www.GuidoDiepen.nl

Getting rid of skip_nax_wizard=true for your facebook page

admin — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:52:52 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, for the company I work for I have created a facebook page. Initially, I would always get to see the “Getting Started” page of facebook whenever I was using my personal account to view the AIMMS facebook page. After I got enough of likes, this getting started tab page was automatically removed.

However, if I used my personal account to view the facebook page, I still would not be able to see any of the custom tab pages I created: almost every tab page I would click on resulted in a redirect to the getting started page of facebook, which redirected automatically again to https://www.facebook.com/aimms.optimization?skip_nax_wizard=true, which defaulted to showing the wall of the AIMMS facebook page. This was especially annoying for the insights, as I was not able to view the insights. The only workaround for this was to click on the link “Use facebook as AIMMS”, after which I was able to see the insights. I just did not like the additional steps required for it

After I created the page, I made one of my colleages an administrator also. The other day I checked with him and when he was using his account, he was able to get to the insights tab page and all the other tab pages, while being logged in with his personal account.

On the internet, the only thing I could find about the skip_nax_wizard=true, is that it would automatically disappear. After I saw that for my colleague there was no problem, I figured there must have gone something wrong with my account.

I filed a bug-report with facebook and right away got the message that they will read all the bugs, but might not respond to them. However, after a couple of days, I went back to the company facebook page with my personal account and all of a sudden I got two additional questions again, one of which was to provide a picture for the facebook page (which I already had set up). It appeared somehow a small reset was done somewhere.

The best news was that from this moment on, I am now able to view the insights of the company page without having to first use facebook as AIMMS again!

If you do have a similar problem, you might want to try to just send an error report to facebook.

Working on new things like facebook applications

Guido Diepen — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:53:23 +0000

The majority of the blog has always been about the SynCE-KPM project I was working on. While I had a windows mobile phone, this project was very useful for me. For the last 1.5 years, I have been very happy with my android device, which means that I am not working on the SynCE-KPM project anymore…

Over the last couple of months, I have been very active for my work to see how I can get the AIMMS users more involved and active. One of the things I did start quite some time ago already was the AIMMS google group. Over the years, this group has become a bit more active.

Besides the google group, I also started a new AIMMS blog in November last year. As you can see there, I have been quite a bit more active on that blog compared to my own person blog here I think the AIMMS blog is a nice opportunity of disclosing information to as many people as possible with as little effort as possible.

After I had started the AIMMS blog, one of the other things I started to take a look at was the social media sites, like facebook and Twitter. After just setting up the AIMMS facebook page, I decided that I wanted to create a custom landing page. Initially, I created this with just a simple FBML page. However, after some time I started to create my first AIMMS tab page application as a welcome tab.

The current project I am working on is to create a new facebook application that will allow any user in Facebook to request a free AIMMS trial directly from within facebook.

So instead of blogging about SynCE-KPM, I might start blogging a bit more about my experiences with creating new facebook applications

Results from 4th Circuitrun at the Zandvoort race track

Guido Diepen — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:10:09 +0000

When I was a student, I was relatively active with sports: I played field hockey and tried to play squash once or twice a week. However, the last couple of years I was not very active anymore and started to notice that I got in bad shape. So I decided to go and run, which I started somewhere in the mid of January. The main goal I set was to run 10KM under 60 minutes.

Last sunday, there was the 4th international circuit run on the race tracks of Zandvoort. Because I did not have enough of time to enroll for the 12KM just yet, I did the 5KM run. Given the fact that I want to do the 10KM under 60 minutes, I must do the 5KM at least within 30 minutes However, my goal for the 5KM was set a bit higher: I wanted to end between 25 and 27 minutes.

The end result was even better than my goal, because my final time was 24 minutes and 42 seconds Only thing left to do now is to start improving this time on the 5KM and start running longer distances to get to the 10KM (and next year run the 12KM version of the Circuit run )

Action foto at the finish:

Action foto finish circuit run 2011

One of the nice things of the new smartphones these days is that they contain a GPS receiver also However, I did find that it was quite a hassle to take my phone with all of the time, so recently I decided to get a new gadget, namely the Garmin Forerunner 305. This is a lot easier to carry with

The advantage of these GPS loggers is that they can provide a nice overview of the race

Finally: official google reader app for android

Guido Diepen — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:33:33 +0000

I really liked the regular google reader to keep up with all websites. However, I never found a good application for my phone (both in my windows mobile time, and now with my android phone). I was really happy to read that there now is a google reader application in the android market.

Below the QR code for direct link to the android market. Just scan it with your device.

QR Code for android reader

Mark all messages as read in HTC Mail app

Guido Diepen — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:09:42 +0000

As you might have read in my previous post, after years of suffering with Windows Mobile, I finally have made the switch to Android by buying a Desire HD.

I was extremely happy with the fact that with the new version of sense that is on the Desire HD, you can add multiple exchange email accounts. However, one of the things that I could not find is to mark all messages in an email box as read. The only possible workaround I could find was to manually select each of the messages, after which I would press “Mark read”. If you have a lot of messages in the mailbox, this is a lot of work

I thought that it should be possible to mark all messages at once, but I could not find anything about it on google. After some playing around with it, I finally got it

To mark all messages as read, you have to follow these steps:

Open the HTC Mail app
Select any of the messages
Marking all messages as read in HTC Mail app - Step 01
Press “Menu” button. Notice that this time it is different than pressing the button when nothing is selected
Marking all messages as read in HTC Mail app - Step 02
Press “Select All”
Press “Mark as unread”
Repeat the steps to select all messages
Now press “Mark as read”

and there you have it, all messages in your mailbox are now marked as read

Please note that you only need to do the steps for marking all messages as unread in case some of the messages in your mailbox are read and some are unread. In this situation, you only have the option to mark everything first as unread, after which you can select everything again and mark the messages as read.

Went from Windows Mobile to Android

Guido Diepen — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:08:38 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I had the possibility of extending my current phone contract again.

The last couple of years I have had a variety of Windows Mobile devices. They were always working for me, but not exactly 100% as I would have liked. With regards to the communication with Linux, I have tried with the SynCE group to work on this.

One thing I never did was writing programs for the device itself, only for communicating with the device under Linux. I did not think that writing programs for windows mobile under linux was very easy, so I never went further with this.

Also, lately I have been getting fed up with the fact that for new websites/services there are excellent clients for iPhone / Blackberry / Android, but almost never for windows mobile. A good example of this is Facebook, which has a very crappy Windows Mobile client.

After seeing which devices were available, I decided to extend my contract and get the new Desire HD. It took me a bit of time to get used to the new kind of interface, but I have to say that I really like Android (with Sense). I am really happy that my current phone does not have Windows mobile anymore The major advantage for me is that finally I have the possibility to add two exchange server accounts to the device at the same time, both with Push syncing: I can have my phone connected to the exchange server at work and at the same time to my Zarafa server at home

Also, having android allows me to easily develop applications for the device under Linux. The only thing left for me now is to find a good idea for which no app has been written yet

Having this new phone will mean I will probably not actively develop new functionality for SynCE-KPM anymore. However, if bugs are found, I will try to see if I can solve them

Risks of living close to Schiphol: Burning airplane flying over Haarlem…

Guido Diepen — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:54:39 +0000

Earlier this evening, while watching some TV I heard an airplane fly over. Because Haarlem relatively close to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, this happens more often. However, this time from the sound I knew that it was flying extremely low.

Turns out that it was an aircraft from Royal Air Maroc that encountered a birdstrike after taking off from Schiphol. After that, it was flying burning over Haarlem (eyewitnesses state as low as 100 meters), after which it made a safe emergency landing at Schiphol again.

Happy everything turned out ok.

New feature in SynCE-KPM: Registry Viewer

Guido Diepen — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:59:52 +0000

After some final coding last night, I finally finished the new feature for SynCE-KPM: viewing the registry of your device via SynCE-KPM.

Currently, the feature is only available in the SVN version of SynCE-KPM (which depends on the SVN version of librapi2). However, we are currently thinking about releasing the 0.15 version of SynCE, which would contain this new feature. As soon as more information about the new release is available, you will also see that on my website.

To show the new feature in this version, I decided to create another screencast. While the previous screencast did show a lot, it was relatively boring due to the fact that there was no sound at all. Therefore, I decided to add a voice over to this new screencast, explaining everything in a bit more detail. In the screencast I do not show all features related to the syncing part (via sync-engine) again, because this takes quite some time and this has already been shown in my previous screencast. In the current screencast, sync-engine is not running and only the device management capabilities of SynCE-KPM are shown.

The screencast:

Of course, you can still view the old screencast if you would like to see the display the status of an ongoing sync-process, or installing a CAB file onto your device. This old screencast is in the Lost screencast post on my website. Please note, that this old screencast is without any sound.

When you have the feature of viewing the contents of the registry, of course the next question is to be able to edit the contents of the registry. This is what I see as the next feature to implement in SynCE-KPM, though at the moment I don’t know when I will have time for this. As with this currently implemented new feature, whenever I have time, I will start working on it

If you have any questions, suggestions, etc, please leave a post or send me an email.

Finally, a car

Guido Diepen — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:54:24 +0000

Although I have my drivers license for some time already again, we never got around to purchasing a car. Especially when we were still living in Utrecht, this was not a viable option anyway, because parking the car in the same street was not possible due to lack of parking permit, and very long waiting lists for this…

After we moved to Haarlem, it still was possible to do the majority of our trips via the public transportation, but often this ended in frustration of delayed trains/buses or having to leave at specific times to ensure all connections were still possible to get back home.

For certain cases, the best solution was to rent a car for a day or the weekend. Every time that we rented a car, it became clear that it would be very useful to have one ourselves

About two weeks ago we finally found a car that we liked, the new model Fiat Bravo. Finally, yesterday I got the message that it would be ready and this morning I went to pick it up.

The mandatory pictures:

Our Fiat Bravo

So from now on, we will not have to rely on the public transportation anymore

Small update in SynCE-KPM

Guido Diepen — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:52:21 +0000

Even though I was not feeling well today (spent day sick at home, having cold shivers all the time…), I did look into one small new feature for SynCE-KPM.

I noticed that on my windows computer, Windows Mobile Device Center was able to show a picture of my device. I was always wondering where this information was taken from. Turns out that this picture is actually taken from the device itself. I guess it must be something prescribed by ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center to have the image /windows/sync.ico present.

After the device is connected, SynCE-KPM will now look if that file exists, and if it does, obtain it and show it to the user in the main window.

Example screen with two different phones I have:

SynCE-KPM now shows device (example 1)

SynCE-KPM now shows device (example 2, my HTC HD2)

I still have the major new feature left: implementing the remote registry editor. This is still on my TODO list, but unfortunately I don’t have as much spare time as I would like to have to work on this.

Another thing that I need to work on with SynCE-KPM is the usage of layout managers instead of not being able to resize as with the current implementation. Will take me some time also. Will get there though, slowly