Author: Robert Baindourov

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Dell Suffering: A Scanner Darkly

lol. Okay that’s a dirty trick that should get me some traffic. 🙂

Anyways. The printer is finally up on the network and working great. I couldn’t be happier with that right now.
But I am stuck at a new problem. I can’t configure the scanner to ‘Scan to PC’ or to ‘Scan to FTP’ correctly.
Oh sure, there is a drop down in the printer’s web interface and tool box software.
But the drop down only gives you the choice of which do you wish to use, SMB / FTP, changing the selection doesn’t make input boxes appear or anything.
You would think the printer is not psychic, and needs to have host, username, and password information entered somewhere.

But alas, I am left in a Death Cap Daze, staring at the printer, my senses and cognitive abilities distorted, and like Keanu Reeves, all I can do is utter a: ‘Woohh.’

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Dell Suffering

Yes, I know.

I complain A LOT.

But when you waste like an hour trying to get your 1355cnw printer on the wireless network, what else are you going to do!
First, the printer itself:

I can’t make heads or tails of the experience / display / setup process. Its horrid. I feel like I’m using an interface from the 80’s.
Not just in design of the external panel, or buttons, or other hardware components. But the over experience itself. The constant restarts, the non responsive menu.
This is poor product design from the soul to the heart of the printer and even the external support for the product, the dell website, has a horrible user experience.

So second poor product from dell, their website:

I believe the dell team should realize that the first page result for the search query “1355cnw drivers” results as the product detail / buy page being the first result.
You would think that a product’s detail page would contain on it, all pertinent links to the product. Such as the drivers. The word drivers is no where easily found above the fold, but it does exist in the footer.

So having not found a direct link to the specific drivers, I clicked back, and went on to the second result.

But this was the download page for the Mac version. At least I am assuming its the mac version because it has ‘_Mac’ in the name. No where does it say for which type platform or version or processor type on the download page.

Wait, it gets worse!

So having to go to the driver downloads home, I try to search for the printer. I choose  ‘Select product from my products’ or a link to that says something to that effect.  The resulting page is a login form. I am thinking that once I login into dell, they will know what printer I bought. But the list is empty, even after I click on it, and login. I am stuck staring at a page with almost nothing on it. So I go back and select ‘Choose from product list’ and begin to refine the search down.

Finally I arrive at my product download page, select three items to download, which is also a f*king confusing page as list multiple drivers with confusing labeling system, and get prompted with an ‘INSTALL OUR DOWDNLOADER  ON YOUR SYSTEM’ prompt.

G*d Dang it.  Oh, man, I am just trying to scan a check so I can start my contract with KForce, and a routine printer installation has become a nightmare.

I have to download, before I can download. Dell, KISS my shiny metal a**.

 

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Apache Proxy for Tomcat

So I am working on this ContactCampaigns.com site in my spare time to keep my skills sharp.
Looks like I need to setup Apache as a proxy, even for development purposes.

Wish me luck, I’m playing around with the directions I found here:
http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/TomcatReverseProxy

________

Okay, I totally bypassed those directions and did this instead:

 

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName contactcompaigns.local

DocumentRoot “C:\Users\Robert\springsource3\emailcampaigner\web-app”
<Directory   “C:\Users\Robert\springsource3\emailcampaigner\web-app”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyVia On

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^/$ http://localhost:8080/emailcampaigner [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(css|js|swf|img|media|video|html|d2c-deploy)/.*|crossdomain\.xml$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:8080/$1 [P,L]

</VirtualHost>

______________

I have no idea what I am doing here, and starting to think about using http://tuckey.org/urlrewrite/.
The problem here is running Tomcat on port 80.

I much rather master the art of configuring Apache correctly.

 

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Contact Campaigns dot Com

Its Saturday,

And I decided to put my recently learned Grails Fu to the test. The concept: Email Marketing System.
I’ve been using SugarCRM to cheat around services like MailChimp and SurveyMonkey.

But I think an email sender is very similar in design terms to any other business process that can be automated.
Which is what I just finished working on, automating a business process in a web based app using Grails.

So I’ve quickly fired it up, everything at the latest version (STS 3.1.0, Grails 2.1.1) , installed spring-security-core for accounts management, and in about an hours time, I have most of the core internals designed.
Very RAD.

At this rate, I might be able to launch the site by next week.

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Transcoding and Content Delivery Automation Project is finished

Just finished up my project over at Disney studio’s.
Too bad it wasn’t a consumer facing product.

There was talk today that Accenture had helped create a less sophisticated version of a similar product over at WB.
And that the WB’s automation system had one a pioneering emmy?
Logically speaking, this Disney one is better, so Disney should apply for an award.

I was thinking “Award Wining” sounds really good.

Anyway, it was a great pleasure to work with Accenture, and Disney.
It was Disney’s brainchild, and I meshed in my Web Design experience to help with the UI.
But we all developed it as a team effort. Every individual helped with the design of a module or two.

I just marvel at the feat of collaboration there alone.
Will miss those guys.

 

 

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Constant Brute Force Attacks

So DirectAdmin has this feature where it scans the logs of process such email, ftp, etc.

This great security measure is abusing the h*ck out of my inbox.
And in turn all these constant emails about brute force attempts is making me  extra paranoid.

So looking for a way to turn on auto ban so I can at least temporarily block the abuser.
Found some interesting scripts online.

http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=404
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=380

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phone-tracker

This is a great little tool created for people who are nosy, like me.

I always wonder what my loved ones are doing throughout the day. And I want to protect my family from exposure to unwanted influences.
Phone tracker lets a concerned parent or spouse have constant monitoring of the activity on a cell phone.

Record text messages, save images, save video, and receive alerts.
Track the persons movement by recording their location on a set interval.

Of course all this does use data. So preferably users should have an unlimited data account.
Check it out: Phone Tracker

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neal saves the day

My direct admin suffering has been resolved.
Neal replaced the exim Configuration file and every thing started moving forward out of the mail queue.

Thank you Neal.

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backbone.js + Laravel reminds me of Grails!

Wow. check out this awesome nettuts video that shows you how to use backbone and laravel to create CRUD operations on ‘data objects’ in the front end.
Laravel really reminds me of Grails. It has methods that seem very much so like the dynamic finders in Grails.

Anyway, I go where the market takes me, but I would be totally stocked to work on a backbone, require, and underscore js project.