Truer Words - A Journal

Paying for Twitterific

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:12:40 GMT

Twitterific is a great little Twitter client for Mac OS X. I use it for most of the day, almost all day. It makes my one-man-office here at Macrobyte feel a bit like I'm working in a big room full of friends and other developers.

The software is free if you don't mind seeing an ad once an hour. They show up in the same space as the "tweets" and can be skipped or ignored very easily. If you don't like the ads, you can register the software for $15. It's a good deal all around.

Some ~~idiot~~ unhappy person, however, has posted a hack that strips out the ads. People who use this hack are stealing money from the Icon Factory: they didn't pay for the software, and they're not showing the ads.

In response, I just registered my copy. They now have my $15.

The ~~idiot~~ gentleman who posted the hack is defending himself, as if he didn't do anything wrong. Here's how we (all Twitterific users, especially software developers) should respond:

Register your copy of Twitterific for $15
Post a note somewhere to let everybody know you've just registered your copy. (I put mine here, but that was probably overkill.)
Post something on your own weblog. Either point here, or reproduce something like these instructions.

Let's see if we can drum up at least a few hundred registrations for them, to show our support. Turn the idiot's bad behavior into something good for the Icon Factory.

Update 1: Some people think the hack never worked, and that it's just link bait for the idiot. Would be great if that's true, but it lets the air out of this particular challenge. ::shrug:: Oh well. At least our friends at the Icon Factory have seen that we will stand up for them. :-)

Update 2: He's definitely a nut. Some people report the hack never worked anyway. Others say it did.

Update 3 ~~(final?)~~: Sheesh, he's a scary nut. With a banana. Now I'm sorry I called him an idiot. Wouldn't have done that if I had known.

Update 4: Here's a MUCH SHORTER version of this story/challenge. Funny!

An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:31:25 GMT

An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep

So here’s my theory: Managers must work shallow and wide, while programmers must work narrow and deep. People who are naturally tuned to one particular method of work will not only enjoy their jobs a lot more, but be better at them. I’m a deep guy, I should be doing deep work.

This article and his theory remind me of something (er, someone) which seems to be completely unrelated: Michael Jordan. When he retired from the Bulls for the first time (shortly after his Dad died) to see if he could play Major League Baseball, he found it very difficult to hit those legendary pitches.

What's the connection? The pitching coach (of either the White Sox or the AA team where he played... the Barons?) said his problem was one of focus. When you play basketball, you have to be aware of everything going on around you all the time. Peripheral vision is key. When you're trying to hit a 90-mile-per-hour baseball, you need absolute tunnel vision, total focus on that one task.

That's the difference between managing and programming.

Like the author of "Wide vs. Deep," I've done both and I prefer programming. (Managing my crew at Macrobyte during its heyday was fine, but I'm referring to my time at RR Donnelley in the mid-90's.)

(Thanks to DF for the original link.)

Birthday, Postponed

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:32:01 GMT

Today was supposed to be my "birthday century". Couldn't do it Sunday, but today should have worked out perfectly.

Unfortunately, I'm behind on work (mostly due to this stuff). I know I *could* take the day off anyway, but I felt guilty about it last night. By the time I went to bed, I'd made the decision to put it off for next week. Probably Monday.

It's too bad, because the weather today is going to be perfect for a long ride. Now, I'm not sure that any weather is good enough to make 135 miles (century plus my age) an easy ride, other than a really strong tail wind that follows me through the whole course, but 74°, sunny, with almost no wind and 50% humidity is really the best I could ever hope for.

I'll ride today, but it'll be just a regular 50.

First PMC Software Auction: Deluxe Mac Software Bundle for Business

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:59:40 GMT

The first PMC Software Auction is FINALLY live!

There are twenty-one apps in the bundle (a few more than I listed last night). Very low opening price, and the reserve is a lot less than I'm hoping for, too.

It's hard to say for sure, but I would guess that this bundle would appeal to anyone who runs their own small business. Self-employed "contract" workers (people like me, for example).

As a reminder: all of these apps (and over 100 more) were donated by their authors for these auction. There's some award winning software in there, and lots of just generally-useful stuff.

As this is for charity, I tried to find a balance between promoting the bundle (on eBay) and saving money. The more I save, the more will go to the PMC. But if it doesn't sell for a good price, that will have been a mistake.

Psst. Spread the Word. Pass It Around

So, I need your help (dear reader). Please tell everybody about these auctions. You could send them to my home page, or to this weblog which only talks about the auctions (and will list each of them as they go live). If you use NetNewWire or GoogleReader, you could even subscribe to the news feed (RSS) for the auctions blog. Update: Send them here, please.

Now that the first one is up, it will be a lot easier for me to do the rest. I plan to run 3-4 auctions at once, with different software in each auction. The successful auctions will be repeated.

This will only work if people find out about it. If I have to put money into promoting the auctions, the charity gets less.

Pudge on Gruber on Amoroso on Steve Jobs

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:31:16 GMT

Steve Jobs wrote an essay about why he thinks the music industry should drop DRM (the 'feature' that prevents you from using music you've purchased at the iTunes music store on more than a few machines).

This greedy clown at Macrovision, Fred Amoroso, responded.

John Gruber translated Macrovision's response from “PR speak" to English. John's a funny guy.

Now Pudge, on /., has translated John's story from "Pundit-speak" to English. It's funny enough to have me laughing out loud most of the way through it.

Macrovision has been in the content protection industry for more than 20 years, working closely with content owners of many types, including the major Hollywood studios, to help navigate the transition from physical to digital distribution.

We've been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years.

I have an amazing power to state the obvious.

Very funny stuff. I'm glad that John linked to it himself, too.

(There's a lot more if you follow the link, that quote is just one part.)

Macworld 2007 Recap

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 01:27:14 GMT

My intent at the start of my travels for MacWorld 2007 was to provide daily updates on my goings-on and derring-dos. Hah. With all the hours in the show hall, and Dinners (with a capital D) every night, I quickly learned that there was almost no time for writing.

This entry will attempt to provide those details which I can recall…

My previous entry finished on Monday morning, and mentioned my plans for the day. This is where we'll pick it up.

Monday

Booth Setup

Bare Bones rented a 2-meter booth in the "overflow hall". There was room there for two presentation stations, or one station and stacks of literature, window stickers, and CD's. They chose the latter.

When I arrived (30 minutes early), nobody and nothing was at the booth. No boxes, no computer, no literature, nobody from Bare Bones. Nobody. So, I spent some time chatting with the guys from provue (makers of Panorama), and then went back to my hotel room.

Back to the booth again at 2:30. The "media rental" guy was there, and was annoyed that we hadn't received anything yet, so he made a call and five minutes later the computer (Dual G5 tower) and the display (30" Apple Cinema) were delivered.

The mac had the wrong display card for that display (only 64 MB of vRam), so it was only able to drive it at 1200x800. I thought that was actually a *good thing*, as it was for presentations, not "daily use." Eventually everybody agreed (or at least agreed to give it a shot), and I'm glad: the display looked great if you were standing back a few feet. We often had large crowds watching our demos, and the low-resolution display made it possible for them to see everything we were doing.

Brian Arrives

Brian arrived in the area a bit early, but I couldn't leave until 3 so he found a parking space over on Mission St. and then walked over.

We met up outside, and I took him downstairs to the show entrance. Couldn't take him past the doors for the lack of an Exhibitor badge, and the 90 year old security guard was clearly prepared to Take Him Out.

Eventually Rich came out, they met, we all chatted for a minute, and then Brian and I found his car so we could go…

Touring Fisherman's Wharf

Oh the tourist-trappiness. It was nearly overwhelming. Every shop offered kitsch at off-season discounts.

In the mid-nineties, while traveling all over the country at the behest of RR Donnelley's sales people, I'd been to San Francisco with Dirk Samuelson (an RRD employee). We found a shop, somewhere, with some very high quality sweatshirts and I bought a couple for my girlfriend, Corinne. Only recently did those sweatshirts wear out enough to require dumping, so I picked up a couple more. I couldn't find anything quite as nice as the old ones (isn't that always the way?), but I did my best by looking at the offerings of every single store.

Brian picked up some chocolate for his girlfriend (whose name happens to meet Macrobyte's standards, even though he hasn't worked at Macrobyte in many years ;-). Then we dropped our packages at his car and returned to Pier 39 for some pictures of the sea lions and us in front of Alcatraz.

After the pictures, he drove me back to the Marriott and then headed back out of the city.

Brian worked for me at Macrobyte for over a year, and we've been friends for over a decade, but that was only the second time I've met him!

Working the Booth

One of the benefits of working the Bare Bones booth is that everybody already knows about the flagship product, BBEdit. In fact, a lot of the people who come to the booth just want a new t-shirt, want to talk about how they use it every day, or they just want to thank someone for creating it. Very cool. Some were very enthused, and that's putting it mildly. (The one day I wore the shirt all the way back to my room, I was twice accosted by BBEdit fans.)

Bare Bones wasn't there for the accolades. It makes for great PR, but the real point was to demo their newest product, Yojimbo.

Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical about Yojimbo before the show. I'd been a beta tester, and then I'd used 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 a little. I installed version 1.3 but didn't do much with it. My problem was that I was too conscious of what it didn't do, so I never really gave it a chance.

That first day, I completely avoided doing demos of Yojimbo, and instead focused on answering questions and doing anything else I could think of that would save me from having to demo an app I wasn't really sure about. I watched Ciaran and Patrick, though, and some ideas started to gestate.

Wednesday morning, first thing, someone asked me to give them a demo of Yojimbo. Overnight I had thought about it enough to know how to tackle it, so I gave my first version of what would become "Seth's Yojimbo demo." It was effective, and I showed most of the app's features in about seven minutes.

Over the next three days I gave that demo many dozens of times, and kept refining it down to the point where I could literally demonstrate every feature of the application in under five minutes, while at the same time I told a simple story about using the software.

With practice I became more effective, and learned what to say. For example, I could show someone how to encrypt something in the application with a single click, but that always resulted in glazed eyes or the question, "Why would I want that?" However, as part of the story I mentioned that the receipt for the gift I've just purchased is right there for my wife to see, but I can hide it from her by just clicking that encrypt button: immediate comprehension.

People like stories.

Tuesday

Breakfast at the Garden Terrace again, this time with Patrick Woolsey (Rich Siegel's partner at Bare Bones) and Ciaran Benson (who worked the booth with us all week).

After eating, Patrick and I went down to the hotel's Shipping & Receiving dept. to pick up the t-shirts and schlep them over to the hall. Ciarnan went to the printer to pick up data sheets of BB's products.

Once we were all at the booth, we only had two things to do: collate all the data sheets and media kits, and fold a couple hundred t-shirts. Ciarnan worked on the paper while I folded.

Eventually, I figured out how to fold the shirts so that the Bare Bones logo was centered on the front. I showed Patrick and a volunteer from another booth how to fold them. With three folders we made short work of the pile.

Then I helped Ciarnan finish with the media kits and data sheets, just as hundreds of visitors swarmed the show floor.

Rules of the booth: drink a lot of water, use the Purel (hand sanitizer), and ask everybody if they have a question. Most will say "no," immediately before asking a question.

Rich's Friends

A bunch of Rich's friends came to the booth toward the end of the day, expecting that Rich would join them for dinner. He had other plans already (see below), but they still hung out at the booth for at least an hour. The bantering was fun.

Someone fussed that BBEdit doesn't support a certain, very simple file type used by Mac programmers. So that night I started throwing a module together, hoping to finish it by the end of the show. Didn't quite get there, but I did have it fully functional by Sunday night. (In fact, it's already in that gentleman's hands and is being beta tested.)

Dinner with the New Rock Stars

Brent had written to a small group on Monday night about having dinner on Tuesday. In his words, "A post-keynote, post-first-day dinner with a few smart folks sounds like just the thing." Apparently, a typo resulted in my receiving the invitation also, but rather than point it out I simply accepted. ;-)

So, Tuesday night we met at the top of the escalators before walking to the restaurant. Attendees included Brent Simmons, Buzz Andersen, Gus Mueller (his page mentions meeting me, in a funny way), John Gruber, Niall Kennedy, Patrick Woolsey, Paul Kafasis, Rich Siegel, Ted Leung, myself, and possibly one or two others whose names I can't remember (sorry!).

Update: Here is Ted's picture of the dinner.

I don't remember what I ordered, but it was terrible. Yuck. Niall — sitting right next to me — made me very jealous with his gigantic, juicy hamburger. Wah.

After the introductions, we mostly talked about the death of Apple Computer, Inc. (the pundits were right all along!), the new Apple TV, and the iPhone. Most notably, the lack of 3rd party app support on the iPhone, which bit everybody in that group right in the tuckus.

Oh, and I told my...

Funny John Gruber Story

What John Gruber story? OK, here:

BBEdit 8.6 added support for the Markdown language. (Markdown is like HTML shorthand, basically.)

Writing the Markdown support for BBEdit was very challenging. This is a language that's designed to be processed once, to convert the markdown to HTML. Speed of processing was not a consideration. However, I (that is, BBEdit's Markdown module) need to process at least part of the Markdown content with every keypress, so as to figure out what to color and how to color it.

While John was beta testing the module for us, he had a bunch of very particular bug reports and feature requests. He wanted everything to be just so. It was tiring, but I appreciated it because we needed a lot of testing very quickly.

Then he submitted one last bug report. Apparently, inline links can have titles (which I knew), and those titles are delimited by quotes. Here's an example:

This is some [linked text](<link_url> "link title").

The syntax docs on John's site said that inline link's titles were delimited by double quotes. Markdown.pl, John's implementation of Markdown in perl — the canonical Markdown interpreter — used double quotes to delimit link titles.

John's bug? He pointed out that even though it's not documented, and the interpreter doesn't actually support it, it's (somehow) a bug that BBEdit did not support 'single-quote delimiters' around the link titles.

(I still think it's funny, but I guess I can see why nobody else would.)

Wednesday

I don't remember much about Wednesday except the MacSB dinner, which was a couple blocks from the show.

After walking down there, I almost went into the wrong place. The restaurant I could see had a sign that said "Chaam Cafe," so I assumed I'd been given the wrong name. However, as I drew near I saw another restaurant next door, and the part of the sign I could read said, "t Cafe". I found out Thursday that others actually went into Chaam Cafe, and two of those with whom I spoke enjoyed a Mac-related party with a bunch of people they didn't know, and got a free meal out of it!

I ate with Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba, Jerry Kayne, and Willian Van Hecke from The Omni Group. However, the restaurant was very crowded and I was tired, so I left as soon as I was done eating.

Thursday

Breakfast

As with every other day on the show floor, we had breakfast at the Marriott. Rich joined us this time, and Agnes (one of the Omelette chefs) recognized him immediately and asked where he's been all week!

"The Fetch guys" sat with us.

MacBrainiac Challenge

Rich was the captain of the developers team for this year's edition of the Macworld game show, which pit the developers against the reporters with trivia questions. Chris Breen was the host.

At the last question — which was actually a challenge, not a question — the teams were tied. The challenge was to send Chris an electronic birthday greeting from their computer (one computer per team), without using email and with the understanding that his laptop was completely off the air.

The solution was to send an SMS message to his cell phone, from iChat. The contact info had been pre-loaded onto both machines, but you had to know how to use iChat with SMS. The reporters tried to use text-to-speech to have their mac deliver the message to Chris vocally, but that answer wasn't accepted. (This really annoyed Andy Inhatko.) Frankly, I think the only reason it wasn't accepted is that it's not the answer they expected. The question should have specified that the solution had to work whether Chris was in the room or 1,000 miles away.

Anyway, the developers won.

Show Floor

My Yojimbo demo was in full swing by this point.

The last couple days of the show mostly blurred together, but I think this is the day that Merlin Mann interviewed Patrick at the booth for about fifteen minutes. You can watch the video, here.

Patrick is about 6' 4" (Update: that said 6' 1" originally. Sorry Patrick. All you little guys look the same!) and weighs a good and very solid 280-290 pounds. Throw in the dark hair, the beard, and the low, rumbly voice and you'll see why I call him Paul Bunyan. :-) Put a knit cap on his head, a plaid, flannel shirt on his shoulders, and an axe in his hand...

Rich wasn't around for most of the day. He spent all day meeting with press people, being interviewed about BBEdit and Yojimbo.

Dinner

Rich made dinner reservations for us at a Chinese restaurant, Brandy Ho's. I walked all the way (a couple miles) in, which felt great. Man, what a city for people-watching. (Corinne wouldn't have enjoyed the walk quite so much, but as I walked I thought about how much she would have loved seeing all the people.)

In attendance at dinner: Rich, Patrick, Naomi (BB's PR person), Sandy (former BB marketer), Sal Sahogian.

Yeah, that's right. I had dinner with Saul, who you all know. :-D

He told a very funny and very memorable story about his days as a nightclub manager in NYC. No room to retell it here, but the best line was, "Sal, I'm starting to get upset," said in a very quiet voice.

After dinner, Rich joined me for the walk back and we mostly talked shop until we had to split for our separate hotels.

Friday

Friday was a blur of exhaustion, sore throats, and Yojimbo-demo-burnout. ;-)

The show ended at 4 PM on Friday instead of 6 like the rest of the week, and most of the hall was rolled up by 4:30!

I couldn't find anybody at the show who was actually selling iPods (how crazy is that?), so after the show I walked to the Apple store to buy one for Corinne. Picked up a 30 GB black (which she seemed to really like when I gave it to her Saturday).

Apollo

Update: I met Apollo on Friday, for the first time ever. Not sure how I forgot this when I first wrote it up, except that I was tired of writing!

(Apollo is a cyclist from the bay area, who has made some very generous donations to my PMC fundraising efforts in the last couple of years. He also had a horrendous bike accident that nearly ended his cycling for good.)

He works right down the street from the Moscone Center, so he took an extra-long lunch break to meet me and see the show. Rich and I were out wandering the show floor (after a friendly, thirty minute chat with the tm boys). We had stopped to talk to a known BBEdit user who happened to be 6' 6" tall (Rich said he felt like a hyphen between us), when this stranger walked up and said, "You must be Seth Dillingham!" He figured it out based solely on the fact that there were two guys there wearing BBEdit t-shirts, and I was really tall!

The most notable moment for Apollo, though, was clearly when the cute Australian boothbabe stepped in front of him and offered him some information about some product. Let's just say she could have sold him any software... ;-)

Apollo went back to the BB booth with me, experienced The Yojimbo Demo, took a couple pictures, and went back to work. Nice to meet you finally, Apollo!

Bare Bones took us out for a huge steak dinner at Harris' Restaurant. A little too far to walk (I was told), but totally worth whatever it takes to get there. Wow. Second best steak dinner I've ever had, and certainly the best ever at a restaurant. This was a celebratory "family dinner," with Rich and Patrick, Naomi, Ciaran, and myself.

Saturday

Saturday morning I packed my suitcase and caught a cab. There were five people in line ahead of me for the cab, but they all got on a shuttle.

Took the taxi to Rich's hotel to pick him up, and then to the airport. So far, it was all smooth...

Airports Schmairport

My itinerary said United Airlines, but when I tried to check in with United they told me I was supposed to go to US Air. GRRRRRRRRR. That's in another terminal about 500 miles away. So I said goodbye to Rich and hurried over there (though I had plenty of time).

Check-in took forever because my bag was overweight. This also cost me $50. It took them 20 minutes to print the receipt for that $50. This meant that by the time I got to the security line, I was already pretty frustrated.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the metal detector.

"Sir, you'd better take off your watch and your belt. If you beep a second time, we have to do a personal inspection." That sounded ominous.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the same metal detector with a tiny, forgotten pillbox in my pocket. I had to strip down to just shorts and t-shirt and stand in a phone booth which is rigged to detect eplosive residue. After that, the "personal inspection." I had to stand with my arms out the sides, palms up, while they wanded me from head to toe. This is all done right out in the open, of course. For your protection.

I checked my anger. Humiliation is the order of the day when you fly, now. It's the next best thing to security!

On the flight to Philly, I sat next to a Java programmer who was very jealous of how fast my MacBook Pro could wake from sleep (he had a Dell), and an old consultant to the printing industry who knew all about the startup of the RR Donnelley Lancaster West plant (which is where I met Corinne). He even thought he recognized her picture.

Philly to Providence was just a 40 minute flight, and I sat next to a couple who cuddled and made out the entire time. Touched down in Providence just a few minutes early, and walked straight to the baggage claim...

... and right past Corinne, who stood there looking amused. I realized what I'd done just a second too late. ;-) (In my defense, I was expecting her to be waiting for me outside, and I was trying to read the signs to see where my bags would come in.)

Thank you, Bare Bones, for letting me help out at the booth. It was a great week! (And it's even better to be home!)

TextMate’s Undo, and the New Editor Wars

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:18:05 GMT

Erik Barzeski on TextMate’s Undo

Recently I conducted another of these experiments. I got so far as trying to modify one of the files in the theme I use on this site. I typed a line or two, uploaded the changes, and realized I'd edited the wrong file. I hit cmd-Z to undo and… yeah. TextMate users know what I found. Undo only "undoes" one character at a time.

I love it. Why do I love it? Check out this snippet from a chat I had with Greg back in July:

Seth:

You had seven items. BBEdit can already do 6.5 of them, almost exactly the same way that TM does it. BBEdit's problem is that they don't present their features very well.

Greg:

y.

Seth:

Actually, 5.5 of them. Their prefs are certainly more complex than TM's. They can reduce them, but they can't eliminate them.

Greg:

i'm not surprised

Seth:

I can't stand TM's undo feature, though. Undoing one character at a time is nuts.

Seth:

At least you can hold it down for fast repeat.

All that just to point out that I've felt exactly the same way for a long time.

There's way more to this story, though. Erik's post touched off another battle in the editor wars, which have raged for decades. Unfortunately for Erik, it doesn't seem that he knew people would get so fired up about it. (See the comments on Erik's page.)

Allan, TextMate's creator, responded there on the site. As did a zillion other people. Back and forth, back and forth. Someone named MJD said:

Something that really turns me off TextMate is the way Allan Odgaard is constantly attacks BBEdit, Barebones, and Rich Siegel. There is no need for it. Especially the attacks on Rich. Try standing on the merits of your own program rather than belittling another.

Allan and his friend Jacob Rus both denied that Allan has attacked BBEdit, Bare Bones, or Rich.

Has anybody read Allan's weblog's version of an acceptance speech for his Apple Design Award? You could say this is his definitive link, it's where he tells the story of winning the award — an award which is a huge honor for any mac developer. In it, he points to a picture of himself that also happens to include a man getting sick, and he says, "no, the guy getting sick is not Mr. Siegel."

I know of plenty of other little bashes on BBEdit, Bare Bones, and Rich. Some published, some not, but that comment in his weblog post is probably the most telling. It looks to this outsider like Allan wants TextMate to succeed almost as much as he wants BBEdit to fail and Rich to be hurt somehow.

Allan: the mac platform is doing well, but the developer community is still pretty small. You have to assume that if you say something, it's going to be quoted and re-quoted. Is your business plan really based around mocking Rich, claiming that Bare Bones is just a sales-oriented company that contracts out all the hard work, and poking fun at other independent developers?

OK, I'm tired of this battle already. It's time for this code monkey to climb back into his tree and finish the next language module.

(Note: please see the BBEdit Disclaimer.)

Authorize.net is Driving Me Nuts

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:40:04 GMT

Macrobyte has its merchant account with a merchant service providor that uses Authorize.net for it's payment gateway. Confused? Macrobyte processes credit cards through company A, and company A's services are basically a "wrapper" for Authorize.net's. That's how it looks from the outside, anyway (at least to a programmer, since nobody else would call it a 'wrapper').

We've been doing things this way since late 1999 or early 2000; I can't remember exactly when. Years ago I knew why we were using company A, now I'm not so sure (and this is something I'm going to look into).

Earlier this year one of these companies (and I think it was Authorize.net, but sometimes it's hard to tell) decided they don't like their customers anymore. First, verybody's login ID's stopped working. We all had to create new ones, after answering a long list of security questions. In order to set up the new ID's, we had to provide our old ones, along with the old passwords... but I had been doing this in the same browser for so long that I had no idea what password to use: the browser on the computer in my office remembered it for me.

Eventually I figured it out. This morning my new password expired. The browser's eagerness to update it's password database interacted with Authorize.net's "reset your password" form in such a way as to lock me out of the system, again.

That's all fixed now, but wait, there's more!

In 2001 I started processing most cc transactions as 'batches'. That is, recurring transactions are stored in a database, and I jsut have to select which ones to run on a given day, enter any special notes to be attached to the individual transactions, and then let'er rip. A few minutes later each client receives an email receipt, and I receive a copy. Then at the same time every day I receive a Batch Settlement Report which tells me that everything was processed successfully, if there were any batches to settle that day. A few days later, the money is deposited into Macrobyte's account.

Back in June, the batches started failing. No settlement report, no money, and no notification of the failure! If I didn't notice that I hadn't been paid, then I was simply out of luck.

A very courteous rep from Authorize.net just told me that he can see that many of my batches have "errored out" in the last five months, but he couldn't see why. Nothing changed on my end, at all, so the problem must be at their end. He agreed, and said he would "try to have an engineer offer some suggestions."

Yeah. That's customer service in the twenty-first century. A courteous, friendly black hole from which no light or information can ever escape.

Programmers (and Their Bosses) Should Take Note

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:45:43 GMT

Every programmer ("software developer") with whom I've discussed Steve Yegge's recent article, Good Agile, Bad Agile, has had a similar comment: "I think I'd like to work there."

Further discussion usually reveals that the person (myself included) might not want to actually work at Google, but most definitely wants to work in an environment like Steve describes.

Steve describes what I love about being self-employed. Most of the time, I'm working on software that I care about, and when business is going well I'm able to work at my own pace. (When I'm really interested in or enthused about the project or product I'm developing, "my own pace" could mean "almost non-stop for days on end" or something a little healthier.) I even have those food-related perks that Steve mentions!

Attitudes about software development, such as Steve ascribes to Google, could transform our industry if enough of us read and retell stories like Steve's and decide that we won't settle for (much) less.

To be clear: I don't mean "transform our industry" in the sense of giving us all cushy jobs where we can eat all we want and be spoiled rotten. That's simply a means to the real end, the real transformation. The real transformation is that the quality of the software will improve because more of us will be creating something we care about, and releasing it when it's done rather than simply when it's usable.

An Example from My Own Recent Experience

Bare Bones recently allowed me (as a contractor) to work on an important feature until it was done. I smile every time I think about that, even though I finished it over a week ago! Yes, there were some scheduling constraints (Meaning I couldn't keep working on it forever. Obviously.), but they wanted something of high enough quality that we could all say, "It's done." (We've since had ideas for some new features that could be added in future revisions, but that's a train that just never stops rolling...) When's the last time you wrote software for someone else (employer or client), and didn't have to release it until you felt it was DONE? It feels good, let me tell you.

Google's definitely on to something, and I hope it catches on.

Virus in an Envelope: How Chelsea Groton Bank Avoided Spreading the Disease

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:31:45 GMT

Corinne works at the local bank, Chelsea Groton. You get an idea what kind of place it is in the first three seconds of seeing their home page. Yes, the officers of the bank really do drive around in bright purple VW Bugs (I'm not kidding). The guy driving the bug (and smiling and waving) in that animation is the company president and CEO, Duncan Stoddard.

Ok, that's not really what the bank is like. It's still a bank. Stuffy and conservative on the inside, they just happen to wear a clown suit on the outside, sometimes.

Sometimes Corinne covers the front desk for her friend Alysia, when Alysia goes to lunch or has to leave early. She did this yesterday, and Alysia asked her to help out with a "little task" while she was out. "Go through the names of the businesses on this letter, and type up a list of their mailing addresses."

Well, that's easy enough. So she did a few, then took a minute to read the letter. Apparently a young boy named Craig had a tumor, and the Make a Wish Foundation was trying to help him get into the Guiness Book of World Records by amassing the largest collection of business cards. They were doing this by asking business people to do two things: send in their cards, and pass the request on to twenty of their business associates.

That's exactly what the bank was doing. Corinne was reading the actual request that the bank's President and CEO was going to send to twenty local businesses, retelling this heart-string-tugging story. "Let's help make this little boy's dream come true, while there's still time." (I just made that quote up, but I imagine something like that was in there.)

A little bell rang in Corinne's head. My babe remembered her training! That is, any message which asks you to forward it to more than one other person, is not to be trusted. Or, in shortened, form, The virus is the email! Except in this case, it was an actual letter-in-an-envelope.

She looked it up. It's not hard to find. Search for "craig business cards" and you'll find more than a few references to this years-old story.

They didn't want to believe it. The folks in Human Resources were all quite distraught.

Personally, I probably would have let them send it, just for the giggles. :-)

Invoice Troubles

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:07:28 GMT

I've been working on one project for the last nine days. Long hours (which is a good thing about all the rain, as there was no temptation to go outside), and my head has really "been in it."

Today I need to generate the invoice, but looking back over my time sheets I see that — on many of those nine days — all I did was write down the name of the project and how many hours I spent on it. Which means producing this invoice is going to take ten times longer than it should because I need to review all of my work in order to figure out what was done when.

As I told Greg, I'm tempted to fire me for this mess, as I certainly know better than to go so many days without putting down any details. Inexcusable and unforgivable. However, firing myself would mean that I have to do all the work, plus I'd have nobody to boss around anymore. We wouldn't like that. ;-)

Bargaining

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:15:13 GMT

Have you ever had a client that dickers with you for a better price?

I have one (occasional) client who has done this with me each time he's purchased from me. I'm surprised to find that I quite enjoy it.

In fact, I used to expect all of my clients to do this. If my quote was too high, I expected them to tell me. Unfortunately, over the years I found that if my quote was too high then my regular clients would simply put the job off until they could afford it (which often meant skipping it entirely), and new clients would just go with someone else. This meant that when business was 'lean', I would intentionally low-bid projects, just to be sure I'd have some work (even with regular clients).

If more people were willing and able to dicker, buying and selling would be a lot more fun! (My impression is that this practice is still quite common in other countries. The person I mentioned in the second paragraph is not from the U.S., which may have something to do with it.)

To be fair, I should also mention that I have one who usually tries to talk me into a *higher* price. ;-)

Update on the Email Conundrum

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 20:58:52 GMT

The email conundrum gets weirderer and weirderer.

First, a little more background. I should have pointed out from the beginning that this contractor (XXX) has been working with the client for awhile. More than a year. Initially, he took over the management of their Conversant sites. We spoke a number of times on the Conversant support site and in private email. Personable guy (though he sees the world through Windows-colored glasses).

Now, here's the additional weirdness, the 'further evidence' I mentioned a little while ago.

The client had asked me for some additional services before shutting down their site. XXX was cc'ed on that request. I responded in the affirmative, and also cc'ed XXX.

On February 7th, after the work was done, I sent a message to the client to let him know the work was done and what I was charging. I have the original email in front of me right now: it was sent ONLY and SOLELY to the client. There's only one 'To:' address, and there are no CC or BCC addresses.

The client didn't respond. The charges were only a couple hundred dollars, which I knew wasn't a problem. 28 hours later, I resent the same email, again only to him.

On the 9th (yesterday), when I still hadn't received a response, I wrote to XXX. Here's what I said (note that BBBB is my replacement for the client's name, just like XXX for the contractor):

	>XXX,
	>
	>I have been completely unable to contact BBBB. All of my email to him
	>just seems to vanish into the ether. I never get any bounces, but he
	>doesn't seem to receive my messages, either. (I've actually wondered
	>if they're being intercepted.)
	>
	>Could you please have him call me tomorrow, towards the end of his
	>work day? I just want to put the charges through for [SNIPped for privacy]
	>
	>I'm in the US (guess you knew that), at 860-572-0244.

He wrote back and said that he would call the client to have them call or email me. They didn't. So, I wrote to him again to see if he knew why.

His response is where things turn weird again:

	>Sorry, Seth it's not a conspiracy - just me.  Today was hell and I
	>forgot they take Friday afternoons off (lucky folk).
	>
	>I HAVE sent them an email and am sure they will contact you Monday.
	>
	>I had already told BBBB what your charges were and he accepted them.

OK, so he didn't call them, and it was too late by the time I reminded him. What about that last sentence, though?

This is ridiculous.

I wrote to ask him how he knows what my charges are, but have not received any response.

If the contractor was a talented individual who (I believed) really wanted what's best for the client, there would be no issue here. Instead (warning: assumption alert) this looks more and more like a more-technically-knowledgeable-than-the-client HACK who has taken the client hostage and they don't even know it.

Maybe I'm wrong and nothing shady is happening. I haven't yet come up with any realistic alternatives, but I guess it's possible.

Mystified in Mystic

An Odd Situation, an Email Conundrum

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 01:09:26 GMT

One of Macrobyte's long-time hosting clients wrote to me a couple of weeks ago to say that, after almost five years, they're moving to a new platform. They contracted someone about a year ago to handle their technical needs, and he has developed a completely new site for them in ASP. This contractor convinced them that their sites needed to be redone from scratch.

Eh, whatever, these things happen sometimes. They professed to be extremely happy with our service, but their contractor really felt that this other technology was more appropriate for their needs. Here's a slightly modified (to omit names) excerpt of my response:

My guess is that, in the end, the real answer will simply be that XXX was more familiar with the other system. That's often the real reason web sites are moved from one platform to another.

If that sounds harsh, it wasn't. I was politely asking if they would mind explaining the decision a little more fully. If there's something Macrobyte could have offered, but didn't, I'd like to rectify the situation for the next client. Still, as you can see, I had my suspicions.

I still have that email. It was only sent directly to the client who wrote to me. The contractor -- who had already taken over all hosting responsibilities for this client, including email and web -- was not cc'd or bcc'd.

This is where things start to go weird.

Three hours after I sent that email, I received a response from the 'new guy'. He cc'ed the client, and confirmed that yes, in fact, the move had more to do with familiarity with the other system than with technical reasons.

Another three hours later, and the client responds to the email from the 'new guy'. Here's the first paragraph of his email (anonymized, again):

I have read your email to me at the end of XXX's email.for some reason I haven't received the email direct.

So... he never received my private email, but somehow the new contrator and hosting service both received and responded to it.

If the client didn't receive it, then he couldn't have forwarded it to the new guy. Note that we're only talking about a matter of hours, here, not days. He didn't simply forget.

I believe all of these facts to be completely correct. With that, I can only come to one conclusion, but I'd like some other opinions. Maybe there's some answer to this which I haven't considered.

Let's leave it there for now. Comments greatly appreciated!

How Gus Mueller became an independent programmer in just 1068 days

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 14:17:45 GMT

Gus said:

When I started writing software on the side for fun, it never really crossed my mind that I would be able to to support myself and do it full time.

This is a great article. Also be sure to check out the comments. It's very cool to see so many recognizable names there (many of them donated to the PMC Software Auctions!)

Deleting 'Invisible' Files: Source of Panic and Adrenalin

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 03:01:42 GMT

I've been working 12 to 15 hour days on a single project since early Friday morning, last week. This evening, after installing XAMPP on that Windows box I mentioned earlier, I was preparing to move the project over to the server. Before moving it, I wanted to import it to svn.

A preliminary test run with the Windows server had revealed a whole mess of hidden files. Anything I edited in BBEdit had a corresponding hidden file, like surgeons_controller.php and .surgeons_controller.php (or something like that). Before committing it all to svn, I wanted to remove all of the unnecessary hidden files.

It's been a little while since I used the find command, so I was careful. I thought.

find . -name .* -print

Nope, that throws an error. Let's try the regex syntax.

find -E . -regex '^.*/\\.[^/]*$' -print

OK, that's better, but it's including the .htaccess files. Need to keep those!

find . -regex '^.*/\\.[^/]*$' \\( ! -name ".htaccess" \\) -print

OK, that looks right. It's listing all of the 'invisible files' except .htaccess. Now I'll just add the command to delete those files.

find -E . -regex '^.*/\\.[^/]*$' \\( ! -name ".htaccess" \\) -exec rm {} \\; -print

But wait! Seems like every few weeks I'm having to reconstruct this command. "I'll just make an alias for it in my .bashrc and .bashprofile, so I don't have to work it out like this every time I need to use it..." (Can you hear the dark, scary music playing in the background? It's there.)

Making an alias is easy: just wrap it in quotes and assign it to something, like this:

alias rminv='find -E . -regex '^.*/\\.[^/]*$' \\( ! -name ".htaccess" \\) -exec rm {} \\; -print'

Saved the file, opened a new terminal window, cd to the right directory, and run rminv (for "remove invisibles").

WARNING: Don't try that at home, kids! It deleted every single file in my only copy of this project. It was a stupid mistake that I've only just now figured out as I wrote this. Do you see it?

No, I'm not kidding, it really deleted my only copy. I panicked, and asked Brian if he knew of any miracle cures for deleted files. He pointed out a few $100 apps I could try but didn't know of anything free that would do the trick.

I figured file-recovery apps might be cheaper on Windows. I found one called r-undelete that was only $55 and had a free demo. The description suggested that it would let me search for the deleted files, but would only let me recover them after paying fo the app.

Well, it turns out that's not the case at all: it recovers all files less than 64 Kb. That's the limit in the demo version. Plus, it integrates with Windows Explorer very nicely.

r-undelete recovered all but five of my files. One of them was unnecessary, and the other four were views (in the MVC sense) that were very similar to views from another model, so they were quite easy to recreate.

In the end, I wasted about two hours on this. The alternative was unthinkable, though. I still just have the demo to r-undelete, but I will buy a copy soon and I'm hereby recommending it to anyone and everyone.

Now I need a nap. The adrenalin rush from realizing that I had just deleted 60 hours of work has sapped all of my strength!

Follow-Up: Contract Programming Rates Negotation Complete, Thanks

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:04:22 GMT

Last week I asked for a little help with a negotation Macrobyte was having with a client, regarding hourly rates for consulting/contract programmers.

Thanks to suggestions that came in by email, instant message, Brian Andresen's link to a DICE.com rates survey and my own willingness to keep negotiating in spite of a lot of pressure to give in... the whole issue was resolved quite satisfactorily, yesterday.

Domain Renewals

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:48:45 GMT

One of the facts of providing web hosting services is that, when a client takes care of registering their own domain name, it's not our fault when the client then ignores the renewal notices from the registrar and the domain is then put on hold.

On the other hand, the drawback is that they still think it is our fault. Even after we explain the situation, they still think we're being shifty, somehow. Not sure how, but definitely shifty. ;-)

Seriously folks, if you have a few dollars, renew your domains for as long as you can possibly afford to. Going year to year just isn't worth the hassle, and it's a lot better than losing control of your domain when you forget to renew.

Standard Contract Programming Hourly Rates?

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:30:49 GMT

Does anyone know where I might find an indication of what the programming/"software development" industry currently considers an average hourly rate for contract work?

Yes, I realize there are lots of sub-categories for software development. Some types pay a lot more than others.

I'm in negotiations with a client for an ongoing project, and we're basing too much on our own opinions. We need real numbers, but I haven't been able to find much.

There are lots of development services out there that list their rates. If there are no other options, I could always do my own survey of those sites... but that's a huge task.

Any help?

Mozilla Foundation Gives Birth

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 19:31:59 GMT

The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it's giving birth to a brand new baby... capitalist! The Mozilla Corporation will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation.

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products.

Apparently they're making too much money -- somehow -- to honestly call themselves "non-profit." I don't really understand that, but I don't know all the rules of non-profithood.

Anyway, there's a major shakeup happening at Mozilla. The software will still be free and open source, so this doesn't really affect the users at all. In fact, I'm not sure it really affects much of anything, except that everybody's talking about it.

You can read a lot more about this at MozillaZine. Most of the stories on Planet Mozilla, for the moment, are related to this news, too.

A Spot on the Team!?

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 20:32:54 GMT

The Conneciticut chapter of the Special Olympics just called.

When she said where she was calling from, I assumed she had heard about my stupendously bad estimation of a recent project, and was actually going to offer me a spot on the team!

Darn. She just wanted a donation. Mabye next year.

The USPS: Keeping the 'Snail' in 'Snail Mail'

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:02:15 GMT

Macrobyte was awaiting delivery of a large-ish check from a large client, all last week. Supposedly, the invoice had bee processed the week of the eighteenth.

Thursday the 27th came, no check. Friday, same deal.

The check had ("supposedly") been mailed from just outside of New York City. We're not even one hundred miles away. How long can it take the USPS to deliver? I used to get mail from California, even British Columbia, in just three days. On the other hand, every business owner has shuddered with dread at the words, "the check is in the mail." Even when the client is a large company, you still have to deal with individuals, and under the right circumstances they'll tell you what they think you want to hear, if only to get you off the phone.

Forgive my cynicism, but I've been self employed for about thirteen years.

The check did show up, finally, on Monday. That's May 2nd. It was postmarked April 23rd!

I'm sure this is why the USPS wants to raise the price of first class stamps yet again. Their snails have hit them with a work slowdown as a protest for their low wages.

Adobe Buys Macromedia. Wake Me When It's Over.

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:48:38 GMT

Adobe's buying Macromedia. I can't see how they wanted anything from this deal besides Flash and Dreamweaver.

The rest of my comments are on Jim's site. I'd have saved them for this space if I'd realized anybody would care about this. Zzzzzzz.........

Paul Graham's Advice to His Dad: Buy Apple

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:11:49 GMT

Paul Graham, in his latest essay, Return of the Mac:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.

Later he explains that in the mid 80's he told his Dad why he should buy some stock in Sun Microsystems. He didn't listen. He ends this essay with some more advice for his Dad:

So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these.

Good advice. Check out their stock chart.

Server Retirement

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:54:07 GMT

Macrobyte's original Free-Conversant server was retired from the ISP a couple of weeks ago, and replaced with a much faster machine (which was another of our servers, whose position was filled by a brand new crazy-fast machine).

This is a machine I built from the ground up, in late 1999 (I think my brother-in-law Art helped some, but I can't remember for sure...).

Until yesterday, the plan was to sell it on eBay for whatever we could get. Instead, it's now in service as my brother's eBay slave. I guess eBay has some software (turbo lister) that only runs on Windows, so Jed's slummin'.

This is a sort of trade, though. He's going to list some of my remaining machines for me. I have way too many functional-but-unused computers around here that need to go.