Tech Articles: Nerdy computer stuff.

Not long after I wrote my last article about Tablet Computing, a really good Black Friday deal came up at the Microsoft Store. I headed over there and got two HTC Radar phones for free, both loaded with the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) software. I had to cancel Verizon and switch to T-Mobile, but it was well worth it.

I can't describe how great this phone is. It's really changed the way I use computers; I end up using them a lot less. All the small tasks I would usually have to plop down in front of a PC to do can quickly be done from the phone. Facebook, emails, checking stocks, looking at website analytics. It has a great web browser and there are a decent amount of applications for it (including games).

I love how Windows Phone links together all of the information about your contacts. I can pull up someone and link all their info together by several accounts, like their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Outlook, and then their Windows Live ID. The phone will fill in the contact's picture automatically and then aggregate all of that person's information on one screen. When you pull them up, you can see all their latest status updates (regardless of the network).

When I signed up for the phone, it came with two $25 dollar gift cards (one for each phone) that were good for the Microsoft Marketplace. I filled in the paperwork required for that and forgot about it. About two weeks later, my mailbox was stuffed with envelopes from Windows Phone. They must have messed up and I ended up getting $150 worth of gift cards! I've used this chance to buy a lot of different games and applications and see what there is out there to offer.

Microsoft really nailed it with this phone, it's just a matter of time before people switch over to this. As part of the switch from piece of crap feature phone to smart phone, I've also made sure to keep my etiquette. I don't bust the phone out in meetings or while I'm talking to people.

The iPad (and it's competitors) at first seemed like a fad to me. Now I'm starting to think that they actually discovered a market that people didn't know existed and it's pretty clear now that tablets aren't going away anytime soon. There have been a lot of times recently where I've been at home and I secretly wish I had a tablet to get comfortable and read websites with.

The amount of content available on the internet has really opened up a market for these tablets.

Continue reading this article

For being a huge corporation, some things about Google are pretty embarrassing. I originally had a Gmail account and decided I wanted to have a custom email using my domain name. Google offers a service called Google Apps that allows you to do that. Cool.

I signed up for Google Apps. I found out quickly that you can't transfer most of your products. I was able to transfer the pictures from my Picasa collection, but that's about it. I had to recreate my Analytics account, my AdSense account, my YouTube account, and more. This was a pain in the ass, but I stuck in there and did it anyways.

Later, I cancelled my Google Apps service in favor of using GoDaddy's Hosted Exchange product. I love Outlook and Exchange, a lot more than Gmail. I was able to migrate all my data over quickly. A few days after I cancelled my Google Apps service, my entire Google account was wiped clean. What the hell?

Continue reading this article

I have a Windows 4GH (4th generation hosting) account through GoDaddy.com and I recently installed the Coppermine image gallery program using Go Daddy Hosting Connection. When I started to upload pictures, the Coppermine program was running out of memory while doing batch adds. This meant it wouldn't create thumbnails and ultimately wouldn't add my pictures.

Since Coppermine uses PHP, we need to increase the memory usage allowed. To do this, we need to edit the php.ini file. This file contains all the settings that Go Daddy web servers will consider when running PHP for your account. Please note, the below procedure is for Windows with PHP 5; if you have another installation, please see this article.

First, let's output the php.ini file. Here's a sample script you can create and put your root directory. Name the file test.php and upload it to your FTP root.
<? system("type c:\\cgi\\php5\\php.ini"); ?>
Execute that script by loading it up in your web browser. It should now output the full php.ini that GoDaddy uses by default. Save that to disk and open it up in your favorite text editor.

Continue reading this article

I haven't done a lot of .NET since back in the good old 2.0 days.

The jobs I held right after graduating from college were extremely heavy on .NET and MS SQL technologies. I joined Intel in 2005, about a year before the .NET 3 framework was released (with the WCF, WWF, WPF, etc). At Intel I mostly worked with COM technologies; C++ and VBScript. I got to do some .NET development, but it was pretty limited.

I joined GoDaddy.com in 2008 where I mostly did C++ and PHP on Linux. I really enjoyed it but when I got the chance to switch teams at the end of 2010, I was really excited. All of the code for my new team is in C#/.NET. Since then, I've been digging in and figuring out all the new features I've missed out on.

I found a lot of great resources when I was looking at all the new features of .NET 4.

Continue reading this article