. I'm not sure if the router was hacked or not. We never ran with the default passwords.

Norton Internet Security 2009 - First look

Yeah, I know it's been out there for a while but we finally got to take a decent look at Norton Internet Security 2009.

The first thing I liked about it was that it will automatically remove your previous version of Norton as part of the install process. In prior versions, you had to do a manual uninstall first and then install the new version.

It does take a while to run the install. I also noticed that it doesn't immediately run a liveupdate so you want to run that manually.

There is a new feature called Norton Insight. The link is on the left of the control panel and could be missed. When you run it, it scans your system for tasks and apps that it trusts so it doesn't have to keep scanning them. I'm not sure how this works from a security standpoint but it is worth taking a look at.

I was running Norton 2007. 2009 kept all of my firewall settings so there was little I had to do.