I hear of facebook getting a lot of flack because of how they manage (or purportedly don’t manage) their users’ privacy. I did this experiment a while back but haven’t had time to blog about it. The tedious task of taking screenshots and logging in and out of 3 different accounts on 2 different social networks seemed a bit too daunting. So instead of screenshots, I decided to illustrate :p feel free to recreate the scenarios yourselves though

I don’t know, maybe google has their reasons for implementing it the way they did. Which do you prefer?

If you’ve already gone to the trouble of verifying your account and getting early access to the new facebook timeline, you might want to share this awesome feature with your friends. If they’re the type that can’t be bothered to go through all the steps (or have concerns about the verification step), you can simply invite them as a developer and they too can get early access to facebook timeline.

If you want invites, find someone on your feed already talking about getting the timeline enabled and ask them to invite you. If they say they don’t know how, send them this post. They should let you know when they’ve finished #4. Then check out the section For the Invitee.

For the Inviter:

1. visit https://developers.facebook.com/apps and go to the app that you created to get verified and click on Edit Roles:

2. You can then add a new developer:

3. Type in your friend/s’ name/s

4. You should see this untill your friend accepts the developer request.

For the Invitee:

1. if your friend has finished inviting you, you’ll get this notification:

2. click on it and you’ll be taken to a page to install the developer app. Once finished, you should see a link that will ask you to confirm your developer request:

3. Once you’ve confirmed, go to the facebook homepage and you should see this notification on the top. Click Get It Now and enjoy Timeline!

I bought this app a while back because I really enjoyed the game and it was 99 cents. There was a free version which only had one puzzle so I paid for it because I enjoy it. Then now it seems they have released an update which made the paid version “totally free”.

I inherited my husbands iPhone 4 so I installed it but now I have the updated version of the app shitladen with ads!

Why didn’t he update the free version or better yet publish a totally new one with the ad support?!?

I want my 99 cents back!

//end rant

Ah marriage. Seems now that preparing for the wedding was the easy part. I’ve decided to take my husband’s name. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn is pretty easy and for the exception of twitter, the 2 are actually accommodating of maiden names.

Before I’m allowed to change my email address at work, I need to produce a document of my legal name change, and that requires me applying for a new passport (my passport is about to expire anyway). If you’re planning to renew a Philippine passport in Singapore, be prepared to wake up at 5 am to physically get a queue number. I’ll detail this tedious in another post, I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

For email addresses, hotmail actually makes it quite easy to make aliases for your hotmail address so if you want to change it, you’re still logging into the same inbox. More details of that here.

For Zune and Xbox gamer tags, it’s actually quite simple. I followed the instructions here and automagically, my Zune account was also migrated and it seems that so have my purchases and subscriptions. YEY! Not only that, my developer account on http://create.msdn.com is actually also migrated. YEY!

My problem now, is my windows phone. Since you set up your live id when you first turn on your phone, and this is something that you can’t change without resetting, I seem to no longer be able to make purchases on the marketplace. Even if I try buying through the zune app, it tells me I have to sign out and back in with the original live id used to set up the phone.

looks like I’ll have to wipe my phone…

Click jacking happens when you visit a website that shows you content to mislead you into interacting with it. When you do, suddenly messages/wall posts/ etc (because this usually happens on facebook) get sent with your knowledge. Sometimes it can be an embarrassing post on your own wall, and sometimes annoying post to ALL your friends’ walls (which is a pain to delete).

We’ve seen those intriguing videos being posted around our friends’ walls and usually curiosity gets the better of us, so we *click*. It leads to a page that can either be a fake video page, or a fake captcha page, or who knows what these malicious folks come up with these days. So, if you’re the really curious type, or you have friends who really do post weird videos that you’re often interested in watching yourself, make it a habit to browse these links in private, so at least you’re safe from being possibly click jacked.

HOW

1.Download and install a browser that supports in-private browsing. I use either IE 8 for XP, IE9 for Win7 or Chrome

2. whenever you see a link to a video that you’d like to view and it doesn’t play directly within facebook (that is, it takes you to another page or opens a new window) right click on the link and select “Copy Shortcut” (IE) or “Copy link address” (chrome)

ght

3. To start a private session, hold Ctrl and shift then press P for IE and for chrome Ctrl+Shift+N. Your new browser windows should look like this:

IE 9

Chrome

4. Go to the address bar of your browser and press Ctrl+V and press enter. Already the link looks malicious, but since we’re in private and not logged into any accounts, there’s no risk of your accounts being compromised (unless you already have an in private session going on where you’re logged in)

The example above just redirects to google now so they’ve probably taken it down. But since it’s not loading a proper page, we can safely assume that that was a malicious link. At this point, I can either ignore any future posts of the friend who posted since he clearly easily falls into these things, or I can help him out by letting him know that there’s a link to a malicious site that’s been posted on his wall in case he’s not aware. And if you’re feeling extra helpful, teach them what you’ve learned about in private browsing. You can do your part to make the internet (well, maybe just facebook) a safer place.

Had the urge to build a new app recently when I came upon this. Since facebook doesn’t support mobiles in SG yet, I have to go with the credit card option. What’s going on? I’m not sure I want to give my cc info especially with all those click-jacking apps floating around. But now that I think about it, maybe those apps are the reason why facebook is putting this extra security measurement. Still though, I’m not comfortable with giving out CC information, too scared I’d end up with a bajillion facebook credits because I clicked a link. :/

I’m glad I created a lot of apps in the past, maybe I’ll try and recycle the ones I’m not going to use anymore…

Ever since we got a new router to replace the one that broke down, we’ve been having trouble with wifi on Macs and iPads at home. Strange cause my win7 machine seemed to be doing fine. So it turns out that we had WEP security on and after searching through forums setting it so WPA or whatever the most secure settings are actually fixes it. No more problems with the wifi. Well, the range is still a problem. Not really sure where the best place is to put the router. Right now it’s in the bedroom, but then our XBOX in the living room can’t seem to get a stable connection Bah, we don’t play that much games anymore anyway..

Just in case I need to go through this again, here are the resources that I found useful.

Walk through on preparing your add-in for deployment

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

Enable Windows Installer Logging – if anything fails during deployment, this is useful for figuring out what went wrong.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300

Thanks for letting me borrow your phone ken!

index.php

change: require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’); => require(‘wp-blog-header.php’);

xmlrpc.php

change: include(‘./wp-load.php’); => include(‘wp-load.php’);

UPDATE: One more thing, in order to enable publishing images through Windows Live Writer, you have to manually create the wp-content folder as well (or is it wp-content/uploads…)

In the course of my building our ROI app, I was trying to figure out how to wrap the legends of charts when the text gets too long.

This is what I get with the default chart.

You’ll see here, there’s a lot of waste of space for the legend when what I really want to see is more of the chart.  So first thing we’ll do is fix the width of the chart. To do that, Right Click on the chart, Edit Template then depending on whether you’ve already been fiddling with your chart template, either Edit Current or Edit a Copy

When you expand the template, you’ll see a grid within the grid that contains both the chart and the legend.

You’ll notice that the grid is split into two, a star sized column and an auto sized one. Since autosizing will adapt the column size to the content, we’ll need to change this to star sized as well. You can do that by clicking on the icon and change it to the unlocked lock symbol.

Now, you should be able to click on the triangle and resize the columns to your desired width ratios.

You’ll notice that when you do this, your legend area won’t have as much space as before and since the legend items aren’t formatted to wrap by default, the text gets cropped if you have long lines of text.

Return to the scope of the user control by clicking on this icon in your Objects and Timeline panel

Find one of your ColumnSeries (or whatever data series your chart is using) Right-click->Edit Additional Templates –> Edit LegendItemStyle –> Edit a Copy

Give your style a name, and choose where to define this style. This depends on where you will be using this style, if it’s only in this page, then you can choose document. If there are other pages, you think you’ll be using this style in, choose Application. If you want to be able to reuse this style in other applications ,choose Resource Dictionary, choose an existing one or create a new one if you don’t have one yet. This stores the style in a separate file which you can then later on import to your other projects.

Clicking on OK should then bring your designer to to the LegendItem template designer. If you expand the StackPanel, you’ll see that we have the Rectangle and Title elements. If you look into the xaml code, you’ll see that the Title element is template-bound to a property called Content.

In my case, since I know that the legend will only represent text content, I can simple delete the title element, replace it with a Textblock object and apply the same bindings. I can do that by first selecting the textbox, search for the text property in the search box of the Properties panel, then clicking on the small square beside the property to access advanced options.

We select Template Binding –> Content

One last thing to do is set the width of the TextBox since it’s currently auto sized and we can’t currently set the width to take up the rest of the unoccupied horizontal stackpanel space. If you want your legend to scale dynamically, you’ll need to change the stackpanel into a grid. To do this, right-click on the StackPanel in your Objects and Timeline panel –> Change Layout Type –> and select Grid

After this step, check on your Rectangle, most likely, the Width and Height properties will be reset to auto so you’ll want to give this a size.

-

For the grid itself, it’s Height and Width gets fixed so we’ll want to reset this to auto so the grid is free to resize as it’s content or container feels necessary.

Now we can add a grid line by clicking on the top portion of our grid, and right after where the Rectangle ends:

then toggle the grid property (by clicking on the lock icon) until we get Pixel sized.

We can leave the other column at star sized so it’ll take up the rest of the available space.

With the TextBox selected, make sure the Width and Height  is set to auto (if there is a value, you can use the button on the right of the field to set to auto), the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment are set to Justified and the margins are set to the distance you want.

Now when you go back up to the UserControl scope, you’ll see the TextWrap in effect. Looking at this though, I might want to change the alignment/margins so that the rectangle is aligned to top instead of in the middle just to make it look nicer.

To go back to editing the template, right click on the ColumnSeries –> Edit Additional Templates –> Edit Current –> Edit LegendItemStyle

In my case, I chose top aligned with a bit of a top margin.

Going back out to the UserControl scope, we’ll be able to see the effect.

You can play around with how you want your legend to look and once your satisfied, it’s time to apply the style to the other series’. No you don’t to do that whole set of steps for each of them so don’t worry. Right click on the other column series-> Edit Additional Templates –> Edit LegendItemStyle –> and this time select ApplyResource and you should see the style you created in the previous steps and click on that. In my case, I named the style LegendItemStyle.

You’ll notice your legend automatically format itself the same way the previous column series did.

And that’s it!

The Bad

• Lost Headphones
  I was listening to tunes on my wp7 on the way back home from work but then uncle cab driver was feeling a bit chatty so I did the polite thing and took off my headphones and chatted with him. I’m not sure whether I remembered to toss the headphones in my bag. I just realized the next morning when I went out for a run that they were gone. Sadness.
• Scratches on the iPad
  Well so much for the claims of the iPad being scratch proof. I guess they relied on people treating it like a holy object that they didn’t think it would ever happen. But alas, while I was cleaning up the screen of the oils and dirt from my fingers, I noticed there was a scratch right by the home button. Sadness.
• 160 Dollar Ugly and Useless Screen Protector
  Happened while the F was buying his Macbook air so I just chucked in the first screen protector I could find. It was from the brand Power Support and it was supposed to be a privacy film guard. I probably wouldn’t have complained if it worked as a privacy film guard but no, it didn’t work as good as those privacy films for laptops in that you could still see the screen from the side angles but it would be a bit blurry and a bit dark. Now I have trouble reading my iPad in bed since it’s more difficult to keep it aligned to the eye. Also, my Boxwave stylus doesn’t work as well anymore. I guess this was my fault for not checking the price but I didn’t realize that a privacy film could be so expensive, AND so crappy. Sadness.
• Failed Vivo City Shopping
  On Saturday, the F and I ventured out to Vivo City to shop for an extra battery for my phone and some clothes for our trip coming up in December. I guess we should have just gone to Ion or somewhere nearby by knowing the weekend crowd, we wanted to avoid that (only to find out there are enough people in SG to accumulate a crowd in most malls on the weekend. I did a search online for the shops I wanted to go to: Columbia and the LG. I found online they were supposed to be on the second floor of Vivo City, but apparently after searching the whole second floor (because they make it so difficult to figure out what the store numbers are) we found that not one, but BOTH have closed down. How I wish that people keep their online listings up to date. We ended up taking a cab to Ion anyway. Sadness.

The Good

• New Sennheiser Headphones
  Although the bundled in ear headphones from LG was already okay quality, these ones are really good. You can never go wrong with Sennheisers. I love the earphones and it just makes the music listening experience so much better. Aural Pleasure!
• Lunch with the Old Bosses
  It’s always nice to meet up with old friends. I got to have lunch and catch up with not one but two of my former bosses, catching up on old times. We’re all in different roles, different companies but it’s good that (at least I think) the friendship is still there. Happiness!
• Good Sunday Breakfast AND Dinner with the F
  We had breakfast at a new place on recommendation from a friend at a place called Wild Honey where they serve all sorts of breakfasts. For dinner, it was at an old favorite, Spices of India for a nice Indian dinner. Chicken Tikka Masala is the bomb. Fullness!

As a friend always says, “don’t sweat the small stuff”. It seemed like a crappy weekend but I think we’re still okay.

Basically, click on all and then refresh. There will be a prompt that will ask you to confirm the creation of your default notebook on your Skydrive. After that’s done, you should be able to access your notes from the phone on http://office.live.com  I found the Personal (Web)

If it’s not in the recent documents, you might want to check “My Documents” cause that’s where I found mine.

So all that works perfect. But what I did discover is you can view and edit your existing notebooks too (though it’s a bit buggy). If you want to try it, go back to the home screen and start up Internet Explorer, then navigate to http://office.live.com

You can then navigate to the existing notebook you want to edit, and click on its icon.

That should then trigger the One Note app to open up the notebook:

You’ll then be able to navigate to the sections on that notebook and edit and sync as you please. One bug in this instance is the One Note app doesn’t seem to name the section right*, in this case the app says “Untitled Section” even though I have it named Project List on Skydrive. Making changes seems to still update the right section though. On another incident where I tried syncing a notebook with 4 sections, 3 of the sections ended up having the same name, even though they were named differently on the server. I’m sure they will send out an update to fix this problem soon.

Oh, and if you want to stop syncing (or want to try re-adding the notebooks to try and fix the section names) just tap on the trash bin icon at the bottom, that will prompt you to select the notebook to delete and it will stop syncing to your phone.

*UPDATE: Seems that the issue is fixed now. If you have any untitled sections, you can just delete and readd them to have them showing right.

Call me easily amused but there. So finally, I got my WP7, its an LG Optimus 7 (LG-E900)

Photo of LG taken with my iPhone 3G:

Photo of (iPhone viewing photo of LG taken with iPhone 3G) taken with LG.

I had wanted to do a whole unboxing thing but just right after I finished paying for the phone, I had to get on a conference call. I think my iPhone sensed it was being replaced because it refused to cooperate. Till now, I can’t seem to go anywhere but the contact list. Basically I couldn’t pull up the keypad to dial O_o. I had an idea to sms the number to someone (the F was the lucky recipient) so it can turn into a smart link that I can click to dial. Yes that worked, but then I was prompted for the conference passcode. Again, something was wrong with the keypad so for some reason, it wouldn’t respond to me pressing 9. I can’t reboot, no matter how long I press the power button, so now I’m just waiting for it to die. (that was just too amusing a story not to tell) So even though I hadn’t charged my new phone yet, I quickly unpacked it, put the simcard in, quickly clicked through the settings and joined the call.

So obviously, the first thing I’m going to say is that you can get it up and running quite quickly, although it could be faster if we had the option to skip the configs and go straight to calling. At least it doesn’t require you to plug it into a PC first before becoming usable.

First thing I did was sign in with my Live ID and configure my work email, which was pretty straight forward. I’m happy that it seems my zune pass is working ^_^ it’s a good thing this phone has 16gb then. I also got my avatar in xbox live peeking occasionally on the tile (very cute, I’m glad I have a cute avatar). I quickly tried the panorama shot: Actually, I wasn’t sure what it was doing which is why it’s a bit blurry.. and random.. that’s the inside of my room by the way.

So apparently, you start it up and then just pan around, no need to click, it actually does that for you once it detects it’s the right moment to. You’ll also be shown a visual guide where you should be moving your camera to. The scan search app also looks interesting. It allows you to view the restaurants and places in your immediate vicinity using augmented reality. I’d post pictures but I’ve yet to figure out how to take a screen shot in wp7.

I did manage to try out the Ring it feature on windowsphone.live.com. Map it didn’t work, I think its because I had my phone plugged in syncing when I triggered it.

Right now, I’m liking this purchase very much. Haven’t seen the Omnia 7 so I’m not sure the “nicer screen” is worth the wait. One thing that bothers me though is that I keep accidentally clicking the camera button, actually half click only so I don’t activate the camera. It’s just a bit annoying but I can live with it. The buttons are a bit too “clickety” too, but I guess it’s alright.

That’s it for me for now, I’ll need to figure out how to do a screen cap in wp7 before a more comprehensive review.

I saw this video going around and obviously it piqued my interest. Also, my left jaw is acting up again so I don’t really feel like going out and about, so I found something else to amuse myself with.

I didn’t want to waste paper and my printer was unplugged so I decided to create a silverlight simulation instead. Try it out in fullscreen below:

You’ll discover that when you re-arrange the pieces as in the video, the blue and green pieces go beyond the boundary at the bottom. This is probably why even when you make the paper cut-out version and try out yourself, the illusion holds because you’ll have no reference to the original square.

At least now I have that out of my system. My jaw still hurts though