The sitelinks on ardamis.com seem to come and go. I noticed that they were back again a few days ago.
But this time around, a search for “Oliver Baty” also returns sitelinks.
This is the first time I’ve noticed that a search for other than the domain name has returned sitelinks for ardamis.com, so I figured it was worth recording for posterity.
My Chicago Card Plus keeps getting rejected at the turnstile with a message to see the attendant, Code: 86.
So tonight, I trotted over to the attendant and asked what this meant. She had to look it up in a book. Maybe they don’t get asked this very often. As it turns out, code 86 means that the card is not active. The strange thing is that nothing shows up in Google for searches about the CTA and code 86. So, this post should change that and hopefully save a few CTA employees from digging out their training manuals.
If my Chicago Card Plus is deactivated and I provide updated credit card information, will it be reactivated immediately?
No. Your Chicago Card Plus will not be available for immediate use. Once your credit card has been successfully charged for reloading purposes, your Chicago Card Plus will be available for fare payment within three business days. This information can be provided by logging on to your account at chicago-card.com or by calling 1-888-YOUR-CTA (1-888-968-7282), TTY: 1-888-CTA-TTY1 (1-888-282-8891), Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
How annoying.
So I logged in and changed my fare type to the 30-day pass and gave them my credit card number. We shall see.
Update: 1.6.11
Progress. I just received this from the CTA:
Date: Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:02 PM
Subject: Chicago Card Plus: Card ReactivatedTHIS IS AN AUTOMATED E-MAIL; PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL ADDRESS.
Your Chicago Card Plus (Serial Number 001075282) was previously deactivated because we were unable to reload your account. Your reloading issue has now been resolved and your card will be reactivated and should be available for use within 3 business days.
If you have any questions, please visit www.chicago-card.com or call 1-888-YOUR-CTA (1-888-968-7282), Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Followed immediately by this email:
Date: Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:02 PM
Subject: Chicago Card Plus: Account ReloadingTHIS IS AN AUTOMATED E-MAIL; PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL ADDRESS.
Your Chicago Card Plus was reloaded with the value you have pre-selected.
If you have any questions or would like to see your transaction history please log into your account at www.chicago-card.com or call 1-888-YOUR-CTA (1-888-968-7282), Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thank you for using Chicago Card Plus as your fare payment option
Update: 1.12.11
Check out this ridiculousness I just received from the CTA:
Date: Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:29 AM
Subject: Regarding your CTA Service RequestTHIS IS AN AUTOMATED E-MAIL; PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL ADDRESS.
Thank you for contacting the Chicago Transit Authority.
When a card is disabled (due to insufficient funds), it takes three business days for every CTA bus and train to update, once there is a positive balance on the account and then the card can be used on the fourth business day. In this regard, your account reloaded on 1/6/11 and the card was used on 1/10/11, which is too soon. You were supposed to use the card starting 1/12/11. Since the card was used before the three business days, the enabling process was stopped. The Revenue Equipment Department has been contacted to start the enabling process again. Therefore, the card will be ready for use on Tuesday, 1/18/11.
Please do not reply directly to this e-mail message. If you have any questions, please visit www.chicago-card.com or call 1-888-YOUR-CTA (1-888-968-7282), Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thank you,
Customer Service
I’m pretty pissed. The CTA is scolding me for resuming use of the card too soon? It’s Wednesday the 12th now. I received the email that my card was reactivated the previous Thursday. I tried using it the following Monday morning and it worked, so I continued to use it that afternoon, Tuesday morning and afternoon, and Wednesday morning this week. Does this email mean they’re going to deactivate my card again and make me wait for six days (three business days plus the weekend) before I can resume using it? It works now! Just don’t touch anything!
I can understand that an activated/reactivated card may not work everywhere for up to three days, but why screw me over like this for using it where it does work?
I quote their web site, “Once your credit card has been successfully charged for reloading purposes, your Chicago Card Plus will be available for fare payment within three business days.” The emphasis is mine. This is exactly what I did – I used it within three business days.
Because the page at http://www.nullsoft.com/free/netmon/ has been down every time I’ve tried to visit it lately, I’ve decided to reproduce it here, along with the download of the NetMon application. Below is the content of the page, with the link updated to the file hosted at ardamis.com.
This is a slightly useful network monitor graphing thing for Win32.
It just sits in its own window, pinging a host, and giving you a
graph of how long it takes each time.
Because all great (err) things should be free, this should be too.
Not only that, we’re pretty much giving away all rights to it, giving
you the source, and letting you do what you want with it (see the
license below).
Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Nullsoft, Inc.
This software is provided ‘as-is’, without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it
freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not
claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software
in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be
appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
Note that this license is borrowed from zlib.
Current version: 0.4 (8/1/00)
Download: netmon04.exe
v0.4 (8/1/00)
I replaced the shattered color wheel on my 61″ Samsung HLN617W DLP television using the excellent instructions at http://www.jangro.com/items/samsung-dlp-replace-color-wheel/.
A shattered Samsung HLN617W DLP color wheel
A color wheel is six separate pieces of glass attached to a hub through which the light from the lamp is cast. The wheel spins insanely fast, and over time the bearings wore and it developed a wobble. Once the wobble became pronounced enough, the wheel tore itself apart. I should have known something was up, because the TV had been making a sound like a vacuum cleaner for a few months.
A shattered Samsung HLN617W DLP color wheel (closeup)
While the lamps on DLP sets are easily accessed, replacing the color wheel requires tearing the guts out of the thing. Still, if you’re comfortable with electronics, you shouldn’t have too much trouble with it.
I like DLP, even though the components are subject to wear and replacement, because you don’t get much more analog than using a high-pressure mercury-vapor metal halide arc lamp to generate a pretty intense beam of light, sending that beam of light through a mechanical spinning color wheel and then scattering it with a reflective micromirror chip against a surface.
I fixed our gas oven a few weekends ago by replacing this Oscillation Overthruster.
Whirlpool gas safety valve and regulator assembly
What would have been a $400 repair ended up costing about $90 and one hour of a Saturday afternoon.
I was tempted to call this gizmo (really, a “gas safety valve and regulator assembly”) a flux capacitor, but honestly, which film would you rather see again?
My wife called me during the train ride home to say that she just had a brief encounter with Peter Sagal as she was unloading the car. He happened to be walking past while she was telling the boy, who was trying to push the stroller, that the wheels were locked. Mr. Sagal commented that he liked his name.
We listen to Wait Wait every week, either in the car while running errands or going to the zoo, children’s museum, IKEA, etc., or the podcast later. The kids dig clapping along during the introduction. Our daughter has named one of her stuffed animals (a cat) Peter Sagal. Mr. Sagal’s opinion of this is unknown.
I don’t use Twitter that much, but I’ve followed him for some time. I told her I would tweet about it and that I bet he would reply. So I did, and sure enough, a few hours later, he did.
Peter Sagal does Twitter right
A user pointed out that while an attachment to an email had the icon of an installed application (in this case, Word) and the correct extention (.DOC), it would not open in Word with a double-click. The Open With dialog box opened instead. When the attachment was dragged to the desktop, it opened in Word with a double-click, as expected.
Because the filename of this attachment was pretty long, I suspected that it had something to do with the length of the filename, and so I started investigating.
I created text files with the following filenames:
119-CAsEvpz1R29z7sdrgs4-apJFmpissj-xxdfgh-dfght66x1aseg-7tSs5lF7lLyd3T-HJf42YiMYwguijgrsywh-wgh3q45y4tys64ysy45-119.txt
120-CAsEvpz1R29z7sdrgs4-apJFmpiRssj-xxdfgh-dfght66x1aseg-7tSs5lF7lLyd3T-HJf42YiMYwguijgrsywh-wgh3q45y4tys64ysy45-120.txt
123-CAsEvpz1R29z7sdrgs437-apJFmpiRssj-xxdfgh-dfght66x1aseg-7tSs5lF7lLyd3T-HJ6f42YiMYwguijgrsywh-wgh3q45y4tys64ysy45-123.txt
129-vpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x1IA7eu9utSs5lF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYwgVZ4FJ-CAsEvpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x1IA7eu9utSs5lF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYa-129.txt
131-vpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x23451IA7e9utSs5lF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYwgVZ4FJ-CAsEvpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x451I7eu9utSlF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYa-131.txt
133-vpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x1IA7eu9utSs5lF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYwgVZ4FJ-CAsEvpz1R296z7apJFmpiRss6x1IA7eu9utSs5lF7lLyd3THJf42YiMYwgVZa-133.txt
Including the extensions, these filenames are 119, 120, 123, 129, 131, and 133 characters, respectively.
I added the files as attachments to a new mail message.
For attachments with less than 130 characters in the filename, the filename is displayed in full.
The “129-” attachment’s name is 129 characters and the full name was displayed. The icon was the correct Text Document file icon.
The “131-” attachment’s name is 131 characters and the name was truncated at the 129th character (…-131.t). This caused the icon to be the Windows unrecognized file type icon (presumably because my computer has no application associated with a “.t” extension).
The “133-” attachment’s name is 133 characters and was truncated at the 129th character, before the . character (…-133). The icon was a Notepad icon, but not the typical Text Document file icon.
It would appear that attachment filenames are truncated at the 129th character when displayed in the attachment pane in the Mail To: window.
Send the email.
Open the received email or view it with the Quickviewer and note that the filenames in the attachment window are again truncated at the 129th character.
Try to open each attachment with a double-click. The “119-” attachment should open in Notepad, but all attachments with longer filenames will not open, and instead cause an Open With prompt to open.
Why was this happening?
Even when the full filename with the extension is visible, the filename of the local copy of the attachment is truncated at X characters, where X = (130 – PATH/TO/XPgrpwise).
In my case, the path to the XPgrpwise folder that contains the attachments is 63 characters long:
C:\Documents and Settings\F_LAST\Local Settings\Temp\XPgrpwise\
This means the maximum filename length for emails opened under my account is 67 characters (130 – 63 = 67).
A longer or shorter path to this folder will cause the maximum filename length to change accordingly, so if you repeat these tests, your experience may vary.
This matters less than one would think, though, because of the way GroupWise 7 shortens the filenames.
Instead of simply chopping off any characters after the character limit has been reached, however, GroupWise will truncate the name portion of the filename and leave the extention portion intact, up to 119 characters. Filenames 120 characters or longer are truncated to the 119-character limit but the extention begins to be cut off. Once the extention begins to be cut off, double-clicking the attachment will cause the Open With dialog box to open if the shortened extention doesn’t have an application associated with it or is missing entirely (as one would expect). Filenames of 123 characters or longer are truncated such that the dot+extension is completely removed. This 119-character limit seems to be independent of the number of characters in the path to XPgrpwise.
To sum up, just because GroupWise 7 displays the full filename of an attachment and the correct icon doesn’t mean that the attachment can be opened in its associated application from the message window. When GroupWise saves the file to the hard drive, it truncates long filenames, potentially removing the extension. Opening attachments with filenames greater than 119 characters in length requires a little more effort because of the way the local copy of the file is saved without an extension.
I’ve written a simple batch file to remove those hidden files that Mac OSX leaves all over shared drives to annoy us Windows users.
del /s /a:h ._* :: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork del /s /a:h .DS_Store :: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store del /s /a:h .Trashes :: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycle_bin_(computing) @pause
Copy the code into a text file, rename it cleanOSX.bat and run it from the root of the drive you wish to clean. The script will look through all subfolders, deleting any hidden file or folder with a name that begins with ._, or that matches .DS_Store or .Trashes. Depending on the number of these files on your drive, the process of deleting them could take some time.
The resource fork is a construct of the Mac OS operating system used to store structured data in a file, alongside unstructured data stored within the data fork. A resource fork stores information in a specific form, such as icons, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and application code (machine code). For example, a word processing file might store its text in the data fork, while storing any embedded images in the same file’s resource fork. The resource fork is used mostly by executables, but every file is able to have a resource fork.
…
Currently, Mac OS X does support resource forks on Windows SMB shares by creating a hidden file in the same directory with the data fork file, with the characters “._” at the beginning of the file name. However, this may be annoying for some users, especially because some Windows power users always keep hidden files visible. Besides, Windows does not treat those files correctly as the file itself is moved or removed.
.DS_Store (Desktop Services Store) is a hidden file created by Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X operating system to store custom attributes of a folder such as the position of icons or the choice of a background image.
Under Mac OS X, when a file is deleted in Finder, it is moved to a .Trashes folder, and when viewing the device’s available space the space occupied by the deleted files is shown as occupied.
I’ve written a simple batch file for backing up files and folder onto a different drive letter.
In my case, the destination drive will be a USB drive. Even though I’ve configured Windows to always assign the same drive letter to that device, the possibility remains that I’ll connect a different drive that will be assigned the same drive letter. In order to be sure that I’m backing up to the correct drive, the batch file performs a few checks before copying files.
The first check confirms that a disk exists at that drive letter. The second check confirms that the path is valid. The third check looks for the presence of a file in the destination directory.
To use, simply paste the following code into a text file, change the variables to match your environment, add additional xcopy lines for other folders, then save it as a .bat file. Fire the batch file manually, or place it in your startup folder to automatically back up your files each time you log in to Windows.
:: Back up select files and folders to a location that may be an external drive @echo off :: Set some variables set destinationDrive=D: set destinationPath=backup Set destination=%destinationDrive%\%destinationPath% set validationFile=asdf.txt :: Check to see if the drive is available if not exist %destinationDrive%\. goto :nodestinationDrive :: Move to destination drive %destinationDrive% :: Check to see if the path is available if not exist "\%destinationPath%\." goto :nodestinationPath :: Move to destination path cd %destinationPath% :: Check to see if the validation file exists if not exist %validationFile% goto :novalidationFile :: Backup location is valid @echo The backup location "%destination%" is valid. :: Copy files and folders if source is newer than destination :: Desktop @xcopy "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%destination%\Desktop" /d /e /c /i /q /h /r /k /y @echo. @echo Files copied. Please review output for errors. @pause goto eof :nodestinationDrive @echo The destination drive "%destinationDrive%" does not exist. goto :nocopy :nodestinationPath @echo The destination path "%destinationPath%" does not exist on drive %destinationDrive%. goto :nocopy :novalidationFile @echo The validation file does not exist. goto :nocopy :: No files have been copied :nocopy ::@echo A valid backup location cannot be confirmed. @echo No files have been copied. @echo. @pause
This file works with Windows XP through Windows 7.
Are you new to SEO? Do you have a basic understanding of how web pages are built, and want to tweak yours for better rankings? I’ve wanted to collect a few authoritative, practical, and non-technical resources on SEO for my clients for some time. The good news is that it’s easier than you think to build a page that does a number of things that the search engines like. The guides below should help explain what to look for when evaluating whether a site has been developed with an eye for SEO.
Google has created a compact Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide of best practices that developers can follow to improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing. This guide is available as a PDF.
The SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO provides comprehensive information you need to get on the road to professional quality SEO. Read it online or download it as a PDF.
SEOmoz’s CEO and co-founder wrote a very nice article on building the perfectly optimized page that explains the most important on-page factors and how they affect rankings in today’s environment.
Sometimes, a client will ask for SEO as though it’s something to be tacked on after the site has been built. Happily, good development practices benefit human visitors as well as SEO, and they go into every site I build, as I build it, from the very first line of code. I’ve written up a list of on-page factors and other considerations within a developer’s direct control that are important not only for SEO, but for good web development in general, at Aleph Studios | SEO Consulting.