Andrei DANEASA

I am a huge fan of Picasa, moved from Flickr due to their stupid limit of 200 photos in free accounts. After one and a half year of using Picasa Web, my web space reached its limit and I had to buy 10 GB of space for $20 per year (this was the cheapest option).

There was a post on Google blog saying they are now offering twice the space for quarter the price. I went immediately to my account and saw that I now have 80 GB of quota !!

… and the first option is to buy 20 GB for $5 ! Long live Google !

One funny thing here: check the “round” prices for bigger plans: $512, $1024, $2048….

Related posts:

I’m a constant user of Google Analytics. It’s a great piece of software with lots of useful reports, easy to read and to understand. However, I was never curious how far I can go with it.

Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no way to develop a web app and don’t need a chart/pie, even this is for the backend. Google offers this Chart API and it’s fabulous. No need to install anything, just call a web page with your set of parameters. Now they offer maps and I can, for example, to keep track of the countries I visited.

Example:

Europe countries I visited so far

People say that one picture worth more than a thousand words. This is true: just change, or offer charts as alternative to your long and boring tables and you’ll see the result.

What have I done here:
Read the rest of this entry »

I used both services to take tests in the past as the following: Microsoft - Pearson VUE and Oracle - Prometric.

It seems that driven by the cut-costs strategy they started to steal each other’s clients. Oracle just moved to Pearson VUE. The result for me as a customer, not as an Oracle employee, is that I cannot access my history. You have to believe me or to wait until Oracle will provide online transcripts when I will tell you what I own. There’s no history on their side, they claim the history will be kept on Oracle’s side at Certview, but I was unable to check my history.

I remembered I used Pearson VUE to take my Microsoft MCSD exams, so I tried to log in with my old credentials. Surprise…. Microsoft is no longer with Pearson, but they moved to Prometric. It’s totally confusing and you don’t want to take an exam these days

Related posts:

Total Commander - File Manager – I am using it since version 3, ~10 year ago. Simply not replaceable.

Pidgin - Instant Messaging – Single client for all protocols, including Oracle internal one.

Launchy - Application Launcher – just press ALT+Space and write a few letters from app name to start it

MPlayer – Movie Player – no GUI, just console, very quick, no need to install codecs. Some issues with external monitor.

Firefox - of course, user since version 0.9 Beta

Dropbox - File Sync – simple sync of some folders between laptops or laptop and desktop. As a bonus files are stored online and you get revisions history

Google Mail – Personal Email – lot of space, even bought extra. Can also use it to read other POP3 accounts, all in a single interface.

Google Reader – RSS reader – the best RSS reader

Google Calendar – Calendar – simple to use, simple to share, to sync. Can also use it to read other calendars.

TripIt – Booking Manager – just forward all the travel plans to Tripit and you’ll have your itinerary ready, published as a web calendar, links to online check-in and other usefull stuff.

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I deleted by mistake some unsaved photos from my camera. Even that I never came across with file recovery software, this time I had to.

After a short google search, I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery who did a brilliant job. Not very fast, but speed was not what I was looking for.
It managed to recover ~200 MB in less than 10 minutes, good enough for a FREE application.

Good luck!

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I had a very strange situation: 2 machines connected wireless to the same router. One was running like a charm, the other one got an IP from DHCP but no gateway and no networking was available on it.

First I thought it is something hardware. Since I had a dual-boot environment on that machine, I booted in Ubuntu and saw that I had also a gateway there and internet was working seamlessly. So it was all about Windows XP…

After lots of formus read, after reinstalling wireless card driver many times, I finally found a solution here, as
- in Windows XP SP2 some repair options were added through netsh command:
Read the rest of this entry »

Today afternoon on any seach on google.com the user was unable to click any of the results since google said it has interstitials. I mean strange, very strange…. all of them?

For those of you that don’t know what an interstitial is, it’s an intermediate page shown before the desired page, usually used to advertise something.

Here is the proof that it was either a hack either a very poor programming:
- A search for word “google“:

- If i am clicking the link for Google.com, I’ve got: “Warning – visiting this site may harm your computer!“:

Now after more than half an hour Google is working well again… hopefully this will not happen again in the future…

Andrei

Seems that my thumbnail generation tutorial was somehow appreciated by community and somebody posted an article on Zend Developer Zone describing my tutorial as “Advanced Thumbnail Trickery with PHP“.

First, thank you!
Second, I never had so many visitors coming from the same referred. When I saw my statistics I thought that my internal statistics tool went crazy and I checked my google analytics account. Seems that it’s true.

I promise I will elaborate the topic and make a class with it. I will also try to do the same thing with ImageMagick as a visitor suggested.

No, it’s not yet another PHP thumbnail generation tutorial! I recently needed a function to:

• create square thumbnails
• don’t crop the initial image, but scale it and fill with white background
• center the thumbnail in the square
• call the function in a loop to process an entire folder

I found no suitable example and I decided that instead of digging too much it’s better to create my own function and a class for it.

Let’s start with a photo that we need to create a thumbnail for:

Nice kid, huh?