Neatly Sliced

I looked at my phone and saw a missed call and a text message from a blank phone number. I was incredibly confused!

Soon thereafter, I checked the voice mail, and I got another text message from blank phone number, with blank content!

It looked a little something like this:

December 31, 1969 5:59 PM? September 4, 2012 6:10 PM? I feel like I’m being given a secret code!

I googled to no avail. But, I searched MacRumors, and according to a post in a thread regarding this very topic:

The network sends a notification from the tower to the phone to send a v-mail notification and then when you check your voice mail it sends another notification to your phone and then it would say on your iPhone that you no longer have a new vmail. but because of the fact thats its not a TMOBILE PHONE that the signal is sent differently to there exclusive phones. So not only the iPhone will be affected other unlocked phones will have similar problems.

Update:
A user at the hackint0sh forum called T-Mobile in a thread:

Apparently they have been making updates to their software in the T-mobile system over the past few weeks. Part of the updates they did were to the speed up the internet on the network, but in the process they screwed up the voicemail notifier settings. They told me it is not a priority to fix it since the problem is only happening on phones they do not currently offer.
…
The only solution for the time being is to have T-mobile disable the voicemail notification. In this case you will no longer receive any text messages or a dot indicator when you receive a voicemail.

Apparently, T-Mobile is working on this issue. Ack! Hope this helps, and that they can fix it soon!

Have you had any fun messages or a different timestamp? Have you found another thread mentioning this issue? Have you called T-Mobile? Let everyone know here in the comment section!

Continued confusion Current lifestamp: April 28, 2009, 9:20PM. Awaiting future self to discover content based texts, rather than blank whispers into the void.
We know that December 31, 1969 is the birth of UNIX timestamps (corresponding to the UNIX timestamp “1″). But what is the significance of September 4, 2012? My precise timestamp above converts to 1240971028. I’ve continued to receive Voicemail texts – all for September 4, 2012, but at more times: 7:14 PM, 10:04 PM, 11:16 PM – with no correlation to the actual time of either receipt of voicemail or checking. And, my initial message is the only one from 1969.

It also seems that if you had a voicemail red dot prior to the text messaging weirdness, you cannot get rid of it. Whatever voicemail state you were, you continue to be. This is because these blank texts are your voicemail notifications – and your iPhone doesn’t know how to process the new T-Mobile notifications. Anyone know how to get rid of the red dot, just for the sake of aesthetics? Let us know.

A quandary, no doubt. Lots of conspiracies in the comments. Any to add?

Good news!
I received missed call and voicemail at 11:52AM Central Time on April 30, 2009, and I received a Voicemail dot! That means no text message! And the Voicemail dot went away when I checked it. So looks like situation normal. Everyone rejoice.

Popularity: 30% [?]

User Controls in ASP.NET are a great tool - they allow you to consolidate sections of code into a reusable piece that you can use anywhere on your site - or even copy the control to a different site.

The only issue I had with user controls was that you had to register the code on every.single.page that you wanted to use it on before you could use it. So, that meant something like this at the top of every.single.page:

Oi! The frustration! There has to be a better way!

Some googling resulted in finding the wondeful haacked.com, with the article listing my answer. ASP.NET 2.0 allows for registering controls in web.config, thus making it available for all pages and eliminating a potential very long list of controls on every page.

The listings go inside the <controls> tag, within the <pages> section, such as follows:

You'll note I have Ektron listed in there as well. This is because I was tired of adding the Controls assembly to every page - so not only can you add your own user controls, but assemblies as well. What a life-saver! Your resulting code does not change at all, but you have just eliminated that page heading overhead.

Have you found another item to register in web.config? Leave a comment and share the wealth!

Popularity: 18% [?]

This game is so beautiful! It reminds me a touch of the Enigmo iPhone game in that you have colored droplets that you have to redirect to enter their appropriate receptacle. Unlike Enigmo, Auditorium's droplets begin as white and change color based on their entry of circles on the map.

Their receptacles are audio containers that begin playing beautiful piano and string arrangements upon landing. It's really simple to begin with, but as you progress it grows quite complicated.

Of course, the whole experience is created by the multisensory tickling - the combination of physics, color, and music. It's odd how fulfilling redirecting droplets to little container can feel.

It's only a preview of the full game which is to come, but it's captivating enough in its short demo length. Play Auditorium now.

(Via kottke)

Popularity: 24% [?]

Not long ago, I updated the food blog to WordPress 2.7. Just this afternoon, I upgraded this blog to 2.7 as well. Usually I delay for a bit and skip a rev or two because it takes all of 10-30 minutes to upgrade with my obsessive re-backing up of backups, and I just don't usually want to give up that amount of time to upgrades. But 2.7 made such amazing improvements of the administrative interface that I opted to go ahead and do it anyway.

I find myself writing more on the food blog because I love the QuickPress option of the Dashboard. It's also vastly easier to navigate quickly from one portion of the tool to another. Speed and ease are king in the content entry world. I hope the same effect occurs on this blog as well. Celebrate.

Popularity: 24% [?]

This morning I transferred my FeedBurner feeds from FeedBurner to Google. Recently, FeedBurner was purchased by Google and the team has been making many optimizations since then. Within the past week, FeedBurner account management pages have been prompting users to transfer (merge) their feeds over to a Google account. Since I already use Google Analytics and other Google webmaster tools, this was no big deal.

All right, how long will this take?

The whole process took about 5 minutes. Seriously. It was painless. I clicked the transfer link, it sensed that I was logged into Google, and prompted me to make a decision: merge FeedBurner with the currently logged in account, the Google account linked in my FeedBurner email account setting, or to create a new Google account to merge with. Then, it went grinding away for a minute or two. Finito!

That sounds easy. But seriously, there has to be some drawback.

I don't see any drawbacks if you already have a Google account. I had a concern that I was going to lose subscribers in the process, because there is a new feed address (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName, where the old one started with http://feeds... - addition of the 2). However, the FAQ assures us that subscribers will not be lost, as Google instantiated a redirect of the old address to the new. And, this redirect supposedly lasts forever.

FeedBurner site visitor stats have been eliminated. However, Google Analytics is far more robust, and likely people with Google accounts already have Google Analytics in place. A reminder to those using FeedBurner site stats that your visitor tracking scripts should now be removed.

Another repercussion: users implementing email subscription forms must update the form code per instructions on the Email Subscriptions page. If you're just using a link like in my sidebar, that link must also be updated.

Meh, this sounds lame. How do I get out?

If you don't want to go with the Google/FeedBurner merger, you have until February 28, 2009 to enable a 30-day redirection option. You are to start using your own feed rather than FeedBurner. This option, for the first 15 days, serves as a redirect to your feed, and for the last 15 days shows users an empty feed that "reads 'This feed is no longer active. A new feed is located at' followed by the URL of your original feed."

Okay, it's not worth all that effort. I'll just keep FeedBurner. What should I do again?

Well, after you do the transfer, update your feeds to point to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName. Remove your FeedBurner site analytics. Add Google analytics if you don't already have it. Update email subscription forms and links. Pretty easy, right? Five minutes, ten tops.

Lost RSS Subscribers? What up?

This happened to me 3 days ago (January 17), and I just today (January 20) transferred my feeds to Google. The loss of subscribers were all Google Reader/Feedfetcher subscribers. Are the lost subscribers due to the transfer? I doubt it. I bet Google is doing something is in the pipes that is affecting their reporting of Google Reader subscribers. Otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed the issue until today. Just a thought.

I hope this helps you and eases any trepidation you may have or have had before switching to Google feeds. I wrote this up in answer of some of the questions I had regarding the transfer, and hope you benefit. All of my data was regarding my two blogs, Neatly Sliced and the Yum blog, so mileage may vary on users with many many FeedBurner accounts to transfer.

Popularity: 26% [?]

I've posted previous tips for CSS conventions, such as using semantic id and class names and keeping your selectors lower case. What about within our styles, between those curly braces? What convention can we apply to our properties?

According to W3Schools, "CSS syntax is made up of three parts: a selector, a property and a value", such as #selector{ property: value;}. Now there are a ton of CSS properties, so we really ought to adopt a convention for writing these out to keep ourselves and our coworkers from tearing out our hair.

I propose we begin alphabetically ordering our CSS properties (if we're not already, of course). Now, I’m not saying to be dogmatic about alphabetizing (ahem, everyone, each font property must be alphabetically listed! I don't want to see font-weight before font-size!) but just in general, group for example the font properties together and list then in alphabetical order in relation to the other properties.

Why would this be useful? Well an obvious reason is that you can quickly find what you are looking for, but another (and more important) reason lies in that it will reduce overriding errors.

Below is the style for a menu that I pulled from a third party:

I needed to paste in font-size and color, so I pasted those two over the existing font-size and above the font-weight that already existed:

Since this was not my CSS, I did not notice at first that the color property was already declared later in that very selector. The result in this instance would be my #fff8f1 would be overridden with #fff because the latter rule (selector or property) takes precedence.

While I was alphabetizing this selector, I noticed the other color and of course deleted it. In addition to preventing override errors, alphabetizing the properties also just gives the selector a feeling of order and organization.

Advice of a different order: Andy over at Aloe Studios suggests ordering properties in a way to mirror the property's effect on the box model. It confuses my simple non-design developer brain, but perhaps designer-heavy CSS developers find it more semantic for their heads. If it works for you, do it!

Like what you've read? Browse the CSS category for more CSS goodness, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed. It's free!

Popularity: 30% [?]