The Full Enchilada

I’m kind of amazed at how so many people bought into the stupid technology talks behind Apple and Steve Job’s decisions. The superiority of one technology over another has absolutely nothing to do with their decisions against Flash or Java or Admob or anything else they’ve gone against.

It’s purely about creating a monopoly and killing the competition. Just think of it, if they allowed Adobe Flash or JAVA on their iPhones, tons and tons of Games and Applications could be run from INSIDE a Browser, no need to pay Apple to put an App in their App store. By simply killing Java and Flash, Apple has prevented millions of browser Apps from doing business as usual, as on the Desktop, through web browsers. In one easy stroke of the pen, everyone must know pay Apple to get on their App store and keep giving Apple a good percentage of their profits. Now they can force all those online content providers to go through them on the App Store to reach their customers on the iphone or iPad.

It’s brilliant! Isn’t it!? That’s why Steve Jobs gets the big bucks!

Have you ever wanted to send a quick text message, of YES or NO? Perhaps you’re in a board meeting and can’t fiddle with finding some microscopic keys on your software keyboard!? It’s simple with the “Doodle Text!” Android App available on the Android Marketplace from http://www.doodletext.com

Well then just Doodle Text! Yes Doodle Text for Android comes to the rescue with an easy way to doodle an quick short answer on your phone and easily send it via MMS sms picture messaging. MMS stands for MultiMedia Message Service, while SMS was simply Short Message Service which supported just text. With Doodle Text you can quickly and easily text doodle photo messages. Just draw or write with your finger quickly and hit send. We do hope they offer a paid version soon without advertising but who can complain about free!

Another great feature is it can let you send text messages from an office with bad phone reception, it can send texts over a WiFi wireless connection instead of the phone network, and this also means you can send out unlimited doodle mms messages for free.

For those who like drawing, painting it has some pretty cool effects also. You have a lot of freedom customizing effects and its really fun, you simply do a long click for a couple seconds on one of the effects which takes you to the customization options. The shader effect lets you choose two different colors to draw with in an interesting way, like candy canes and you can even select two effects and combine them together for even more interesting effects.

So perhaps when you’re also taking a break from Angry Birds, you’ll do some Doodle Texting!

Though meant for good, to clean up the spam from their search index, many legitimate websites appear to have been abruptly hurt with the latest changes. Some have reported that name brand websites, huge companies, such as Amazon and other retailers have made huge gains but smaller websites have been hurt. Content ‘pushers’ apparently have not been affected much or as much as they should have been.

This brings on a valid question: Where does Google stand in 2011? Is there any viable competition to compare search analytics with?

We propose there are a few to compare with:

1. http://Bing.com
2. http://Blekko.com
4. http://Baidu.com (China)
5. http://clusty.com (now Yippy)
6. cuil (NOPE, cuil is DEAD)

It was time.

I needed a ’smart’ phone. I had an iTouch, so it was going to be Android based not iPhone.

Luckily, even though I was on Tmobile, I wasn’t on a contract. Strangely though, it seems Tmobile stores have no idea about Tmobile.com sales and offers because when I happened to visit a local tmobile store to compare the Samsung Vibrant with the Google G2 and mytouch 4G, nobody told me tmoble.com was offering the Google G2 for free. (yes, with some fine print I’m sure, had to be a new contract etc and likely they wouldn’t waive the $35 activation and may even charge sales tax on highest msrp value around) It was later from home that I found out about the deals from browsing the tmobile website.

Unfortunately, even though I was on contract, I didn’t qualify since tmobile only wanted to offer that to ‘new’ customers, In other words, if I wanted to go from no contract to signing on for a 2year contract, they wanted to charge me $199 for the Google G2 instead of giving it for ‘free’, and yes I talked with Tmobile support. In fact a nice guy there even confirmed for me that, yes, I should do what I was thinking of doing to get the best deal…

What was I thinking? Well, I thought, why not just cancel my current tmobile service, and then go and sign up for a new 2year contract and get a nice FREE smartphone!? I found that BestBuy was giving the Google G2 for FREE also and the deal didn’t end on Cyber Monday like with Tmobile.com though they still charged for $35 activation fee and sales tax on the full price of the phone. This would bring the total cost to about $85 or so….but that’s not a bad price to pay for a brand new tmobile Google G2 phone with keyboard.

Wirefly had similar deals but they didn’t last as long, and what bothered me was that Wirefly seemed to ‘force’ you to buy into the “Unlimited” $30/month data plan. They would not sell you the phone at the advertised $49.99 plus tax without the $30/month data plan, and yes they charged the $35 activation also.

The sweetest deal came by way of Costco. Yes, thank God for Costco. No waiting for mail order, picked it up in store, price was $49.99 plus tax on retail (but their retail number was $399.99 which is set lower than other places) and Costco reimburses the $35 activation. The Google G2 actually was $69.99, but you can get the mytouch 4G for just $49.99 which is just as good if not better, but for the lack of a physical keyboard. So you can walk out of Costco with $86 less but a nice brand new mytoch 4G phone that would cost you about $550 + tax, almost $600 to buy on Amazon unlocked. Initially you do get a assigned a brand new phone number with your new 2year contract, but you can easily get your old number back by requesting it from your carrier. During the process, I once did a live chat with an operative that disconnected on me when I mentioned that it was a bit dishonest to list on their website that ‘A Web service is required in order to access this phone’s Web functionality and features, including Internet access and e-mail.’ when in fact they force you to enjoy those ‘features’ whether you want to or not, ie they won’t let you buy the phone without a data plan. On the other hand as I mentioned, on the phone I had talked to a very honest and helpful gentleman, and later I did talk to a pleasant support person on chat who helped fix some issues.

It is recommended to turn off “Mobile Network” ie 4G/data on the phone if you only have the 200MB/month $10/month plan since 200MB can go by fast and then surplus charges may be exorbitant. Since the phone has wifi, disabling Mobile Network isn’t a big deal if you’re around wifi spots often.

I didn’t explain how I made up my mind between the Samsung Galaxy S/Vibrant (which Costco was selling for $0.01, yes for one penny!), the Google G2 and the mytouch 4G….it will be the next post…so far the phone (mytouch 4G) has been great!

In my previous post I talked about trying out native mysql .net connector instead of odbc…well it turns out that the ODBC connector route gives better performance….

The same file doing some simple select NickName, Email from users table and printing out results…

Mysql .net connector (using linux ‘time’ measurement)
real 0m0.270s
user 0m0.238s
sys 0m0.011s

The same thing using ODBC connector (via unixODBC and Mysql ODBC connector driver version 5.1 /myodbc from Mysql AB/oracle/sun website)
real 0m0.079s
user 0m0.068s
sys 0m0.012s

So it seems the ODBC connector is considerably faster! I was actually surprised, I was thinking I would get better performance with the MYSQL specific method using System.Data and MySql.Data.MySqlClient… but seems I was wrong.

Guess will have to figure out how to speedup my mono .net webservice some other way…maybe its a SOAP issue…

I had ODBC working fine with unixODBC and the myODBC connector from mysql AB…the 5.1 version odbc and it was working fine but i wanted to try the native mysql .net connector instead.

I was getting errors compiling and had to switch from mcs to gmcs compiler but then i was getting
could not be loaded:
Assembly: MySql.Data (assemblyref_index=1)
Version: 6.3.5.0
Public Key: c5687fc88969c44d
The assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly

which was annoying because I had done the export MONO_PATH=/path/to/mysql.data.dll but still had same error…. (sometimes you might get error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `MySql.Data on compilation)

Anyway, the trick to fix these problems are two things. One is to make sure your MONO_PATH includes the full path to /mono/lib/mono/2.0 which should contain a bunch of files/assemblies and dirs….and to make a symbolic link from where gacutil -i system.data.dll installed into…which is usually in /mono/lib/mono/gac/MySql.Data/longversion_infodirectory/MySql.Data.dll

Once that’s done mono should be able to run it ok without anymore errors…

I had some issues with a .Net webservice that I ported to run on Mono, it kept on giving error that database.Table does not exist….and when i changed the “Table” name in the .cs c# code to reflect a lower case ‘table’ name and renamed the mysql database Table to “table”…it would then still give me an error that database.Table does not exist…anyway, the quick fix was to edit my mysql server config file, could be my.cnf in my case was my.ini or mysql.ini and i added lower_case_table_names=1 depending on mysql server version you might have to use lower_case_sensitive = 1 and put it in your [mysqld] section of your config file. It will then assume all table names as lowercase….under Windows I think that’s the default behaviour anyway since from what I know it doesn’t support case sensitivity….

In case it helps anyone out, if your having problems with install or startup of your mysql server and get errors indicating it can’t write to /usr/local/mysql/data or that it can’t find my_print_defaults or “mysqld_safe The file /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld
does not exist or is not executable” it could be a very simple solution of just adding the mysql bin directory path to your environment PATH variable…on linux of course this is a simple “export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin”
and of course change that to your own actual path to the mysql bin directory….

After adding the bin dir path to your $PATH environment variable mysql server mysqld_safe should startup without any problems….

I was trying to get my webservice .asmx working on linux….

I first failed due to mono version not being the latest and some issues with DataSet Extensions and XML.Linq etc….I was able to solve these issues by installing the latest version of Mono for CentOS/RHEL and then installing all the data, core, mono-web, etc and also WCF which didn’t install by default with mono-tools server etc… (gacutil came in handy, and sometimes I modified my web.config to reflect the ‘version’ of dll/library that gacutil said I had…)

For the curious, my .cs file behind App_Code used these libraries:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Services;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;

Anyway, I finally had it working just fine with xsp/xsp2 … I thought I was all set… ;( wrong..

Installed Mod_Mono but it wasn’t so easy sailing…

I was indeed able to get a simple Hello World index.aspx file working no problem with the default out of the box mod_mono.conf placed in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ but my .asmx service kept giving errors….first complained of and i just completely removed …. then I fixed the customerrors to off so i can see debug on remote browser etc…

My asmx web service kept on giving me Application error in ‘/’ (server error 500)…”Type Service Not Found , HttpException etc….”

I began to suspect that it was trying to run with mono server version 1 instead over version 2 for a version 2.0 application….so I began to make changes to the mod_mono.conf file which kept giving me errors on apache httpd restart:

[crit] The unix daemon module not initialized yet. Please make sure that your mod_mono module is loaded after the User/Group directives have been parsed. Not initializing the dashboard.

After re-ordering things I’d get rid of the errors somewhat, but what I didn’t know was that the config had reverted to Autohosting (MonoAutoApplication) instead of my manual override attempt, and so it was still running the wrong/default version server.

I finally solved that my moving down the Include conf.d/*.conf line in my httpd.conf after my user and group directives (in my case User Apache, Group Apache)

Here’s pertinent part of my mod_mono.conf file:
MonoDebug test true
MonoSetEnv test MONO_IOMAP=all
Alias /test “/var/www/html/Service”
MonoServerPath test /opt/novell/mono/bin/mod-mono-server2
MonoApplications test “/test:/var/www/html/Service”

Allow from all
Order allow,deny
MonoSetServerAlias test
AddHandler mono .aspx .config .asmx
SetHandler mono
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI “\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$” no-gzip dont-vary


AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript

MonoAutoApplication disabled

Well that’s about it, my service is now working fine under mod_mono ….

It’s been quite some time since I played around with Adobe After Effects, perhaps several years. And yet even with version 4 and on and on….it was quite “complete” in its features. It had and still has the widest range of plugins available. The latest incarnations, the CS series, currently the Adobe After Effects CS5 mainly adds native 64-bit OS support over CS4 along with Roto Brush tool and the mocha plugin.

Now I was always curious why so many raved about Eyeon (eyeonline website) FUSION years ago when it had no sound/audio support, and apparently years later it still doesn’t. The same thing can be said for D2/thefoundry’s NUKE or NukeX, again absolutely no support for audio, not even playback, forget about keeping it in the final render. Some would have you think that’s not a big deal….which is ludicrous.

Sure it isn’t ‘bad’ to own Nuke, NukeX or Fusion but my recommendation is if $10k is a lot of money to you, stick to Adobe After Effects. Its an unbelievable bargain for the power within it, and you won’t have to go through headaches of manually synchronizing audio clips. (frame numbering never agrees between applications with certain encoders like Divx etc and when you base it on time its not as accurate and forget about effects that change the timeline since then resyncing your audio will have you pulling your hair out and then jumping off a cliff.)

So why don’t these so called “high-end” FILM video compositing systems support audio? Adobe After Effects does, and does it well, which allows for easy usage of such great fx such as Trapcode Sound Keys and others. The music, audio/sound effects in a movie or a commercial are just as important as the video and there is no doubt being able modify one without having to redo the other is a very huge time saver.

So no, not having audio support doesn’t make those programs “cool” and “high-end” and not “bloated”, it makes them incomplete, a work in progress, beta software, at least not something that can be used without crutches.

I say this out of disappointment, because I really do prefer the NODE based workflow. I really enjoyed Silicon Grail, Rayz and also NothingReal Shake (then bought by apple to be cannabilized).

I’m now very curious about Autodesk TOXIK (it seems to borrow a lot from the ultimate Autodesk/Discreet FFI, Flame, Fire, Inferno along with their great keyers which used to be SGI only back in the days), which has been renamed Autodesk Maya Compositor and is included with Maya 2010. It also has a nice nodal based workflow reminiscent of SHAKE and I bet it probably can handle AUDIO, because Autodesk is a ‘real’ company