GPS & CELL PHONE

Got this story by email, don't know it's true or not.  But somethings are useful. Here are my suggestions: 

1. First, alway think twice before click on any link or text back.
2. Second, put your password on your cell phone or any mobile devices such as tablet, iPad, iPod Touch.
3. Third, make a new email to use on smart phone only. In case your phone lost or stolen, people cannot use that email to reset your account password.
4. Last, don't put you home address, birthday on your address book, Facebook, LinkedIn or anything not necessary. When I search for map direction on the web, I used the public location nearby such as school, store or supermarket as my home address.

* * * * * 

This gives us something to think about with all our new electronic technology.

GPS

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me that someone she knew had their car broken into while they were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard.

When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen. The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house.

The thieves knew the owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was scheduled to finish and so they knew how much time they had to clean out the house. It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the house of its contents.

Something to consider if you have a GPS - don't put your home address in it.. Put a nearby address (like a store or gas station) so you can still find your way home if you need to, but no one else would know where you live if your GPS were stolen.

MOBILE PHONES

I never thought of this.......

This lady has now changed her habit of how she lists her names on her mobile phone after her handbag was stolen. Her handbag, which contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet... Etc...was stolen.

20 minutes later when she called her hubby, from a pay phone telling him what had happened, hubby says 'I received your text asking about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago.' When they rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was already withdrawn. The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to text 'hubby' in the contact list and got hold of the pin number. Within 20 minutes he had withdrawn all the money from their bank account.

Moral of the lesson:

Do not disclose the relationship between you and the people in your contact list.

Avoid using names like Home, Honey, Hubby, Sweetheart, Dad, Mom, etc....

And very importantly, when sensitive info is being asked through texts, CONFIRM by calling back

Also, when you're being texted by friends or family to meet them somewhere, be sure to call back to confirm that the message came from them. If you don't reach them, be very careful about going places to meet 'family and friends' who text you..

Using Visual Studio 2013 Preview and Team Foundation Service

Back to Microsoft Windows stuff. To maintain my program skills, I alway learn a new thing, practice what I learn and review what I did. This time I work with ASP.NET by using Visual Studio 2013 Preview on Microsoft Windows 8.1 Preview with Microsoft Team Foundation Service, a free TFS on the cloud.

Learning ColdFusion 10

Temporary hold my current projects: Microsoft C# ASP.NET MVC and Google Android Demo App for a week to try out Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 Developer edition and MySQL 5.6.12. I love the opportunity to learn a new thing.

Install Adobe ColdFusion 10 Developer edition on Microsoft Windows.

Install MySQL 5.6.12

Using GitHub on Windows for version control.

Using GitHub for Windows with Bitbucket

GitHub is a popular Git version control hosting but it's not provide free unlimited private repositories like Bitbucket. I end up using both. To push files to Bitbucket.org using GitHub for Windows:

1. Open Git Shell
2. Change to other directory if need (cd "..\Visual Studio 2012\Projects\DisplayRSSFeeds")
3. Add .gitignore
4. Add readme.txt (optional)
5. Initialize empty git repository: git init
6. Add the existing files to the repository: git add .
7. Commit the files: git commit -m "First commit" or git commit -a
8. Log into Bitbucket.
9. Create a new repository.
10. Add a new remote: git remote add origin-bb https://yourusername@bitbucket.org/yourusername/yourgit.git
    (Note: See picture below. You cannot push or remove the remote origin, so just make a new one called origin-bb as I did).
11. Push up the repo for the first time: git push -u origin-bb --all  

Other git commands
# view current remote
git remote -v

# remove remote
git remote rm origin-bb

# Use these sequence git commands to update Git repository in both local and remote later.
git add .
git commit -a
git push -u

Further reading:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Import+code+from+an+existing+project
http://git-scm.com/book/ch2-5.html

Buying a new laptop

If you are going to buy a laptop using Microsoft Windows, make sure it has Windows 7. Windows 8 is not good, hard to use and took a lot of time to learn. Thus Microsoft force to make Windows 8.1 as a new free upgrade.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/155747-windows-8-1-will-be-a-free-upgrade-will-begin-public-beta-testing-on-june-26.

Also, make sure the CPU support supports Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) along with many advanced technologies as I mentioned on my previous post. I preferred Intel® Core™ i3, i5 or i7 processor.

Your laptop should have:

• 15.6" monitor screen. 
• At least 1.9 GHZ Intel® Core™ i3 processor 
• At least 4 GB RAM expandable to 8GB or 16GB
• Built-in high-speed wireless 802.11b/g/n and Gigabit Ethernet LAN. 
• Two or more USB ports.
• Built-in front camera.
• At least 3 hours battery.

My experience with Android Studio

I love to learn or try a new thing everyday. Yesterday, I downloaded Android Studio and installed on both Mac OS/X Lion 10.7  and Ubuntu 13.04 laptop. Here is the screenshot of Android Studio my MacBook Pro.

I'm still figuring out how to fix this error: "emulator: ERROR: unknown skin name 'WXGA720'" when  attempt to load Android Virtual Device without using Eclipse Juno to launch the AVD first.

For Ubuntu 13.04, I must using Oracle Java Development Kit instead of OpenJDK to run Android Studio. With Eclipse IDE, I can use OpenJDK. Here is the screenshot when I make a new Android project imported from my GitHub account:

I also trying to install Android Studio on Microsoft Windows. To save time, you need to read carefully the note on http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html

Since this is a preview release, I don't expect much. I hope Google will make Android Studio tool better.

Error when add the StoreManagerController on MVC Music Store Tutorial Part 5

When I followed the MVC Music Store Tutorial using Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web on Windows 8, I got this error:

Unable to retrieve metadata for 'MusicStore.Models.Album'. Using the same DbCompiledModel to create context against different types of database servers is not supported. Instead, create a separate DbCompiledModel for each type of server being used.

No idea. Let google for a solution. Here a solution from ITorian (http://www.itorian.com/2012/10/unable-to-retrieve-metadata-for.html) :

After I delete this line in web.config, it worked: 

     connectionString="Data Source=|DataDirectory|MvcMusicStore.sdf"

     providerName="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"/>

Thank the author of ITorian.com.