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My dad sent me the photo bellow the other day.  It's a 5MB hdd from 1956.

When you look at that pic, it's SCARY how small memory storage has become in 50 years.  As a comparison....below is a photo of a 1GB Compact Flash, next to a SD card, next to my new 2GB Micro SD card.

Do you think the guys in the first picture would have ever believed you would get 2GB of storage on something the size of your fingernail?

Broke the Jas Jam already :(

Got my new 2GB micro SD card for the JasJam this morning.  Put it in, and it just kept going...couldn't click it back out!  Of course John's was fine (I always get the duds).

So took it back to Telstra, and they managed to get the card back out using tweesers and gave me a new phone.  Before I left i got them to put the card in the new phone (just in case) only to discover the card wouldn't stay in the new phone.  Hmm...odd...so they got another phone, which had the same problem as mine.

3rd phone lucky, card goes in, card  goes out.  YAY!

Interesting thing is..the "blank" micro SD card worked fine in all of the phones. Just the real cards didn't.  Very lucky for me since I've only had it 2 weeks it was under direct swap warranty.  So i you have a JasJam, and haven't tried the microSD card...do it now!

 We've turned 100 .  Well not 100 in years, but in blog posts.  Since the 6th August 2006 we've now done 100 blog posts.  No match for someone like Frank, and we kinda cheated cause there's 2 of us blogging...but hey...still a milestone.

So to mark our 100th blog birthday, here's a recap and figures on us.

Most people view our site on a Wednesday

December saw the most visitors yet (but January may still win as it's no over yet)

Top 5 posts:

Clustering a million points on Virtual Earth using AJAX Elections - still in the dark agesNew Polygons in Virtual EarthCustom Pushpin's Offset in Virtual EarthXmas comes early - my new 24" Dell Top 5 searches:

sticky keys virtual earth popup pushpin soul solutions Top 5 on tech talk (based on thumbs up)

mygeoland.com - for people that are sick of whereis Good female developers and the Loch Ness monsterVirtual Earth Licensing, you know you need it. Online food shopping...yes please Video - Find the sydney opera house and Stadium Australia in 3D Top 5 referrers

google.com forums.microsoft.com viavirtualeach.com techtalkblogs blogs.msdn...

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I'm sure many of you are in the same boat with email spam. The latest attack here is spam pretending to be a mail returned message. Well I think i have a simple idea to put an end to it.

Currently the techniques are about looking at the content or blocked lists and ...  it doesn't work. I still get spam in my mail but i also get real emails in my spam!

So I know what i would do if i could re-invent the email protocol but that is very unlikely to ever happen. So what do you think about this?

Email arrives in your POP3 public mailbox (mailbox1) Program retrieves list of emails (POP3 protocol) Program checks which sender domains / address are in allowed list Program sends allowed emails to private mailbox (mailbox2) and deletes off public mailbox (mailbox1) Program emails the non-allowed email senders a templated email with a GUID in the subject line. Email says nicely "if you are not spam please replay to this email without editing the GUID in the subject line" GUID is stored against the email. Program looks for emails with GUID in subject, if GUID matches then original email is sent to private mailbox (mailbox2) After configured period of time emails that have not been approved are deleted. User experience: User has a normal email address directed to public mailbox User has 2 standard POP3 mailboxes User can use whatever software they like to access mail from private mailbox Some interface to access the allowed / disallowed list, template and settings What do you think? Would you be majorly put out if when you sent an email to a new contact an automated email came back and said "are you really you?". Well this could be automated too at some stage?

The point of this exercise is you know who actually sent the email so even if spam responds to your GUID your existing filters can get rid of it.

...

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For some reason SQL 2005 help is showing "help on help". Very frustrating. What i need is a simple reference of the correct function names like ROUND() etc. Anyway this is the best i could find from MSDN:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174318.aspx

We got new JasJams the other week.  I really like the phone, especially the keyboard...makes it so much more useable.

Only trouble i was having with it, was i couldn't get to my phone and answer it in time if it was in another room.  For some reason the longest ring time before diversion is 30 seconds.  This is fine if the phone is next to you....but not if it's in another room, inside a bag or a case etc.  Also, you can't turn the call forwarding checkbox off...no matter how hard you try it keeps coming back.  I hate messagebank, never use it.  I can see someone tried to call me..if it's important they'll call back or sms me...so i just wanted the call forwarding gone.

The solution to this, other then improving your phone answering time, is you have to ring Telstra and they can switch it off at the network level.  It takes them all of 2 seconds and tada...it's fixed.

In this article I will explain how to design a Virtual Earth application to load its pushpin content on demand. Although this technique is very well suited for use in high performance sites combined with Clustering and encoding I will cover only the basics to keep it simple.

Loading your pushpin popup content on demand

Couple of handy javascript properties i can never remember off the top of my head to get url and query string data:

To get the anchor position of url:
this.location.hash

To get the query string of the url:
this.location.searchsubstring(1);

I'm starting to wonder if there's anywhere that can reliably print a decent representation of digital photos.

It seems to be a bit hit and miss getting them printed.  When i first started printing photos I used to get them printed online.  I soon stopped this when the photos came back bent, chopped off, bad colour etc.  When you print them online there's no-one to complain to.

Last year I got a photo printed on canvas.  It was printed sooo dark you couldn't make out the mountain, it was just this big black blotch.  It took me about 2 months of constant phone calls to get my money back.  They blamed the photo and said it was too dark.  I'd looked at it on at least a dozen monitors and printed it in 6x4's and all were fine.

In my latest drama, I took a whole pile of photos at a wedding.  Spent all morning colour correcting, and cropping how i liked in 6x4 aspect ratio.  Took them into a staore, ordered 250 photos, went back and picked them up, got home and realised EVERY photo had 1 cm cut off the top and side, which mean in some photos tops of ppls heads were cut off or very close to the top of the photo. 

Went all the way back, trying to explain that no...i'd saved them as 6x4 so they should print that way and that they'd looked fine on their kiosk.  They looked at it on the kiosk and it looked fine, tried printing one of the photos with the same result.  They gave us our money back, which is pretty much all they could do...but I just find it a bit disturbing they had no idea there machine was printing incorrectly, and that it would continue to do so.

Their suggestion was try again another day or in 6 mths when they get a new machine, or print them somewhere else.

So this meant that we didn't have time to print them somewhee else before people went home which is very sad :(

Since then, I've read a lot of reviews and everywhere seems to have the same problems..even the "camera stores" seem to do randomly bad print jobs and not care.

So anyone got a reliable digital...

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We decided since our mobiles were really old and the batteries were really dead that it was time to upgrade our phones.

I'd been looking at the K-Jam and the Jamin for awhile...and knew that they were pretty easy to use and they fit in my wallet (a very important criteria).  What I'd liked about the k-jam was the keyboard which made it a lot easier to type docs and internet addresses etc.

John was pretty keen to see virtual earth on his phone and we liked the idea of the next-g broadband on your interenet.  So we ended up getting the JasJam.  So now not only do we have matching lappies we now also have matching phones...sad I know.