Does Facebook now hate MMS? For the past couple of weeks every time I tried to send a photo I got the following error message:
You have uploaded from an unrecognized address. For instructions on how to upload photos to Facebook, go to http://www.facebook.com/mobile"
I got this sending to both [email protected] and 32665. The referenced page is no help at all, and my phone number is registered with Facebook Mobile.
It turns out that there's a new secret email address. On the Facebook site click the icon to share a photo:
Then click Upload a Photo:
Then click upload via email:
Your personal email address is finally revealed and can be used to send a photo via MMS.
Facebook - update your error message to point this out!
(Published to the Fediverse as: MMS Photo Upload to Facebook #etc #facebook #mms How to MMS photo Upload to Facebook via the hidden personal upload email address. )
The Ambient Orb is (was) an LED illuminated globe designed to display subtle information - stock market prices, weather, etc. Normally the Orb is controlled via the pager network but you can buy (or build) a developer module and connect the Orb via your serial port.
I've used my Orb via both pager and serial port for a number of applications. I've just released a library - Ambient Orb Controller - on GitHub that supports both methods of control. I wrote the library to make it easier for me to gin up new Orb applications. If you use an Orb let me know what you come up with. Two of my favorites are using the Orb for continuous integration and as a music visualizer.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Ambient Orb Controller .NET Library #code #random .NET library to control the Ambient Orb (available on GitHub). )
Now here's a niche:
I'm occasionally jealous of an iPhone app, in this case a station finder for NPR. I hate hunting on a long drive or in a strange city. Luckily, NPR has an API, so I've whipped up an NPR Station Finder for Windows Mobile.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Licensing Fail: WinZip vs. ScanToPDF #etc #licensing #drm ScanToPDF's painful licensing process makes me mad enough that I ultimately open sourced a free alternative. )
I was a micro-ISV (µISV) for years before I heard of the term. It was coined by Eric Sink to describe a one man software shop, and is now generally used for any small software company.
There isn't much market data available this far down the long tail so I've spent some time analyzing PAD files to see if I could answer a few questions.
PAD is the Portable Application Description specification from the Association of Shareware Professionals. It's used to describe software for submission to download sites. How useful these sites are is another question — read Scott Kane on this if you haven't already.
I spidered all the PAD files listed in the ASP directory, downloading data on 76,066 products from 39,861 µISVs (companies / people / publishers). It's not a perfect data set as there are PADs that aren't software and µISVs that don't use PAD. I've also heard that some people are developing web apps these days. But here goes…
Overwhelmingly in the US. Other countries with more than a thousand listed are the UK, Russia, China, India, Canada, Germany and Australia (in descending order). Most countries have at least one µISV but the numbers fall off pretty quickly.
$29.95.
About a third of products are free and a third fall into 9 price points (all ending in 5). I found over a thousand different US Dollar price points overall.
The most expensive product was a $150,000 Green Living site license from South Beach Software (an order of magnitude more expensive than the runner up).
There's not much action past 20 MB. Most downloads are between 1-2 MB. There's an interesting little spike around 14 MB. I guess this is a popular framework, possibly Java? The largest download was almost 1.5 GB.
This is a tough one to get at because PAD files just tell you about the most recent version, not the release history. The chart really shows a last update distribution for the products in the PAD catalog.
There's a large number of products last updated in mid-2008 with nothing comparable in 2009. Could this be a drop-off in PAD usage? A shift to web apps? Maybe final releases before the recession hit leading to less spare cycles for side projects (my µISV certainly pays for beers rather than mortgages).
This final chart shows that most µISVs have just one product. Of course in some cases there might be a brand per product and still a single entity — it's impossible to separate this out from the PAD data. The largest number of products from a single µISV is 616.
(Published to the Fediverse as: State of the Micro-ISV-osphere #etc #asp Data on micro-ISVs - small software publishers - generated from association of software professionals PAD files. )
I've been busy updating a couple of Catfood products.
Catfood Earth updates your desktop wallpaper to show day, night and cloud cover. It can also display earthquakes, time zones, places and US weather radar:
Catfood Follower is a Twitter tool that automatically follows people who follow you and/or removes friends who stop following you. I think it's most useful for business accounts:
With these two out the door my next project is overhauling the Catfood website. I'm kind of dreading it, but the current architecture is over six years old and it's definitely showing its age.
Catfood.Shapefile is a .NET read-only, forward-only parser for Esri shapefiles. With Catfood.Shapefile it’s easy to enumerate all the shapes in a shapefile together with their metadata.
From version 2.00 Catfood.Shapefile is available via NuGet. It has also been migrated to .NET Standard 2.0. This means it is compatible with .NET Framework 4.61 or better and .NET Core 2.0 or better. If you use an older version of .NET then you should continue using Catfood.Shapefile 1.60. The source code is on GitHub.
Esri (originally Environmental Systems Research Institute) shapefiles are a GIS (geographic information systems) file format that can store a wide variety of geographic information. I originally started working with these files to add country borders to Catfood Earth.
Shapefiles actually consist of a number of different files with different extensions. There are three mandatory extensions: .shp, .shx and .dbf and so a shapefile containing borders might be distributed as borders.shp, borders.shx and borders.dbf. The .shp file contains the actual shape data in vector format, often lines or polygons. The .shx file is an index to the shapes. Finally the .dbf file is a database of metadata associated with the shapes. Catfood.Shapefile requires these three files.
There are several optional extensions that might be included with a shapefile. .prj contains the geographical projection, .xml is an alternate metadata format, .sbn and .sbx index for spatial queries, and .cpg defines the code page used by the shapefile.
Here is some sample code for a .NET 6 console application to print basic information about a shapefile and the first point in the first polygon:
To use this, create a new console application, paste the code into Program.cs and add Catfood.Shapefile via NuGet.
The default constructor uses a database connection string that uses the Jet driver. This is only available for 32-bit applications and you will need to target Windows x86 to use it. An overload is available that allows you to specify a custom connection string to access metadata.
Catfood.Shapefile supports Null, Point, MultiPoint, PolyLine, PolyLineM and Polygon shapes. Three dimensional shapes (PointZ, PolyLineZ and PolygonZ) are not currently supported. There is also currently no support for writing shapefiles. If you add any of this please send a pull request on GitHub!
I am grateful to the developers who have contributed to Catfood.Shapefile over the years. Most are credited in the release notes below. If you need help or have feedback please leave a comment on this post.
I just released Catfood.Shapefile 2.00, my .NET parser for ESRI Shapefiles.
The big change is that I have migrated to .NET Standard 2.0. This makes it possible to use from .NET Core as well as classic .NET Framework from 4.6.1 up. If you need to use an older version of .NET Framework then you'll want to stick with Catfood.Shapefile 1.60.
Catfood.Shapefile is now also available via NuGet. This is the recommended way to install. The source code is still available on GitHub.
I just released Catfood.Shapefile 1.60. This contains a fix from Libor Weigl that factors out the enumerator so that you can still access the shapefile after enumeration.
Catfood.Shapefile is a .NET library for parsing ESRI Shapefiles.
A few people have asked for 3D shape support in my ESRI Shapefile library. I've never got around to it, but CodePlex user ekleiman has forked a version in his ESRI Shapefile to Image Convertor that supports PointZ, PolygonZ and PolyLineZ shapes. If that's what you need please check it out.
I've just released a small update to my C# Shapefile library on Codeplex. Catfood.Shapefile 1.50 fixes a couple of bugs related to metadata and adds the ability to access metadata records directly via IDataRecord.
I’ve just released a small update to Catfood.Shapefile. Stephan Stapel, who implemented PolyLineM support, has contributed a patch that improves the class hierarchy. CodePlex user originSH suggested supporting the ACE driver for 64-bit systems. I’ve added a constructor overload that allows you to use predefined Jet and ACE connection strings or provide your own templates if necessary. Thanks to Stephan and originSH.
Catfood.Shapefile is a .NET library for enumerating ESRI shapefiles. I originally wrote the library to help me build some complex layers in Catfood Earth. Since then it’s picked up thousands of users and some really valuable suggestions and patches from the CodePlex community. I’m very glad a took a couple of hours to open source the library back in 2009.
I’ve just updated Catfood.Shapefile, my ESRI Shapefile parser for .NET, with PolyLineM support thanks to a contribution from Stephan Stapel. The solution for the new version has also been updated to Visual Studio 2010.
Download Catfood.Shapefile.dll 1.30 from CodePlex.
I've just released a small update for my ESRI Shapefile Reader project on GitHub. The only change is a patch from SolutionMania that fixes a problem when the shapefile name is also a reserved name in the metadata database. The patch escapes the name preventing an exception from being thrown.
Catfood.Shapefile.dll is a .NET 2.0 forward only parser for reading an ESRI Shapefile. Download 1.20 from GitHub.
I've just released v1.10 of my ESRI Shapefile Reader (Catfood.Shapefile.dll). This is a .NET 2.0 forward only parser for reading shapefile content.
Sharon Tickell was kind enough to report two bugs with suggested updates. These have both been fixed in 1.10.
While working on these fixes I also discovered that there are no 64-bit Jet drivers (since releasing the first version I've upgraded to a 64-bit box for development). This is an easy fix, just target any application using Catfood.Shapefile.dll at x86. I've updated the demo application accordingly.
Download Catfood.Shapefile.dll from GitHub.
(Published to the Fediverse as: ESRI Shapefile Reader in .NET #code #shapefile #esri #github #codeplex #polylinem #c# #.net #nuget Catfood.Shapefile is a .NET library that provides easy access to Esri shapefiles (.shp, .shx, .dbf), available on NuGet and GitHub. )
This is a joke metric that I first proudly displayed on Catfood Magazine back in 1997 (it's broken on the archive of the site). Everyone had a hit counter back then, but as far as I know we were the first site with a non-hit counter.
The dirty secret was that the counter just showed the world population. The readership was a rounding error.
My new count of non-visitors uses the US Census Bureau's world population estimate and subtracts unique visitors from the Google Analytics API. The count is cached for an hour so it doesn't slow the page down too much.
Updated 2022-11-15 14:50:
The United Nations says:
"The world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022..."
And the 8 billion number is being widely reported today, however my current unread count is a paltry 7,932,915,881. That's because the US Census world population estimate is a lot lower, by over 66.8M people. That's approximately France!
(Published to the Fediverse as: How many people don't read this blog? #etc #ithcwy As of the last update to this post, 7,927,037,899 people have not read I Thought He Came With You in the past month. )
Sometimes it's fun to argue with support. Sometimes you just need to short-circuit the idiot script to get through to the person who can fix the problem.Them: Hello, my name is Phil, how can I help you today?
You: My DSL connection is slow.
Them: Okay, I can help you with that, have you...
You: My first thought was that the Linksys router that's been working perfectly for five years has gone wrong. So I connected my computer directly to your off-brand modem with the same result. I then thought that the problem must be with the computer, so I reinstalled it from the manufacturer discs and rebooted about seven times.
Them: Let me connect you to my supervisor...
Them: Tap, tap, tap, oh, we seem to have switched your service back to the basic package. Tap, tap, tap, fixed.
(Published to the Fediverse as: How to get technical support without spending hours on the phone #etc #support How to bypass the first few levels of tech support and talk to someone who can actually help you. )
(Published to the Fediverse as: Business of Software 2009 #etc #bos A review of the Business of Software 2009 conference. )
Download a Sharepoint File with GraphServiceClient (Microsoft Graph API)
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
Export Google Fit Daily Steps, Weight and Distance to a Google Sheet
Monitor page index status with Google Sheets, Apps Script and the Google Search Console API
International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates
Scanning from the ADF using WIA in C#
Sending email via GMail in C#/.NET using SmtpClient
Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
