The Short & Curley

HELO servername
MAIL FROM: sender@adomain.com
RCPT TO: receiver@adomain.com
data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: A Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

The Long Explanation

First you need to identify to the SMTP server, the helo command takes care of this. Most mail servers do a lot of anti-spam checks and for this reason it’s suggested the servername you provide should be a valid mail server. That servername should also resolve to whatever IP address you’re connnecting from (another antispam measure).

helo servername

Next you provide the email address you’re sending from. It doesn’t have to be a valid email adress, but many servers will use SPF to ensure you’re allowed to send for that user/domain.

mail from: sender@adomain.com

Follow that with the email you’re sending too. If an error is thrown after this, pay attention to the message as it generally means you’ve got something wrong or that mail can’t be accepted by this mail server for that email address.

rcpt to: receiver@adomain.com

After this we follow with the data command, this tells the email server that everything after this and up until a single line with a lone fullstop (.) is part of the email message. Some exceptions to this are things like the Subject and From lines, which are each used for pretty presentation in e-mail clients.

data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

Following all of this, hit enter again to queue the message for sending. A full stop (period) as the first and only character on a line informs the SMTP server that the message is finished.

Posted from Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

1. Tweetdeck – Possibly the best iPhone application for Twitter, TweetDeck is great for users who are following lots of people.
2. Flickr – Yahoo’s Flickr iPhone application is used for browsing flickr and uploading your iPhone photos
3. eBay Mobile – eBay on the go, this application is great for just browsing eBay on the move or getting push reminders about watch items
4. FStream – FStream is great for listening to those streaming radio stations on the go!
5. Google Earth – The world at your fingertips, literally!
6. Google Mobile Application – Everything google Web App under one convenient roof, it’d be nice if the web apps launched inside this app though.
7. WordPress 2 – WordPress 2 is an application to manage your WordPress blog, whether it be creating and editing posts or trashing comments.
8. Uno™ – Do you know Uno? The great game, transformed to iPhone with multiplayer capabilities.  A free version is available if you don’t want multiplayer.
9. Facebook – Facebook, duh.
10. Stanza – Stanza is an e-book application for the iPhone and features purchasing through FeedBooks and others, plenty of free works available.
11. Apple iTunes Remote – A must for all iTunes users the remote will allow you to control iTunes over your wireless network.
12. RampChamp – Another addictive casual game, think shooting or ball toss at the carnival
13. Quota – Quota is an application for viewing your bandwidth quota with ISP’s like Telstra, iiNet, Optus, 3 Mobile, etc. free versions are available for iiNet and Optus
14. Peggle – The world’s most addictive casual game is now on the iPhone, waste time wherever you may be!
15. Oz Weather – The best weather tool for Australia on iPhone, Oz Weather data is supplied by BOM and doesn’t just provide numbers, but satellite imagery also.
16. OsXs – OsXs is a free Naught and Crosses game from some guys i know
17. NetNewsWire Premium (Free/Lite/Ad Version)
18. Domino’s Pizza – Sometimes you just want to order cheap pizza and have it meet you at home, this iPhone application will do just that
19. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D – One of the first driving games to hit the iPhone, a fun little game
20. CardStar – CardStar is an application for storing the barcodes of all those customer loyalty cards you carry around, enter them all in CardStar and never carry them around in your wallet again.
21. Bomberman Touch 2 – Volcano Party – A classic video game, the Bomberman series for iPhone is everything you’d expect it to be and then some.

Recycled for Recycle A Blog Post Day

1. I got the feeling PayPal loves the buyer more than the Merchant, something seems backwards there
2. PayPal want you to think “outside the box” but still do things their way?  I must say though, being forced to do things their way is sometimes a good thing, othertimes not so much.
3. Criticism is generally met with spin – some products were criticised or lack of products and spin spin “maybe we will, maybe we’ll do something else” just answer the question, if you don’t know you don’t know.
4. They failed to engage our local web community as a whole, due to this the turnout was terrible, next time get in touch with the AWIA.
5. My security key won’t activate, i called on the phone for help (i’ll never be calling PayPal again, just because your primary business is online, it doesn’t mean your phone support can be TERRIBLE, yes that’s right my experience was TERRIBLE)

I want to expand upon that last point, at the event we were told we could activate the security keys onto our accounts, upon trying to do this when i got back to work it just wouldn’t activate.  The error eventually told me to call the 1800 number, which i did.  After waiting on hold i spoke to a girl who basically kept telling me I had no card associate with my account and i didn’t order it, after i repeatidly told her how i aquired it free at the Developer Day.  She then asked me if it was an eBay security key, which i told her it wasn’t, she then told me it was an eBay security key because thats the only way i can get a free one and that i needed to call eBay.  After 15 minutes of this back and forth over the card i gave up, fairwelled the young lady, tweeted to @PayPalAustralia to try get help (still waiting but thats ok, it’s friday night) and now have a very negative perception of the kind of service my customers are going to receive when they phone PayPal with an issue.

Later in the afternoon i thought i’d try my hand at another call (after all the website did tell me to call that number to sort it out).  This time, the prompter forwarded me to another line that basically went like this “We’re experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment, most questions can be answered by visting the help link at the top of every page, Thank You for calling PayPal, have a nice day *hang up*”.  Ummm, if the call centre your IVR is targetting me to doesn’t have enough lines to take my call, that’s possibly the worst way you can handle the situtation.

All in all the developer day itself was great and i hope they come back next year if only so everyone can come next time.  But I feel PayPal Australia still have a bit more to do in Australia to win people over, they still have a very negative perception amongst alot of users (just because they’re active users, doesn’t mean they’re happy users), but they definately look to be taking steps towards changing how they’re perceived.

Sitting at my parents house I started to realise where it got to and convinced my mum to drive me 40 odd minutes back to work and wait for me while I looked everywhere for it.  You can be assured I didn’t find it and in a way I’m kind of retrospectively happy about it.

I slept like crap last night, not because I lost an iPhone (that’s laughable), but because I couldn’t stop thinking of all the things connected to my iPhone i needed to be changing passwords on or watching like a hawk.  The list was huge, my phone has been seriously connected to my life since the XDA Atom. In the end I gave up and resigned to changing things that matter and preying someone would use the public services like Facebook, last.fm or Twitter.

Everyone kept saying to me “Don’t you have that app that helps you find your fone?” “Dont you have mobile me?” my response was simple “None of that helps when it’s flat” and even if it wasn’t i would’ve been able call it and find it anyway, unless of course they threw the sim.  At no point amongst any of this banter did I remember that I could just log straight into my Apps4Rent WebMail, hit options and wipe my device, had I realised this I would’ve done it last night.

This is the greatest feature ever, who cares about finding your phone i was too busy caring about every ounce of what my life that was on there.  The hardware was replaceable, someone having someone elses pesronal data is not a good thing in my books.

So I’d been calling it all today (and so had friends and family it seemed) and finally at about 10 past 5 it came on and someone answered, OMFG! Not only does this guy have my phone, he lives around the corner and rides the exact same train stops as me.  We often cross paths at the train station and even ride the same train, had I _NOT_ gone to my Mum’s house, this guy would’ve walked right passed me about 10 minutes later while i waited for my friends, with my phone in his bag unknowing that it belonged to me.

I put a call block on my phone last night as I didn’t want un-necessary calls going out and the first thing he tried to do when the phone powered up was call entries like “Dad”.  When they didn’t work, he went to the start of my phone book and tried to call the first person and a few seconds later Chris called him and we organised to get the phone back.  Long story short, he came around in his car about 20 minutes later with my phone and I don’t think i’ve ever felt so happy, relieved or thankfull.  I owe this guy something and he’ll get it along with worlds of good karma. The hard part is i’m going to be so happy everytime this guy turns up anywhere near me for the next few weeks, his presence is just going to remind me that people are still amazing.

Some points to take away:

• What good are these “find the phone” services when theres no sim/battery?
• Does chaning the password on my exchange/mobile me acct, stop the find the phone/remote wipe from working?
• If i’d done a remote wipe, he’d never been able to have seen who the phone belonged too, he’d never have been able to try call Dad, he’d never know who was calling when we rang, it may not have been callable anymore?
• Good people still exist
  
• I think i have a guardian angel watching closely or something like that….
  

The plugin adds an itunes button to the visual editor which when clicked brings forward a dialog containing a search for the iTunes store link maker.

After searching, clicking on any link will ask for a title for the link and insert it into the content editor. The link also enables the ability to directly link to albums, something the standard link generator does not normally do.

Enough gaff, if you want it, it’s here.  It’ll be on wordpress.org soon enough.

Coupe all this with the fact i’m really starting to not hate the iPhone as much as i used too, because i barely use iTunes anymore and i might just start to be happy with my purchase. You can check out some pictures of what’s coming over at Engadget and also see Apple‘s iPhone 3.0 Preview Presentation.

Fast forward a few years and we’ve seen Apple since day one, ram iTunes down the throat of every ipod owner in the world. This was understandable, after all it’s a portable music player and it only ran on OSX to start with, so it’s ok to force a music player that’s already installed on the operating system along with the device to provide sync support, in fact it totally makes sense.  That is until they released on windows and iTunes wasn’t that great, also for years we’ve all been using Winamp or Windows Media Player and have no desire to switch to iTunes.

The one thing that always turned me off the iPod was iTunes, because on Mac it runs great but on Windows it just blows hard.  I was pretty much given a 20Gb iPod photo a while back and was glad to see Winamp supported sync of the iPod (just like it did my WM6 device), so i didn’t have to piss around with iTunes.  Wishful thinking, i still had to install iTunes just so i can restore and manage updates to my ipod, still.. i can swallow it, it’s a media player it makes sense that the program that controls the syncing is also a media player, right?

Here’s where it gets interesting, Apple released the iPhone, it runs it’s own flavour of iTunes/iPod and along with that is pretty much a fully blown smart phone/PDA.  So heres where i begin to question the integrity of iTunes, when i’m syncing my Calendar, Music, Contacts, Photos, Videos, Software Updates and Applications all through what used to be a media player that i will soon be forced to use 100%, just so i can keep my mobile phone up to date.  This little twist, in my opinion, makes the iTunes/iPhone(ipod) combo way worse than Microsoft ever did with Internet Explorer, yet for someone reason.. no one seems to give a shit? everyone is just copping it and dealing it with.

I shouldn’t have to install a media player that i don’t want to use, just because someone decided the updates for my phone should be delivered through it.  It’s high time Apple released something that synced everything on your phone without using iTunes, perhaps an extended iSync for Windows/OSX with the ability to put files into the devices media player DB without iTunes?

iTunes should be a media player, it should have a ‘sync interface’ that any device can use (listen closely apple).  Apple should have some central ‘sync software’ for their ipod/iphone collection that acts as a central point between the devices and ANY software (Yeah that’s right apple, not just iTunes).  This way apple can still maintain proprietary code in iTunes and in the way they handle the sync, but still allow people to make decisions for themselves about what software they want to use and not have something they don’t want to use, rammed down their throat.

Oh and please, this isn’t some debate about what’s better and what’s not, because that’s always going to come down to user preference, which is something Apple isn’t providing right now.  Yes i know most other major portable media players are playing the game the same way, but that doesn’t mean they’re playing fairly for us, the consumers.  Perhaps one day people will learn to work together a little to build great things instead of trying to win the war, whether it be a format war, a software war or just good old fashioned war.

After searching for a while and finding nothing, we eventually worked out what we wanted to know through trial and error. So for everybody else who has SVEC KVM and can’t locate the manual and can’t locate SVEC for a manual (they seem to have gone out of business) heres a quick run down on what we found.

The default password is 00000000 and the hotkey is scroll lock, scroll lock (that’s a double-tap on scroll-lock), once you’ve hit that, you can follow it up with any of the keys below:

• R – Reflash ROM (wipe it clean and start from defaults)
• SPACE – Enter the Configuration (setup names, etc.)
• F – Find (Type in machine name, it’ll locate that machine)
• UP – Browse up through all the connected machines
• DOWN – Browse down through all the connected machines
• ESC – Go back to normal keyboard connected to the machine mode

Hope this is useful to you, it took us a bit of trial and error to sort this thing out with no manual and theres pretty much no useful google results for the FD7419, so i figured i’d write something so anyone else having the headache we were can sort the problem and move on.

If Microsoft are trying to get us to go Wow at what they’re doing, they’re definitely going the wrong way about it. How about showing me some real world use cases? Instead of useless applications that look like I just threw up McDonalds after a night of heavy drinking. Hey Microsoft, i’m not going WOW yet, as much as i like the idea of being able to pass my UI design off to a designer and having him send me back XAML i can integrate into my project, you’re just not showing me how great it really can be.

One of the guys at work has been doing some XAML UI design for a client and i’m aware of how good it can be and how great the use cases are, but they need to show people this. Theres 29 people in the live meeting training session i’m in all getting a very poor impression of WPF.