I got curious what the Android 2.01 SDK User Agent was returning after toying around with the iPhone theme for Magento. It appears Apple has standardized the UserAgent and “Mobile Safari” as a condition should enable future detection of Webkit on any device without conditioning more. Here’s the full user agent being returned
Recently installed the Zend Studio for Eclipse and took it upon myself to get Android Development setup as well. I also found Magento works best with ZendServer, although it does require a few work arounds to get Magento to work with ZendServer.
However with that being said I’m pretty much happy to have one IDE that I can do both Web Development, and Android Development in one IDE!
Now if only I can setup C# development, and Eclipse not be such a resource/memory hog.
If anyone desires I can write up a more detailed step by step guide, however at this point I think its pretty easy to figure out, with the links I provided.
It appears some have claimed there Magento installation has been making calls back to IP’s owned by Varien/Magento, The thread is initially a year old, and more recent discussions have claimed they haven’t found anything of such nature. I know X-Cart used to use a javascript blank 1×1 gif image to track installations of X-Cart but it was only on the backend/admin side, and not the front end. Has anyone else run into similar instances? Also this may not pertain to 3rd party modules installed as that may a whole other can of worms you could be opening up your store up to, most modules are free, but nothing is really free in this world. Here is the original thread: Magento Phone Home?
I’ve been doing quite a bit of Date and Time manipulations lately, and have grown to enjoy MySQL’s DateTime fields just as much as UNIX timestamps. Particularly its built-in functions for selecting any range of fields based on a time frame.
Needing to remove all entries from a table that are older than 30 days, at first I thought I would need to iterate over the very large table (90+k) rows of data and convert each MySQL DateTime field to a UNIX time stamp to do the calculations myself with PHP. However after a bit of research I’ve learned of a few things with MySQL DateTime that make this a lot easier.
The “timestamp” field is the MySQL DateTime field. Using the DATE_SUB, CURDATE and INTERVAL one can easily grab all records that are 30 days old without the headache of converting to UNIX timestamps in PHP and doing the grunt work yourself.
Also as a side note, if you wish to convert a MySQL DateTime field to a UNIX timestamp you can easily do this by:
It appears the people behind X-Cart (qualiteam) have just released a beta version of their hosted AJAX/Gears based E-Commerce package. The package is free however it is a hosted solution with Amazon’s cloud hosting or EC2 web service for data storage. Some of the cooler features is the Drag and Drop functionality for items to your basket. Mobile version with static HTML Catalog for SEO purposes as well. It is widget based so it can easily be dropped into any CMS system.
The biggest downside it seems to such a solution is there is no means currently to have a custom solution, via API or through Qualiteam themselves. The Cart is visually customizable via CSS within the admin but I’m guessing it won’t be very “in depth”. Also there is no manual.
On the plus to all these items though is it is FREE
Some late night fun… Since I can’t sleep… I’ve successfully found a means to combine multiple video files and add audio to a combined video progmatically and documenting my findings, thought I would share…
First I had to install GPAC which contains MP4Box, using it allows to combine the video files pre-existing as we have them now into one single file (1.mp4 and 2.mp4 are video files captured with an AXIS IP Camera in H.264):
And then we cut the audio file accordingly, the above PHP script returned 14 seconds for our two combined videos, since 13.60 is rounded to 14 from MP4Box, so it starts at 00:00:00 and takes a total time of 14 seconds of the audio file and creates a new file to be used next.
Appears X-Cart is finally picking up where everyone else has been with 3rd party contributors for years. Wordpress what?, MagentoConnect what? Ever since I had developed some aftermarket products for X-Cart, Qualiteam pretty much frowned on the whole concept of anyone else besides themselves benefitting from custom solutions to their existing software. However, I still see they require you be a special member in order to list your products in their market, unlike many others who will allow you to list them for free without much governing.
X-Cart can be a great ecommerce cart, don’t get me wrong but, there really isn’t much framework in it to allow for addons or modifications that can easily hookup into existing code without causing major headaches down the road once it is time to upgrade the base code. This was the biggest reason I switched from X-Cart to MagentoCommerce.
While experiementing with Flash 5 and ASP/Access around 2001 I wrote a pretty simplistic based forum with Flash as a frontend.
Still seeing some traffic coming from ActionScripts.org that I had simply experimented with, I’ve since moved away from old ASP, and Access Databases. It is merely for learning purposes, A Novice person may find it interesting as for more advanced may find it quite amusing
I make no warranty with the zip and there isn’t any “install” instructions.
Out of curiousity I wondered if mbliss.com was available last night and to my surprise it was available, it hadn’t been in quite some time, since most have trouble spelling the word molotov, I decided to scoop the domain up. I’m still not sure if I will keep it pointing here or if a seperate entity will appear on it and the blog would stay here, I’m mainly concerned with back links and 301 redirecting everything properly. I am also concerned with the domain being parked here if Google will start penalizing me for duplicate content. Anyone have any thoughts, on what would be the best use for this new shortened domain?
Hopefully the thought process will end up like this:
Smashing Magazine has listed 5 universal principles for successful eCommerce. I would have to agree with all of the items listed, as they are brief and not really a detailed how-to fix them, but more less a guidance on things that should be focused on in the eCommerce realm. In short here’s basically what they have listed:
Design for customers, not yourself or clients.
Go beyond usability and make the interface as transparent to the end user as possible.
Pay attention more closely to product detail pages, The checkout process, End user security concerns and page weight.
Give your customers what they want, listen to them and interact with them through social medias like twitter, surveys and polls.
Make good use of color and type faces to help lead customers through out their experience.
Here is the full details with all the pretty pictures and fancy sub titles like “Paint your pictures at home”
Here is the original thread: 
Also as a side note, if you wish to convert a MySQL DateTime field to a UNIX timestamp you can easily do this by:
It appears the people behind X-Cart (qualiteam) have just released a beta version of their hosted AJAX/Gears based E-Commerce package. The package is free however it is a hosted solution with Amazon’s cloud hosting or EC2 web service for data storage. Some of the cooler features is the Drag and Drop functionality for items to your basket. Mobile version with static HTML Catalog for SEO purposes as well. It is widget based so it can easily be dropped into any CMS system.
