Blogs

I've spent the last two weeks taking a segue to learn how to develop applications for Android phones.  I just gave a presentation last night to the Seattle Google Technology User's Group.  If you're interested in getting started with Android, I pass on some general tips for the beginning developer.

My friends know that I have an interest in antique computing devices, and in particular, the German Enigma machine.  I thought it would be cool to make a very realistic simulation of the Enigma that I could run on my phone.  After two weeks of work, I finally published my Pocket Enigma Machine into the Android market - and sold 6 copies in the first 12 hours!

We got an envelope that said "Official Document, 2010 Census".  But on the inside, it's a "survey", where you eventually see by question 5 that this is NOT an official US census, but rather a fund-raising letter from the Republican National Committee.  WTF?

This IS a US Census year, so it's easy to see why people would be confused.  It's just a slimy attempt to deceive recipients into opening a piece of junk mail they would otherwise discard.  Is this legal?  It's certainly unethical.  Do people respect organizations that walk the fine line between legality and criminality by playing these dirty tricks?

Maybe I've just become overly sensitive to unethical behavior, but I keep running into examples of bad-behaving companies and organizations.  I find it hard to understand why people behave this way; it certainly does not enhance their reputation and respectability.

I've twice reported companies to the WA State Atty General for unethical business practices in the last year (Microsoft, for retaining my credit card against my will, and SquareSpace for retaining my subscription payment after the point I determined that their service was defective for me).  This RNC letter may compel me to send a 3rd complaint.

Earning money is hard - but do businesses really have to resort to tricking their customers to make it?  I would love to see stronger laws in place that would penalize companies for acting badly; especially when there is such a big divide between the power of the company vs. the power of the individual.

Here's are my biggest pet peeves of bad behavior:

1. Making services more difficult to cancel than they are to purchase.  E.g., not allowing consumers to cancel a service using the same mode as they purchased the service (I can sign up for Vonage VOIP phone quickly online, yet I have to wait on hold on the phone to cancel the service).
2. Not refunding the (unused) portion of a subscription payment if the customer finds the product or service defective to their needs.
3. Retaining customer (billing) information against the wishes of the customer.
4. Sending deceptive communications in order to trick consumers into reading email or mail (actually there ARE laws against this - but companies walk the fine line of being strictly legal, but still unethical).
5. Repeatedly charging consumers for services they don't want or are no longer using.

I've been meaning to update my personal web site for a long time.   When I heard the glowing recommendations from Leo Laporte about the SquareSpace hosting service, I signed up for a trial account.  The migration of my existing web site looked to be a bit more complex than I had thought.  So I had to upgrade my account to have another user log in so I could get some help from Zach.

After several attempts by both of us, it became apparent that their service is just too limiting for the type on content I want to create.  SquareSpace is pretty - but it's a locked down environment, and they are missing features like FTP access to do bulk upload of content to their service.

So, after paying for SquareSpace for 6 months, and never deploying my site to it, I finally canceled my account.  BUT, here's where SquareSpace shows their true colors.  Because it has been more than 90 days since they took my payment, they refused to refund ANY of my 1 year subscription.  Even though their service never worked for me, and despite my willingness to pay for "time served", they were totally inflexible in giving me a refund for the remaining time on my contract.

This puts SquareSpace in the "Evil" column for me - just like cable TV and cell phone providers.  They position themselves "against" their customers, rather than trying to serve them and provide real value.

So, SquareSpace wants keep my money, even though their product was never able to satisfy my needs.  After several back-and-forth emails with their product support, they just told me "I'm screwed".

So - chaulk up another company as entering the "Evil" column.  I would never recommend that anyone use this service.  There are many more companies that can solve the same problem (and for a much better value - compare to DreamHost where you can get multiple domains, and mulitple user accounts all for about $10/month).

StartPad has been running for over 2 years now, and has attracted some great entrepreneurs and developers to our space.

We just had a 300 sq foot area open up at StartPad that would be ideal for a team of 2 to 5 people.  Our rental rate is $300/person per month and includes everything your team needs to get started:

As I've been researching the Exhaustive List of Google Products (now up to 256 items), I was looking at the Google Services and Tools Page.  The page contains a number of product icons, which are arranged is a single large image map.

Interestingly, there are icons in the image map that do NOT appear in the page. I've found what a few of them are by looking at the CSS file that styles each of the images. There, each icon is given a 4 character name (e.g., the icon for Google Alerts is called 'ALER'). With that as a clue, I was able to determine:

265.com is a Chinese site with links to common web resources. Google aquired them a few years ago and they link to them from the Chinese Google home page.

Music Home - a Chinese site with links to music.

MOBA - I think this icon represents Mobile Applications

But there are other icons I've not yet been able to identify. Anybody have any idea what products these icons represent?

GURU - This might be an alternate icon for the defunct Google Answers, but there is another "Q&A" icon in this set too - so I'm not sure that it is.  Found (11/27/09) - Q&A Forum is available in Thailand (Guru), and Russia (Otvety "Answers")

REBA - Is that an asian script in the logo? Found (11/27/09) - Rebang (China) - "Hot List"

CLAS, SHEN, TRAD - There are 3 distinct names used for this logo. It looks a bit like a classifieds icon with little strips of paper you can tear off like a posted notice. Found (11/27/09) - Shenghuo (China) - "Life Search", also in Russia (Classified Ads).

TEXT - ???

TOPI - Topics?

Update (11/27/09): I found two of these icons on the China Services and Tools Page.  

Last week, Scott Wisniewski and I were guests on the Startup Success Podcast (by Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley).  We started out talking about co-working and the origins of StartPad (at about 9 minutes in).

Scott introduced his code-backup solution - Transactor.  He's been working out of StartPad since beginning this project, and is now very close to shipping his first version to (non-Beta) customers.

I've become a huge Google fan over the last couple of years.  There are a mind-boggling number of products, services, and programs that Google has created.  I was curious to see how many I could think of.

In a few hours, I had come up with a list of about 100 of them (which I added to a Google Wave document).  I've recently expanded the list with links to each service and published it as a Google Spreadsheet.

The attached spreadsheet is a living document - so it may have been updated to have MORE than 139 products listed by the time you read this.

I currently can't edit existing values in a Google Spreadsheet.  It seems like an interface change Google made broke this most basic function (unless I'm missing something that should be obvious).  Here's a video to show what I mean:

And "fixed" an hour after I noticed this...

One of the reasons people HATE to call product support people on the phone, is that many of them are incented to "get rid" of the product support incident as quickly as possible rather than "help" the user or address the underlying problem.

Last week, I reported a bug on the meetup.com web site.  I provided a detailed explanation that was formatted as a very clear bug report.  And I gave a reproduceable series of steps showing how to re-create the bug.  Instead of a "thanks - we'll look right into this" response that I was hoping for I got this message:

I understand your concern, but it's very rare that users encounter this
issue.  If you clear your cookies, you should be all set!
...
If you still have trouble, try signing  in under a different browser as well.

Cheers,

Kathryn Fink
Community Support Specialist
Meetup HQ

The problem I reported has NOTHING to do with my cookie state (a quick experiment showed that the bug was still reproducible even with cookies cleared).  This lazy support "specialst" is trying to either (a) get the customer to "go away" or (b) get their USER's to do all the work of diagnosing and tracking down their bugs.

To make matters worse, this is a SUBSCRIPTION web site.  I'm PAYING THEM MONEY to use their sofware.  And they still treat their users like this.  From my point of view, they should be GRATEFUL that I took the time to send them a detailed, actionable bug report.  Most users would just say "this site is crap", cancel their subscription and leave.

You can be certain that I won't be a user of meetup.com for long.  I'll be actively looking for a more economical solution and one that doesn't "blame their users" for the bugs in their product.

UPDATE:

I just got this email from a contrite, Kathryn Fink, when I replied to her that I thought she was mis-understanding my bug report:

Thank you for taking the time to get back to me, and I'm truly sorry for
my confusion.

I had not replicated the error on my end, and incorrectly assumed the
page you were redirected to was a bad cached page in your browser.  This
was my mistake and for that I apologize.

The Tech Team replicated the error and logged a bug for it.  We're just
waiting for the fix to go live, which should happen shortly.  We truly
appreciate your bringing this to our attention.  It was a sitewide bug
and issue that would have effected other members too.

Many thanks again!

Best regards,

Kathryn Fink
Community Support Specialist
Meetup HQ

Meetup.com redeemed!

I love web-based applications; they have so many nice attributes, like being accessible from anywhere, not requiring software installation, etc.  Yet they can be amazingly under-featured.  We forget that our desktop client applications have evolved over many decades, to the point that most operations we need to perform have been optimized by the successful application developers.

Take, for example, basic file operations.  We take for granted that we can open a window on our computer, and copy and paste a whole batch of files to move them from one directory to another (or even on a file share on another computer on the network).

Yet this very basic operations is incredibly tedious with most web applications.  The whole notion of copy and paste of just about any "object" we deal with is a mature feature of desktop operating systems, yet nearly non-existant on the web, or even in custom mobile applictions (on iPhone or Andriod, say).

Today I had the task of moving files that were stored in a SharePoint server to a new location.  In the version of SharePoint I have, the web interface does not allow for bulk copy and paste (webdav might have been a possibility, but that has always been very buggy when I've tried it).

Since I'm a developer, I decided it was a much better use of my time to write a program to scrape a SharePoint web site and download the documents, than to manually click on and download each of the several hundred files I needed to copy (isn't is inhumane to make ANYONE go through this kind of mindless operation?).

I've attached this Python program in case there are others that want to do this.  Unfortunately, it's not as easy to run as a stand-alone application.  Here are the steps you need:

1. Download Python (I use Python version 2.5).
2. Dowload the BeautifulSoup library (use version 3.0.7a - future version seems to croak on the sharepoint html - unfortunatly Python's built-in HTML parsing libararies are also not that reslient to unexpected or mal-formed html tags).  You'll need to run 'setup.py install' to install the library for use by Python.
   
3. Download download_sp.py (see attachment below).

To do a bulk download from a SharePoint document library execute this command:

download_sp.py -d <url_of_sharepoint_doc_lib> -t <local_directory>

The program will prompt you for a password if needed, and then crawl the web page to find all the embedded document links, and download them to your local directory.