Brian R. Bondy RSS News

Easy taxes for Ontario Canada

4/13/2008 12:21:41 PM

I used this program to do my taxes (and my wife's). Once done using the program, it will give you a .tax file which you can use to file your taxes online. You simply upload the .tax file to the government's online site here.

Solution Environment Variables for Visual Studio

4/5/2008 9:13:42 PM

I found a VS plug-in that allows you to define solution level build environment variables. This is something I've been wishing Visual Studio had built in for several years now. One of the reasons that it's so important is that you can easily define include directories for all of your projects while keeping them in sync. This is important when administering multiple build configurations.

Typically a simple project only has 2 configs (Debug, and Release) so the problem is not that apparent. But a production level product has at least (Release + Debug) * (x64 + x86 + ia64) = 6 configurations that you have to try and keep in sync. You can download the Solution Build Environment plug-in: here. Also it is important to patch Visual Studio because they have a bug in VS2005 SP1 where plug-ins don't work if you run via command line. You can download this fix here

Why is math important?

3/30/2008 12:08:25 PM

A quota from Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language:
"I think of math as a splendid way to learn to think straight. Exactly what math to learn and exactly where what kinds of math can be applied is secondary to me."

I've always said that about math, and I agree with it 100%.

Microsoft-Yahoo

2/3/2008 11:46:42 AM

Everyone states that putting 2 companies together who are not leading will not take over the leader Google.

This is true, but only for search. Yahoo is a great company with a huge community that reaches much further than search. In many ways Yahoo beats Google, just not in search.

Most advertising money is spent on search. Even if Microsoft-Yahoo doesn't have the majority share of search, it doesn't matter. Aggregating both portals into the same advertising service, will simplify advertiser's management of their budget. It will also be a bigger market share, and so people will take more interest in advertising on Microsoft-Yahoo.

There exists a subset of users who advertise with Microsoft but not Yahoo. Likewise, there exists a subset of users who advertise with Yahoo, but not Microsoft. Putting Microsoft-Yahoo together will expand on both of these subsets of people, by broadening their advertising base.

It is a great move by Microsoft in my opinion. That is, just as long as they can properly integrate the parts of the company that should be integrated. For now, phase 1, this should only be the advertising portal.

Windsor Social sucks

8/23/2007 2:04:14 PM

Windsor Social, and Canada Social are horrible.

What ever you do, do not submit your email to them. After several phone calls, they assured me that my email would be removed, but it never has.

They continue to send unwanted SPAM. Companies like this should be pelted with rocks.

Married

8/6/2007 12:17:39 PM

I got married yesterday to Shannon. Hurray :)

Funny simpsons quote

7/28/2007 11:29:33 AM

Homer: "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

7 part interview with Steve and Bill

6/3/2007 6:09:12 PM

7 part interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/

Parallels with MacBookPro (MBP)

5/29/2007 1:26:31 AM

I have multiple Macs and PCs. I like to use the Macs more, but I do most of my development in windows. I tried using parallels at first, but it turned out to be slow for several apps.

I've been using parallels with my MBP for a few months now. My MBP had 2GB of RAM and is a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Parallels always made OS X slow, and running applications like Visual Studio was painfully slow.

I decided to replace one of my 1GB sticks of RAM with a 2GB stick of RAM to reach the maximum available 3GB of RAM in my MBP. Apprently if you try to use two 2GB sticks of RAM, then there could be memory address overlap and problems can arrive.

What did I find? The performance difference after installing the extra 1GB of RAM is amazing. Windows runs extremely fast in parallels, and there are no delays at all. I have parallels configured to use 16MB video and 1500MB of RAM. It runs better than my best PC. Before I had parallels configured to use 1GB of RAM.

I even keep parallels open during my normal work day while in OS X just for convinience's sake. This is something I wouldn't dream of doing with my old configuration.

In conclusion, if you're going to buy a MBP and you are going to use parallels. Make sure you select the 3GB RAM maximum. It makes all the difference in the world.

Why do file copy dialogs suck so much?

5/28/2007 11:02:35 PM

In all operating systems that I've seen the file copy dialog sucks. Why is this simple dialog that is used by everyone everyday so hard to come up with a good design?

Mac is better than all versions of windows, but it still isn't ideal. Windows fails to give you a do not replace apply to all option.

It would be nice to see a list of some sort detailing all of the status' of each file that was copied. It would be even nicer to be able to select this list and copy it into the clipboard.

The main problem with windows is if a single file fails to copy, the entire copy operation is aborted.

I could go on with several more points, but it just comes down to the developers lack of caring for the operating systems they develop.

Apple hardware hype advantage

4/4/2007 11:04:17 PM

Apple not licensing its OS to other hardware vendors, gives Apple a big advantage overall.

Anytime there is any type of hardware upgrade, Apple gets the credit (and traffic/hits/sales). When a new processor gets released by Intel (for example today's 8-core release), Microsoft will not get any new traffic from it; However, Apple will get millions of unique hits (once they release it) because of the hardware release.

The other good part, is that Apple can guarantee that anyone that has an Apple, has a good reliable, fast, non-sluggish experience. With Microsoft, they can't guarantee this since Windows runs on any PC hardware which is not sold by Microsoft.

Windows vista annoyance

4/4/2007 10:56:16 PM

Every version of windows allowed each application to stop the computer from entering sleep mode.

This is an important function and is required by several applications (for example backup software). This ability was removed in Windows Vista. I.e. Windows Vista (without manual tweaking of a group policy) does not allow an application to veto sleep mode.

This is just another reason why Windows Vista sucks.

Why I don't like the Microsoft Internet Explorer team...

1/24/2007 1:16:29 AM

It took Microsoft 5 years to finally release version 7 of IE.

Internet Explorer 7 has no original ideas and it is largely just copying Firefox and Opera's features. It is an improvement from version 6.0, but I'm largely disappointed overall.

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have support for emerging standards like SVG. SVG is the acronym for Scalable Vector Graphics. I remember reading the SVG recommendation which was created by the W3C almost 6 years ago. I knew that although browsers didn't have built in support for SVG, that eventually they would.

Today I see firefox and others with built in support. Microsoft decided that this extremely important technology should not be included.

Had IE7 included SVG support, the internet would be a different, better place. Microsoft has ruined that, and as usual they have shown us just how little they care bout web standards.

Does your browser support SVG?
If you can't see this than go get firefox here

Note that you can get SVG plug-ins from Corel Corporation and Adobe, but IE should have included built in support for it. Maybe adobe paid them off so that SVG wouldn't be a competitor to Flash and Microsoft's newer crappier similar product to flash.

Writing good and easy to understand emails

1/11/2007 8:57:43 PM

The most important rule to writing great easy to understand emails, is simply that: Writing is not a linear process.

Read the email over, add to your email, spend time on your email, cut your email up into sections.

Replace words like "it" with the object that you are talking about. Your readers will probably have no clue what you're referring to in your email.

Reading is a linear process. Writing is not. It's really that simple.

C++ inconsistency

12/17/2006 2:59:24 AM

You can't do forward declarations in C++ (with Microsoft's compiler anyway) across namespaces. I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't be available. And there's no way around it.

In my code I needed to use a forward declaration, otherwise a major restructuring would be needed. I tried and you can't make forward declarations across of namespaces :(. I had to change the names of the class I was using to be more unique and remove the namespace.

A story of a 17 inch MacBook Pro

12/11/2006 5:03:54 AM

I wanted a high performance laptop that could run both Mac OSX and Windows. I ordered the 17 inch MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz 2GB RAM Dual Core laptop. This post will discuss my experience with the performance of the laptop, my disassembly of the laptop, my experience with apple phone support, my visit to the apple store, my experience with replacement parts and my overall impressions of the MacBook Pro.

2 weeks ago I received my MacBook Pro directly from apple.com. I took it out of the great looking box and tried to turn it on, but there was no response. I figured the battery was dead, so i plugged the laptop to the wall and pressed the power button. Again no response, so I held down the power button, I noticed that the power button was loose.

Eventually I got the computer to turn on. After working for a couple hours I figured the battery would be charged enough. The power plug is magnetic so I really wanted to try popping it out as I've seen so many times in their commercials. Once I pulled the plug, the laptop turned off right away. I plugged it back in, turned it on again and watched it boot back into OSX. I checked the power management settings and everything was OK. At this point I figured I was doing something wrong.

Every MacBook Pro battery has a little button and 5 LEDs next to it. You press the button to see how charged your battery is. It's a very nice feature that allows you to see how much battery power you have before turning on your laptop. The next day, I noticed that my battery was fully charged. I again pulled the plug and realized that it turned off the computer. I figured I had a faulty battery and looked on the net for anyone with a similar problem. I found a couple forums that described the issue. From this forum I found the apple battery exchange program, but noticed that my serial number wasn't in their list of acceptable serial numbers for an exchange.

I called support and found the customer support rep to be very helpful. They had me try 5 or 6 different things and then they put me on hold as they called a manager. A couple minutes later the support tech was back and told me that I did indeed have a faulty battery. He asked me if I had purchased the Apple One Care when I purchased my laptop. I informed him that I did. He asked for my credit card number in case I didn't return the faulty battery after the replacement battery arrived. I happily provided it.

There are a couple important parts of the support call that I left out.

The Apple One Care didn't arrive at my house yet, and they didn't have a problem helping me.
The laptop wasn't in my name, my business partner ordered the laptop online.

They informed me that my battery would be at my house in 5-7 business days. I asked them if they could ship it express because I had a trip to San Francisco in a few days. He said that it was not possible for replacement parts even if I were to pay for the extra shipping cost. On the second business day my replacement battery arrived. I was very happy because it arrived within a couple days of my trip.

The replacement battery fixed my problem. But another problem started to occur. The loose power button that I mentioned at the start of this posting started to move around and it became harder and harder to turn on the laptop. I didn't have time to deal with it yet so I went on the trip to San Fran.

When I arrived there I realized that there was an Apple store only 5 minutes from my Hotel. I went in and asked a rep at the 'genius bar' if he could help. The genius bar is a big desk with several tech reps that can help you with any and every problem you have. He informed me that he would help me, but for future reference, I had to make an appointment to get help. He told me it would take 7 business days to fix the power button. He would have to replace the whole front panel.

The apple store, by the way... was amazing. It was glass, 2 floors with translucent steps and all computer models and iPods were laid out with a lot of space. You were free to play with anything and everything. Upstairs they had their famous commercials playing from a projector. They had a few rows of chairs and they held tutorials on Mac OSX software every day.

My trip to San Fran was only a few days, so I couldn't leave it with them for 7 days. I asked the genius bar tech rep if he could do the repair by the next day and he said that it wasn't possible. He mentioned that he saw this problem before and that it was a missing spring in my power button. So he wrote me up a case number and told me all I'd have to do would be to call apple and reference the case number. He also moved the laptop out of my business partners name and into my name.

After arriving home I couldn't bring myself to return the MacBook Pro for what would probably be another 2 or 3 weeks while apple looked at it. It might even be longer because of the holidays. I decided to take the chance and take apart my MacBook Pro. Knowing that it was very possible to mess it up and void the warranty, I still thought I'd take the chance.

Disassembling the laptop was pretty hard. Figuring out how to get the front panel off took me about an hour. Once I got the front panel open I had to figure out how to put the power button together properly. I was crossing my fingers that the 5 pieces that make up the power button was all I needed. After about 2 hours of playing with it I finally figured out how to get the power button working. It had nothing to do with a spring like the apple tech at the apple store mentioned. I don't think he was educated at all about the issue. If anything his suggestion cost me a lot of extra time because I was trying to rig the power button so it would touch a sensor on the main board. There was no spring and there is no spring involved in the power button.

So now I finally have a fully working MacBook Pro. I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and the performance is nothing short of amazing. I love the glossy display, I love the speed and I love the performance. I'm overall very pleased with apple and their support, although the apple store techs at the genius booth didn't turn out to be of any help.

As for working with the actual laptop, I love the way you can scroll left <-> right by dragging your index and middle finger from left to right. Ditto for scrolling top <-> bottom. I like that there is a single button and that you can right click by placing your index and middle finger on the pad and pressing the button. The build in speakers are very loud and clear. The symmetry in the laptop and the silver finish is beautiful.

The end result is that I'm extremely satisfied with apple support, I'm extremely satisfied with the performance of the laptop, I'm a little disappointed that I had a laptop with a bad battery and a broken power button. And I believe that in the future I'll only buy apple hardware. That has to say a lot, that even after all the problems above I still would only buy apple.

Windows Vista info and thoughts

12/5/2006 1:18:29 AM

BusinessWeek estimates it took 10,000 employees about five years to ship Vista. That's 50,000 employee years. They estimate about 10 billion in cost to develop the operating system.

But is the operating system something that is wanted by consumers in the first place? I don't think so. As long as people can use the latest applications and play the latest games, do they really care about a different operating system?

I'm not sure why I'd want to upgrade from Windows XP Pro, to another platform where i get annoyed by security popups every 2 seconds.
I'm not sure why I'd want to develop software for this operating system and learn an entirely new language, when I know I can use the old languages and it will work on all old and new versions of Windows.

I can't see vista taking off and making its costs back. Surely it will make in the billions, but I think relatively it will fall flat on its face. I think Microsoft took too long to get it out the door.

What should they have done? They should have released smaller, incremental changes. End users don't want to have to re-learn everything. They want small sets of new features.
I'm anxious to see if Vista ever does overtake XP, like XP did 2000. I don't think history will repeat itself though.

Thoughts on Apple and Microsoft

11/27/2006 1:02:09 AM

I was going to write about when people started to hate Microsoft, but I came across something more interesting... the supposed reason why people hate Microsoft.

Many people say that one of the main reasons people don't like Microsoft is because of the size of their dominance. "People simply don?t like big monopolies". On the contrary though, Apple's iPod owns a huge amount of market share for digital audio and video players, yet they are still absolutely loved by almost all. Many people find it exciting that they are so big.

I believe that it's because of perfection. Microsoft can't be bothered with perfection. Instead they focus on copying the latest features, and getting something out the door. The focus on simplicity and elegance, is simply not there. With Apple the ease of use is there, the perfection is there, the focus on usability is there. I don't believe the people who work at Microsoft want to build the best thing possible. I don't believe they are inspired to do so. I don't believe they have the drive to. I believe that the employees want to get their job done, and that's it. At companies like Apple or Google, the employee's goal is to create something great, something perfect, something that has a great ease of use. And that's why we love them.

One example that comes to mind: When Microsoft launched their Live search, it was supposed to be a Google killer :)... you couldn't middle click on links to open them in a new tab. Did Microsoft not care that just about every Firefox user uses this in their everyday use? The quality is just never there with Microsoft. It took them years to realize that tabs give a superior ease of use and that people that browse everyday can save a considerable amount of time by using Firefox. Microsoft's lack of simplicity and usability is why I personally don't like Microsoft. They don't try to make things usable. They try to make them for idiots.

One final reason that could have a lot of effect is that Apple doesn't disclose what it is releasing and when they are releasing it until it is ready (most of the time). Microsoft always disappoints all of their customer base.

Information on the Macintosh

11/27/2006 12:35:35 AM

Who is Jef Raskin? Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project. He hired Bill Atkinson who put together the first prototype.

Jef named the Macintosh after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh Apple. This name was only supposed to be a codename, the real name would eventually be the Apple V; However, the Macintosh name stuck.

Why is the Macintosh important? For one, it was the first computer to popularize a graphical user interface. It is also the moniker used in all of apple's computers.

Steve Jobs abandoned (or was forced out of) the Lisa that he was working on, to work on the Macintosh. Jef and Steve didn't get along and in 1981 Jef left the Macintosh project. The first Macintosh was first released in 1984.

It is said that Steve had more influence on the end product than Jef, which I would believe to be true if he was on the project without him for the final 3 years before launch.

Apple 30" cinema display

11/26/2006 5:30:32 PM

I have an Apple 30" cinema display and new Mac Book Pro Laptop. The 30" cinema display has a max resolution (which I use) of: 2560x1600. The screen is huge and is sure to give me a huge productivity boost for my work. The price tag on the 30" apple display is around 2k USD, but over time it'll pay for itself. I'm extremely happy with it. Ever since I got an iMac several months ago, I will never go back to PC hardware. Everything is bright, nice, fast, and overall just plain better with Apple.

Useful visual studio shortcut key

11/26/2006 5:24:59 PM

If you're a programmer, and you you use visual studio for programming then you should be using this shortcut. Go to Tools Customize and then click on the Keyboard button. Select "Edit.GotoNextLocation". And assign a global keyboard value of F4. For the GotoPrevLocation set it to shift F4. Then whenever you have build errors you just hit F4 to go to the next error. Ditto for when you have a find in files window.

linked senses

11/24/2006 9:44:49 AM

Linked senses rare in some people, but does exist. For example hearing music and seeing colors, or having tastes as you see things. Read here.

Transparent fridge and washing machine

11/24/2006 9:40:33 AM

Transparent fridge and washing machine... very cool. see it here

Amazing video about a blind kid

11/20/2006 5:59:58 PM

This kid uses echo location to find out where he is. See it here

White and Nerdy

11/8/2006 11:42:33 PM

Funny weird Al video White and nerdy: See it here

Can you answer this brain teaser?

11/7/2006 6:42:44 PM

You are in a prison. There are two doors. One leads to freedom and the other leads to certain death. There are also two guards in front of the doors. One always tell the truth while the other one always lies. You can ask only one question to one of the guards before you open one of the doors.
What question do you ask?

Stay hungry, stay foolish

11/6/2006 2:30:08 PM

See the 2005 commencement speech at Stanford by Steve Jobs here.

iTV will change the world

11/2/2006 12:30:31 PM

If you haven't heard of iTV, it's a product that apple will be releasing in the first quarter of 2007. Not many people realize it, but it's going to change their lives. In the future, say goodbye to DVDs and any other type of disc based media. Say hello to new ways to view video for free such as integration for your TV with youTube. Say hello to podcasts on your TV from sites like revision 3. Say goodbye to renting and purchasing movies. Everything will be downloaded and synced automatically to your iTV box.
iTV will power it all. It will connect wireless into your home network. Just about every home that has a TV and a DVD player currently will have one, including you. The price has been announced already, $299.00 USD.

Steve Jobs

11/2/2006 6:19:04 AM

Probably the most impressive guy on the planet...
- Steve Jobs was booted out of apple by the board in 1985.
- In 1986 he bought ?The graphics group? which he renamed to Pixar. He purchased it for 5 million.
- After leaving apple he also founded NeXT.
- The internet was CREATED by tim berners lee on the NeXT operating system.
- In 1996 apple bought NeXT and used it as the basis of their OS X operating system. They bought it for 402 million.
- In 1997 Steve started work as interim CEO back at apple.
- In 2000 he dropped the title interim and became CEO.
- In 2006 Disney purchased pixar for 7.4 billion.

Random Wikipedia homepage

10/24/2006 9:30:13 PM

Best homepage you can set is a random Wikipedia page. Simply add the following as your home page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

IE 7

10/20/2006 11:52:08 PM

IE 7 is finally out to the public and out of beta. I wonder if it will effect firefox's market share, or the rate of increase of firefox's market share. If i had to bet i would say that it will slightly slow the rate of increate of firefox's market share. So my guess is that firefox will continue to gain market share.

18 mistakes that kill startups

10/18/2006 2:57:10 PM

Read them here

Added picture of myself

10/9/2006 11:18:25 PM

You can see in the About Me section.

Google trumps Yahoo! and MSN

10/9/2006 10:34:03 PM

Yahoo! and MSN, along with others in the search market, had the chance to buy youTube, but they let Google scoop it up for the small amount of 1.65 billion. Just another example of Google being a great company, they seen that video is becoming a huge part of the Internet and the Internet's future, and they decided to become #1 at it by buying youTube. iTV by apple is coming out first quarter of 2007, and i would bet that this has a lot to do with Google. Live streaming from Google's youTube to iTV? I think so...

Nintendo power glove - cooler than the wii remote?

10/5/2006 12:51:23 AM

From this commercial the Nintendo powerglove looks even cooler than the Wii remote.

I hope Wii turns out to be a bigger hit than the power glove :) I bought the power glove and used it at most twice.

Everyone talks about how innovative Nintendo has become for going in a different direction from PS3 and XBox; however, this type of thing has always been Nintendo's focus. From the power pad, the NES ROB robot, Nintendo duck hunt gun, Nintendo gamecube bongos, DDR mat, ... Some of them were huge hits, others not so much, but it's the reason I love Nintendo so much.

Google code search

10/5/2006 12:41:33 AM

Google code search allows programmers to search source code. Works very well.

A map of the Internet

10/5/2006 12:29:23 AM

see it here

10 million to any team that can completely decode the genes of 100 people in 10 days

10/4/2006 4:31:26 PM

The X Prize Foundation is partnering with a wealthy geologist (Canadian woohoo) to offer a $10 million prize to any team that can completely decode the genes of 100 people in 10 days.

Why google desktop search is annoying

9/30/2006 8:32:57 PM

If you've ever used it before, you know that it wants to run at startup. If you specify in the settings not to run at startup, then one day you decide you want to use it, you start it, and it will automatically add itself to startup again when you try to close it. This is annoying. If you specify once that you don't want something to run at startup, that should be enough. Google please fix this.

Prize money

9/20/2006 11:56:57 AM

We're starting to see more and more contests which propel technology beyond their current boundaries. In these contents, an objective is given which has never been accomplished, and a cash prize is given for the first person or team of people to figure out the objective. This is a great thing, and wealthy people should be doing this same thing for their fields of interest. In 10 years or so, I plan to setup some similar prizes. It?s a good way to make your life useful and help advance civilization. I believe that this type of prize system will only increase in the future. It will become people?s full time careers to pursue some of these breakthroughs, or be sponsored by a company that is pursuing them. A good example of this is the Ansari X prize. Other more recent examples are the Hutter prize for compression human knowledge, and the anti-aging research prize.

Great local band

9/18/2006 1:04:24 AM

Teach Yourself Piano is a great local (to Windsor Ontario Canada) band. I head them at Chapters book store a few days ago, and now listen to their music daily.

visual studio C++ suggestion

9/9/2006 10:57:13 PM

When adding a header file include that is not from a directory in your include directories, it should ask you: "Would you like to add [path] to your include directories?"

Smart cats

9/3/2006 9:35:56 PM

I have 2 cats, and they (one of them) must be very smart because they went pee on my ALT software T-Shirt. This is a company that I have worked for in the past and very much dislike. It's the first time they went pee on any article of clothing of mine. By the way, I wasn't wearing the shirt at the time :)

nice Mac wallpapers for your pc

9/3/2006 6:33:31 PM

You can get them here.

boot camp

9/2/2006 11:41:39 PM

I've never seen windows work so fast and nicely before. And of course it's on apple hardware. Pretty funny.

Managing Gigabytes - Compression and IR

8/25/2006 11:40:50 AM

I purchased this book for learning more about compression and information retriaval. So far it's very good. The second chapter has a very good coverage of text compression.

Google analytics now open to all users

8/17/2006 12:19:05 PM

Web tracking tool Google analytics is now open here. I tried it out and it is far superior to any other website tracking tool I've used. It is still a little buggy though, but I'm sure the bugs will be worked out soon.

Studies in lossless data compression

8/16/2006 12:53:38 PM

I'm going to start studying compression a lot more (yes inspired by the Hutter prize) so that I can hopefully be the first to win the competition. The prize money isn't really important as I believe it will only work out to about 1-3 thousand euros. I've always had an interest in compression, so this just gives me a reason to study it more, and a distinct goal to follow. I have a lot of catching up to do in the lossless data compression field, so this is more of a long term goal.

Hutter Prize - Compress human knowledge

8/13/2006 7:22:29 PM

There is a new contest relating to compression here. All you have to do is beat the previous record and you can win up to 50,000 Euro.

New service URLZip

8/13/2006 12:21:49 PM

You can now go to urlzip.org and "zip" your long URLs into small URLs. Converting long URLs to short URLs is useful when sending long URLs via email. You can also set keywords for your URLs, so that you can always access long URLs just by remembering a short URL.

URL redirecting temporarily disabled

8/11/2006 9:33:20 PM

URL redirecting via this page is temporarily disabled because of this email I received from abuse@myspace.com with a CC to abuse@godaddy.com. So much for trying to provide an innocent good service to users for free with no ads:

BrianBondy.com is hosting numerous files being used to redirect users to third party affiliate sites for commercial gain.

The user accounts posting the redirects were compromised through illegal means. Immediately remove the redirects on your webserver, and desist in any continued use and abuse of the MySpace.com site and userbase.

MySpace.com can and will take legal action against BrianBondy.com for it?s involvement in these illegal activities.

MySpace.com

Writely - Forgot password leads to new account

8/1/2006 9:00:12 PM

I signed up to be notified when I could join writely. I never got an invite. Today I went to lost password and it seems that it bypasses the wait for a new account. It emailed me a pass that I used with my email to access Writely. If anyone needs an invite, please try the above. If it doesn't work, just email me and I can invite you.

Google tech talk: Python 3000

7/25/2006 10:15:47 AM

Creator of Python talks about Python 3000 (Python 3.x series). Click here to view it.

XULRunner = cool

7/19/2006 12:33:05 AM

With XULRunner you can develop your own XUL applications without having Firefox nor Thunderbird installed. This leverages the power of XUL, XPCOM and it's extensibility. And of course it allows you to make cross platform applications.

Ubuntu package insalls

7/16/2006 2:04:05 AM

After doing some package installs, and seeing how great Ubuntu is with upgrading and installing new software, I'll never go back to Fedora. Being based off of debian is awesome.

installed Ubuntu Linux

7/16/2006 12:46:35 AM

I installed Ubuntu Linux, and I'm very impressed with it. I previously tried to install Fedora Core 5, Fedora Core 5 had problems with starting up (would hang at udev loading), after a few hours when I got in, my sound and network didn't work. I installed Ubuntu, the installation for Ubuntu took about 5 minutes, and everything worked including my internet with no configuration. It looks really cool and fast too. I would highly suggest to get Ubuntu if you want to install Linux.

Wikipedia contributions

7/14/2006 12:15:01 AM

I finally signed up for an account at Wikipedia. I've made several anonymous changes in the past. You can see a list of my contributions here at my wikipedia user page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netzen

Learning Cocoa with Objective C on XCode

7/14/2006 12:09:17 AM

I've been starting to learn programming on my apple computer. The cool thing is that all dev tools on Mac are free unlike in windows. The bad part is that it is quite a bit different from programming Win32 :(. I guess maybe i should be using Carbon (Which is more for porting applications from C++). Apple claims that they will be updating both Cocoa and Carbon as time goes on equally.

UDP/TCP hole punching

7/14/2006 12:04:32 AM

I've been reading a lot about hole punching. With hole punching, you can get past routers and allow peer to peer communication. The problem is that you can always connect to an outside host, but when an outside host is trying to connect to you, your router doesn't know who to forward the communication to. This is because all computers on your LAN have the same outside WAN IP. In general, you bind multiple sockets to the same local IP and port. With one of the sockets you connect to a public server, known as a rendezvous server, your router then makes a hole for your local address and port. You then use that same local address and port to connect to the LAN IP and WAN IP of the peer you are trying to connect to. With the same code you can even build a portable library that works on all OS's. Very cool! :)

Got a new apple computer

7/4/2006 5:56:44 PM

I got a new apple iMac computer today. My first impressions of it is that it is very cool. It has a remote control, a built in web cam, built in dvd/cd burner, as well as built in wireless. It has a ton of software and everything just works out of the box true to the commercials :)

DynamicDNS addition

7/3/2006 2:43:53 PM

I updated the DynamicDNS service so that you can pass paths directly to the mapped IP.

For example:
http://www.brianbondy.com/brianbondy/testing123/hi.html

Screen resolutions

6/25/2006 8:15:23 PM

I found this interesting, almost all sites that don't take up the whole screen are fit to an 800x600 screen resolution. I think the last time I myself used this screen resolution was 10 years ago. It seems that only 12% of people today still use this screen resolution. And there's a good chance that of that 12% of users most of them are not very tech savvy. So if you have a technology related site, or are selling software online. You might as well make your site look better for the masses and build it to fit 1024x768 instead.

1. 1024 x 768 56.15%
2. 1280 x 1024 15.79%
3. 800 x 600 12.04%
4. 1280 x 800 4.09%
5. 1152 x 864 3.90%

Long URLs to small URLs

6/15/2006 1:35:57 PM

Long URL paths that you want to send to people via email often aren't clickable because email clients will insert line breaks in the middle of the URL. I created a page that will allow you to turn a long url into a small URL. You can access it here

Dynamic DNS update

6/14/2006 2:31:24 PM

Dynamic DNS now allows a real http path to point directly to your computer. After creating a dynamic DNS called for example 'brianbondy' you can now access the dynamic IP via http://www.brianbondy.com/brianbondy
Since the dynamic host brianbondy is linked to 127.0.0.1, you can access the web page on your local host via that URL.

Added submit URL button to Links page

6/14/2006 8:17:05 AM

Added a new submit URL button to the Links page. It will add the submitted URL to a database for my manual review.

Dynamic DNS

6/13/2006 8:10:14 PM

Added a new section available here which allows you to keep track of your non static IP address via a user defined host name. You can use the SOAP Dynamic DNS API to update your IP address periodically, as well as check what the IP address is via the API. You can also simply use the form on the Dynamic DNS page to access the IP address of your host name.

New tools added and updated look and feel of the site

5/21/2006 9:39:36 PM

Added tools and descriptions for the following topics: Base64 encoding, Base64 decoding, URL encoding, URL decoding, and obtaining HTTP headers. You can access these pages and tools via the 'Other' link on the left hand navigation bar.

Signup page

9/15/2005 12:59:26 PM

Added a page to sign up for an account at brianbondy.com. I plan to offer several services which will be announced over time, but they will need to store information, and therefore you wll need to create an account. You can create an account [here]

What's my IP

8/30/2005 12:58:33 PM

Added a page to the Other section that allows you to get your external IP address. You can access that page [here].

Archived old front page

8/29/2005 12:57:29 PM

I archived the old front page. You can access that page [here]