How to Enable Sync in Samsung Galaxy Note 2

I was made aware of this problem when I attended a Google Developer Group Meetup this month. While the event was going on, I suddenly remembered that I can use the Party Mode feature of Google Plus to share the photos taken in the event. That way, everyone has a common place to access all the pictures

I tried to turn the feature on. But I was surprised when it complained that I needed to turn on Automatic Syncing in "Accounts and Settings". The last time I used this feature, I did not get this notification at all. I thought I never need to.

So after exploring the Settings, I found out that that I can turn on automatic syncing in Settings -> Accounts -> Google for each of the accounts that I had.

I thought that was the end of it, but it did not do what I expected. When I tried to sync all of my accounts, the indicator that is supposed to show a green light to indicate that automatic syncing is disabled.

I was confused.

I have some friends in the meetup that have Samsung Galaxy phones and assured me that it should work.

But it never did.

So I tried many things like restarting my phone, trying to change it on my tablet and looking for other Setting options which might be the real option to change. But those actions proved fruitless.

I was frustrated enough by then that I searched Google for answers. I tried may keyword searches until I got the one that leads me to a site that gave me the clue to the answer.

The forum's solution said that I should simply go to my notification shade bar and turn on my sync there.

But I noticed something strange. There was no Sync toggle at all! This led me to believe that there must be some specific peculiarity with the Note 2.

So I went to Display -> Notification Panel, and sure enough, it was there. It was just not included into the default setup

So what I did was I put it there

I pulled down the Notification Shade, toggled on the Sync and bam! The syncing was fixed!

Finally! Problem solved. I was able to use Party Mode to take pictures :D

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Expression Engine Parse Order

I have been using Expression Engine while working on some freelance projects the last few months. It is not free and I am only able to use it because a colleague I am working it bought a license for it.

Expression Engine is touted as the best Content Management System(CMS) for web designers. Even if I am not one of those creative types, I can certainly attest to the ease of use it provides to people who wants works on how the the page is displayed as opposed to knowing how the system works.

However, it can be a pain for web developers looking to implement a solution that requires lots of custom code and tweaks.

I am talking about the template parse order

Their templating system goes through specific steps when parsing each template. Usually, you don't need to know about the parsing order when working on your templates. In fact, it isn't apparent when you code your code is simple at first.

But the more complex your template tags are, the higher the chance of encountering an error that is caused or related to the parsing order.

In order to solve this problems, you need to understand the parsing order. The links below will prove useful.

Ellislab's Template Engine Documentation
Low's Expression Engine Parse Order(PDF)

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Goodbye Enso, Hello Launchy

For the longest time, I have been using Humanised Enso as my launcher way back 2008.

At that time, launchers were not as popular today. There were only a limited number of launcher applications available so you have very few choices. Out of all the launcher options that I had, Enso was what caught my eye and I downloaded it to try it out.

And was it a joy to use. I was delighted by the fact that I don't need to use the tedious Start -> Programs Menu process anymore to access my applications. I can quickly access them with just a press of a button and typing the name of the application. Enso even has a "learn" feature where I can make it directly open folders, links, or portable applications by telling Enso to associate it with a word that I want. And most of all, it looks cool!

But the times has changed. While I was content using Enso, other launchers have tried catching up to Enso's features and succeeded.

Today, Enso's internal process of using shortcuts to access files is less efficient than indexing the filesystem. I also noticed that it was less responsive than the new competing launchers.

So I finally decided to try out other launchers. I quickly searched the internet for the best one out there and it was Launchy that was consistently suggested.

At first try, Launchy has these look and feel that is minimalistic. I also found out that you can navigate through your filesystem by just typing the path(very much like Unix/Linux filesystems), a feature I found very useful. We will see how Launchy fares against Enso(I will probably writing a review about it in a future blog post).

All in all, Enso has a good run but it is starting to show it's age. It was nice working with it but it is time to move on.

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