Blog Marco

How to stop "PayPal Instant Payment Notification Disabled" emails. Go to https://www.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-ipn-notify and you'll find your offending Paypal setting. I turned my IPN off since I don't use that shopping cart anymore. "To stop receiving IPNs permanently, click Turn Off IPN." Usually the result of an abandoned shopping cart website development project of yours...

Are we all addicts to the Internet? (link) Can Generation X, Y and Z survive without the internet? Generation X saw the dawn of the new computer age when they were kids and in their teens. Now most of their jobs are somehow connected to the internet. Generation Y saw the dawn on the internet age when dialup's came mainstream in the 1990's (remember Compuserve and those pesky AOL disc s and CDs?). They grew up on slow 14400 baud modems in their teens. Now with Generation Z, they know nothing else but computers and the internet. I watch my young cousins (aged below 3) jump on a browser, do a google search for their favourite games and start interacting. I was doing a survey the other day about my internet usage and I noticed that I seemed to tick all the boxes. I wondered if this was the case for most people? Are we all reliant on this massive electronic giant? What do you use the internet for?

• To spend time with friends or family
• To give me something to talk about
The Internet | add new comment | read more »
Submitted by Marco on Fri, 21/08/2009 - 6:49pm.

Looking at some SEO jobs in Sydney on Seek.com.au. These people earn quite a high income for what they do. I find the whole SEO industry quite interesting. The industry was started because finding things on a search engine is so important. Businesses take advantage if this so they can influence the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and rank their business higher. But all SEO isn't good - there has been some high profile companies like BMW that was punished by Google because of bad practices. Also small businesses can find their business wiped out if their SERPs rankings fall. All this and more was written about in last weekend's Google Monster article.

Here is a comprehensive list of "You are an Internet Addict When..." There are many variations of this list all over the internet. Some of them are a little "old" like this one: "You've already visited all the links at Yahoo and you're halfway through Lycos. or [C]ontinue?" Lycos? What ever happened to that search engine? All jokes aside... here is a Public Service Announcement from me about Internet Addicts. It is a real disorder: "Internet addiction disorder (IAD), or more broadly Internet overuse, problematic computer use or pathological computer use is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. These terms avoid the distracting and divisive term addiction and are not limited to any single cause. IAD was originally proposed as a disorder in a satirical hoax by Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995. He took pathological gambling as diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-IV) as his model for the description of IAD. However, IAD receives coverage in the press, and its classification as a psychological disorder is being debated and researched." Wikipedia Enjoy the list!

• You log off for four minutes to make yourself a cup of coffee and AT&T assumes there must have been a fault on the line and sends a repairman to fix it.
• You refuse to go on a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone lines.
• Your bookmark takes fifteen minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
• You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month “unlimited.”
• Your phone bill comes to your door in a box.
• You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.
• All of your friends have an @ in their names.

Internet addiction is a rising problem in today's technologically advanced society. You can laugh at these jokes about internet addictions, but IAD - Internet Addiction Disorder is a serious psychological disease. China has the world's largest number of internet users with 338 million -- more than the entire population of the United States. More than 10 million of the country's 100 million teenage web surfers are internet addicts, the China Daily said, citing a survey by the China Youth internet Association last year. There is controversy over the treatments for internet addiction and how it is diagnosed. The health ministry last month banned the use of electroshock therapy to treat internet addiction, the China Daily said. Internet addiction kills, there have been deaths linked with playing games on the internet continuously for many hours, and a more recent death of someone dying indirectly because of his internet addiction.

Sneaky RewardsCentral aka EmailCash recently changed their Guessing Game from guessing a number between 1 and 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and instead of daily draws they now run it weekly?! They've spectacularly reduced the chances of winning. That and they send out crappy rewards.

You have got to check out new search engine WolframAlpha. What is this new search engine do? How is WolframAlpha different to Google? Wolfram Alpha offers an exact answer, instead of showing up the links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer, like Google and other search engines. You type a question and instantly get an answer. "Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database. … In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge." Do we even need to think anymore?!

Wolfram Alpha For Easter Eggs and Novelty Search Ideas

More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

This website died for a few hours. Hopefully this information will help someone else with the same fail conditions. Some garbled error messages came up:

MySQL Error: Can't open file: somefile.MYD (errno: 145)
MySQL Error: Can't open file: node.MYD (errno: 145)

...along with random mysql queries and other fail or fatal error messages. After scrambling for an answer browsing through help pages and forums I found that this error is a result of two things:
1) Database crashed and is corrupt. Solution: Use phpMyAdmin to repair tables.
2) Full disk, MySQL will crash if your disk is full. Solution delete stuff, geta bigger hard drive.

So my host expanded my site space temporarily and I cleared my host hard drive space so MYSQL has more wiggle room. FIXED!

What is the difference between a Programmer and a Developer? Both occupations seem similar, so for those of you out there looking for a career in Information Technology (IT) here's the difference...

In IT, programmers and developer belong in a world of building software solutions to the business world. Each piece of software, when properly assembled undergo 8 stages of development:
1) Project Initiation
2) Analysis (of the problem)
3) Design (of the solution)
4) Implementation (writing code)
5) Testing and Debugging Software
6) Documentation
7) Installation and Activation
8) Maintenance

If you have some secret or special files that needs to be hidden from people, now you can hide your secret files in an jpg photo image or any other file you want using MS Command Prompt...

You can watch this Youtube screen capture video on how to hide your files using this rar jpeg marriage combo technique...

Sydney had terrible weather yesterday. It was like a cold winter's day, rainy and windy. I received a package yesterday, stuffed by the postman into my mailbox. This yellow envelope was drenched. The envelope was from Rewards Central. RewardsCentral is a new website brand which grew out of EmailCash. It's basically the same company, same website - they just felt they outgrew their EmailCash namesake. Back to their crap rewards.

RewardCentral rewards customers with crap rewards. A MousePad for getting 500 Exp?!? Well, thanks for the mousepad... but is this all we get? I would have preferred a cheap pen. The "With Compliments" slip says: "As one of our highly valued members we are happy to present you with this RewardsCentral mousepad. We hope you enjoy it!" All I'm going to enjoy is throwing it into the bin since the plastic is peeling off the mouse pad from being water damaged and its USELESS. Thanks RewardsCentral and your crap rewards.

I keep getting this error popup box in the corner of my screen from AVG Free Antivirus. Error says: "Invalid Update Control CTF File". I've got Windows Vista and this isn't the first time this stupid error has appeared. And the consequence is that the virus definitions file isn't being updated.

In Vista, to fix this "" you'll need to go to" C:\ProgramData\avg8\update\download (open up explorer by pressing WinKey+E and pasting that address into the address bar). Then delete the two corrupted CTF files in that folder: "avginfoavi.ctf" and "avginfowin.ctf". Now open up AVG Virus (double click its tray icon) and click "Update Now" - this will now download a new CTF file and refresh your virus definitions.

In the past I've downloaded many flickr photos. However some are protected using some smart HTML/CSS coding which covers the real image with a stretched transparent gif image file called spaceball.gif. (Other websites which utilise the same protection methods use gif file names called space.gif or clear.gif). Why would I want to download the images? So I can compile a collection of reference photos on my hard drive from which I like to refer to when seeking inspiration or ideas for future photoshoots... So how do you remove the spaceball.gif? to download protected photos from flickr?

Well there are a few ways to do this. The first is a very easy way and handy if you are only going to do it once or twice but becomes irritating if you have more than 10 or so... simply do a complete web page save (File>Save Webpage As... and choose complete). The photo will be in the folder amongst the other images on the webpage.

There is a web-based option to download the protected flickr spaceballed image is to visit deFlickr.

An article from SMH reports about illegal downloads in two universities based in Sydney: UNSW and UTS - but no doubt every university in Australia or internationally faces the same problem... students logging on the free university wi-fi internet connections from their own laptop and downloading copyrighted movies and songs... But students have always found ways to beat the system. There are plenty of ways to avoid getting caught using torrents.

Why do students illegally download stuff at university? Because the internet connection is SUPER FAST. Universities have access to the fastest internet connections - at optimum speed downloads can reach 500mb to 1 gig in one second. And according to the report, incidents of copyright infringement are increasing.