Please promote this Force.com idea

For everyone with the force... please promote this one!  Would be a big help for users who have to pick records in a custom object lookup box.

https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000jehvAAA

The limitation of search in a lookup field is documented here:

http://na13.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/search_fields.htm#LookupSearchFields

The road to cable cutting: part I

The number on the cable bill just kept getting scarier.  That really could cost you a car payment each month.  So flirting with the idea of cable cutting at some point became inevitable.  Of course it's not like I'll throw out Verizon for good.  FiOS will still be my Internet provider, may be phone too.  So it's about $45 a month off if the cable TV portion is out.  Then, we'll have to get some entertainment on the little screen.  The question is, where?  The search is on.

As the options go, all roads go through the Internet without doubt.  I've heard about the following:

• Hulu Plus
• Amazon Prime (one of its benefits is lots of included Amazon Instant Videos, which have both TV and movie contents)
• Google TV
• Apple TV

 Starting with the service I have the most direct experience with - Amazon Prime.  Here's the basics:

• cost: $79/year
• device support: great, but with one important deficiency - any non-Kindle Android device.
• media content: plenty.  On 2/17/2013, here's what's available:
  -13,377 SD movies and 268 HD movies
  -1,719 SD and 622 HD TV items (including individual series/seasons counted as single items)
  One complaint I have about the movies is that HD movies can't be watched on the Web (I bet that's the result of DRM)
• tryout: 30 day free trail (not bad at all!)

(To be continued...)

Can't make a lookup field read-only on page layout - if it's on a custom object

... because then the lookup field stops working on the UI: if you create a new record from the "New" button on the related list from the parent object, the lookup field won't be populated, as it would when it's not read-only.

This is just the way it is, and I haven't found an explicit reference in documentation on why that is, or even the behavior is there.  Please note that this is not the same for standard objects.  For instance, the Account Name field on Contact will still work - populating correctly - if it's made read-only on a page layout.

So if you're looking this direction for a simple way to discourage reparenting (like I did), stop. 

Adobe Acrobat - page operation pitfalls

Overall Acrobat is a polished tool for handling PDF files, other than being a little bloated (using 9.2 at this moment).  However I have a few pet peeves about it, especially for page action items under the Document menu. 

• Inserting/replacing pages with forms.  This is pretty common when updating the form page in a big file.  First of all, replacing is usually not a viable operation (would be the best if it were!), because the replaced form almost always has some peculiar issues, particularly with the form fields.  Often times they're out of whack from the intended configuration.  Inserting is less bad, but do keep in mind that form fields will get merged if the document already has some fields with the same names as in the inserted form.  It does remind you that when you try, but provides no option to help you remedy it - locating/listing the duplicate fields or something.
• Replacing pages with graphics.  I recently had an issue that if I replaced a page with a new page with graphics, the border around some of the pictures mysteriously would disappear.  So I had to remove the old page and insert the new.  Not very convenient. 

Will probably have more to add later...

Useful link to clone account

http://website-experts.ca/how-to-create-a-clone-button-on-accounts-in-salesforce/

Probably wouldn't need it everyday for most, but this is handy if I happen to need easy cloning in some special situations.

The price of free social media services

The recent controversy over the Instagram's new user agreement language is a bit overblown, if you look at it closely.  However it does again provide a chance for people to ponder what we pay for all those "free" social media services. We don tend to forget the fact that, as users of those services, we really do not have the status of customer, as users of traditional, paid services do.  The service providers provide the services in exchange for private information or content we create that they can derive revenue from (usually through advertising/marketing).  In that sense, the advertisers or marketers are the true customers, and we users are, to put it bluntly, just crops.  All the things provided to us are for the sole purpose of certain kind of harvesting.

The biggest harvester out there is no doubt Facebook.  So don't really be surprised by the "voting" system they put out that really made a mockery out of the concept of democratized decision making, and even that had to be dismantled.  The only reason to keep crops happy is for the harvest, and a painless one usually has higher yield.  

As users we certainly should try to defend our rights to the max extent, but please do keep in mind our "crop" status to set realistic expectations.   There's an important distinction between us and real crops though: we do have the ability to walk away from the field.  

Cron string for Apex Scheduler

The information in the Apex Guide on the scheduling facility actually doesn't do justice to the cron capability available.  For instance you can schedule things to run hourly for given period of the day, but the Apex Guide doesn't provide enough working examples to illustrate uses like that. 

Here's a discussion on the practical use of the cron syntax, and you can tell quite a few people still doubt the advanced capability of the cron string.