For the last week I have been trying to buy a t-shirt from CafePress for the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk, and CafePress have three options to pay.

Sweet, ‘Checkout with Amazon’ I say, I love Amazon. So press that, then log into Amazon, press ‘Submit my order’ and get an error saying:

Really, it states my state quite clearly to me, in fact, I didn’t enter any values. It even knows the magic long zip code, which means blanking out my house is almost pointless.

So I called the CafePress phone support, and the guy on the other end siad: “Oh yeah that got broken a few weeks ago with an update from Amazon, our IT guys are looking into it. I can complete your order over the phone if you like”

Um, how about if it’s been broken for two weeks, and your IT guys are too clueless to fix it in that time, you edit the page to not show the Amazon option. Then I would have seen your online payment option or Pay Pal, and chosen yours.

But instead you gave me a known broken option, and expected me to chase you as to how to work around the problem.

So now I have a dilemma, I want to have the t-shirt, but I don’t want to support such a useless merchant.

[Update 11 Sep] Still broken 2 ½ weeks later, so it’s been broken for a whole month. Cafe Press need some new coders.

I have a new WinCE platform to port our project onto, and was getting “No process is on the other end of the pipe” when I would try remote debug the app, after successfully deploying via WinCE development without Active Sync on Win 7 as previously mentioned.

The application would also silently refuse to run when launched from WinCE explorer or the command shell.

I created a new default application, and it remote deployed and ran. So I knew there was something special with my application.

I tweaked lots of things that had zero impact, but in the end adding Wininet.lib and calling InternetOpen caused my test app to also not run. If I included the library as a depenacy but didn’t call InternetOpen the application runs fine, if I call InternetOpen it fails.

I suspect Wininet.dll is not present of the development WinCE 6 OS I have, and therefore the failure to load the .dll is pulling the executable down.

Email sent off to OS team, so I’m back onto a different project…

[_Update: A few hours later…_] Yip, wininet.dll has been removed.

Just signed up for the Peoria Wildlife Prairie Park walk as part of the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk 2011.

Might see you there, or maybe you could do one in your area. It’s world wide after all.

I was talking about raspberry flavored candy or drink in a team meeting the other day.

Today a team member brought me some Walgreens Candy Classics Raspberry Liquorice.

Yummy!

I’ve asked a Pages question of the Apple forums, but so far have not had any luck, any insight appreciated.

Today I was helping Michaela with formatting her assignment and she had left and right justified text in her header.

On some pages the right justified text was not correctly aligning on the right edge, so I inserted a Text Box into the header, made it’s alignment right with text flow, and then made the text in the Text Box right justified. The numbers are the ‘Page Number’ and ‘Page Count’ Auto Text

And this looked good until I looked down in the double digits pages, were you see:

It you copy the Text Box into the page body it does not have this problem. If you copy’n’paste the Text Box over it’s self it correctly draws, but if you change any text alignment settings, or save/load the document that ‘flow’ error returns.

The problem only occurs for the Text Box text in the header/footer, not the same text values placed into the header/footer normally.

I think the problem occurs, because the Text Box is only flowed for the first Header as the later text all uses the space for the first ‘Page Number’ value which is a ‘1’. If you put a section break on a page, then on the next page, turn off the ‘use previous headers & footers’ option, but have the same formatting the Page Number (21 for my example) is correctly spaced:

Because my laptop has been running Backup this morning (~4 hours), and while that happens my laptop is like this:

Compiling code, or the likes what the system go 100% for minutes, with most programs going blank with UI freezes.

I’m starting to wonder if I about to have some hardware failure?

Normally I throw away Monday mornings to backup, but I have another story to tell  (later post) from yesterday, that once it was solved, made me want to run my backup now.

Looking at the back of a box of cereal I noticed this great modesty:

No it more sounds like bad copy editing to me. Noting that superlative is not a superlative, it’s an adjective (or adverb).

I’m guess this came about because someone said lets get some quotes from customers and then be coy about not not using those words (yes double negative).

So person A gave the following text to person B, “Superlative” and “Superlative” just sounded a bit like bragging and then person B knowing that if they asked customers what they thought they would get “Bland” and “Cardboard-like” and those are not really positive or superlatives, I would have to said “Blandest” and “Cardboard-est”.

So person B Google’d superlative, choice unsurpassed as there first word, which means: not capable of being improved on and (superlative of `good’) [Source]. The former is true and I’m not sure how you could improve this product, and the second ‘good’ is just untrue. At this point person B’s brain prolapsed from personal integrity check failure, and when they awoke they had something that look like “super…” and “unsurpassed” and it looked good enough.

Ship it!

Then in the search for a cereal that is not mostly sugar, or honey coated (natures sugar, it must be good for you), my wife purchased it, I lucked out by eating it. That box is finished, but we have two other types from the same company, and the first of those is equally bad so far.

Groan.

When setting up my SageTV server, I needed to move the server from the office to a spare room to get better over the air reception. In doing so I had to alter my network layout, so I had my Ethernet over power link running from the server to the HD300, and then a wifi link from the server to the rest of my network.

I was having all sorts of problems getting the routing correct, when I noticed Windows 7 has a bridge device option.

(shown turn off above as this image was captured on my work laptop)

When I click this option it said something like: ‘You need to select two devices to bridge’, good point. So I selected the Ethernet and Wifi at the same time, right clicked, and bridged them.

Now the HD300 can see the internet, and it all just works (this was done months ago) and it is still just work.

So Windows 7 earns a “just works” point, well done to the OS team there.

Talking to a work college recently about how to construct a pentagon with just a compass and straight edge, as you do, he could not remember the steps, and I never knew…

Later I found Wikipedia’s Pentagon page and it has these two cool methods for just this thing: