AllScoop Technology

I have created an export for Cube Cart, which imports into Paypal’s multiorder shipping module. This will enable you to import your order information into Paypal for printing shipping labels. Avoid re-typing the information into Paypal, saving time and preventing data entry errors. This will not make any changes to your database.

There are 2 options, export all orders with the status of “processing”, or export all orders for a certain date.

I am looking for a few people to test before I release, please contact me if this is something you would be interested in trying.

I hate to use the cliche, but this is the video converter swiss army knife. I am truely amazed at how often I find myself opening up this program.  Any video converter has been able to convert everything I have thrown at it. Here are the conversions that it supports. Ten different types of media! Very impressive.

• DVD Video NTSC (mpg)
• DVD Video PAL (mpg)
• MPEG-I (mpg)
• MPED-II (mpg)
• Flash Video Movie (flv)
• Mobile Phone MPEG-4 (mp4)
• AVI Movie (avi)
• Windows Media WMV (wmv)
• MP4 Movie (mp4)
• Wave Audio (wav)

The most important one to me is the FLV conversion. Just about any video you wish to put on the web works great in FLV.  Or if you have an FLV and want to edit the file in Windows Movie Maker, just convert it to AVI, or WMV, bingo.

Look at the screen shot below to see all the options you have when converting. (this is the flash file options)

There is a free version and a paid version of the Any Video Converter software. So far the free version has been able to do everything I need without any problems. I would highly recommend this program for your video conversion needs.

Also did I mention that you can pull out video directly from You Tube? Yes, it will do that as well.

This hard to find free utility is an awesome little tool. It seems to work with all Outlook versions, from 97 up to 2003 (have not tried it on versions beyond that).  You download and install the utility and it creates a small little “ListServ” button up on your Outlook toolbar.

Click on that and you will bring up the simple window. Here you can choose your address group, and it will extract them all into a nice format that can be copied to the clipboard, and used for whatever you wish. Perfect for exporting into an external email list tool, or newsletter software.

You can get the free Outlookemail extractor/exporter utility here.

Every web marketer will tell you one of the keystones to website success is using email newsletters. For an ecommerce site, it should be mandatory. You are already collecting an email address when you are making a web sale, so there is a good chance your customer will want to sign up for your email list.

Your ecommerce shopping cart may come with a newsletter module, but chances it might get the job done. So what do you do if you want a little more out of it?

There are plenty of pay for email newsletters services out there, one of the better ones being Aweber. But of course this comes at a price. In the case of Aweber, it will cost you $19 a month for the service for up to 500 customers.

Many of us fall in between, not yet ready to commit to the monthly charge, but still wanting an easy, and reliable way to get out a newsletter.

In comes phplist to save the day. This free script is loaded with features. It was very easy to install, it took me about 30 minutes of playing around with the program. I set up a few small test lists with a handful of personal email addresses (yahoo, gmail, etc…), and soon I had a good feel for the program.

I would certainly recommend you make sure that you fully understand the program, because sending out a newsletter to hundreds of customers in NOT something to be taken lightly. While it won’t make your business, it could break your business. Again, I would not import you live list until you are pretty sure you know what you are doing in the program.

phplist is a very flexible program. You can create your own questions associated with a newsletter signup, and it can all be done from the web-based interface. (this part took me the longest to figure out, but I was glad I could remove the “sample” questions).

Once I was ready I imported my emails from my shopping cart, (during the import be sure you mark your users as confirmed, as you may end up having a confirmation email go out to all your already confirmed users.), you can also mark all your imported users as “html” users. Meaning they prefer to receive HTML based newsletters.

Once all my users were imported, you simply go to “send a message”, enter your message, set a few options and off it goes.

Now, since I am using the list just to import, setup and send. I will be flushing and reloading my user list each time. There isn’t an obvious way to do this in the program, but it can be easily done following these steps I found in the forum.

Go to your lists and ‘view members’
At the bottom of the page it says:
‘What to do with all users
This will process all users on this list
Delete (from this list)’
Do that.
Do that for all your lists.
Now all the users in the datbaase are not connected to any list.

Now go to:
Manage users
Reconcile Users
‘delete all users who are not subscribed to any list’
and they will all be removed.

from http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?p=43905#43905

I will admit it took me a little while to fully understand the program, but don’t give up, after just a little while you will find that it is a pretty simple, yet flexible program to use. phplist has many more features than those I’ve touched here, that is only because I already had my list, and I only need to import emails. phplist can be a beginning to end email marketing solution, and will actually manage your list for you.  phplist also has fantastic online documentation. Not bad for a free program!

Simple. Elementary, and not involved or complicated windows calendar application.

Sometimes, you just want to see a calendar, and clicking on the time in the tray can be cumbersome, and there is the possibility you may accidentally change your system date and time. So here is a free windows calendar app that could not be more simple and easy. A 16k file, that just opens up a calendar.

2008 year calendar and download.

Download Windows Calendar

You have 2 network cards, and are connected to 2 networks.

You want to specify which one is used to surf the internet.

Here is how you do it on Windows.

It’s comes down to an “Interface Metric”.

First, right click on the network card/item that you wish to use for the internet. In this case it is the “wireless network connection 2″

Here I left click once on the connection to select it, then right click to get the dialog box below. Choose properties.

Then scroll down until you see Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), select it (make it blue), then click on the Properties button.

Then you will see the screen below, click on the Advanced button.

On the bottom of the next screen as shown below, you will uncheck the Automatic Metric check box and place a 1 in the metric box.

Now your first Network Card is setup with a Metric of 1. Repeat the exact same process with your other network card, except give it an Interface Metric of 2.

That should do it, now when you surf the internet you should see the IP of the network card with a interface metric of 1. (visit here to see your IP). And all your other network activities should work as normal.

Newest discoveries in fuel cell technology.

We all hear a lot about fuel cells on the news, but what exactly is a fuel cell? Simply, a fuel cell is a device that takes stored chemical energy and converts it into electrical energy. A fuel cell is an electrochemical conversion device. It is a kind of a device that produces electricity from the fuel that acts as the anode and is the positive part in a cell and it is an oxidant that acts as a cathode, which is the negative part in a cell. Now, the oxidizer and fuel react in the presence of an electrolyte, which acts as the medium. Now, a reactant flows into the cell reagents and products flow out, and electrolyte remain within the cell.

The principle on which the fuel cell works is the principle of catalysis. According to this principle, the reagent fuel is separated into two components electrons and protons, electrons are forced to go through a path that is pre-specified and, hence, the electrons are converted into electricity. Today, the catalyst that is used in this reaction of fuel and oxidizer used is generally composed of a metal of the platinum group or alloy. There is now another catalytic process in which electrons are taken and these electrons combine with the protons and oxidants which ultimately develop waste products. These wastes are simple compounds such as water and carbon dioxide.

There is a classic hydrogen-oxygen design of fuel cells which is also known as proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) design. A proton-conducting polymer membrane (electrolyte), separates the anode and cathode sides.

At the anode, there is a diffusion of hydrogen to diffuse the anode and catalyst later; it dissociates itself into protons and electrons. The protons are conducted through the membrane to the cathode; on the other hand, the electrons are forced to move in an external circuit (energy supply) because there is an electrically insulating membrane. At the cathode catalyst there are oxygen molecules that react with electrons. These electrons are those who have traveled through the external circuit and protons to form water - for example, waste products that are generated, are either liquid or steam.

Other than the type of pure hydrogen, hydrocarbons for fuel cells can also be used. These are fuels such as diesel or methanol and chemical hydrides can also be used as fuel in fuel cells. The waste produced in these types of fuel is carbon dioxide and water.

There are many combinations of fuel cells, because there are many possible combinations of fuels and oxidants. To name a few we have “a metal hydride fuel cell”. The electrolyte used in this fuel cell is an alkaline aqueous solution such as potassium hydroxide. Then there is a merger of carbonate fuel cell. The electrolyte used in this cell is alkaline, molten carbonate, such as sodium bicarbonate.

There is a difference in behavior of fuel cells. It is due to the electrochemical batteries in use for some reasons. The first reason is that fuel cells consume reagents and it is necessary to rebuild these reagents from time to time. The second reason is that the electrodes of fuel cells are a catalyst and it is therefore relatively more stable than the electrochemical batteries.

Google Chrome. Personally I think this is really big move by Google. They are completing the circle. Almost all of their applications are web-based applications. Now they are making sure that they run correctly and as fast as possible by having them run in their own specially designed web browser. Everything new in this browser points to the goal of running their own web applications. The focus on fast JavaScript, this it the core of most of their web-based apps. Another is the “application shortcuts”, this one could not be more obvious. They want to make you feel like a web-based application is the same as a desktop application. When you create an application shortcut in Google Chrome, it takes the icon for the shortcut, removes almost all web-like buttons from the app, and looks like a desktop application in your taskbar.

Each tab runs in it’s own process. This is designed to allow you to run more critical applications in your web browser. Maybe like running an important spreadsheet in Google Docs, and not have the whole page lost when a flash game you were playing in another tab crashes.

how to unzip files on blackberry

unzipping directly on your BlackBerry is not available without adding some additional software to your BlackBerry. An application called Ziplorer gives you the ability to unzip files on a BlackBerry. http://www.s4bb.com/software/ziplorer/

The first one is called Audit Trail. It does what the name implies. It keeps an audit trail of all activity on the blog, you can configure different levels of auditing and storage times. This can become very handy to keep an eye on what is happening in your blog if you have different users changing content.

The next one is called Role Manager. This is an extremely powerful and useful plugin, you can create new roles, and edit roles. You can tailor a users permissions to very exact needs only.This can be great if you have users performing only specific tasks, and don’t want them to have more rights than they need to have.

plastroltech

The website is down! For anyone who is ever worked in an IT department. This is a very entertaining video. http://thewebsiteisdown.com/

Business Process Management and the Web

Taking BPM to the Web

Now that the acceptance of the need for business process management (BPM) software is becoming mainstream, the demand for the technology has reached the critical mass required to force software vendors to heed their customer’s demands for “zero latency” access to information.

BPM is rapidly headed to the web and the timing couldn’t be better. There aren’t many CEO or CFOs left who are willing to go to jail for the sins of omission and, if it did nothing else, an investment in BPM would be worth it just to stay ahead of the requirements of Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley.

In reality there are any number of reasons why BPM makes sense in a competitive environment where sales are being squeezed by imports, labor costs are rising, and every business process is finally starting to get a real price tag attached to it.

Web-enabled BPM software offers the first real promise of seamless integration with existing ERP systems and the great hordes of legacy data that most organizations have hiding in their electronic closets.

One of the most pressing issues facing developers of BPM software is finding a standard and sticking with it. In a flurry of confusion, reminiscent of the Betamax vs. VHS conflicts of years ago, various vendors are circling their wagons around different standards.

J2EE (Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition) is a strong contender because of its widespread availability and reputation for compatibility with XML, EJB, JSP, XML and the rest of the usual acronym suspects including the lowly JavaScript.

XML is enjoying wide acceptance as a genuinely platform independent standard for data representation.

Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures, based upon SOAP and WDSL are fully supported by major players including BEA, IBM, Sun and Oracle.

And, of course, Microsoft is a player with their .Net initiative which also embraces XML, SOAP and WSDL.

All of this not withstanding, many industry watchers have their eyes on an emerging standard known as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL4WS), an XML-based language which is specifically designed to handle task-sharing in a distributed environment by utilizing a variety of Web services. Although not available in any shipping products, it is garnering strong support within the industry.

Another contender in the race to be the preferred platform is the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). This is a meta-language, along the same lines of XML, which is specially designed to model business processes.

Two “Soon to be thought about more deeply” standards wanna-bees are the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which offers a graphical method of defining business processes using a Business Process Diagram (BPD), and the Business Process Query Language (BPQL) which utilizes a business process server and a process repository to execute and deploy queries.

If all of these emerging and soon-to-be-emerging standards are too much for you to keep track of, you’ll be happy to know that an organization exists which is championing the cause on your behalf.

According to their web site, the Business Process Management Initiative “embraces existing standards where appropriate, working with complementary standards bodies such as the OMG, WfMC and OASIS. In areas where standards are lacking, BPMI focuses on standards development to support the entire life-cycle of business process management - from process design, through deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization”.

While it may be fun to keep track of all the three and four letter acronyms, making the wrong standards decision won’t bring as many chuckles from the boardroom. IT executives and managers need to make strategic decisions now while depending upon standards which are subject to change in the future. The cost of making the wrong decision can be high, but the cost of making no decision at all is even higher.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time is come and this is the time for business process management software to integrate with the web.