GS Design Just another developer blog

If you find yourself one morning with your dropbox client not connecting to the server, and you trace the problem to the company/ISP ( or country if your in China :-p ) firewall then you can put the kind words for them to the side a little and try the following.
Most of the firewalls block the main IP for dropbox.com 174.36.30.70 but the alternate IP is open

So add this to your hosts:
174.36.30.71 www.dropbox.com

Hope it works for you.

It seems to a bit of an old news, but i just found out about it

Google has launched Google Analytics Data Export API beta and is now publicly available to all Analytics users. This i think opens up a whole new realm of possibility in terms of web traffic analysis. And it is a very good news for all companies in SEO and SEM domain.
Imagine accessing all the data from the Google Analytics from your own application, automating reports send to clients.

I am looking forward to see the applications that will be build with the new API.

Cheers

I have been using flickr for a while now, i even got a Pro account but i got to admit that i always have craved for desktop uploading tool. As much as i like the flickr service the fact is that google’s picasa has the upper hand when it comes to client software with its picasa client.

Well it seems Yahoo has finally has heard the cryings of its users and released a better client for uploading pictures and videos to your account : Flickr Uploadr 3.0.

The Uploader lets you select photos for upload, add tags, organize them into sets, and change privacy settings.

So basically it does what it says it does .. uploads your pictures. I would have been much more excited if they had integrated more suport for managing sets and colections.

Cheers

If you are a developer than you are well aware of the importance of testing your applications, and i dont mean testing it your self since that is really not going to be very helpful beyond the development stage.

Since you ( or your team ) have build this application you will not be tester, since you already know how the application will perform. The best thing to do is to do a test with more subjects, of all knowledge levels if possible and give them a series of events and tasks to perform to see how the application handles and how easy it is for them to perform those tasks.

I found that in all test groups there is always a “bird brain” (as the speaker in the presentation reffered to it) that will execute a series of actions that will crash your application (usually things you havent thought of anybody doing). Although some developers hate those type of testers ( how the F did you managed to get there) i like them. At my old job i used to have a secretary that would find any bug i might have overlooked in a matter of minutes, just by clicking around ).

Anyway, the point i was trying to make ( beside the fact that testing is important ) is that human driven tests although very creative at times, have a few limitations and will not managed to test the full amount of possibilities. And above this will take quite a few resources ( human and financially ) to execute this tests, and they cant be reused if the application changes.

So there are some really smart persons that are looking into making an automated system for testing web applications. Some the research in this field are also done by microsoft ( this is a small inside info for all those microsoft haters ).

I am not going to go into much more details and let you watch the presentation.
Enjoy.

Google announced yestarday on there blog that that they’re ending the agreement with Yahoo made earlier this year that gave Yahoo! the option of using Google to provide ads on its websites (and its publisher partners’ sites) in the U.S. and Canada.

We feel that the agreement would have been good for publishers, advertisers, and users — as well, of course, for Yahoo! and Google. Why? Because it would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements. Better ads are more useful for users, more efficient for advertisers, and more valuable for publishers.

No that is not a mistype or a scam i am pulling, this is for real.

How many times did you need a place to put your content, your files someplace online so you could share it with other people ? Did you find a service that offers it for free ? Well i did but they usually offer like a couple of gigs, and not 1TB.

The service i found via chris pirillo is oosah.com

Oosah is a Web-based digital media content hosting and management system. Oosah provides individuals and businesses with an all-in-one service for uploading, hosting, managing and sharing their digital media assets. Members can also use Oosah to create new media assets in the form of multimedia presentations that we call “oosahs.”

First, Oosah is very intuitive and easy to use. Oosah features are accessed using the same drag-and-drop, and keyboard commands that you are familiar with from desktop applications.

Second, Oosah gives you a full Web-based File Manager. The Oosah File Manager gives you the ability to organize your content better than any other Web 2.0 content hosting site.

Third we give you more sharing options than any other site. Not only can you share content by emailing, or by linking/embedding in other sites, but you can also podcast your content, or you can download it and burn it to CD/DVD for off-line distribution.

We even let you print your photos at full resolution on your local printer. There are other features unique to Oosah as well, which you will find as you use it, and more are coming.

Not only this but the service can connect to other websites such as youtube, flickr, picasa and facebook to herlp you manage your content.

They even have a desktop application for gamers that instantly uploads screenshoots to your oosah account, by just pressing the print screen key, pretty coool.

Combine all of that with 1TB of storage … and you have a winner

Created at Oosah.com

I just stumble upon an interesting and frightening website in the same time. Its called felonspy.com and using it you can check the persons with a criminal record that live in your area. Even this sounds like pretty cool i think that to some point you might not want to know, just because you might get scared when you see the stats for your neighborhood. Lucky for me i don’t live in America so i cant check my area )

About Felon Spy

Who We Are

FelonSpy.com is a small group of dedicated community activists who are committed to making sure that you do not fall victim to any crime, not rape, murder, robbery or even petty theft. We help because we can and we care because we have all been victims of crimes ourselves, and by all that is holy by the grace of God, we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.

We are former law enforcement officers, information technologists land developers and community leaders, all of whom have given up our posts in pursuit of this noble, sometimes misunderstood quest to label the underbelly of society by their actions.

The Technology

FelonSpy.com uses a broad array of databases, each completely legal when used individually. They are probably also legal when used together, but that answer hasn’t yet come to us. Our servers compare city, county, state and federal criminal databases with telephone records to pinpoint the location of the person you need to know is living next door to you.

In many cases the public telephone directory has incomplete or insufficient data, so about once a month we get updated address and number records directly from a number of telephone companies and credit reporting agencies (at tremendous cost to us, I should add). Don’t ask how we get most of our information, but we do it, and we get our top shelf info from sources who wish to remain anonymous, and we pay a lot of money to insure that we keep getting it.

The good news is that you can be safer in your home at night, even if just because you have better information, or because “somebody” takes the needed actions to get these people off the streets.

Who We Track

We track virtually everyone with a criminal record including sex offenders, ex-cons (felony and misdemeanor), and those guilty of some of the more serious traffic infractions. You have the right to know who your neighbors are. We hope to track persons accused of crimes but acquitted in the future, but at this time we do not have sufficient funding to expand our database that far.

Ask too many questions and who knows, we might be tracking you next.

For years now when ever you wanted to scouter the internet for some bit of information you headed right away to a search engine like google.com or yahoo.com or what ever rocks your boat. Well any of those search engines are… well lets say to much tech and simple. They show results in a scientific fashion on a simple interface. Some would argue that simple is better, and i would agree with them.

But if you want to spice up your searches you might be interesting in heading out for viewzi.com.

viewzi.com witch is still in beta state gives you a new view on search results, a more visual one, making the user experience more personal. Not only this but viewzi.com aggregates data from several locations and this can improve your search results, plus it can search in severals ways: web searches, picture searches, video searches and a few others that i will let you discover.

How is Viewzi Different?

It’s all about Views
We think there are better ways to present information than in a simple list. We start with specific topics or search terms and ask: “Is there a better way to present this data?” The result? Dozens of new, unique ‘views’, or ways to look at information, each custom-tailored for that content. It’s the right data, presented in the right way.

It’s Refined
Some views are more utilitarian and pull from broad sources like Google or Yahoo!, while others can be tailored for a specific topic like world news, celebrity gossip, or gadgets. This means your results are right for your search. No more sifting through millions of results.

It’s Smart
Our View Picker helps connect you with just the right Views. We do the work of finding the best places and sources and brings those together for you. One search bar for hundreds of sources. It’s like having thousands of search engines in one search bar.

It’s Fun
It’s just more fun to use Viewzi. So fun that we’ve been called, ‘The iPhone of search.” Each time you search for something you can try a different View. Our views are hand crafted by some of the best designers and experts across the globe, each one of them passionate about making search exciting and fun for you.

What is your thought on this new social search website ? Feel free to comment away.

Well i hope you enjoy it and i will leave you with a video review from Chris Pirillo.

As social networks seem to get bigger and bigger and new ways of online communication spring up, people get more and more caught up into updating their accounts on various networks.

So wheres there’s a need there’s an application .

As i was talking a few days ago a new service has been borne a few months ago called ping.fm that allows users to update their services all from one place. Well today i stumble upon a class on phpclasses.org called Ping.FM Wrapper that can be used to update multiple social networks using the Ping.FM API.

It accesses the Ping.FM Web services API server and can perform several operations to update social networks of a given user. It can for instance post messages or the user status, retrieve received messages, etc..

I guess this will make the life of developers required to do an application that will update social networks a whole lot easyer.

Cheers

If you are a geek like or you just like to talk a lot online or maybe you jsut like connecting with other people online, maybe people from around the world, well in all of those cases you are likely to have a whole bunch of accounts opened all over the place.

So i guess you have accounts on social networks like myspace or Hi5, or maybe facebook, but as much as you like communicating i bet you opened a twitter account. Well you might not have as much accounts as i do ( ) jk ) but i bet you find it difficult to update all your accounts, and keep them up to date. I have that same problem, it is really time consuming.

Well there is an answer to our prairies and it is called ping.fm.This is a new service that has been in beta for almost 6 months now .. from what i know and has been giving beta codes to register to a limited amount of people, and still is but i managed to get a key .
What it does is that is making your life easier by updating a bunch of services at once from one place … pretty cool huh ?.

And there are a few ways to update as well, beside from the actual website, you can use your IM accounts like AIM, YM, MSN or GTalk, an iPhone or iTouch application and even a regular WAP application.

At the time of this article they had support for :
Bebo, Blogger, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, kwippy, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress.com.
I think that is a pretty impressive list, and i bet the it will grow in time.

And i have a good news for the ones that are interested .. i managed to get a beta code for you guys … so use pingadactyl to register … dont know how long it will be valid.

Cheers.