Blog

  • Peacock Lumber, new project.

    Just came form Peacock Lumber, in Oshawa. Great friendly bunch. Really helpful, and willing to help.
    I would recommend them to anyone needing lumber/wood supplies.
    Bought some 3/8″ baltic plywood… secret as to what I’m making for now. 🙂

  • What I intend on writing about in the near future

    note to self, write about the following:
    magento objects. Specifically product and customer objects
    magento optimization.
    titanium php development.

  • Windows 7, links not working

    If you get an error message like:
    “this operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer”
    Culprit is google chrome.

    1. uninstall google chrome, through it’s uninstaller, not the windows uninstaller
    2. reinstall chrome
    3. restart any application that is still giving you a problem.  Such as outlook.

    Drop a line, if this helped.

  • Inbox zero, years later…

    It’s been over three years now, and inbox zero is still happening.
    I’m throwing everything into an archive folder, for each year’s quarter seems to be working well.
    Does it give me more productivity? In a single word, yes.

  • Bad Restaurants in Toronto, boycotting one, and can't use the other.

    I’ve been trying out different places, be that dine in, take out, and ordering online…
    Some places are exceptional service, but others, are absolutely horrible.
    1.) Mama’s pizza at 118 Yonge Street, Toronto, has terrible service.  After I placed my order and I wait 5-10 minutes, before the cashier gets my attention, and asks to me pay.  I was hoping that the pizza is near ready.  I had a hunch that it wasn’t even started yet, so I ask if the pizza was started.  “No, sorry”.  I was angry.  I didn’t yell at him, I didn’t do anything besides, say “forget it then…”.
    Why was I waiting for 5-10 minutes between letting the server know what I wanted, till I was asked to pay?  People, if you don’t want to waste your time, go somewhere else.  Mama’s pizza has lost my business for good.
    I wonder how much this business has lost, because of badly trained staff?  Why take an order, and allow the person to wait.  The point of taking the order, is to MAKE it, not sit around, and then ask payment, only to then start.  If that’s the case, TAKE ORDER, IMMEDIATELY TAKE PAYMENT, IMMEDIATELY START ORDER.
    2.) Swiss Chalet canada — online ordering form.  Wow, whatever business that sold you the ordering system, has sold you something that is, well… less than functional.  Hope you didn’t pay much for it, cause you sure aren’t making as much business as you could –in fact, I’m pretty sure you’re losing a lot of business.  I tried your ordering system in chrome, safari, and firefox…  (I really wanted some Swiss Chalet, to have tried all three browsers) —  If you say “use MSIE”, well, you just lost of ton of users that are on MACs, Linux, and mobile phone orders.
    – Maybe I should contact them, and see if they’re willing to get a system that would be actually functional?
    – Situation: After you enter your phone number on the home page (I’ve probably used my phone number before at a different location, but I don’t remember), you enter your details on the second page, third page asks you for your postal code.  Click submit, sends you back to the first page.  Didn’t you hire a QA person, to test this site out?  You know, it’s kind of fundamental to your system, if you require each person to SINGUP to order from you.  Or a functional analyst, to determine the different use cases of your system?
    Swiss chalet please fix your online ordering system, or hire a 3rd party business that can actually deliver you a working website?  If you’re looking for a contractor that could build you the system in its entirety, please let me know.
    I really wanted some chicken, fries, and chalet sauce… 🙁

  • pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan [update #2]

    Okay,
    Been working with pidgin w/msn-pecan on ubuntu 10.04.  New problem, pecan doesn’t crash pidgin anymore, however I am logged out after I’ve been away from my computer a little bit.  As in, when the screen saver kicks in, pecan logs me out or can’t maintain a connection.
    Doesn’t seem to happen in windows 7.
    If I can live with this issue,  and so far I have… it’s kind of a nice flaw, as this allows me to be not distracted, while at work.

  • pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan [update]

    Discovered that is crashes a lot, on ubuntu.  Pretty stable (haven’t noticed it crashed yet) on windows.
    Verdict thus far: good on windows.  Horrible on ubuntu.

  • pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan

    Day 1
    I decided to try a new msn protocol for pidgin.im today.  Why? Was just browsing the list of plugins, and saw the alternative…
    http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan
    Looked at the list of added benefits, and decided to give it a try… lets see if I stick with it.  So far, it is fast on start up.  Interesting to see that it picked up a ton of friend requests, that I didn’t see before.

  • Debugging a segfault in PHP

    debugging segfaults is not fun.
    My low key technique:

    1. place a printf(“made it here: %s, %s+ %sn”, __METHOD__, __LINE__, __FILE__); everywhere…
    2. put “DIE(‘something’);” to figure out the exact line that fails.  If dies, good.  move it further down.  If it segfaults, move the die statement up.  Until you’ve found the exact line that fails.
    3. Figure out why it’s segfaulting…  uh… good luck with that.  Google, and look at the changelog in PHP to see if it’s been fixed.

    An easier option, if I were the one controlling the box — Update to the latest PHP.

  • little project ideas

    Just found a need to access my home server… however, it’s powered down… how can I overcome this problem in the future.  To answer my own question…  I should go lookup how to send a wake-on-lan command to the box. As well as know what my IP is…
    project ideas:
    1.) Current IP notifier – send to my webserver, what my home server IP is. (Dynamic). I could use a dynamic dns service… this maybe interesting to learn how to do this, if I have my own VPS… have the home-server, notify the web-server to update the DNS setting. So I would have something like: homelan.lloydleung.com or whatever.
    2.) wake on lan commands.
    3.) vpn to the network instead… with a combo on 1. This way, everything is encrypted…