Leese Internet Technology

Several years ago, this KB article would have been very handy. I needed it again today, so here it is:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/96269

Recently sent this to a client regarding email applications…

1. Blacklisted? Not sure? Check http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
   and enter IP Address
2. Spamcop got you down? Not sure? Check http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
   and enter IP Address
3. For gobs of information (and to signup to be in the feedback loop) -
   visit http://postmaster.aol.com. The whole site has a lot of useful
   information. Being in the feedback loop will allow them to notify you if
   a user puts your email in the junk mail. This way you can unsubscribe the
   customer, instead of risking being blacklisted.
4. Yahoo! wants to be your friend. How can you be their friend? Visit
   http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-15.html
5. Finally, here is a legal blurb about commercial email systems:
   http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

In case anyone is searching around on Google or Yahoo! for a character encoding format that works for iTunes - I have found that UTF-8 works great. And I use htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″) to get the text formatted properly.

Also a note, that if you leave the length field empty, iTunes doesn’t display the file as an option to the consumer. It makes sense, but I just want to put it out there because after we fixed our encoding issue, we realized we had to fix a filesize() error that was occuring.

Free tip from Uncle Leroy

Now that openid.net has announced that google and microsoft are putting out products with openid included in them i guess its time to get on board. with so many technologies changing so rapidly i like to wait and watch to see how things will evolve. i think they have evolved. anytime you have google AND microsoft backing something, its got some wallup - some real umph. its momentum enough for me and we’ll start recommending it to our clients.

http://www.aronson.co.il/asp2php.php

I wish I would have found this sooner and if I wouldn’t have found it - I probably would have created it myself.

From your Uncle Leroy …

Use:

php -l *script_name*

..to test the syntax of your scripts.

Obviously, you want to unit test all code, but in a pinch, if some piece of code is difficult to setup the test environment, at least run a sytax check on it. Or use Eclipse with its syntax checking/highlighting turned on.

If you lead a software team or work on a team, you need to read this article

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

It is mostly about Customer Service. What is? Software. It’s all about customer service in fact. I mean, you build a User Interface so that your users can interface with it. And if that interface doesn’t make sense (BTW, that was your first line of customer service) then they call or email you (your second line of customer service). In fact, all software serves, and most of the time, serves its human customer. So you have to have people skills and a heart to serve, or you aren’t going to make it. If you only love the engineering side of it, then get into mechanical or some sort of physical engineering …software is for people.