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GMail Officially on the iPhone, with Push

September 22nd, 2009 Harry No comments

GMailToday is a good day for iPhone owners, who happen to use Google religiously. It has been an incredibly long time coming, but we no longer need my GMailPush application. We no longer need GPush, or any other work around trying to get GMail on the iPhone with Push. Why you ask? Because today Google released an update to Google Sync that allows GMail to sync on the iPhone.

Excited to hear the news, I quickly popped open my “Mail, Calendar, Contacts” settings and turned it on to test it out…

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Have you destroyed your hard drive lately? (Part 3)

September 11th, 2009 Harry No comments

If you have not read part 2, please go here: http://blog.harryfino.com/?p=120.

ADR was located on 1600 Market St in Philadelphia. The office building was your typical Philadelphia office building, and their office was located on the 38th floor. If you go there without instruction, you may be a little lost. Why so? Because there is no office of American Data Recovery on the 38th floor, but rather a Competitive Computer Solutions. Having trouble finding Competitive Computer Solutions too? That’s because they don’t have an office either. Instead, they have space inside another company’s office, called JuriStaff Legal Staffing.

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EmptyGee v1.2 Released

August 24th, 2009 Harry No comments

The new version is out, and this time the deck builder is supported in Mono as well. I added a zip file for use with Mono. Just extract the files, and run the following command in Terminal: mono EmptyGee.exe

Here is the changelist from this release:

  • Added back the onclick events for the deck builder buttons (they were removed after I added the card hiding ability)Changed the SQLite depenendency on deck builder to work with Mono
  • Fixed a bug with the static paths not working in deck builder when it was launched from EmptyGee
  • Added back the magic icon for the main application
  • Added registry settings to the installer

http://code.google.com/p/emptygee/

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EmptyGee v1.1 Released

August 23rd, 2009 Harry No comments

EmptyGee v1.1 is now available for download. The link is here: http://code.google.com/p/emptygee/

This version is now functional in Linux and OSX through the use of Mono (http://www.mono-project.com).

In order to do this, I had to change three things:

  1. I was forced to switch from a WCF client/server model to a traditional TCP client/server
  2. I needed to change the SQLite dependency to a managed-only version
  3. I needed to fix my file system access code to be cross platform

Give it a try!

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Have you destroyed your hard drive lately? (Part 2)

August 22nd, 2009 Harry No comments

If you have not read part 1, please go here: http://blog.harryfino.com/?p=116.

After panicking [I had no idea panicking had a K in it...], I knew I had to do something to make sure I didn’t lose my data. I stopped all windows updates, etc, and downloaded a tool to help investigate the situation: TestDisk.

I ran it and tried to recover the partition myself. I wasn’t able to find the partition by doing a deep search for NTFS logical partitions. It wasn’t until I did a deep search for “Non-partitioned Media” that I found my files. The only problem with this is that I wasn’t able to rebuild the partition table with this option. At this point I was at least happy that the NTFS filesystem was still intact… even if I couldn’t get to it.

I decided to call a specialist.

Living in the Philadelphia area, I quickly found a company called American Data Recovery (ADR). After speaking with another company that outsourced their customer service to another country, ADR’s customer service was music to my ears. I spoke to a gentlemen named Dustin, who wasn’t just a service rep or sales guy, but a techie like myself. I explained my situation to him and he told me that since my drive wasn’t damaged that their service would cost anywhere between $300 to $1200. Ouch! I’m really hating Battlefield Heroes right now!

Dustin wasn’t shocked that I was having a heart attack on the phone and told me that it sounds like I was smart enough to do it myself. He told me to use RStudio to create an image of the drive on a second piece of media and then to RStudio’s recovery tools to retrieve the files. I told him I would consider it, and then call back if I wanted to use their service. If his original estimate was lower, I would have just sent my drive in — incredible first impression.

I went to RStudio’s website and checked out their tools. Only $50 for their NTFS tool… I could handle that! I dusted off my old computer and turned it on. That was when I realized that I had absolutely nothing (big enough) to put my drive image on. So I had to make a decision. Do I go out and buy all the tools I needed to do this job, or do I just send it to some people who know what they’re doing. I decided to send it in. Luckily, they were local in Philadelphia, so I didn’t have to ship my drive, just walk it in.

(to be continued)

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Have you destroyed your hard drive lately? (Part 1)

August 20th, 2009 Harry No comments

I have, and it wasn’t pretty. Let me back up and tell you the story.

It all started when I installed a new game on my computer, called Battlefield Heroes. I played the game a few times, went to bed, and woke up in the morning for some family events. I connected to my computer later in the day, remotely, and was presented with a screen from Symantec Antivirus asking if I wanted to try and clean up some quarantined items. What? I had some questionable files?! I call BS!

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GMailPush v1.3 Released

July 24th, 2009 Harry No comments

I put out an update to GMailPush that handles any errors it receives. Previously, it would see an error and stop checking for mail. Now an option exists to tell it whether or not it should stop checking for mail. It will also log the error and a stack trace.

If you’re receiving a lot of errors, feel free to send them to me on the GMailPush code page. Every once in a while I’d run into a null reference error when sending pop commands, so I did some more null checking in the function. I think it was occurring because of network interruption, but we’ll see if any of you experience the same thing.

Download here: http://code.google.com/p/gmailpush/

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GMailPush mentioned on TechCrunch

July 14th, 2009 Harry No comments

I sent a tip to the writers at TechCrunch to inform them of GMailPush. I figured their readers might get some use out of it. It wasn’t particularly well-received, but hopefully someone is now using it.

Here is a link to the article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/a-workaround-for-the-gmail-push-workaround/.