Nick Bartlett“Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” - Emerson

For a site that currently has an Alexa traffic ranking of 5, this is pretty dumb.  It’s almost as bad as the sporadic errors on myspace.  Site maintenance?  Really?  At 10:45am on a Tuesday?  Come’on.. give me a break.  Facebook is one of the busiest sites on the net and you disable my account for “a few hours” in the middle of the day?  I’d expect they would be able to release code with a “flip of the switch”.  If not, I’d expect downtime to be scheduled and during times of minimal traffic.

I started getting this error for a few days ago now.  I simply send a hyperlink to a friend and facebook doesn’t like that.  WTF?

12/31/08 Update:

I found a post on Facebook about the issue at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=18347337130 .  Apparently, “if you try to send a message that contains a link to a website with an importer” you’ll get that message.  “This response is our way of trying to protect every one’s privacy. Right now, the sites that are asking for this information, and that we are blocking as a result, gain complete access and control over your account”.  Okay, but I entered a few different URLs over a time span of a few days and every one of them was blocked.  I’m pretty certain it’s a bug.

Here is a way to put ringtones on your iphone without having to pay for it through itunes.  This trick also allows you to use any portion of an audio file on your computer as your ringtone.

1. download the sound file to your computer and open it with Itunes
   
2. In Itunes, right click the file and choose “Get Info”
   
3. Select the “options” tab and check both checkboxes next to “start time” and “stop time”. Enter the start and end time portion of the sound file you’d like to save as your ringtone. The ringtone can be a maximum of 30 seconds. If your sound file is already less than 30 seconds, you can skip this step. Click the OK button when finished.
   
4. In Itunes, right click on the sound file again and select “Create AAC Version”. This will create another copy of the file in a different format and place it in your Itunes play list below the original.
   
5. The new file in the Itunes playlist will have an extension of “.m4a”. Drag this file to your desktop and change the extension to “.m4r”.
   
   
6. In Itunes, select “ringtones” from the library and drag your m4r file from your computer back into Itunes in the ringtones directory. Then, which your iphone connected, drag the file from the “ringtones” directory within “library” to the “ringtones” directory within “devices” to put the file on your iphone.
   

That’s it. Now you have free ringtones for your iphone.

I have about ten email accounts and have setup rules to sort mail into folders based on which account the mail is from in Thunderbird. This way, I don’t need an inbox, sent, trash, drafts, etc for every account. They all use a common sent, drafts, and trash folder. The annoying thing is, whenever the mail is moved by a rule into a folder, it sorts them by “order received” after the move, not the date received. My preferences are set to sort by date (view->sort by->date). Outlook does this by default. One of the annoyances I’m experiencing moving from outlook to Thunderbird. Anybody know how to do this without having to click the columns everytime?

If you’re going to perform a merge, I can assume you’ve already created, checked out, and have made modifications to a branch from your code repository.  On your checkout, right click a directory or single file and select “TortoiseSVN” then “Merge” from the context menu.

From the next window, you may need to alter the “From” URL to your repository.  This will most likely be pointing to the same directory or single file in the trunk of your repository.  For beginners, this can be confusing.  What the interface is asking you to do is specify a revision range to merge with your files.  In most cases, the “From” and “To” URL will be exactly the same.  The difference is the “From” entry where you’ll need to specify the beginning revision number to start the merge.  The “To” entry will usually be the “Head Revision” if you’d like to get the most recent commits.  The “result of the merge” will automatically point to your branch.  Perform a “Dry Run” the first couple times until your comfortable with the process.

Watch for conflicts

Edit and resolve conflicts, then commit all changes to your branch.