Archive

Author Archive

Inbox zero, years later…

July 31st, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

It’s been over three years now, and inbox zero is still happening.

I’m throwing everything into an archive folder, for each year’s quarter seems to be working well.

Does it give me more productivity? In a single word, yes.

Categories: Business, General Tags:

Bad Restaurants in Toronto, boycotting one, and can’t use the other.

June 12th, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

I’ve been trying out different places, be that dine in, take out, and ordering online…

Some places are exceptional service, but others, are absolutely horrible.

1.) Mama’s pizza at 118 Yonge Street, Toronto, has terrible service.  After I placed my order and I wait 5-10 minutes, before the cashier gets my attention, and asks to me pay.  I was hoping that the pizza is near ready.  I had a hunch that it wasn’t even started yet, so I ask if the pizza was started.  “No, sorry”.  I was angry.  I didn’t yell at him, I didn’t do anything besides, say “forget it then…”.

Why was I waiting for 5-10 minutes between letting the server know what I wanted, till I was asked to pay?  People, if you don’t want to waste your time, go somewhere else.  Mama’s pizza has lost my business for good.

I wonder how much this business has lost, because of badly trained staff?  Why take an order, and allow the person to wait.  The point of taking the order, is to MAKE it, not sit around, and then ask payment, only to then start.  If that’s the case, TAKE ORDER, IMMEDIATELY TAKE PAYMENT, IMMEDIATELY START ORDER.

2.) Swiss Chalet canada — online ordering form.  Wow, whatever business that sold you the ordering system, has sold you something that is, well… less than functional.  Hope you didn’t pay much for it, cause you sure aren’t making as much business as you could –in fact, I’m pretty sure you’re losing a lot of business.  I tried your ordering system in chrome, safari, and firefox…  (I really wanted some Swiss Chalet, to have tried all three browsers) –  If you say “use MSIE”, well, you just lost of ton of users that are on MACs, Linux, and mobile phone orders.

- Maybe I should contact them, and see if they’re willing to get a system that would be actually functional?

- Situation: After you enter your phone number on the home page (I’ve probably used my phone number before at a different location, but I don’t remember), you enter your details on the second page, third page asks you for your postal code.  Click submit, sends you back to the first page.  Didn’t you hire a QA person, to test this site out?  You know, it’s kind of fundamental to your system, if you require each person to SINGUP to order from you.  Or a functional analyst, to determine the different use cases of your system?

Swiss chalet please fix your online ordering system, or hire a 3rd party business that can actually deliver you a working website?  If you’re looking for a contractor that could build you the system in its entirety, please let me know.

I really wanted some chicken, fries, and chalet sauce… :(

Categories: General Tags:

pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan [update #2]

May 23rd, 2010 Lloyd Leung 1 comment

Okay,

Been working with pidgin w/msn-pecan on ubuntu 10.04.  New problem, pecan doesn’t crash pidgin anymore, however I am logged out after I’ve been away from my computer a little bit.  As in, when the screen saver kicks in, pecan logs me out or can’t maintain a connection.

Doesn’t seem to happen in windows 7.

If I can live with this issue,  and so far I have… it’s kind of a nice flaw, as this allows me to be not distracted, while at work.

Categories: Linux, Technology Tags:

pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan [update]

April 8th, 2010 Lloyd Leung 2 comments

Discovered that is crashes a lot, on ubuntu.  Pretty stable (haven’t noticed it crashed yet) on windows.

Verdict thus far: good on windows.  Horrible on ubuntu.

Categories: Technology Tags:

pidgin.im msn protocol alternative: msn-pecan

April 2nd, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

Day 1

I decided to try a new msn protocol for pidgin.im today.  Why? Was just browsing the list of plugins, and saw the alternative…

http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan

Looked at the list of added benefits, and decided to give it a try… lets see if I stick with it.  So far, it is fast on start up.  Interesting to see that it picked up a ton of friend requests, that I didn’t see before.

Categories: General Tags:

Debugging a segfault in PHP

April 1st, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

debugging segfaults is not fun.

My low key technique:

  1. place a printf(“made it here: %s, %s+ %s\n”, __METHOD__, __LINE__, __FILE__); everywhere…
  2. put “DIE(‘something’);” to figure out the exact line that fails.  If dies, good.  move it further down.  If it segfaults, move the die statement up.  Until you’ve found the exact line that fails.
  3. Figure out why it’s segfaulting…  uh… good luck with that.  Google, and look at the changelog in PHP to see if it’s been fixed.

An easier option, if I were the one controlling the box — Update to the latest PHP.

Categories: Programming Tags:

little project ideas

March 1st, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

Just found a need to access my home server… however, it’s powered down… how can I overcome this problem in the future.  To answer my own question…  I should go lookup how to send a wake-on-lan command to the box. As well as know what my IP is…

project ideas:

1.) Current IP notifier – send to my webserver, what my home server IP is. (Dynamic). I could use a dynamic dns service… this maybe interesting to learn how to do this, if I have my own VPS… have the home-server, notify the web-server to update the DNS setting. So I would have something like: homelan.lloydleung.com or whatever.

2.) wake on lan commands.
3.) vpn to the network instead… with a combo on 1. This way, everything is encrypted…

Align windows in osx

January 25th, 2010 Lloyd Leung No comments

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/twoup/

while it doesn’t do cascade of windows, it does a lot for being free. It can send a window to the left/right/top/bottom half of a window. The full paid version allows a little more. Seems to work fine, after I reset the hotkeys.

Useful when trying to view two windows/apps at the same time.

Exchange protocol comes to google mail/gmail

September 25th, 2009 Lloyd Leung No comments

Exchange protocol comes to google mail/gmail.

Meaning the iPhone can use it!

gmail iphone exchange how-to

Categories: General Tags:

how I’m using software now, as opposed to a few years ago.

August 22nd, 2009 Lloyd Leung No comments

I’ve used Firefox for a long time… since version 0.6 if I remember right.

The main feature of firefox is it’s flexibility and expandability of extensions.

I’ve now realized, that the majority of the applications I used, are web based.

  • Google Calendar and Gmail has replaced MS Outlook.
  • Google Docs has eliminated my need to carry a USB key around for documents. Having a single repository of documents is great! Also has journaling.
  • I’ve even allowed Facebook to integrated itself with Firefox. At least on my home computer…
  • Ping.fm has allowed me to send updates to all my social network sites.
  • Google Reader and RSS feeds, allow me to read all my sites quickly and easily.
Categories: General Tags: