Pretty nifty, the next IBM Lenova W700ds mobile workstation (laptop) will have a pull-out secondary LCD screen for dual-monitors on the go.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology

Here’s one of those posts I hope someone finds a-googling in search of the stupid little solution that has eluded them for hours. If you’re implementing your own signout button in an ASP.NET site (as opposed to using the built-in LoginStatus control), be sure to follow this pattern:

Session.Abandon();
FormsAuthentication.SignOut();
Response.Redirect(…);

You MUST do that redirect immediately after the SignOut() call. I had some other database calls, unrelated to any ASP.NET framework web stuff, between the two and a subsequent call to Request.IsAuthenticated() in my Global.asax was returning true. Taking out those intervening calls made Request.IsAuthenticated() return false. So any other custom operations you need to happen on signout must happen before the above code.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

With more than 13 million iPhones in the world and the most comprehensive developer strategy ever for a mobile device, Apple has enabled many developers to quit their jobs and turn to iPhone app development full-time. In addition to an easy-to-use developer toolkit that makes it easy to make the apps, Apple extended the concept of the iTunes store to distribute the applications wirelessly to iPhone users. Since its so easy to get your app in your pocket, popular apps quickly sell into the millions. Prices for apps vary from free to somewhere around $20, but most are priced around $1 or $2, making even goofy apps a no brainer for users. Its not hard to justify the entertainment value of a fun app that costs less than a cup of coffee.

While some developers look to get funding to take their projects farther, many are content to write and distribute apps on their own. Pangea software has created Mac games for more than two decades. According to founder Brian Greenstone, “It’s crazy. It’s like lottery money. In the last four and a half months we’ve made as much money off the retail sales of iPhone apps as we’ve made with retail sales of all of the apps that we’ve made in the past 21 years — combined.”

There are useful apps and frivolous apps. The point is that Apple has created a mobile device and platform that are limited by little more than a developer’s imagination. Some of my favorites are Ocarina, Evernote, Twittelator, SnapTell, Shazam, BeatMaker, and CTA Tracker.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Technology, Web

For those looking to save the environment, cut down on hamster cage maintenance, and securely destroy those compromising documents you’ve got laying around, check out this paper shredder running on hamster power. It takes about 45 minutes of continuous wheel-running to shred one piece of paper, but it’s certainly innovative and might even be produced on a wide scale. Who is going to bother taping together all your documents after your hamster has had his way with them?

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Green, Technology

Fun Web 2.0 Quiz to see how many logos you can recognize. I was surprised to see a few I didn’t know!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web

Trying to figure out how to make money online? This article highlights a few web entrepreneurs who have enjoyed great success in the Web 2.0 world. It still requires ingenuity, and most importantly sweat, but perhaps this will spark an idea with you or motivate you to implement the one you’ve been kicking around. Technology has made the prospect of getting a prototype of an idea up and running easier in many cases than it ever has been. And then once you’ve proven the value of the concept, you will face fewer barriers turning that idea into a profitable business model than in the past.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

In a nutshell, a podmap combines driving directions like you’d get on MapQuest of Google with voice recognition so that you can speak to your destination and get a file with visual and written directions. Like a podcast, you would be able to take this file with you, put it on various devices, etc. I enjoy the GPS navigation system built into my Prius, but the one thing it’s missing is some way to download destinations I look up on my computer rather than punching in addresses manually. Not the end of the world, but I always seem to want just one more feature. Good thing they keep making them better!

Apple filed for a patent back in January 2007, so I’m eager to see what comes of this new technology.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology, Web

A bit of fun on this Friday-like Tuesday before Christmas. Who doesn’t like a good flow chart? And a meta one at that! From one of my favorite online comics: xkcd.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun

The Astek office is decidedly Mac-centric. We’re on MacBook Pro laptops, with a Mac file and office application server. The crux of which is Daylite, our calendar and contact application. There’s no real getting around having to use a Mac to access that. And although I had never owned a Mac before coming aboard here, I was interested in checking it out, and certainly not intimidated by the prospect. And I have since come to really enjoy the Mac experience.

BUT, the wrinkle here is that Astek as a web development company had long ago embraced Microsoft ASP.NET as a standard for any project of a certain complexity. There are many reasons for this, which I won’t get into now. But it hasn’t posed much of an issue in the past since the existing remote development team just worked on their own Windows development environments. So how do I do it then? Enter Parallels. Parallels allows me to have a fully functional Windows virtual machine running inside of my Mac operating system. It integrates pretty seamlessly, and runs with impressive capability. I’m often running at least one instance of VisualStudio, plus SQL Server Management Studio, along with all my normal Mac apps (Mail, Daylite, Firefox, etc). And I can hit the Windows IIS web server (and SQL Server beneath) running in Parallels from Firefox running in Mac OS X.

Really my biggest problem with all of this is the #$#&*! Control versus Command/Apple key business. I get a little boggled by that switching back and forth. I tried disabling the “windows key” functionality of the command key within Parallels, which seemed to work for a bit. Then that setting somehow went away and I haven’t messed with it since. Also, the new version of Parallels has seemingly made the Windows C drive harder to access from Mac land, but it also makes Windows run noticeably faster.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Do we really need an application that turns off our computer’s Internet connection until you reboot it? Freedom does just that, though you can also specify a time for it to “release” your Internet back to you. I guess since it’s my job to be online most of the time this seems impractical to me, but I appreciate the sentiment. Some of the best work I get done is on airplanes where I have no Internet AND no phone. However, I find it a bit sad that we have so little self-control that we need an application to do this for us. It’s easy enough just to turn off your wi-fi or unplug your network cable. But then again, it’s easy to plug it back in as well if you just HAVE to check your Facebook news feed.

This might be useful to me when they figure out how to block cell phone signals from you computer as well.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, General, Technology, Web