humandoing software

Presently upgrading to Snow Leopard, and this kicked me in the teeth. The latest Vlad gem is 2.0, but the documentation is still, um, rough (that’s being generous).

$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.2)
default formats are encoded in ISO-8859-1
>> require 'vlad'
=> ["Vlad"]
>> Vlad.load :app => :passenger, :scm => :git
MissingSourceFile: no such file to load -- vlad/git

Anyways, it turns out that as of Vlad 2.0, the git portion of Vlad (probably others as well) are separated out into their own gems.

To fix:

sudo gem install vlad-git

Thanks to Richard Hart, through whom I found the solution.

Once you have a mysql console / command line / prompt:

SET autocommit=0;

E.g.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 53
Server version: 5.0.45 Source distribution
 
Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.
 
mysql> use your_db_here
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
 
Database changed
mysql> SET autocommit=0;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)<strong></strong>

There might be an easier way to do this without escaping the regex to grep, but for my small brain to remember later on – I wanted to grep the output of rake routes and search for two strings (logical OR):

rake routes | grep “\(give\|gift\)”

I recently met with a realtor friend of mine here in the Langley area as I’ve been thinking about purchasing an investment property near to where my wife and I currently live. My friend recommended some houses close by built by a company called Castleview Homes. Given that I like to do my research, I tossed their name into the GOOG to see what I could read about them from their site.

Greeted immediately by blaring music and a flash intro, with a site interior that wasn’t much better, I felt a bit traumatized. I couldn’t find a half decent list of past projects organized in a fashion that I could read, no gallery of past houses or developments. The entire site is in flash, limiting my ability to copy and paste, I honestly just couldn’t deal with it.

I’ve come across many such sites over the past few months, and it’s starting to grate on me. So I wrote them an email trying to provide some feedback. I took detailed screenshots, annotated them with Skitch, and sent it off.

Included below is the body of the email I sent, verbatim (if you want to see the site, you can view it yourself here):

Hi there,

I recently visited your web site while doing research – a realtor I met with recommended your homes to me.

Sadly – I have to say I find your web site completely unusable. I’d love to provide some feedback:

1) Flash is a very poor technology choice for any web site
a) It is not accessible
b) There are serious navigation problem with the back button
c) There is no way for someone to highlight, or copy and paste text
d) Music on web sites is agitating – and it takes control away from
the users viewing your site
e) “Flash Intros” serve as a distraction for users. They waste your
visitors valuable time by forcing them to wait through it, or spend the time and effort finding and clicking through to “Skip” the intro before actually getting to the content on your site.

2) Properly formed HTML markup and CSS based layouts (one of the technologies used to build standards compliant, modern web sites) drastically increase your search engine rankings, and have been the de facto standard for web technology for years – fully flash-based sites are almost exclusively the domain of the entertainment industry at this point, and even there, I believe, it is a poor choice.

3) Even the company logo on the site is poorly pixellated, and not crisp and sharp.

4) Your navigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why is “Private Entrance” a navigation item? What does it mean?

5) Your portfolio page offers no easy to view hierarchy of your current or past projects. There is no nice, easy to browse photo gallery, no project overviews unless I start scrolling through a huge text field that is filled with rectangles that don’t make any sense.

6) There is absolutely no consistency to your typography and font choices whatsoever. The site flows from Serif, to Sans Serif to handwriting to italics and back again.

I apologize for all the negative feedback, but I hope that you’re able to utilize some of it in the development of a more user-centric and user friendly site. The web is about user experience – and companies really need to be able to deliver a positive, pleasant and refreshing experience to potential customers and investors. I felt invaded when I came to your web site – without coherent content or navigation, inconsistent text and audio that kept blaring at me. It made me want to leave as soon as possible.

If you require assistance with any of this – I’d be more than happy to help – or I could make several recommendations of other excellent web designers and developers who could help create a truly remarkable experience for your customers and clients.

Warmest Regards,

-daniel

I received two emails in response. One was from someone whom I’m assuming is the webmaster for the site, thanking me for my detailed feedback. He also indicated that they’ve received a tremendous amount of very positive feedback on the site, and that my feedback provides a bit of balance.

Following that, I received this email, from a Mr. Brian Horn of Fine Line Calgary whose contact information can be found here. I include his email, verbatim, below:

Hey Daniel,
Or whatever your name is, you are a coward, why not just be honest and sell people your product honestly, Yours is a very slimy way of approaching people.

Don’t contact me again , I don’t deal with slimeball salesman.

Brian Horn.

I don’t take well to people calling me a coward and a salesman, mostly because neither are true. I take my reputation and my integrity very seriously. I replied to Mr. Horn with this email:

Hi Brian,

I take tremendous offense to your accusations. I was genuinely trying to provide honest feedback for your site. I’ve run a software consulting company in Vancouver for the past 6 years, and I’ve lived and breathed the Internet and software development industries for more than 10.

I don’t have any interest in selling you anything, simply providing feedback that you can independently verify and pursue as you see fit.

I’m also extremely confused as to the hostility, as I visited the Castleview site specifically as an investor looking to find information on and potentially purchase homes.

You won’t hear from me again.

Warm Regards,
-daniel

The sad thing about this is that I had no interest personally in rebuilding or somehow earning money from Castleview Homes (or whoever) from this site. But as an investor or customer, I wanted a site to go to where I could view cohesive information about this builder, their past projects and the type of work they do. Given that I didn’t receive any of that, my intention was to offer assistance, and put them in touch with any one of a dozen people I know who could help them build a better experience for their customers and users. Instead, I’m called a coward and slimeball.

Looking back at my email now, maybe I was a bit gruff, and my words were a bit strong – but I don’t think it makes them any less true.

Maybe I’m a slimeball after all. Neat.

I’m sure I could write this post as a set of diary entries. If only I could narrate it, and my voice was as cool as Rorschach. Without further ado – here is my entire iPhone upgrade saga via Rogers. The good, bad and ugly alike.

It’s worth noting that my reason for trying to time the arrival of my iPhone (I didn’t care when, as long as it was prior to July 2nd) was because I had planned on using tethering to get work done while I was away on vacation for nearly a month.

June 17th – The First Call

My Rogers contract is up in August, but because of such poor reception in my home office (zero bars, I have to call forward my cell to my home number in order to be able to receive any calls at all), I was already given permission by Rogers to break my contract, which I discussed with the CSR (I’ll use this acronym a lot, and I intend it to mean Customer Service Representative) I got on the phone.

I spent a substantial amount of pre-research time, constructing a phone / data plan that would meet my (and my wife’s) needs with Fido, before I made my call to Rogers. The sad irony of this is that Fido is actually a Rogers owned subsidiary that their competing with for my business.

When I got the first CSR on the line, I spent about an hour discussing plans, sharing my needs. He couldn’t help me come up with anything even close to what I had built with Fido, so I asked him if someone in retention might be able to help me put together something more suitable. He thought someone would be able to help, and transferred me to retention.

After that I spent about 30-45 minutes with a gentlemen in retention who came up with a great plan for me and my wife, similar to what I researched at Fido, but with a few extra features. The total cost of the new Rogers plan would be about $10/month more than what I worked out at Fido, but a price I was willing to accept. All told, I was extremely happy with the new plans we discussed. I knew going into it that I needed to be patient, prepared and willing to spend the time necessary to talk through things.

June 19th – The Order

The iPhone 3GS release date. Sweet glory indeed. I called Rogers back to place the actual order and change our plans as per discussion with retention. Was placed on hold several times, “the system is slow” is a line I hear repeatedly. No worries, I’m patient.

I’m told I can’t add visual voicemail until I actually receive my iPhone, their system won’t allow it, so I have to call customer service back once my iPhone arrives to get it activated.

At this point, I was told that my 32GB Black iPhone 3GS will arrive at my door via UPS on Wednesday June 24th.

June 23rd – I Can Haz A Tracking Number Plz?

Called to get a UPS tracking number. CSR gave it to me. Tried the tracking number I was given after I got off the phone, tracking number was invalid.

June 24th – The Sadness

Phone doesn’t arrive.

June 25th – I Can Haz A Real Tracking Number Plz?

Called Rogers to confirm the tracking number I was given. The CSR told me that there was no tracking number even available. So he puts me through to the “track and trade” department. He tells me that “track and trade” is really busy, and the wait on hold would be 30 minutes.

Waited on hold.

Waited on hold some more.

Finally got through.

Track and Trade CSR: “Sorry, the phone is on back order, we don’t have any in, there are tons of orders ahead of yours, and we have no idea when they’ll be arriving. We’re working with Apple on it.”

I ask questions. I’m upset.

I’m told repeatedly: “There’s nothing I can do.”

Every time I ask a question: “There’s nothing I can do.”

Track and Trade CSR: “Would you like me to transfer you to customer relations?”

Me: “No, I’ll call back later.”

I paused for a bit to weigh my options, and did what many geeks in my situation would do. I posted to Twitter:

Just got kicked in the face by #rogers re: iphone order… it will be blogged.

Here’s where I was surprised – I got a reply / mention back from one RogersKeith.

@humandoing I’m with Rogers. Can I help?

And then me:

@RogersKeith – if you can help – that’d be awesome. If you email me I’ll give you my cell#. junk at humandoing dot net.

I get an email from Keith, and I send him my story. He passes it to someone at “the office of the president” (which sounds incredibly official).

Later that night (7pm PST) I get a call from Ian at “the office of the president”. We go over my story, and he’s heading on vacation. He says that the only way I’ll be able to get a phone before I leave on my holiday is by canceling my order, going and buying one from the Apple Store – and then getting a credit on my Rogers account. At this point, that was sounding fine to me. He told me to call Mary tomorrow (June 26th) and he gave me her phone number, because he was heading on vacation.

June 26th – Office Of The President

I phoned Mary at 9:30am PST. No answer, so I left voicemail.

Called again at 1:30pm PST. No answer, and the call didn’t go to voicemail.

I emailed Keith again just to see if he could follow up.

A short while later I get a call from Mary (who, I might add, was extremely helpful, extremely courteous, and had the power to Get Things Done™). She confirmed what Ian had told me the night before, and says to call her once I’ve gone and made the iPhone purchase from a local retailer. She also told me that in order for me to receive a reimbursement, I had to purchase the phone on my VISA – no big deal to me, as that’s how I pay for pretty much everything.

The previous day there were a bunch of 32GB iPhones around my place in Langley, but not today. I found one at the Rogers store in Willowbrook Mall, but was told that the price would be $880+tax, and that I’d have to pay cash (the Apple / Rogers sanctioned price is $799, and you can pay however you want). This was probably the most bizarre wrench of the whole story. Not only am I told that I’ll be charged $81 more than the sanctioned price, I’m told that I have to pay cash? Are you guys out of your mind?

So I phoned the Apple Store in Vancouver, they hardly had any 32GB phones available, and they only had them in white. She said they can’t put one on hold for me, but if I came soon they should “probably still have one”. Again, fine. I’ll settle for white.

Wifey and I drive 1 1/2 hours to get into downtown Vancouver on a Friday afternoon, only to arrive and have them sold out of the 32GB phones. At this point, I was so beyond my wits end dealing with the whole situation that I bought a 16GB just to be done with it. And I now have a beautiful, shiny black iPhone 3GS, but sadly with 16GB less storage than I had wanted.

June 29th – They Said It Would Be How Much?

I emailed Mary the receipt for my iPhone, along with a brief description of my saga. I also phoned and left her a voicemail. I’m pretty sure that the launch of the iPhone 3GS has been the bane of many Rogers’ employees existence for the past 10 days.

She called me back a short while later noting that I’d purchased the 16GB phone instead of the 32GB phone. When I told her about my experience with the Rogers store, she was incredulous. She actually put me on hold and phoned them up. They told her they’d been sold out of 32GB iPhones for “a week and a half”. Pretty sure that there was some major CYA going on.

Given the whole gong show (on top of the other gong show, on top of the other gong show), she says “I’m going to give you an additional $15/month credit on your account for the next 2 years”. That was another shocker. She was really going out of her way to try to make this right, in whatever way she could. At that point, she had even still offered to replace the 16GB with the 32GB, but given my need for connectivity over the next month, I told her I couldn’t wait for one. Even so, she told me to use the phone, and if I ended up being extremely unhappy with it, to call her back and she’d work to provide additional assistance towards resolution.

July 6th – Bye Bye Data Plan?

My data plan along with my ability to tether magically “vanished” from my account. I called Rogers technical support to ask why tethering was broken.

The tech support guy told me that I had made account changes the day previously and had removed the data plan from my account. Funny, maybe I did it in my sleep?

So he transfers me to a CSR who fixes my account and restores my magical disappearing data plan.

July 27th – Will It Ever End?

Got home from vacation and had received my first bill. The $8/month credit that I was supposed to receive for visual voicemail was missing. Also was billed $4.65 for text messages, even though my plan supposedly included 50 sent text messages.

Had to call Rogers again to sort out the $8/month voicemail credit. Was told that the $4.65 I was charged for text messages was because of the dates that the account changes came into effect. The CSR told me that I didn’t have a text messaging plan on my account from the dates of July 1 to July 6. I don’t know how that’s possible, given that I still had my voice plan (which has the text messages as part of a bundle). Whatever. She wasn’t in a happy mood, she wasn’t going to credit it without an argument – so I just told her to forget it. I wasn’t prepared for a 20 minute argument with a Rogers CSR over $4.65.

After that, I realized my call forwarding was no longer working, which led to yet another call to Rogers. When I get the tech support guy on the line, he tells me “the call forwarding service seems to have disappeared from your account”.

He can’t re-add it, so I wait on hold as he tries to find a CSR who can “find the correct call forwarding service to add.” I’m starting to wonder if 3 calls a month to Rogers is just going to become the norm in order to keep my phone services and billing in order.

Finally off hold, magical call forwarding service that actually works has been re-added to my account, and I’ve verified that it’s functioning. Anyone want to take bets on how long before something else goes wrong?

Conclusion

So what do I conclude with? I don’t know. The whole process has been such a mixed bag of lies (aka “misinformation”) and screw-ups, along with people that were genuinely interested in retaining my business, and bending over backwards to come to an amicable resolution.

I feel like the whole experience has left me a bit marred. I love my new phone, but how long will it take before I just look at my phone and enjoy it, instead of thinking about the gong show involved in getting it?

The really frustrating thing is that most of the circus could have been avoided if, when people called to upgrade, the CSRs at Rogers simply said “I’m sorry that we’ll be unable to provide any estimate as to when your phone might arrive. The demand is unprecedented, and it could easily take 2-3 weeks. If you are in need of an iPhone immediately, your best bet is going to be to call the retail locations in your area and try to get one that way. I’m really sorry about that.”.

Some customers will piss and moan, but at least you’re setting their expectations correctly, as opposed to blowing smoke up their collective behinds.

About four days ago I upgraded the hard disk in my MacBook Pro (the 2009 summer model, unibody with SD card). I took out the 320GB 5400 RPM Fujitsu that it came with, and added a 320GB 7200 RPM Hitachi (Travelstar 7K320-320). After restoring my SuperDuper clone, all worked perfectly, and I had a nice little speed boost.

This morning I went to upgrade my firmware as per the software update, and BAM, my laptop now failed to boot. I did the whole verbose-hold-down-Command-V-when-powering-on to get a verbose dump of what was going on. Eventually, I get this gem: Failed to issue COM RESET successfully after 3 attempts. Failing…

Bummer.

I found only one thread on the Apple Discussion Forum to help me out with this particular error, but it looks like there are several people who are having the same failure to boot or random data errors after updating the firmware, who have installed after market drives [here, here]. There are other reports surfacing on the web about what appears to be the same issue.

So what did I do? Well I yanked my shiny new Hitachi drive out, and threw the Fujitsu drive back in, and we booted fine. Yuck.

In an ongoing attempt to “manage” my “online identity”, I’ve madly been trying to amalgamate all the disparate crap I seem to have all over Teh Internets.

For the past few years, humandoing software has been running SimpleLog, which was a tragic mistake. It quickly went into “no maintenance whatsoever” mode – and has since been a pain in my neck as long as I can remember. I’d finally had enough, added some code to do a full RSS export of the whole thing, imported the blog content to a WordPress install (which you’re currently reading) – and separated the blog from the more “corporate” type site.

I’m still no designer, but thanks to Kuler / ColourLovers and 960grid, I was able to put up a half decent site without too much fuss (half-decent excludes what the site currently looks like in IE6).

Sadly, I wasn’t able to easily preserve the tags and comments from the old blog, so I’ll probably try to update things manually here and there as time goes on.

I’ve tried to 301 as much content as possible – if there is anything missing, send me an email and I’ll try to get you hooked up.

If you haven’t installed apache and php:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Then to enable curl:

sudo apt-get install php5-curl
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

RT @mezzoblue: client request: “I want Ajax Motherfuton. Or else.” #clientsarebecomingsmartasses

Love that tweet. Yes. It was me.

Says Virginia Heffernan from the NY Times

These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.

And later:

Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away.

Note the emphasis is mine. I highly recommend reading the whole piece entitled Why Twitter is a Trap.

I’ve been starting to feel this way about connectivity for a while now. Most notably I’m disturbed by the shakes and withdrawal symptoms I seem to acquire any time I’ve gone for more than 17 minutes without checking my email.

How do we continue to push the envelope of technology and the evolving web without forgetting what it’s like to cut down a tree, plant a garden or cook on an open fire? Maybe what I actually want is the cowboy-like space life of Firefly, but I’m not really sure.

What do you do to avoid ‘connectivity’ as a trap?