At my company CitySourced, collaboration is key and for a long time we were die hard Dropbox users. They have a spectacular product from a consumer point of view, but as we grew, it was clear their product would not work for me and my team in the long term. Yes, I’m aware that they have a Dropbox for Teams. But that product is really just a half-baked attempt at addressing the real needs for an enterprise. All that being said, we looked to evaluate a couple other platforms – SugarSync, JungleDisk and Box. We went with SugarSync because of: 1) price and 2) user administration features. SugarSync was a complete epic fail because it didn’t work. The one thing it was supposed to do, sync, it didn’t do consistently. Folks on my team were constantly complaining that they weren’t getting the files others were adding, and I wasn’t seeing files they were adding. And to put icing on the cake, their support was horrendous. They would close out trouble ticket issues within 48 hours if there was no response. Fail. They would close out trouble ticket issues if the sending email didn’t match the account. Double Fail. (Our exchange server uses a {firstname.lastname} convention, but we all use the {firstname} convention when signing up for services) Now I’m sitting on hold for chat service. Triple Fail. Yes, you read that correctly. Chat. They don’t even have a telephone support line. At least if they do, I couldn’t find it on their website (and I looked hard).

The bottom line for us was that the product didn’t work, and they didn’t support it anyways. I’m a very busy guy, and I don’t have time to wait 10 minutes in a chat queue so a call center agent in India (or wherever) can run me through a script. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have to wait that long if their product worked in the first place.

We’ve since moved on to Box and I have to admit, the service is working pretty well. It’s syncing (albeit a little slow for my tastes) and the user management seems to work very well. We’re also allocated 1TB of storage. All in all, I’m happy with it so far. If things do go south and we have to bail on Box, I’ll be sure and write a post on that. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

– UPDATE!

I’ve just gotten off my chat session with SugarSync customer support (after my 10 minute wait), and they’ve now told me to call in.  Nice. I wanted to call in at the beginning, but couldn’t find the number on their website. For anyone reading this, please take note. SugarSync’s customer service telephone number is: 877-784-7962. If you’re outside the US, you can call: 650-356-6356

I’m glad this catastrophe is behind me. Sheesh!

I saw this post on Facebook and just had to repost here in my blog. This is great stuff.

—–

The budget explained in simple English.

Now, remove eight (8) zeros and pretend it’s a houshould budget.

Total Budget Cuts Which Some Politicians are Proud Of: $385

Vote the insanity now. Vote them all out and demand a balanced budget!

Having been thrust into mobile development, I’ve had to become acquainted with the Eclipse IDE. I had some experience working in Eclipse while I was at MySpace, but the experience was pretty limited there as it was a mix of Windows and Linux for that particular product (MySpace Karaoke, if you must know). Now that I’m pretty much in the weeds with the whole thing now, I’ve noticed that the performance is pretty poor right out of the box. Project builds, in particular, are painfully slow. I must caveat this entire blog post by admitting I am a HUGE fan of the Visual Studio IDE – VS2010 seriously rocks for development. Anyway, after scouring the web for answers, I did come across some posts that show how to tweak your instance of Eclipse to get the most bang for your hardware buck.

I’m running Windows 7 Ulimate x64 on an HP Elite workstation. I’ve got the i7 quad core CPU and 9 GB of RAM. Eclipse should be running pretty quick, no? Wrong. Out of the box, they limit quite a bit the initial memory allocation, and the Java version is set to 1.5. Here’s what I did to get my system running quicker.

Open your eclipse.ini file – C:\Program Files (x86)\Eclipse\eclipse.ini – and edit the memory values to higher numbers. You’ll also want to change the Java version to 1.6. My exact setup is below:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.201.R35x_v20090715.jar
–launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
2048M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
2048m
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-Xms768m
-Xmx768M
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

Finding the exact values was a bit of trial and error. Putting number that were too high caused Eclipse to crash on startup. Be sure to back up your original in case you get too far down the line and can’t fix what you changed.

Enjoy!

My aunt again forwarded me this delightful free gift opportunity from the IRS. Enjoy!

The IRS has announced that they will give a free pencil sharpener to all taxpayers who pay their taxes on time this year. It can be placed on your desk as a constant reminder of the service they provide to you each year.

I got this funny email forwarded to me by my aunt today. I got a kick out of it, so I just had to share it with everyone! Enjoy…

Have you ever wondered how a woman’s brain works?

Every one of those little blue balls is a thought about something that needs to be done, a decision or a problem that needs to be solved.

A man is different, he only has 2 balls and they consume all his thoughts.

I’m pretty upset at our situation here on Maui, so I’ve decided to write a post. This is one of the beautiful things about the internet. It gives everyday people the opportunity to voice their opinion and actually get it heard. Enough of my babbling… Here’s my review.

We got a great package deal (airline, hotel, car) on Orbitz for what we thought was a great price. We booked our vacation well over 3 months in advance. After arriving at the hotel, my wife and I were told that the ocean front room we booked (and specifically upgraded to) only had two (2) double beds, not the king size bed we had specified. Say what?

Well, it turns out that this hotel does not “guarantee” the bed type requested, and since this hotel was at capacity we were simply out of luck. What’s the point of requesting a bed type if you’re not going to get it? I definitely would NOT have booked the room had I known this (they know this too which is probably why they don’t tell you). The woman at the front desk – Krystle – was of absolutely no help either. She simple went through the standard script and wouldn’t give any reasonable explanation as to why they have this insane policy. Customer service? Major fail.

Oh yeah, the ocean front we upgraded to? Not an ocean front in my book. We can barely see the water from our balcony. And to top it off, our refrigerator is broken and one of our lights keeps flickering.

My advice to you – if you want to guarantee you get a king bed (or any bed size specification for that matter), go somewhere else. The Westin next door is amazing. We’re booking there on our next trip.

I came across this blog post randomly, and I had to share it with you all. Now, I know we’re in hard time, but this seems a bit ridiculous to me. Apparently, the City of Philadelphia is going to charge it’s residents to have a blog. This article on sports blog BroadStreetHockey has some very interesting insight as to what’s going on in the City of Brotherly Love. Not so much love, would be more appropriate, I think.

I know cities are hard up for cash. We’re all hard up for cash. But come on people! I’m just glad I don’t like in Phily right now. I’d have to pay them $600 / year (this blog plus my MySpace account – every MySpacer would have to pay $300 / year as they include a blog for every account). No thanks.

And I’m going to have to keep an eye out for my city on this one. I definitely don’t want them sneaking this one by.

So I, like many other tech enthusiasts, have a million email addresses. I had been using my Yahoo! email address as my personal email address for years, but I’m finally fed up with it, and I’ve set up my auto-responder to let everyone know of my new address (yes, it’s a Gmail account). Why would I go through all that hassle and make the switch to Gmail? Well, if you have to ask that, you obviously haven’t use Gmail. First off, my Yahoo! account didn’t play well with my iPhone, constantly showing me emails that I had deleted from the mail interface days earlier. Second, every time I’d go to the web mail interface, I’d be inundated with ads. Ads everywhere. I suppose that’s what I get for signing up for a free service, but Gmail’s approach is much more acceptable in my opinion. Finally, I don’t think Yahoo! is going to be around all that much longer. I haven’t seen any innovation coming from them, and all I read about in the news concerns their impending doom.

So now that I’ve made the decision, I wanted to move all my existing mail from Yahoo! to Gmail. Simple, right? Not nearly. After about an hour online and trying a few different approaches (IzyMail and ZPOPs – both didn’t work by the way), I came across a blog that explained how to do it. Once I followed the instructions, I was able to bring all my email into my Gmail account (via their POP import feature) in about five minutes.

What was this glorious solution? I switched my Yahoo! account to a Yahoo! Asia account. Apparently, Yahoo! Asia allows their users to access their email via POP3 (in the US, you can do the same but Yahoo! wants you to fork over $20 / year).

So there you have it. If you want to bail on Yahoo! and still have all your email in your new Gmail account, you can. And you can do it for free. Hit me up at my Gmail account if you have any questions – dotnetallday@gmail.com.

I was emailed this very cool story by my uncle over the weekend, and I was laughing so hard I just had to share it with everyone. Read through the story yourself and let me know what you think at the end by leaving some comments. Enjoy!

—–
The kids filed back into class Monday morning. They were very excited.

Their weekend assignment was to sell something, then give a talk on productive salesmanship.

Little Sally led off: “I sold girl scout cookies and I made $30,” she said proudly, “My sales approach was to appeal to the customer’s civil spirit and I credit that approach for my obvious success.”

“Very good,” said the teacher.

Little Jenny was next.

“I sold magazines,” she said, “I made $45 and I explained to everyone that magazines would keep them up on current events.”

“Very good, Jenny,” said the teacher.

Eventually, it was Little Johnny’s turn (you remember him don’t cha?).

The teacher held her breath.

Little Johnny walked to the front of the classroom and dumped a box full of cash on the teacher’s desk. “$2,467,” he said.

“$2,467!” cried the teacher, “What in the world were you selling?”

“Toothbrushes,” said Little Johnny.

“Toothbrushes!” echoed the teacher, “How could you possibly sell enough tooth brushes to make that much money?”

“I found the busiest corner in town,” said Little Johnny, “I set up a Dip & Chip stand and gave everybody who walked by a free sample.”

They all said the same thing, “Hey, this tastes like dog crap!”

Then I would say,”It is dog crap. Wanna buy a toothbrush?”

“I used the governmental approach of giving you something crappy for free, and then making you pay to get the crappy taste out of your mouth.”

For all you .NET wonks out there, I had some serious trouble finding the solution that fit my business (CitySourced – http://www.citysourced.com) when it came to processing geo spatial elements. Yes, there’s the SQL Server 2008 and their new spatial types (which I use as well), but there was nothing that allowed me to work with geo spatial elements directly in my .NET application. We’re now using ESRI’s ArcGIS 10technology for a lot of the heavy lifting at CitySourced, but there is definitely a need for doing some of this in-application.

That being said, I’ve collected the libraries that were most useful to me and zipped them up. I’m doing this because the library I’m most fond of was the most difficult to find and get working – SharpMap 2.0 beta.

Download my .NET_GIS_Libraries

In addition to the download, I’ve decided to add links to all my favorite websites. Enjoy!

http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/
http://dotspatial.codeplex.com/
http://projnet.codeplex.com/
http://geoapi.codeplex.com/
http://mssqlspatial.codeplex.com/

And a great how to blog for SharpMap 2.0 – a must read!

http://geekswithblogs.net/JuanDoNeblo/archive/2008/04/13/showing-esri-shapefile-layers-on-a-virtual-earth-map.aspx