Seeing how I haven’t posted in a while I thought I’d throw something useful together and post it up here.
Here is a list of some of the better free and/or open source software I have come across. Feel free to submit programs you think are great to add to the list.
Ballenger Motorsports has had a FedEx shipping account for a long time. FedEx service was set up completely in a single 5 minute session with an excellent level of tracking visibility and billing.
Ballenger Motorsports has had a USPS shipping account for a short time. USPS service was set up completely in a single 5 minute session with a mediocre level of tracking visibility and billing.
Ballenger Motorsports has had a UPS shipping account for months. UPS service has, to this day, not been set up to an acceptable level of service in any way. The process has worked something like this so far:
1) Establish account, enter information username password. Account checks my business DNB # and apparently my credit is good. So far so good.
2) Hmm…. I can’t use billing, adiminstration, or quantum view services, I wonder how I set these up. After a brief search and a call, I apparently need to have an account representative do this. I have to wonder why? Why can’t I just set this up as with UPS competitors instantly? Apparently my account reprenstative works 9-5, m-f which is not helping me on a saturday afternoon. Isn’t there someone who can just set this up or some automated system? Apparently not.
3) 1 week later, my account representative finally decides to contact me. I ask to have billing and quantum view setup and to have admin acccess.
4) 2 weeks later, my account representative finally actually sets this up for me. The username and password do not allow me complete access (or so i think). I get my billing pin information in the mail. I finally get emails for my developers key and xml access key (which appear with no key, I actually have to view the source of the message to find the key).
5) I am unable to setup the same username and password for all services. I try lots of combinations and finally get my basic ups.com and billing center to have the same access information. I am unable to get Quantum View working properly at all. I contact my account representative with my problems and ask for a simple setup… really, just please make this all work with my single username and password. Apparently she isn’t able to do very much and I truly fail to understand why these representatives exist as the extent of the support and help I get is a phone number for someone else. Why do I need a person to set this up when an automated system should have done this initially?
6) I contact support and meet a condescending individual who proceeds to tell me that asking for a single simple login to do everything is ludicrous and outside of the “UPS universe of possibility”. It is at this moment that I wish I had a record button on my business phone. I am also subject to a very forceful explanation of what “case sensitive” means. When my issued password fails to work, I am told that I am unable to type. I go through the forgotten password process (despite having the seemingly proper one) which is supposed to email me. After hours, no email. The support individual tells me that it was sent instantly and something is wrong with my computer. Thanks man… it’s not like I can’t test it’s function; I send myself several emails from different accounts successfully while I’m being told my computer is broken.
7) I gather the pieces together and this is what I have figured out so far. First you need to establish a UPS account. Then establish a ups billing account. Then get an account rep to establish a Quantum View admin account (This will only take 6-8 weeks apparently). Once this is done, login with the initial accounts to ups.com and delete your original account. Go to your billing account and alter it to your desired username and password. Login with your Quantum view manage account and establish a new ups.com account with the desired username and password. Create admin access for this account. Now delete your undesireable account name and password.
This system is inherintly flawed, annoying, time consuming and stupid. No one at UPS can do much about it and no one seems to care. I just got bounced from point to point wherein there was supposedly always a problem with some other system. I am frustrated, I have lost time and money because of this ludicrous bloated wad of crap that they call UPS and I STILL don’t have this setup properly.
UPS is the only shipping company with which I have received damaged packages (due to mishandling). UPS also randomly decides to improperly change the size and weight of some of my inbound & outbound packages such that their shipping cost more than doubles. As an example, I purchased a package from Uline that weighed 37 lbs and was 36×31x8 in size. UPS adjusted the pricing for this shipment for a 56×30x8 package which moved it to an oversize class 3 package which changed the calculated shipping weight & cost to 90 lbs and an oversize charge of an additional $40. When I call them to correct this problem, they seem to change without question but really, why should I have to call for an adjustment that they should have never made in the first place?
I would love to stop shipping UPS altogether. Nothing about their system is good but I recognize that some customers will desire this service and I will either offer UPS.com service as an option if requested or leave it as a normal option and put specific text recommending against ups.com. Interestingly, I can see my inbound packages through my bills but with no other method. How is this company in business?
See my geeks links page for a new way to track UPS packages with google maps. There used to be a way to do this with GreaseMonkey but UPS killed it. Now this site does it without having to download greasemonkey. Very cool!
Update 11/25/2006 - IOFAST has been offering this service for quite some now. It is the only one I have seen that is written using Google Maps API v2. Still needs a little work to be solid in IE but Firefox renders it 100% accurately.
In Wireless Advanced:
1. Turned on Afterburner
2. Xmit Power to 55mW. Default is 28. Safe is 70. I wanted to be real safe so I chose 55.
In Administration -> Management:
1. Under IP Filter Settings:
Maximum Ports 4096
TCP Timeout 120
UDP Timeout 120
These settings were mentioned by brianslayer Author of DDWRT
Just to confirm DDWRT does work on the WRT54GL and holy crap is it bad ass!! I turned on SpeedBooster and raised the transmit power!
I have started a mirrors subdomain with mirrors of interesting finds and hard to get files I come across. Check it out on the main menu might find some cool stuff.
For some reason I decided to google GPG thunderbird tonight and started reading about a plugin called enigMail. After I spent about 10 minutes reading about the plugin and how it worked with GPG I decided to give it a go. I downlaoded and isntalled the latest version of GPG (1.4.2.2) which I had to obtain from a mirror and then downloaded the enigmail plugin for thunderbird. After installing the plugin and restarting thunderbird I went through the wizard that enigmail provides. Everything went seemless and before I knew it I had my own PGP public key and thunderbird all set to send emails with all of my accounts. I must say after trying to do the same thing with outlook express many years ago this process has improved immensely. Google enigMail and GPG for some quick tutorials.
Last night I was getting fed up with Azureus. I had got used to it killing the performance of my computer when it’s in heavy use but ever since the most recent update it along with Java decides to completely freeze my machine to the point where the mouse is no longer responsive whenever I try to exit. So I unistalled everything - all the Java versions I have along with Azureus, rebooting several times along the way as I was asked. So I start fresh go ahead and follow the FAQ on how everything should be installed and what do you know? A complete meltdown again.
Time to find a better solution. bitComet is available but I have read a lot of sour posts from people about it’s ability to actually disable certain functions even when you have them disabled which leave me with the feeling of what gives?? So I have been hearing of µTorrent for a while now (pronounced micro torrent for those not in the know) so I decided to give it a whirl. Holy crap this thing rules. The entire program is just a standalone exe that, in it’s current 1.4 stable release, weighs in at 130KB.
This kind of took me by surprise at first as I failed to read the instructions. Maybe I was thinking it is just a really tiny installer for a really tiny program. When you double click on the exe it fires right up and asks you if you want to associate torrent files with it and will create the association to it’s current location if you say yes. For some reason the idiot inside me decided to click on yes even though I had the exe on my desktop. Well I closed the program and made a folder for it in Program Files (x86) and dropped it in there. When I ran it again it must have noticed the association was invalid (as it was pointing to the desktop) and asked me if I wanted to associate it with torrent files again. Very cool.
There are still a lot of things I love about Azureus and I will keep it on most computers I use but I think for the most part I will be switching to uTorrent. The plus side about writing Azureus in Java is that it will run on more operating systems than just windows which is currently the only platform uTorrent runs on. The performance appears to be spectacular compared to azureus probably largely due to the fact it is not running on top of Java. One of the great this about Azureus is the auto update ability but I have read a few sites online that claim that uTorrent auto update takes less than 5 seconds from start to finish including downloading the update and restarting the client. I don’t think Azureus can even start in that amount of time! It seems like the designer of uTorrent modeled it after Azureus as a slimmed down version that would be PC only.
Head over to µTorrent’s website and check it out.
I released a “Spyware Attack Pack” on De-Blander.com. I know it is not life altering but it just has a group of good standalone tools I usually download at one point or another when working on a computer that has been crapped on by spyware.
Well I just got notified automatically by Firefox about the 1.5.0.1 update about an hour ago. It went very smoothly and I am honestly happy to see that. One of the things I didn’t like about Firefox 1.0 was that even though I could explain to people how to update it, show them when it was signaling it needed to be updated, or walk them through it once or twice, every time I visited those computers they were always out of date and potentially at a greater risk. These are the computers that need the monthly registry, services, hijack this cleaning. Now that it has the overly large “update me now!” screen that comes up I think most people will be able to catch on. I wonder how long it will before unscrupulous advertisers start making their ad look like the Firefox update screen.