Category: Networking

Musings about Bing rewards program

Post author By Joker
Post date 2011-01-18

The other day I saw a Google ad that said the following.

“Get 400 Free Xbox Points
Get 400 Free Xbox Points. Join Bing Rewards!
www.Bing.com/Rewards”

I was intrigued as I’d like to get some Microsoft points so I can buy some arcade games on my Xbox 360. The only issue I have with this ad is it sounds like you can get 400 Microsoft points just for joining the Bing rewards program. To get the 400 Microsoft points you need to have 400 search rewards points. Apparently from what I’ve read when they first launched the program you could redeem 100 search rewards points for 100 Microsoft points. I guess Microsoft realized this was to low of a number because they give you 250 search rewards points just for signing up for the program.

If you do the daily search items first they will also count towards the total number of searches that will earn you points as well. At the moment I’m writing this they seem to have two daily searches worth 3 points each & until January 29th 2011 you can earn one point per search up to a max of 10. So the current maximum you can earn a day is 16 points, which would take you 25 days at that rate to earn 400 search rewards points. But if you want to earn the first 400 search rewards points you can get that done in 10 days with your bonus 250 search rewards points that you start with.

One more thing before I rant about the installation process of the Bing bar. According to the Bing Rewards Preview Frequently Asked Questions “The Bing Rewards Preview ends on September 30, 2011. Credits accumulated expire December 31, 2011.”. So you have a limit amount of time to earn the points. Also remember that the Microsoft points rewarded from this method are only good for a limited time after you receive them from the program, so spend them shortly after you get them.

Now on to some of the issues I have with this program. First it installs three add-ons Mozilla Firefox Which if you are running the current version of Firefox they will be disabled right after they are installed, I haven’t tested with older versions as I refuse to run old versions of Firefox. They disabled the items because Microsoft said in Bing Bar support for Mozilla Firefox to disable them to prevent a security issue. While I applaud Mozilla for disabling them I’m irritated at Microsoft for installing software that they know will be disabled on install. When I last read the article it said “Article ID: 2430460 – Last Review: October 5, 2010 – Revision: 3.0”, meaning that they have known about this issue for several months at the point when I installed the Bing bar on my computer, & yet they insisted on installing the software they knew would be disabled.

You can see a complete list of what add-ons the current version of Firefox will disable on install at Add-ons Blocklist | Mozilla. At the time I wrote this post the first three in the list are the add-ons that the Bing bar installs. They are Bing Bar for Firefox, Default Manager v2.2, & Search Helper Extension.

I will admit I haven’t found a way yet to remove it from just Firefox. I have done some basic searches, but I have found nothing yet that will remove it only from Firefox. I have found ways to remove it from Firefox & Internet Explorer at Removing the Search Helper Extension and Bing Bar though.

Also during the install of the Bing bar it insisted that I close both Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. I closed Firefox on my own so that I would be sure to not lose the tabs that I had opened. It did reopen Internet Explorer after it finished & I was given my bonus 250 search rewards points.

C130 Cell Phones Dash Express Glance VX7100 Google Google Voice GPS Internet LG Motorola Net10 Verizon

Other stuff I have noticed with my hardware

Post author By Joker
Post date 2010-12-31

I have noticed some quirks on several pieces of hardware that I own. So I thought I’d post them. I will start with my Dash Express GPS for my car.

My Dash Express has a few minor quarks that I’ve noticed. If I have it running on battery power regardless if it has a lock on GPS satellites to know its coordinates on the globe when it is plugged into the car it will stop attempting to route me to my requested destination. I’ve also noticed that it assumes whatever direction you are traveling in is always forward, not a major issue but it can be confusing if you just backed out of a parking stall & you forgot about this feature.

I have also noticed that when you do not have Internet on it as all Dash Express GPS units should now be, if you let it turn off on its own when it looses an outside power source it will have the wrong time most likely. The solution to this issue is when it asks you to “shut down” you tell it no & then go into settings & select the option “turn off and power down device”, then hit “ok”. It will take longer to boot back up, but if you want it to switch between day & night mode automatically it is the only way to do it, that I have seen or figured out.

On to my old LG Glance phone, which to my knowledge was only available on Verizon wireless. They decided it was a great idea to make a phone that can take pictures, but it can only share them by sending text messages to more capable phones. This causes several issues that I can think of. One is the pictures have to be relatively small to send as a text so they may be at a lower resolution then when you took the picture. Two if you don’t have a texting plan the text part costs 20¢ which can add up quickly, also they seem to think that this is competitive when Net10 only charges at most 5¢ for a text message. Third as it has a media attachment unless you have a data plan you get to pay an additional 60¢ for sending the picture. So you have to pay 80¢ for every picture you take that you want to get off of the phone & I have yet to find an easy & free way to get them off that phone. That’s right you can’t even use Bluetooth to send the picture to another Bluetooth enabled device. For sending media texts I’d expect Net10 to be cheaper as the data costs are 10¢ per minute you are online.

Talking about cell phones reminds me of my old Motorola C130 had a feature that I loved & I haven’t seen in any phone I’ve owned since, is that I could schedule it to turn off & back on at certain times of the day. This was really important for a period in my life when I was working graveyards & I’d have friends & family trying to call me during the day when I was trying to sleep. It is also the last phone I’ve owned that had a sensible set of keys to unlock the phone. I liked needing to press two keys that were far away from each other to unlock the phone. I liked this because it never was unblocked accidentally, while my LG Glance would not only unlock but the default configuration would have it trying to connect to the Internet frequently which was annoying as I didn’t want a data plan with that phone.

For the issue of not being able to schedule the phone turning off & on the best solution I could find was to either remember to turn the phone off everyday, or give everyone my Google voice number & tell them they can reach me at that number. I did that mainly because I can get voicemail for free with a transcribed version available & I can also tell Google to not ring certain phones at certain times of the day. It isn’t perfect as I currently can only tell Google Voice on weekdays & weekends for my schedule. Since I don’t work Monday through Friday their current offering lacks some of the features I want.

Dash Express GPS Internet Internet Explorer Microsoft

More on resetting the Dash Express

Post author By Joker
Post date 2010-12-11

The only information that was lost was any statistical data that was from my device that had not made it into one of the updates from Dash. So nothing that was an update was removed, but I now can search for Burger King by name. So if it was an update it is still on the system.

In other words a factory reset on the Dash Express is similar to resetting Internet Explorer to its defaults, in that you still have all of the updates installed, but all your settings go back to the default. It is slightly different because your address book is gone on the Dash when your favorites are still there for you in Internet Explorer.

To be clear the only things it deleted was from the following list, Address book, recent destinations, search history, WiFi access points, saved search entries (they require Internet to work), & any historical traffic data that was not in an official update from Dash.

I can confirm that I had data from traffic data as I went to Kirkland Washington using my Dash Express & as I was going up I saw historical traffic data on roads I have never been on in my entire life. Also if you use the 2008 map update DVD it will tell you that you are using a newer version of several things including historical data.

One last thing right before I cut the Internet off from my Dash Express I was invited to a beta test & I can confirm that I still have the beta version running on my Dash Express, as they made some slight modifications to the map screen with the beta that I was in. Unfortunately for me they didn’t release the full version before I killed the Internet on it & I didn’t have money to connect it again until after Research In Motion had decided to kill the Internet for all Dash Express customers.

Dash Express GPS Internet

Dash Express and saved search

Post author By Joker
Post date 2010-09-05
2 Comments on Dash Express and saved search

Well since June of 2010 was the last time you could connect a Dash Express GPS device to the Internet I decided to do something about mine. I had removed the Internet connection on mine which removed access to even the historical traffic data & also you can’t search for a saved search anymore. I did find out that you can do a factory reset & because it has no servers to connect to it will restore your ability to see historical traffic data & that is the only way I found to remove the saved searches.

There are some disadvantages to this is that you will erase all of your contacts in your address book as well as your favorites. Since it got rid of the saved searches it made it so I can search for burger king again.

You hit the “menu” button on the top, then select “settings”, scroll down to near the bottom selecting “reset to factory settings”, & finally hit reset. You then just need to wait for it to wipe everything. After wiping the data you will have to enter any addresses into the device again. Obviously you will need to use the touch screen to enter the information as you can’t use the Internet site anymore.

This was useful for me as I now have a feature back that they can’t take away from me without offering Internet for my GPS again. I’m of course referring to the historical traffic data.

Apache blog Microsoft PortableApps.com Windows WordPress

Installing WordPress to XAMPP on a portable drive

Post author By Joker
Post date 2009-12-05

A long time ago I wish I could to do exactly what I’m about to show you how to do, that is have a portable web server that I can plug into almost any computer. This is a useful way to develop for a client & never let it be seen on the Internet until you have finished the job.

Before I list the space needed as this may be an issue if you try to do this on just any portable drive. For some reason Hard drive manufactures think that a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes when in reality it is 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 bytes times 1,024 bytes. Also if you are using a flash-based portable drive it only has a limited number of writes for any particular sector, so with use the amount of available space will go down. (I’m not going to get into the details of that in this post as that is another discussion altogether.) So all the space that I’m saying you will need you will need the manufacturer to say that you have IIRC about 7% to 11% more than what they say. (Sorry I didn’t feel like doing that math again.)

One other note with most if not all flash-based drives you can not read at the same time that you are writing so during the copying process you get to wait before you can do much else. Also because the drive I’m using in this is really old you should get faster speeds than I did.

Also I reference “G:\” through out this walk-through you should substitute that with whatever drive letter your drive is assigned.

The following numbers to not account for wasted disk space they only account for total bytes that are used ignoring the wasted space.

1.2 MB PortableApps.com Platform Only (Size on disk is 1.26 MB)
150 MB PortableApps.com Suite Light (Size on disk is unknown)
355 MB PortableApps.com Suite Standard (Size on disk is unknown)
221 MB XAMPP (Size on disk is 241 MB)
116 MB XAMPP Lite (Size on disk is 160 MB)
1 MB XAMPP Launcher (Size on disk is 183 KB)
7 MB WordPress files (Size on disk is 7.04 MB)

230.2 MB for XAMPP, Platform Only & WordPress files
379 MB for XAMPP, Suite Light & WordPress files
584 MB for XAMPP, Suite Standard & WordPress files
125.2 MB for XAMPP Lite, Platform Only & WordPress files
274 MB for XAMPP Lite, Suite Light & WordPress files
479 MB for XAMPP Lite, Suite Standard & WordPress files

So according to these number a 256 MB drive might barely be able to do this with XAMPP & Platform Only, but since it ignores wasted space I guess you could try XAMPP Lite instead.

Here are the files you will need to download. (These links all point to the current version at the time I write this post & the size requirements may change.)

Download PortableApps.com Platform Only, download PortableApps.com Suite Light, or download PortableApps.com Suite Standard (You would go here to check for newer versions.)
Download XAMPP or download XAMPP Lite (You would go here to check for newer versions.)
Download XAMPP Launcher (You would go here to check for newer versions.)
Download WordPress (That link always gets the current stable version of WordPress.)

After you have downloaded all of the files to your computer you will start installing them to a portable drive that can fit all the stuff you just downloaded. Well I just discovered I have a 256 MB flash-based drive so I will try the install on it. I got it almost 10 years ago so it will have some use on it as well. After retrieving the data on it & formatting it I have 246 MB available formatted FAT32. Because I’m installing using FAT32 I don’t have to deal with any security issues I might have if it was formatted NTFS, besides Windows XP won’t let me format it NTFS.

For step 2 You will need a lot of patience as it will take some time to finish installing. Also as far as time goes it does partly depend on the speed of the drive you are copying to my 256 MB drive was old & as such it is slower than a newer drive which would be much faster.

Install the PortableApps.com platform or suite that you chose to download. If you don’t have a previous version installed & have it running you will need to tell it which drive to install it on, you will need to remember this for the next step. Aside from that Windows asks if you really want to run it which is a yes, than it asks which language, since I speak English I went with that, You hit next so it will ask you the drive letter, in my case it was “G:\” (They do have a browse button.), than you click on install, than leave the box checked to “Launch PortableApps.com Platform”. A new icon will show up in your system tray, which is down by the time.
Install XAMPP & specify the drive letter you noted in the last step. (Remember you drive letter may be different then it is on mine so don’t go with “G:\” unless yours was assigned to that letter also.) It will also ask you if you want to run it so you click on run, then it asks the installation folder which on my computer it defaulted to “C:\” which is wrong so I changed it to “G:\” & clicked on install (It has a browse button as well.), I then waited for over 3 hours. After the wait it brought up a DOS window asking “Should I add shortcuts to the startmenu/desktop?” so I said no, then for the “Should I locate the XAMPP paths correctly?”, so I said yes, then for “Should I make a portable XAMPP without drive letters?” so I said yes (this takes a while as well I didn’t time it though, but I think it took less than 20 minutes.), it then lets you know which time zone it thinks it is in, & provides information on what file to modify to correct that if it is wrong. After that all you need to do is tell it to exit with an x & then an enter.
Install XAMPP Launcher If you have the PortableApps.com platform or suite running it should detect which drive to install on to. So if you have the portable app running all you need to do is click on next, than install, than finish. To see it in the list you will want to go to the portable apps icon in the tray, Options, Refresh App Icons. After installing all of that I noticed I was out of room so I can’t even fit WordPress on it. (It turns out that a full copy of XAMPP takes up 241 MB due to wasted space.) Also before I started this I thought that the Lite version didn’t have MySQL but had SQLite instead, turns out I was wrong so I guess I’ll try that instead.
Install WordPress. You need to launch the XAMPP Control Panel so that you can start MySQL & Apache. You also need to copy the extracted files & folders for WordPress into “G:\xampplite\htdocs” I just copied the wordpress folder so that it will be here once it is installed. So browse to here to create a new database. You need to name it, create a user name for it & a password for the user name. So under “Create new database” you enter the name you want to assign it, I just called mine wordpress, then you just click on the create button. Since it will automatically take you to that table you just need to go to the “Privileges” tab & click on “Add a new User”, set “User name” to the user name, set “Host” to local in the drop down, Hit the Generate button next to “Generate Password” to assign a random password to the database with the third field showing you it in clear text, you will want to either copy it watching case or copy it to the clipboard. Then under that make sure that “Grant all privileges on database” is selected, next to “Global privileges” you want to click on “Check All”, then you just have to click on the “Go” button. Now you want to go here to start the install, click on the “Let’s go!” button, set the MySQL, database name, user name, & password. You can leave the database host with the default of localhost also if you want you can change the “Table Prefix”, I never install more than one install to the same database as I don’t want to ever deal with that. Then hit the “Submit” button, than if you got the details right you can click on the “Run the install” button, it than asks for a “Blog Title” & “Your E-mail”, on my personal blog that I posted this my “Blog Title” is “Joker”, the “Your E-mail” is the e-mail address that the admin account will be assigned, If you leave the “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.” option checked when you click on “Install WordPress” you can just export from the USB install & than import it on to your web host. After waiting for a time assuming you have your php.ini set to allow it to run long enough you will be told that the user name is admin & what the randomly generated password is.
If you want to follow good protocol you will go here to get a custom set of constants which are used since version 2.6.0 of WordPress. You then add it to the wp-config.php file in about lines 45 through 48. This isn’t as important on a portable install but it is still a good idea

When I installed XAMPP Lite it only took about 2 hours to install, it asked the same questions that was asked for the regular XAMPP install. I didn’t time how long it took to make the change for XAMPP Lite so that it doesn’t use any drive letters.

I also learned something else during this install. If your drive is slow enough you will have timeout issues after you enter the “Blog Title” & “Your E-mail”. I got this after I changed the max_execution_time to a ridiculously high 999999. The php.ini file is located in “G:\xampplite\php”.

The final total for XAMPP Lite, Platform Only & WordPress installed uses 167 MB. I’m not testing how much space is ultimately used with any other combination as that takes way to long to do.