Yahoo sucks

Asides from being a nice web account to allow free samples of spam to be taken from (due to poor spam filtering), and a nice place to read all the latest hot gossip (not really), Yahoo, absolutely FAILS at accomplishing one of the basic tasks of being an email provider.

Now, my experience so far with Yahoo was that I needed to use it for Yahoo Messaging. Well, guess what -- I have both a Skype account and a Facetime account. Whelp. That makes Yahoo pretty irrelevant nowadays.

So, I started to use it as an alternative account that I won't check, primarily for spammy newsletters, Yahoo! TV Show alerts, and as a dump-run email account.

But then, I decided to use it for my debit card. Whoops. Bad mistake...

One of the first email accounts that I created back in the late 10's was used for most things that I used to love... I don't now, of course, but the account has been deemed by Yahoo to be "inactive", And has been "recycled".

WTF. What's the point of having a physical web address, when you know that you're going to lose it? It's like buying a car, and finding out that what you purchased was rent for a few months.

Of course, the analogy wouldn't really work, since Yahoo is a free service.. But... Wait, don't they actually collect data from your emails and/or browsing activity and sell it to third party advertisers anyways (not speculating, there are sidebar ads on Yahoo email).

The analogy would be more of like if you registered for a service, that you have a piece of mind that would be reliable for a long period of time, and having it be deleted after a few years of usage.. Oh wait, that wouldn't be much of an analogy, since that's almost exactly what happened....

This message "Your Yahoo account has been deactivated. Your Yahoo account has been inactive for an extended period of time and is being recycled."

represents an account of over 6 years being lost.

But am I complaining? Yes. WTF Yahoo, that was one of the first accounts I created and you chose to delete it? You suck. That's one of the many reasons why I've moved on from the silly little news bits and Yahoo Answers service...

I just lost $99, and who knows what else....

Google App Engine Launcher Settings

Recently, I did a little bit of maintenance on my computer (aka wiped the entire hard disk and changed the partitioning table to GPT) and so files here and there were lost, shortcuts weren't pointing to the right places, and unfortunately, Google App Engine Launcher failed to respond to these changes and I was unable to point my application to the right places..

So after a little bit of searching, I have found the place where Google keeps the settings for its "Google App Engine Launcher":

C:\Users\[Your Username Here]\Google\google_appengine_projects.ini

You can replace portions of the path for your applications in the file located here.
Save the file and reload the App Engine Launcher to allow for the program to reload the file and reflect upon the changed file path of your application.
If done correctly, everything should work fine again!

The application that's still red is an unfortunate part of wiping out an entire hard drive.

This post covers the following:
How to change project path in Google App Engine
How to find the Google App Engine settings location
Where is the Google App Engine launcher settings location
Where is the Google App Engine registry location

deMobilify

Recently, I got sick of having to deal with mobile webpages when I bookmarked a link on my phone to read on a desktop computer.
The interface works well on mobile where you've got low screen estate, but on a desktop computer, mobile websites are absolute torture!!

Fortunately, sites like vimeo and youtube automatically deal with the smartphone vs desktop issue and redirect you to your correct destination, but how about Wikipedia?
Sites that refuse to give in and automatically redirect you to your desired non-mobile website are annoying.

and this Google Chrome extension seeks to solve that.

It works passively in the background; no data is transmitted when using this extension and you have pretty much nothing to lose when installing it.

And allows you to make full use of the desktop versions of websites, and not plain old crappy mobile websites..

Install it here! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/demobilify/bpipmbekabalflpojmlifpoelndhfhpe

Long-time iOS user burn

As an Apple user for more then 4 years, I have seen Apple's exceptionally good products suddenly burn and die once a new device comes out. Sure they could optimize and fix bugs on new updates, but every update that you apply to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad lags it. I have a second generation iPod touch like many other early adopters of the touch-screen technology (and touch screen apple devices) and it was revolutionary and could run silky smooth, doing what I wanted it to do without any lag. Then the updates kept rolling month after month, until the iPhone 4 was announced, and iOS 4 was released.. Since then, it takes around half a minute to open the music app, longer to read emails and minutes to browser the web on Safari. Turning off spotlight helped with the lag dramatically, but until this day, iOS

4.2.1 is what my iPod touch has been stuck at, and performance isn't perfect (at all).. What Apple did to the device was to cripple the hardware through the software updates, and as an iPhone user, I feel burned and disappointed by Apple for not providing a product that can last.

Tl;dr: I'm disappointed at Apple, they killed a perfectly good iPod touch off

Pywin IOError on Windows 7

How to fix "IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'C:\\Program Files\\Python27\\lib\\site-packages\\win32com\\gen_py\\__init__.py'"?

From: https://simonsays.googlecode.com/svn-history/r6/wiki/InstallationGuide.wiki

IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'C:\\Python27\\lib\\site-packages\\win32com\\gen_py\\dicts.dat'
The easiest fix for this appears to be to open up the win32com directory for Users - Full Control. This will allow all the code to run as non-admin. 

EWOULDBLOCK error code in Windows, c++

You should be using WSAEWOULDBLOCK instead of EWOULDBLOCK if you're compiling c++ with

#include <winsock.h>

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms740128(v=vs.85).aspx

How to save graphics to file from a picturebox in vb.net

If you're like me and you've been trying to desperately convert a picture box that uses CreateGraphics() to bitmap or any other image in VB.net, you'll find that you can't do it. The object that that creates can only seemingly be accessed by .GetHdc(), however using Bitmap.FromHbitmap(objcanvas.GetHdc()) results in an error..