Posted on: May 7th, 2012 by Famous Phil

If you’re like me, you hate using a cell phone in the first place because they have crappy reception just about everywhere when you compare it to the old fashioned land line (admit it, land lines don’t cut out and have more consistent clarity).  Perhaps you aren’t like me and don’t mind cellular technologies, but I bet that you’ll agree that it isn’t worth your time to pick up the phone to hear “we want you to buy this product”, or “we want you to vote for this person”.  Unfortunately, I am one of the millions of cell phone users who suffer from having to deal with these campaigns, and I’m willing to bet that you are also a victim of these worthless calls.

Hopefully, you’ve heard about the Do Not Call registry (located at https://donotcall.gov/) and already have registered your phone number on this site.  This site is a great tool to block telemarketers who follow the laws, but medical organizations, political campaigns; not-for-profits are exempt from this list and can call you regardless!

So what can we do about the rest of these telemarketers?  Back when the telephone system was invented, several special tones were conceived to send information over the line for remote telephone routers, callers, and other purposes.  Just as a very brief side note, telephone hacking was popular back in the 1970’s and had a term called Phreaking, and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple was actually a hobby based phone phreak (hacker).  Anyways, back to topic, today I learned that the TeleZapper ™ is a $50 device that simply plays the special tone for “this line has been disconnected”, which is 3 beeps that progressively get higher in frequency.  This works because it costs telemarketers money to call your phone and they share similar phone number databases.  When the telemarketers come across a disconnected line, they will update that database accordingly to save them money (there is no sense in calling a disconnected number, right?).

Since 99% of telemarketing calls are automated by computers, the computers are typically programmed to be efficient and save the telemarketer money, meaning the computer will disconnect / update the number if they come across certain special codes.  If they don’t, they’ll redirect your call to a human that is being paid to market a product to you.  The human costs the most, so the idea is to keep this cost as minimal and as profitable as possible.

So now the basic idea, what happens if we play the special tone on our voice mail message?  Our voice mail is the very first  thing that plays if we don’t answer the phone ourselves, and furthermore, we can turn off the automated “the number you have reached…” message to simply allow our own recorded message to play immediately after the 4^th ring.  Telemarketing computers typically ignore the ring, so if the special disconnect code is the first thing that plays upon connection, the computer will usually assume that the line is disconnected.

Today, I added this tone to the very beginning of my voicemail, and then I proceed to give my normal message.  I know that if anyone important really wants to talk to me, they’ll leave a message past the 3 tones because my voice explains why it’s there in the first place.  So if you’re willing to take an easy chance at stopping the telemarketing calls, try this, you never know what might happen!

If you’d like the tone to download, you may grab it at this link: http://famousphil.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/disconnected.wav 

Finally, one last thought: since I’m on the topic of phones, I got a great graphic about the dangers of Cell Phones a while back from a Mr. Tony Shin, you may view his graphic at http://www.onlinemastersdegree.com/cell-phones-kill/

Tags: cell phone, disconnected, do not call, telemarketer, tone
Posted in Mobile Technology, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: January 6th, 2012 by Famous Phil

Its amazing what a major boost in PR can do for a website in terms of guest posters.  This will be the last guest post that I accept for a while so that I can post about more technical topics that I want my website to be focused around, and guest posters have a lot of difficulty providing the type of content that I strive to offer.  Anyways, here is a guest post from Kristin Mullen that discusses credit cards for younger (college) students that kind of co-insides with the amount of college debt that I’m repaying.

There are hundreds of suggestions online telling students just how to manage their money. While most of these suggestions are valid, tips on how to handle your credit are potentially the most important. You may think that a credit card will help solve all of your problems, but the truth is that many young adults get into financial trouble fast when they don’t know how to manage their money productively.

Avoid Aggressive Credit Card Companies

Some colleges and universities allow credit card companies to set up booths and promote their low introductory interest rates to students on campus. They try to draw in these unsuspecting students with free gear like shirts and backpacks when they apply for a credit card. Many students fall into this trap and end up with a bunch of credit cards that they simply don’t need. Using all of these credit cards could result in the student drowning in debt that will take years to pay off.

Manage Your Credit Card Wisely

If you have thought through all of your options, and you decide you will need a credit card, make sure you manage it wisely. Get only one, and make sure you will be able to pay off the balance at the end of each month. Keeping a zero balance on your account from month to month will improve your credit rating, which could help you in the future with your financial aspirations.

Research different credit card companies and try to find a card with no annual fees, the lowest interest rate, and a grace period of 20 to 30 days before the company will charge you interest on your balance. Cards with one-time processing fees and low introductory interest rates that will rise after a few months are probably not the best for you. Also, look into credit cards that are secured by a bank deposit. With this type of card, you will use money from a savings account instead of using money you don’t have now, and the use of this card will still help you improve your credit score.

Once you have your credit card, don’t use it to buy anything you won’t be able to pay for right away. If you have an emergency, make sure you will still be able to make your monthly payments before using your credit card to solve the problem. Try to make payments larger than the minimum amount whenever possible so your interest rate will stay low. Finally, make your payments online or mail payments to the company several days before they are due to avoid late fees.

Build good credit

In order to build good credit, you will have to pay your bills on time and repay all of your debts as promised. As I have said, a good credit record will help you achieve your financial goals in the future, like buying a car or starting a business. Your future employer could also check your credit report before hiring you, so a bad credit score could keep you from getting a job.

To avoid financial trouble and improve your credit, you should follow these steps.

1)      Pay all of your expenses on time.

2)      Make all of your credit card payments on time.

3)      Pay off your loans before you make other large purchases.

4)      Only apply for the credit cards you need. Applying often could tip off lenders that you are in financial trouble, even if you are not.

5)      Don’t let your checks bounce.

If You Get Into Financial Trouble, Seek Help

If you don’t know how much money you owe, use credit cards to pay other bills, or will have to miss payments or pay your bills late, then look for someone who can help. Dorm resident advisors, financial aid officers, or even a psychologist can help you figure out your financial dilemma. Your parents or guardians will most likely be your biggest supporters when trying to get out of debt, but you should also try to show them your determination to not make this mistake again.

Kristin Mullen is an author who writes guest posts on the topics of business, marketing, credit cards, and personal finance. Additionally, she works for a website that focuses on educating readers about online debt consolidation.

Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: September 30th, 2011 by Famous Phil

I typically don’t post more personal things on my website, but my college degree is one of the few exceptions that I was considering posting (depending on what information it gives away).  Surprisingly, my degree doesn’t reveal much of anything that you couldn’t find out about me by looking at my resume or just my website’s WHOIS information, so I decided that I’d post a picture of the two sheets of paper that cost oh so much money to buy. A lot of hard work went into these two sheets of paper, so I’m very proud of them and my accomplishments and pain that they represent I felt that they deserved their own blog post If you’re curious, my major is Computer Science, with a concentration in High Throughput Computing for my Masters.

Tags: Bachelors, computer science, degree, Masters, Phiip Matuskiewicz, science
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life
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Posted on: June 13th, 2011 by Famous Phil

I bring you a guest post from Jason who is associated with the subtext project which is a blog written in ASP.net!  Disclaimer… I do not guarantee (or verify) the accuracy of guest posts.

A webmaster has many things to think about from choosing the right host to making sure everything is running smoothly on the backend servers. Fortunately, different tools, applications and developments exist that can help us simplify the process of running a website. Subtext skins can help designers more effectively and efficiently create the styles used for personal blogs on their website.

While you can always decrease your workload by choosing options like managed hosting, if you are responsible for web design then you should look into the many advantages of Subtext skins for blogging.

What is a Subtext skin?
Subtext is a blogging platform offered as open source software under the BSD license. The whole concept behind Subtext was to create a very simplified blogging engine that allows bloggers to concentrate on creating actual blog content rather than trying to figure out how to use the blogging software.

Almost all websites these days have their own blogs. In addition, many sites offer blogging as a service to their users who can sign up to create their own personal blogs. You can use Subtext both for the site’s own blog and to offer blogs to site members.

A Subtext skin refers to the styling and layout of the blog page. Skins are versatile as they allow you to create page formats and designs without coding from scratch. A Subtext skin is actually made up of five separate style sheets that can be used to format different elements on the page like divs, spans, boxes, headers, footers, sidebars and forms.

The five style sheets used for each Subtext skin are:

• style.css – the default style sheet that determines the basic underlying skin layout.
• secondary style sheet – this file handles the specific Stylesheet attribute of the skin. The secondary style sheet is generally used to create styling contrasts over the style.css file. For example, the web designer may choose to give the header a different border than the sidebars where in the style.css file they use the same border.
• custom.css – this style sheet is used for custom design features set by the blog author. Primarily used to set styles and layout for personal badges or for the actual post content.
• non-attribute css files – generally used for CSS frameworks or for system styles.
• css files with limited attributes – these stylesheets have a title and media attribute, and cannot be merged with other css files. The attributes specify IE version compatibility and that they are applicable only in screen mode or in printing mode.

Packaged and custom Subtext skins
Web designers can choose from a large library of pre-designed skins or they can create their own custom skins. Creating a custom Subtext skin requires some basic knowledge of CSS scripting and also learning the basic Subtext parsing rules.

Fortunately, Subtext is highly simplified to allow users to quickly master the underlying script.

Skin templates are folders that can be used to render different Subtext skins. Each folder actually contains a number of skins that are related in certain attributes and themes. The folders or templates have their own series of controls that are used to render a skin in that template along with associated style sheets.

Once you have a library of packaged and/or custom skins, you will be able to style blogs quickly after learning how to tweak the skins and templates.

Instead of racking your brain each time you need to come up with a new design, you can simply browse through your selection of Subtext skins. Each skin can be modified according to the primary and secondary CSS files associated with the skin. You can easily find the types of skins you are looking for because they will be arranged in skin templates or families according to related attributes. For example, you can have a Rainbow template. a Geometric template and an Origami template – each having multiple skins that express the same theme. The number of templates is only limited by your imagination and willingness to create custom skins.

When using the Subtext blogging software, the skin templates are arranged in folders in an easy to manage directory system. The setup makes it simple to find the skin you are looking for and simply click on the selection to implement it on the Subtext blog.

By using Subtext skins, you can save time and energy creating page designs and layouts for multiple blogs. No need to code style sheets from scratch when you can access an easy-to-use Subtext skin library and quickly find what you need.

Each skin will handle the styling and layout of all page elements including headers, footers, sidebars, text format, boxes and forms.

You can find out more about Subtext and skins at the Subtext Project Site: http://www.subtextproject.com/.

Tags: asp, blog, engine, skin, subtext, theme, wordpress alternative
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: May 26th, 2011 by Famous Phil

On August 30, 2009, I made a blog post about my x10 home automation system, but I didn’t really cover it in depth enough to satisfy myself.  Therefore, I decided to revisit the topic from that blog (which is here).  This blog contains a video detailing the system that I ended up with during my University experience.  I expect that my future home will be much more automated than this video shows.  In order to appreciate the video, I decided to write some content to supplement what I talk about in the video, which is below.

In 2009, I came up with the first version of my light control system.  This consisted of a clapper, a set of cheap computer speakers, and an audio recording of my clapping.  My original system used a web interface to have the speakers (connected to the web server / site) clap when I wanted the lights to come on.  This quickly became unmanageable since I couldn’t monitor the states of the lights without a webcam monitoring my room (and I wasn’t thrilled about securing a webcam in my room that could be hacked into).  This lead into X10 which has done wonders for me over the course of the past two years.

Its funny remembering back to when I first got an x10 system, because the x10 website doesn’t look like your average store, it looks more like an adult site with lots of flashy banners (ha ha).  I do have to admit, with x10, the initial impression was very deceiving for me, since their products are really good!  Anyways, moving on, My x10 system consists of a USB transceiver module (CM15A located here) which connects to my windows server that runs a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  In addition, I have several lamp modules, appliance modules, and remote control wall switches (which wirelessly communicate to the CM15A).

As for the software, I installed the ActiveHome software onto my server (that came with the CM15A).  This software installs a few application libraries (dlls) which enabled programmatic access to the CM15A to send and receive x10 commands over the power lines ran in my apartment.  Using this api, I wrote a quick program that makes a command line based program that can run certain commands.  I have to note that ActiveHome includes a default command line executable, but this didn’t have all the functionality that I wanted, most notably output in HTML for my web interface.  With the executable I wrote, I simply have the apache web server run the command as a local user which sends the x10 signals over the power lines ran in my apartment.  I should note that I considered using ASP.net which could interface with the API directly, but at the time I wasn’t very familiar with ASP.net and I wanted to use PHP.  I didn’t use IIS because I didn’t have the time to go permissions hunting to figure out why PHP wasn’t allowed to run programs as a local user on the web server through IIS.  Luckily a standard WAMP install that included Apache and PHP worked out of the box with little configuration.  The WAMP that I used was Vertrigo.

For the IR receiver that controls my projector, I use a USB-UIRT that I found on Ebay (I didn’t feel like waiting the estimated 6 weeks at the time for a new one).  Fortunately, the executable program that was included could send and receive signals from the USB-UIRT that I required, so I wrote some PHP that invokes it for the commands I used.

In 2009, I mentioned that voice control would make its way into my system.  I have to admit that it did!  Unfortunately, it didn’t last long because of all the bugs that I ran into.  I used the Microsoft speech libraries with a program called SmartButler, which could listen for speech commands and run commands on my server.  I initially used a cheap computer microphone, but quickly found that the interference in the audio made commands very inaccurate, and furthermore, if I held a conversation in the room, my lights would act up!  I figured that a USB professional Condenser Microphone would fix the problem, so I quickly ordered one and integrated it into my system.  This did significantly improve the quality of my system, but normal conversations would still occasionally trigger some of my web control panel controls inaccurately.  The final straw that broke the camel’s back (and caused this system to get removed) was when my RA (resident advisor), Stephanie came into the room, said hello to me and my lights went out of control (since I didn’t train it for a higher pitched, female voice, I’d assume).  I’d like to approach this problem in the future when I get the time to do it properly, but until then, I’ve been satisfied with web control panels that both my smartphone and computer can access.

Finally, at the very end of my video, I took a moment to show my Linksys PAP Adapter (VoIP, Voice over IP).  This works through a service from voip.ms.  Voip.ms is a prepaid service for VoIP adapters that allows you to buy a phone number for a very reasonable price (even 800 numbers).  They also have really reasonable rates and really good control for those phone numbers.  I thought I’d provide a plug for them since they are really good.

I would like to add that the Linksys adapter required an unfirewalled IP address to work properly (for incoming calls) in my experience.  It does have a NAT mode for this situation, but the university firewall constantly crushed this mode.  To get around this problem (and allow my web server for x10 to work properly), I implemented OpenVPN on my network and pulled in several public IP addresses and left them unfirewalled.  This solution worked well for me at UB, and I documented it fairly well in my OpenVPN post.

With nothing more to mention on the topic, here is the video that details my light control system and some other stuff.

Of course, I made many bloopers in this video (I improvised a lot!), so I thought the bloopers video would be appropriate.  Warning, there is a little language in it and the audio isn’t exactly balanced.

Disclaimer: I was not paid to endorse any of the products above (and I’m never paid to do that!).  I like to think that when I make a recommendation, it carries a lot of weight with it, which it should!

Tags: apache, home automation, light control, linksys, php, smartbutler, usb-uirt, Voice Control, voip, wamp, x10, youtube
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: May 22nd, 2011 by Famous Phil

Yesterday, 5/21/11, I pulled out my dust-covered semi-professional camera and decided that I should use it.  In conclusion, I took a few hours out of my day to take several scenery / nature photos on the UB North Campus… conveniently a few days before I leave for good *Yay, I have my Masters in Computer Science after 5 years of hard work!*.  Hover over the photos to see a caption (I only captioned about 25% of them), click on them to see a much bigger version.  I’m willing to share the original HQ versions upon request, just email me.

As a preview:

The full gallery is at: http://famousphil.com/photos/university-at-buffalo-may-2011/

NOTE: Updated 6/19/11 due to new gallery links.

Tags: buffalo, north campus, photo, suny, university
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: April 5th, 2011 by Famous Phil

This is a video blog continuation of week 3 (see 2 posts ago).  Its the final video in my 4 lecture series.  The site this corresponds to is http://famousphil.com/websp11/

This video covers a lot of demos including how to make a crude content management system work on your site, as well as an introduction to wordpress as a content management system.

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 4.  There will be a fourth and final lecture next week.  As always, thanks for reading!

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Posted on: March 30th, 2011 by Famous Phil

This is a video blog continuation of week 2 (see the previous post).

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 3.  There will be a fourth and final lecture next week.  As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Tags: .htaccess, adobe, club, cms, content management system, educational, educational web developmhtml, Google, hosting, html, ieee, ieee student club, mysql, php, phpdesigner, putty, rewrite, security, student, university at buffalo, vim, web development, website, wordpress
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Posted on: March 23rd, 2011 by Famous Phil

This is a video blog continuation of week 1 (see the previous post).

Background: I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.  Anyways, here are the videos from Lecture 2.  As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Tags: adobe, educational, Google, hosting, html, ieee student club, mysql, photoshop, php, putty, university at buffalo, vim, web development, website
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Posted on: March 10th, 2011 by Famous Phil

It seems like its been a while since I last posted to my blog.  As usual, the mid semester grind is hitting my time hard, so I don’t have the resources to write here as often.  Thankfully this is my last semester as a Masters student, *yay*.   So coming up soon, I will be writing a blog on regular expressions, I’m still in the process of making it, so it might take a while.  I’ve also got a great blog for April fools day, so stay tuned for that!

Now onto the topic of this blog.  This is a video blog (go figure, right?).  Actually, I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.

Being the kind of person who likes to share knowledge, I agreed to give the lecture series with updated information.  John suggested that I video tape the lectures and post them to my blog, which I thought was a great suggestion.  So in the next 5 to 6 weeks, I will be posting youtube 720p HD recordings of the lecture series to here.  Feel free to watch it and make comments about my presentation skills.  I know that I’m not perfect, so I’m always open to suggestions!

As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Tags: adobe, development, education, Google, hosting, html, ieee, mysql, php, putty, student club, university at buffalo, vim, Web, website
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