All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

Blogger -- Image Upload Headaches with Google Chrome


I rarely shut my laptop down.  I have two versions of Eclipse running on it (one to run a Tomcat project) and one purely for Android that uses some of the Tomcat capabilities.  In addition, it acts as a MySQL server, and I read email and post to Twitter, and monitor various websites all at the same time.

A couple of days ago, Google Blogger image upload stopped working.  I couldn't upload an image to my blog.  Instead of the file selection box to pick an image from my computer, it says "In order to select an image from your online storage, please sign in".  I figured, what the heck, I will re-sign in with my Google credentials and see what happens.

 When I try to sign in, I get:
There was an error!
Details:
The feature you requested is currently unavailable. Please try again later.

I figured that this was a temporary thing.  I set it aside and for two days nada.  I finally decided to solve this this morning.  I shut down Chrome and restarted.  Nothing.  I rebooted the laptop.  Nothing.



I started Chrome, went to the three parallel bars in the corner, the menu and selected:

Tools > Clear Browsing Data
I cleared all of the browsing data, shut down Chrome, re-started it,
I then went to Settings and the content settings and enabled third party cookies.
 After all of that, it started to work again.  I can now upload images from my computer.

Hope this helps someone.

Nigerian Spammers Now Using RapidShare


RapidShare is now the spam platform of choice for Nigerian and African scam artists.  I had never heard of RapidShare so I went to their website:

Our Offer - simply smart

Whether you are at home, on the move or at work. It is now easier than ever to store, share and secure your data with RapidShare.
Being headquartered in Switzerland guarantees the highest data security and independence from foreign service providers.

The reason that I went to their website was that I got this email, and it wasn't in my spam folder:


Hello,
Sonia Abdul invites you to access the following file via RapidShare:
hi
HI
Message from Sonia Abdul:
Hello Friend

I am an Investor looking for patner. My name is Sonia,I need your collaboration in a partnership business in your country under your control as my business manager. I have $6.700.000 as my capital money,please for more details about this partnership investment contact me at my personal email soniaabdulmohamed@yahoo.com

Yours faithful, Sonia Abdul ( soniaabdulmohamed@yahoo.com )Hello Friend

I am an Investor looking for patner. My name is Sonia,I need your collaboration in a partnership business in your country under your control as my business manager. I have $6.700.000 as my capital money,please for more details about this partnership investment contact me at my personal email soniaabdulmohamed@yahoo.com

Yours faithful, Sonia Abdul ( soniaabdulmohamed@yahoo.com )
Now it is easier than ever to store, share, send and secure your data with RapidShare. RapidShare provides you with high-capacity, fail-safe servers. This enables you to access your favourite music, images and videos via the internet anywhere. RapidShare helps you stay organized - at home, on the move or at work.
Your RapidShare Team



There was a clickable link to access the file. Yeah right. 

I have some advice for RapidShare.com.  Your landing page said that 198,000 users used RapidShare yesterday.  I bet you that up to 99% of that traffic was for spam, or illegal distribution of music, videos and other IP and copyright infringement material, if traditional numbers for spam hold up.   You simply have no way of knowing, but I can garner an inkling of it, since I am the recipient of spam from your platform.




Tech Support Story

User: My usual password is not working suddenly. Why?

Tech Support: Your password has expired -- you must register a new one.

User: Why do I need a new one as that one was working fine?

Tech Support: You must get a new one as they automatically expire every 30 days.

User: Can I use the old one and just reregister it?

Tech Support: No, you must get a new one.

User: I don't want a new one as that is one more thing for me to remember.

Tech Support: Sorry, you must get a new one.

User: OK, roses

Tech Support: Sorry you must use more letters.

User: pretty roses

Tech Support: You must use at least one number.

User: 1 pretty rose

Tech Support: You cannot use blank spaces.

User: 1prettyrose

Tech Support: You must use additional letters.

User: 1fuckingprettyrose

Tech Support: You must use at least one capital letter.

User: 1FUCKINGprettyrose

Tech Support: You cannot use more than one capital letter in a row.

User: 1Fuckingprettyrose

Tech Support: You must use additional letters.

User: 1Fuckingprettyroseshovedupyourassifyoudon'tgivemeaccessrightfuckingnow

Tech Support: Sorry, that password is already being used.

Are You Too Old For IT? Repost From Information Week

Are You Too Old For IT? (via InformationWeek)
Ageism might be a taboo topic among employers, but veteran IT pros say it's very much an industry reality. It is illegal for employers to base hiring and firing decisions on a person's age. Explicit discrimination can be tricky to prove, however, and…

For the full post (this post is not a complete article) : http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/team-building-and-staffing/are-you-too-old-for-it/d/d-id/1006268

For all of you Apple Developers out there


Just got this note from Apple:

iOS 7.1 beta now available.

iOS 7.1 beta and Xcode 5.1 Developer Preview are available on the iOS Dev Center. Download these new releases today and test your existing apps for compatibility
Sign in to the iOS Dev Center

Using the Android Simulator Webview, with Localhost and Apache Tomcat

Okay, let's suppose that you are developing an Android app with server support.  Let's suppose that you are using the server to securely access a database and you are using JSPs to do it, since Android is Java and you know Java.  So using Tomcat (what else) to serve up the JSPs, you want to do the development running Tomcat on your computer.  When you fire up your simulator to test the webview app and try to access the web url using http://localhost:8080, nothing happens.

Why?  Because the simulator is using localhost.  127.0.0.1 doesn't work either.  The simulator acts as a router, so if you want to access http://localhost:8080/index.jsp the way that you would do it in a browser, the URL host in the activity has to appear as 10.0.2.2 as the IP address.  So in the above example, you would use http://10.0.2.2:8080/index.jsp.

If you are like me, you have a separate Eclipse for Android development.  You can either start Tomcat using the service control panel, or you can invoke both the Android Eclipse SDK and the JSP Eclipse SDK.  I don't try to combine the two with two separate projects just for simplicity sake.

And that brings us to last item of integrating webview with an Android app.  Suppose you have a webview page and you want to trigger an activity with a URL instead of going to another JSP.  Easy peasy.

In your activity where your webview is, find the following bit of code:

WebView webview = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview);
        webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
            @Override
            public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
                view.loadUrl(url);
                return true;
            }
        });


This is a standard bit of code for displaying a URL from a web server in webview.  To make a url do an activity, you modify it easily.  The first thing that you do, is that you signal an activity in the URL.  One way is to construct the url like:   <a href="app://signal_activity">

Then modify the above method to catch that string:

 WebView webview = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview);
       webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
           @Override
           public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
              // view.loadUrl(url);
            if (url.contains("app://signal_activity")){
                    
                   //trigger an Android action...,

               return true;
            }
            return super.shouldOverrideUrlLoading(view, url); 
           }
       });

There you go -- everything that you need to know to (1) use your local machine as the web server (2) use Tomcat to serve up the web stuff for the Android web view (3) use your Android simulator with your local machine and (4) integrate web pages with Android activities.

Hope this helps.

New XCode Seed Available for Apple Developers

New Xcode Download Available
Xcode 5.0.2 GM Seed
headershadow
This is a pre-release version
 of the complete Xcode developer toolset
 for Mac, iPhone, iPod touch,
and iPad. It includes the iOS 7.0.3 SDK
 and OS X 10.9 SDK. Xcode 5
 requires OS X 10.8.4 or later.


Just got this notice this evening in my mailbox.  New version of XCode available for download.

Another Google Software Bug on Blogger

I like the Google Blogger platform, but as smart as the geeks at Google are, it is somewhat gratifying to see that even the mighty Google has software bugs.  It makes me feel downright self-righteous and happy when I discover a Google Software bug, because I know that I am not alone in creating bugs.

I haven't posted here for 4 days, because I have been busy, and then this blogging platform has been hit by a bug.  I try to upload a picture from my computer to my blog, and I get this black window saying "In order to select an item from your online storage, please sign in".  WTF?  Who said anything about online storage.  I want to upload a pic from my computer.

Nothing seems to fix it but waiting it out under some brainiac at Google finds out that their precious software isn't working as it should.

Sometimes it takes awhile.  The only cure is to wait it out until Google fixes it.