Alesandro O's dashboard

Alesandro O replied on July 20, 2009 19:58 to the problem "SMS update with special characters corrupted." in Ping.fm:

No, the SMS updates doesn't show up correctly there either. (Sorry for omitting that.)

Alesandro O replied on July 20, 2009 18:57 to the problem "SMS update with special characters corrupted." in Ping.fm:

Just sent an update with the '~' character via Ping.fm's Web interface, and it seemed to work fine there: http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...

Alesandro O reported a problem in Ping.fm on July 20, 2009 18:54:

SMS update with special characters corrupted.

Sending an update with the '~' character seems to corrupt the rest of the message, when sent via an LG Flare (LX165) from Virgin Mobile USA. I sent the same SMS to my email, and it arrived perfectly. I sent the first update at 1:33 pm (http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...), and I tried sending again the same update at 2:48 pm (http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...), with the same result.

Update should've been: "Me quedan 300 paginas para leer de Cien A~os de Soledad. Que mierda. The book should've ended 75 pages ago! Llevo un mes leyendo! Argh. :("

Alesandro O replied on June 23, 2009 22:17 to the problem "The dollar sign ($) is replaced with '@'s when sending update via SMS." in Ping.fm:

I don't remember sending other messages with the US dollar sign via SMS, so I can't say if it's a new or old issue. I tried sending a message from my LG Flare (Virgin Mobile USA - LX165) to my email and there was no altering of the message.

I tried sending two updates shorter than 140 characters, and they seemed to work.
http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...
http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...

Actually, I just tried sending the exact update from the same phone, and it works now: http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...

Could've been a hiccup or something, although it's still quite strange. :/
Today my phone tried to trick me as well (unrelated issue)... it must think it's smarter than me! :P

A comment on the problem "The dollar sign ($) is replaced with '@'s when sending update via SMS." in Ping.fm:

US SMS (918-814-4042) – Alesandro O, on June 23, 2009 21:39

A comment on the problem "The dollar sign ($) is replaced with '@'s when sending update via SMS." in Ping.fm:

US SMS (918-814-4042) – Alesandro O, on June 23, 2009 21:37

Alesandro O reported a problem in Ping.fm on June 20, 2009 00:57:

The dollar sign ($) is replaced with '@'s when sending update via SMS.

The dollar sign ($) is replaced with '@'s when sending update via SMS. My phone's carrier is Virgin Mobile USA. This issue doesn't seem to occur via the Web interface.

Web interface test (via http://ping.fm): http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...
Mobile phone update (via SMS): http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...

Cheers,
Alesandro (The_PHP_Jedi)

Alesandro O replied on March 01, 2009 19:33 to the problem "SMS update cut-off right before question mark" in Ping.fm:

Will do. I haven't had any problems for the last few days anyway.

Cheers :D

Alesandro O replied on February 17, 2009 01:29 to the problem "Ping.fm is down." in Ping.fm:

Yeah, I read about that a few minutes ago. I was right on my initial assumption that half the Internet was broken :P

Cheers.

Alesandro O replied on February 16, 2009 20:08 to the problem "Ping.fm is down." in Ping.fm:

Alright. It's been working for a while now. I hope you identified the cause. :)

I did notice that MediaTemple's GridServers came back online just about the same time Ping.fm came back up. Just an observation.

Alesandro O reported a problem in Ping.fm on February 16, 2009 16:44:

Ping.fm is down.

From Puerto Rico, USA, using connection that goes through Miami. Others (via Twitter) in the US and Canada are reporting extremely slow loading times, and also not being able access the site at all, like myself.

thephpjedi@generis:~$ ping ping.fm
PING ping.fm (69.44.44.70) 56(84) bytes of data.
From ge-3-0.miamfl6lcx1.wcg.Level3.net (4.68.111.210) icmp_seq=1 Time to live exceeded

thephpjedi@generis:~$ traceroute ping.fm
traceroute to ping.fm (69.44.44.70), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254) 8.577 ms 11.215 ms 11.235 ms
2 196-28-48-178.prtc.net (196.28.48.178) 23.753 ms 25.631 ms 25.759 ms
3 196-28-55-145.prtc.net (196.28.55.145) 23.924 ms 32.741 ms 32.765 ms
4 196-28-48-2.prtc.net (196.28.48.2) 32.766 ms 32.776 ms 33.287 ms
5 * * *
6 63.245.5.116 (63.245.5.116) 92.309 ms 63.245.5.120 (63.245.5.120) 66.444 ms 62.468 ms
7 s-1-0-0-nmi-core02.nwnnetwork.net (63.245.5.69) 73.578 ms 63.245.5.70 (63.245.5.70) 73.685 ms 75.755 ms
8 xe-8-0-0.edge2.Miami1.Level3.net (4.59.84.5) 75.772 ms 77.760 ms 79.298 ms
9 ae-13-51.car3.Miami1.Level3.net (4.69.138.68) 79.429 ms ae-23-52.car3.Miami1.Level3.net (4.69.138.100) 81.163 ms ae-13-51.car3.Miami1.Level3.net (4.69.138.68) 83.382 ms
10 ge-3-0.miamfl6lcx1.wcg.Level3.net (4.68.111.210) 85.073 ms 87.260 ms 89.224 ms
11 ge-6-24.car3.Miami1.Level3.net (4.68.111.221) 89.339 ms 92.853 ms 69.802 ms
12 tampfl1wcx1-pos6-0-oc48.wcg.net (64.200.240.106) 94.130 ms !H * *

Alesandro O replied on February 13, 2009 19:23 to the problem "SMS update cut-off right before question mark" in Ping.fm:

Thought it'd post a possibly related incident here. I sent an SMS update earlier today, and instead of truncating it, the message after the '~' character was garbled.

See http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...
It should've read "Ahh... Slept for ~18 hours, from 5pm to 11am. Took care of my messed up sleeping patterns of the last few weeks. Yay for no classes Fri+Mon!".

Alesandro O marked one of Adam's replies in Ping.fm as useful. Adam replied to the problem "SMS update cut-off right before question mark".

Alesandro O replied on February 12, 2009 03:31 to the problem "SMS update cut-off right before question mark" in Ping.fm:

Ah. I hope you get the new one soon ;) Hopefully it won't happen again.

Cheers, and keep up the excellent work! :D

Alesandro O reported a problem in Ping.fm on February 12, 2009 01:09:

SMS update cut-off right before question mark

The following update was cut-off to right before where the question mark character is located: http://twitter.com/The_PHP_Jedi/statu...
It should've read "Is it possible to connect a VGA output to a RCA input directly? I want to connect laptop output to SDTV. Not sure if I need a special output".

I'm going to throw out a wild guess, but perhaps it has something to do w/ the parsing of special characters through SMS? I had a similar issue through e-mail ages ago, but that was when I was the first beta tester ;)

Cheers

Alesandro O started following the problem "All my configured social networks vanished" in Ping.fm.

Alesandro O replied on December 24, 2008 21:30 to the idea "Various suggestions/fixes to user account system" in Stikked:

It's easy to circumvent, but extremely effective and removes one (annoying) step for the user.

I've never had a spam bot circumvent the reverse captcha at Slexy.org, nor has Ping.fm (which has ~50k users, and is fairly high-profile).

Try it out for a week, at least ;)

No problem. Always glad to help out. :D Cheers!

Alesandro O shared an idea in Stikked on December 24, 2008 00:20:

Various suggestions/fixes to user account system

a) Needs to tell you that you can't have a username longer than 25 characters when registering, not when logging in.
b) Needs to use reverse captcha instead of Re-Captcha.
c) Needs to allow non-alphanumeric characters in username, such as underscores. They are vital to The_PHP_Jedi

Other than that, great job on the user accounts. :)

Alesandro O replied on October 21, 2008 01:35 to the problem "Ping.Fm down?" in Ping.fm:

Uhh... DownDoggy is just another one of GoDaddy's sites. Blatantly similar design, and the companies behind it are the same.

Alesandro O replied on October 21, 2008 01:29 to the problem "Ping.Fm down?" in Ping.fm:

*ahem* Use NameCheap next time. GoDaddy has screwed me over uncountable times as well.

I hope Ping.fm is restored soon.