simple solution for filling air in your tires

Innovation at Costco – A Simple Solution For Filling Your Tires

I prefer to change my tires at Costco when the tires are due for a change. Once in a while, if I see that my tires look a bit deflated, I bring it there to have them filled up. I just need to drive up to the Tire Center and a mechanic will fill it …

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google.sets.logo

Going to miss Google Sets, my favorite project from Google Labs

When Google first started with the ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy, they were just a search engine and trying to beat the evil competition – Microsoft. But over the years, Google became more evil than it would have liked. Not that they did anything wrong, but the fell into the trap of doing what they were inspired to …

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instagram in perspective

The Instagram acquisition in perspective

You have heard by now that on April 9th, 2012, Facebook announced the acquisition of Instagram. For a billion dollars, no less. This has come as a shock not only to app developers around the world, but also to the employees at Instagram! The Facebook CEO Mark Z has pledged to allow Instagram to remain …

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statuses

PomsApp – A SaaS Web Application for Purchase Order Management – Draft 1 Rev 2

About two months ago, I decided to build a web application. I looked at the various offerings that were available and decided that the Web Application I would write would help manage Purchase Orders. I now have the first draft, which is just high level requirements for the system. Only the functionality of the app …

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Image courtesy Lacoste

Advertisement Banner Scam – Beware of Free Money

Money is never free. Not even from your parents. So if some ad agency wants to pay you a large sum to put their banner on your website, for no apparently good reason, be wary. It is a scam. There is a scammer (or a few of them working together) to try to gain access …

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Disneyland Fantasy Fair

Disneyland and Del Valle – Two Wonderful Weekends

We had two wonderful weekends this month already. For the fourth of July weekend we went camping to Del Valle in Livermore. One of the highlights of the camping trip was the ride on the tour boat. It was very educational. Dams with Rocks: The Del Valle reservoir supplies water to the residents of Pleasanton …

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red.and.green.lines

How to quickly hide the red and green underlines in MS Word

There are times when you want to quickly create a document to jot down some steps. They are probably filled with short phrases. You don’t really care if the grammar is completely correct. You might be documenting UNIX commands that don’t have regular English spellings. If you do this in Microsoft Word, it will immediately start showing the wavy underlines in red and green. It makes the doc hard …

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Innovation at Costco – A Simple Solution For Filling Your TiresGoing to miss Google Sets, my favorite project from Google LabsThe Instagram acquisition in perspectivePomsApp – A SaaS Web Application for Purchase Order Management – Draft 1 Rev 2Advertisement Banner Scam – Beware of Free MoneyDisneyland and Del Valle – Two Wonderful WeekendsHow to quickly hide the red and green underlines in MS Word

What really happens in traffic court – the procedure

May 10, 2012

May 10, 2012

After reading several accounts on the Internet, I’m sure you will note that the procedure in any given court is determined by the traditions and conventions in the area. So here is another one to add to the mix. This may or may not be the way it happens in the court near your home. But this is how it happens in San Mateo, CA.

Disclaimer: This is based on my experience. I am not trying to tell you how to prepare for traffic court, or how to behave once you are there. This is just my understanding of the procedure and proceedings in a traffic court. Hopefully, this will help you become familiar with the procedure. And best of all, when I lose all memory of this, this posting will remind me of what happened.

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The best tools for push notification

May 5, 2012

May 5, 2012

I wrote the following about a year ago. It was in response to an email request. So the information is a bit dated. But it is very frequently requested that it is relevant enough to post here. I have extracted a portion of the email.

It appears that iLime is no longer a viable option. But Urban Airship is still going strong. And it looks like my original recommendation was UA as well.

When iOS 3.0 came out with APNs (I think about two years ago), it was very confusing to everyone. Then two companies called UrbanAirship and iLime created an API for that and they were selling the service. Their pricing is very competitive. For example, if you use Urban Airship, the first million notifications are free. After that it is very cheap, 1 cent for 1000 notifications. If you are sending a million notifications, most probably you have some money coming in so it is affordable. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three good reasons to refill medication online – if you are with Kaiser Permanente

April 30, 2012

April 30, 2012

If your medical insurance carrier is Kaiser Permanente, you probably go to the pharmacy to get your medication. I don’t usually call the previous day. I just go there and ask for a refill. They usually have it ready in 10 to 15 minutes. Not a big deal one would say.

But the fact is I waste a lot of time, energy and money doing that. Here are the details. It takes between 10 to 15 minutes to get to the pharmacy depending on where I am when I decide to go (or which pharmacy I decide to visit). Then it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get the prescription refilled. Standing in queue twice – once to order and once to pick up could be anywhere between 1 minute to 5 minutes in all. Then another 10 to 15 minutes to drive back. So I spend at least a half hour in all to get a 3 month supply of the medication that is currently running low.

So obviously ordering a refill online saves you plenty of time. That’s just one reason to order online. The best reason is the next one… Read the rest of this entry »

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How to make a Linux system show the date in the local timezone

April 18, 2012

April 18, 2012

If you rent out a Linux system in the cloud, chances are when you run the date command, the time will be shown in UTC. Not only is that very disconcerting, it is downright useless. In the rare cases where there is a whole bunch of geographically distributed linux users accessing the same system, may be it is OK to keep it in UTC. But most of the time, it is better to have it in your local time zone.

Of course, no one checks the date and time on a Linux command line, because you can simply check the bottom of your computer or on your phone, or on the wall clock to know what time it is. But when you are comparing file times using ls -l, it can be very irritating to not understand the timestamps.

So here is the quick and simple solution to show the date and time in your local time zone. In this example I am using the America/Los_Angeles time zone. But you can use the one you want. You can find the whole list of American time zones under /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/ and the rest of the world in the parent directory.

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Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive)

April 17, 2012

April 17, 2012

I created a git repository on assembla. Granted I have not created one there in a long time. That’s why I forgot about the rsa key hash. In fact, only after I went into my profile to check did I see that I already had one for my iMac there.

I had just created the repo on assembla. I followed their instructions to create a local repository and push it to the remote.

I did

git remote add assembla git@git.assembla.com:appname.git

No errors. When I did

git push origin master 

I got

Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

This is most likely because you have set up ssh keys. When you get that on assembla, here’s how to fix it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Going to miss Google Sets, my favorite project from Google Labs

April 13, 2012

April 13, 2012

When Google first started with the ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy, they were just a search engine and trying to beat the evil competition – Microsoft. But over the years, Google became more evil than it would have liked. Not that they did anything wrong, but the fell into the trap of doing what they were inspired to fight.

Over the years, Google has come up with or bought several new products in Google labs. Many of them were killed quietly – just like Google Sets was killed on September 5, 2011. I have used several of their now dead projects including the wave, the buzz, the knol, etc. But I never felt saddened by their deaths. They were all projects that did not deserve to live as much as the ones that survived. Read the rest of this entry »

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Installing Ruby 1.9.3 on a Linux AMI on Amazon AWS

April 12, 2012

April 12, 2012

As of April 2012, if you create a new virtual machine in the Amazon Cloud, the default installation that contains Ruby still installs Ruby 1.8.7. But the most recent stable version is Ruby 1.9.3. And it has been stable for a while. So you really want to use that.

As you may know, the best way to manage multiple versions of Ruby is by using the Ruby Version Manger – rvm. If you have read my previous documentation on how to install RVM and Ruby 1.9.2 on the Mac, it is very different on Linux. Not only that, the RVM repository has moved permanently to its new home, so the rvm installation commands will not work.

So without further delay, here is the set of commands I ran to install rvm and ruby 1.9.3. Note that I did not set 1.9.3 as the default. The next time you start any new shell, 1.9.3 becomes the default by itself. Note also that you need to run all the commands as root. So I start with “sudo -s”.

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The Instagram acquisition in perspective

April 9, 2012

April 9, 2012

You have heard by now that on April 9th, 2012, Facebook announced the acquisition of Instagram. For a billion dollars, no less. This has come as a shock not only to app developers around the world, but also to the employees at Instagram!

The Facebook CEO Mark Z has pledged to allow Instagram to remain independent. Of course they may eventually tie it in very closely with FB, but for now, they will remain independent. If FB wants to leave Instagram be, why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Why not just give them the funding they were looking for? They could have still controlled what was going on at Instagram – and if they only wanted it to be independent, it was way cheaper to do that.

Was it to acquire new customers? Not really. All Instagram users are already FB users. Both on the iPhone and on the Android. How does this compare with previous acquisitions of larger companies?

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How to quickly hide the red and green underlines in MS Word

March 29, 2012

March 29, 2012

There are times when you want to quickly create a document to jot down some steps. They are probably filled with short phrases. You don’t really care if the grammar is completely correct. You might be documenting UNIX commands that don’t have regular English spellings.

If you do this in Microsoft Word, it will immediately start showing the wavy underlines in red and green. It makes the doc hard to read on the screen. You don’t want to change the doc because the way it is now is exactly how you need it. The only things you want to get rid of are the red and green lines. Here’s how you can do it in a jiffy.
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The Android Market’s new Merchant Page

March 27, 2012

March 27, 2012

The Android Market used to have a console where developers could upload applications (APKs). Earlier this month Google made major changes and updated the Android Marketplace to something called google play.

Along with that the developer/merchant console location was updated. True to form they did not inform anyone. For my future reference here is the new console’s location. Google Play Merchant Console.

Some of the other related changes.

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