Xavier's dreams, thoughts, tech tips... » General

Ditching the iPhone 4 for a Windows Phone 7?

Xavier — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:47:57 +0000

Well, a few months ago I would’ve thought this is something totally unreasonable. Now I tested a Windows Phone 7 and I actually did. The iPhone is just stashed in a drawer while I test the WP7. More on this soon

Costa Rica – un pais de tercer mundo hecho para ricos

Xavier — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:39:11 +0000

Chicha me da hoy cuando se me riega el cafe encima de mi teclado, el cual Amazon me recuerda que tiene 14 meses nada mas.

Pero mas chicha me da ir a Office Depot y otros lugares y ver que el teclado que en Amazon vale $28 esta aca a 40 000 colones, que son aproximadamente $80.

La pereza es que todo es asi, los carros valen un 40% mas, cualquier cosa aplica la regla de 10, que significa que si algo vale $10 aca vale 10 mil colones que son $20, es decir casi el doble.

Y dicen que no pagamos impuestos… Y la chicha de los impuestos no es pagarlos. Es pagar impuestos para que alguien del gobierno se los robe!

How Netflix is preventing customers from running away

Xavier — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:53:51 +0000

We all know Netflix is having a hard time keeping customers happy. So I guess they got very creative in how to retain customers. Look at this:

- I tried to cancel my subscription today

- And voila! I can’t! Nice way of keeping your customers paying month to month!

The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Xavier — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:48:32 +0000

I got today this error, which is brand new to me. I like to write about uncommon errors that I bump into, so here goes an explanation of what happened (btw: me very dumb! hahaha)

I am creating an ASCX control for a .Net 3.5 site. I have an all white control and wanted to have a quick UI just to do a bit of testing and prototyping without having to spend too much time working on the UI piece of things. My motto is “get it to work first, and now make it look pretty”, which is not exactly what most devs do. Most devs do “get it to work, who cares about it looking pretty”.

Anyway, I created a Master page, copy pasted directly from the web and VOILA, besides an endless set of strings and multiple forms I also got the following line in my new master page.

value="/wEPDwUJMzY3MzIxNzk0ZBgBBR5fX0NvbnRyb2xzUmVxdWlyZVBvc3RCYWNrS2V5X18WAgUVZG5uOklOR0VOSU1FTlUxOl9jdGwwBRZkbm46SU5HRU5JTUVOVTEyOl9jdGwwWhmzjTYBHZePNjI/JaIh52TikEw=" />

Just delete all references to viewstate in the copy pasted text. Do the same for forms, simplify and use the new UI

for demonstration purposes only

Error text:
Server Error in ‘/PaymentsWeb’ Application.

The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Source Error:

[No relevant source lines]

Source File: c:\Users\xavier\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\paymentsweb\8e1d30e5\5e7998b7\App_Web_smihqcyt.0.cs Line: 0

Stack Trace:

Tren Urbano ya casi llega a Curridabat!!!!!!

Xavier — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:51:44 +0000

Foto tomada hoy desde el gimnasio nuevo por donde Pepe Figueres! Ya esta a punto de llegar el tren!!!!! Estoy feliz, si llega ahi entonces ya no ocupo tragarme todas las presas diarias atravesando la ciudad.

Should we really be happy for Netflix Latin America?

Xavier — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:34:35 +0000

Being a loyal customer during my multiple trips to the US, I was THRILLED that finally Netflix is coming to Latin America. Until yesterday…

As soon as it became available, I signed up and went straight to my beloved Documentaries section. I am disappointed…

Look at what I found, there are only like 20 documentaries, mostly low quality :

Check out the equivalent US section taken at exactly the same time, it has hundreds of titles in multiple categories:

Netflix: will the Latin America service be equivalent to the US one? Please don’t disrespect us. Just because we live in a third world country, that does not mean that you should give us a third world service.

Also, don’t make the mistake of adding translated titles to spanish. We want the movies in their original language!

Helping like on the one laptop per child… or at least one tablet per child

Xavier — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:58:49 +0000

I was reading today this great article, Can you hear Apple’s iPad competitors sobbing?, and just thought to myself that instead of making a huge pile of Android devices – why don’t all these companies that built IPad look alikes and failed miserable – instead of just throwing them away they give them away for free to children in third world countries.

It is not exactly a one laptop per child, but it is a one internet-enabled-device-that-children-can-use-to-learn that could make a difference in the upbringing of many underprivileged financially minds that can also have potential for a better life.

It all makes sense to me, maybe not Nicholas Negroponte’s dream, but still it is a great way of helping the poor and not throwing a way those devices. Some of these companies might even get some good PR… you know… help the children… third world… which as we all know some big corporations would never give something away without a tax break or good PR in return. But who cares! What I care is about giving opportunity to those that don’t have one.

Am I being just too naive?

RIP Iphone 4

Xavier — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:15:06 +0000

De ponerse a llorar…

Y tambien del otro lado

Pero aunque no lo crean… aun funciona y le paso un carro por encima…

My first dollar in the App Store

Xavier — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:20:37 +0000

Hopefully more to come, but this is my first dollar on a personal app

How deep do you want to go? Parallels, VMWare, Remote Desktop Connection

Xavier — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:11:17 +0000

I just noticed something. I am:
- Using my Mac Book Pro (Lion? not yet) to connect via Remote Desktop Connection to
- My Dell PowerEdge Server with Windows Ultimate 7, which is next to me but I don’t change the Apple display for anything, plus I like the mobility – work from everywhere via RDC to my server – and
- In my server I am running VMWare Player to host another Windows 7 that
- I then use to VPN all the way to a server in the UK via Citrix (I use a VM as the Citrix software sometimes blue screens on 64 bit systems)
- And in the Uk I connect to another virtual machine running Windows Server 2008
… Where I can check if our software is running appropriately.

Best of all… it works!!!!

In my Mac I also run Parallels, I love it… Give it a shot, Coherence is great! (If you don’t know what Coherence is, think of it as just running both Windows and Mac OSX and feeling it is the same one.

Also, I had the PowerEdge running Windows Server 2008 with HyperV. HHHNNNNN. Gets the job “done”, but VMWare Player is far superior for what I need. Won’t run in 2k8, so that’s why I moved to W7.