Dawn of the Geeks

Dada Mobile is apparently scamming people. Instead of billing individuals for their service, when you sign up for the “free” ringtones, they bill your cell phone company $9.99 for the subscription they opt you into and all they need is your cell phone number. The charge will show up on your cell phone bill which you may not notice if you auto pay your bill or don’t read it closely. This makes it very difficult to reverse the charge as your phone company may not be able to do it and good luck getting Dada Mobile to refund the amount.

Short version, avoid this company. Legitimate companies bill you and don’t hide the fact that they’re going to charge you. I tried looking at their terms and conditions and it doesn’t exist.

What’s even worse is all you have to do is open up the text message they send you and they’ll bill you. Instead, hit reply and send them “opt out”

Using Yahoo! Stock Data

There are a lot of really bad tutorials out there on grabbing stock information from Yahoo!’s servers. They are bad because they use the same URL string as everyone else and don’t bother to tell you what all those characters mean and fail to mention that there are many more characters you can use to grab a lot more useful data. I’m working on putting together a stock web-site and as such I need to grab *all* the information I can from Yahoo!’s servers. The above Wiki entry lists all the character codes and what information they will pull down.

Another very important thing that every other tutorial leaves out is that you don’t have to grab the information for just one stock at a time. You can comma seperate the stock symbols and grab up to about 200 in a single request. I don’t know the exact number. This speeds up the process emmensly. Using proper coding techniques the stock site is able to download all the stock information for nearly 6000 stock symbols in just a few seconds.

The above wiki entry is not a complete tutorial. It’s currently just a reference for the URL codes. The tutorial will be worked on as time allows.

RSS News Feeds: All the Important News in One Place

Slashdot, Little Green Footballs, Powerline and eventually some others are available for instant viewing in one place. Check it out.

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