February 2012 Blog Posts

New yaTimer trial mailing list

As of yesterday when you download the yaTimer free trial you are asked to enter you e-mail address (optionally, there’s also a link that let you skip this step if you want) and when you enter your e-mail you will receive a series of 6 short tips during your free trial. This e-mail tips series has two purposes, first, it lets me tell potential customers about things that are not obvious about yaTimer and second, it will hopefully reduce the number of people who download yaTimer but never use it.

Doing vs. Learning

There are many sites that provide great information on the internet – especially on topics like marketing, selling, SEO and other parts of running an on-line business. The better sites are actually a never ending stream if useful content – to the point it’s hard to keep up with all the new great information. As a side note, most of the better sites are not free – but they are worth every penny if you implement what you learn there. But here’s the problem, you are flooded with so many great videos, interviews, tutorials, articles and discussions...

Special Promotion – yaTimer Central for FREE with any yaTimer subscription

Update: this promotion is no longer available As of today anyone getting yaTimer as a monthly subscription will receive free access to yaTimer Central Personal for the duration of the subscription. This is a really good deal you will be getting a service worth $4.50 for free with a $5.99 service. This promotion is a marketing test, I can stop it at any moment with no notice – so if you’re thinking about buying a yaTimer license you better do it now, If you already got a yaTimer subscription you also still get this deal, just create a yaTimer Central account and follow the...

Release often vs. sell upgrades

I usually only announce things on the blog after I’ve decided what to do and how to do it, this post is different, in this post I’m sharing a business problem that I really don’t know how to solve (but don’t worry, I will solve it somehow), if you want more posts like this one please respond – leave a comment, send me an e-mail or use the contact form – just respond somehow. I’ve announced that in 2012 I’m going to try and release a new version of yaTimer every single month – this means that every month...

We’ll make you so secure you can’t do anything

Html injection is a serious security problem – it’s so serious Microsoft has decided it’s better to crush a web site that may potentially be attacked (even unsuccessfully) than to let it proceed – this is like executing someone on the spot because you suspect someone else may be planning to rob him. So, what is HTML injection? Web pages are basically text with embedded formatting instructions, for example if I wand to show the word bold in a bold font the web page will contain the text <b>bold</b> where <b> is the instruction to turn bold on...

Why I’ve started a photography blog

So what possessed me to start a new photography blog, especially when I already barely have time for all the projects I already have? Quick answer: the two following pictures where taken at the same location, one after the other, with the same off-white wall as the background (click image for the blog post about how it was taken): They both only had minor color corrections (less than one minute work using free software) and I got the black and white background only by changing camera settings and the position of the flash. They are...

Only one piece of data is needed to completely take over your life

Scary title, isn’t it? But it’s true, the only thing an evil hacker needs in order to take over everything you ever touched over the internet is your e-mail password. Once someone has your e-mail password all he or she needs to do it go to every popular web site and click the “forgot password” link, the web site will than happily send a new password to your inbox the attacker can now read, So what can you do? First secure your e-mail password, the one single thing that makes a password secure is to make...

Giraffe Upload 1.3.2 Released

I’ve just uploaded a new version of Giraffe Upload, the new version contains multiple bug fixes, mostly to what happens when a trial subscription expires but there’s also one uploading bug that was fixed. If you have Giraffe Upload installed it would update itself automatically over the next day or so, there’s nothing you need to do.

Be careful with configuration files

Just about every program has some configuration or preference data it needs, and this data needs to be stored somewhere, it may be in the windows registry or a file but it’s saved somewhere and it is needed for the program to function correctly. Most of this data is completely harmless and contain things like the window location on screen, other is somewhat risky like the recently used file list (do you want your employer to accidently discover you are working on your resume?) But some of this configuration data is outright dangerous – passwords and secret encryption...

Setting Priorities

Let's talk about priorities. How many times have you heard that prioritization is important? Probably a lot - but how many times have you heard that prioritization is hard because of ACTUAL LIMITS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN? Yes, that’s right, our mind can't prioritize, it’s not your fault you are bad at prioritizing that’s just how we’re built – but there's hope, like with just about every other limit of the human body we can use tools to overcome this limit. But first we have to understand the problem, there are two common well know...

yaTimer now helps you avoid blank reports

Every once in a while I get a support e-mail telling me yaTimer started producing empty reports – and in every single case the problem was an incorrect setting in the reports window, usually setting the project, client and/or color filters to a combination that just doesn’t have any matching tasks. This is not the fault of the customer who sent the support e-mail – this is a design failure of the yaTimer report filtering user interface that makes it easy to choose a filter that will result in an empty report (in my defense, this is a design...

Task Zebra is up and running

My latest application Task Zebra is now up and running, it is currently available by invitation only and I’ve sent the first batch of invitations today. I’ll write more about what Task Zebra does soon.