Well, those days are gone. Another of my monitors is now failing. I called support and was told that their policies have changed. I now have to ship my monitor back to them and wait up to two weeks for repair and return (they’ll replace only if it cannot be repaired). Which means I am without the monitor for two weeks. Which means I need to buy a new monitor. This time it will not be a Samsung. And that’s a shame. I love their products and have been buying them exclusively for years. Maybe this is normal policy for the industry, but their old policy had me publicly singing their praises, while the new policy has me publicly deriding them. Wonder how that will play out for them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It really is that simple. Dropbox places a folder on your desktop. Anytime you drag another folder or file into the Dropbox folder it is instantly synchronized and available to your other machines running Dropbox. In addition, you can also right-click on any file or folder and create a private URL to that resource. Sending that URL to someone gives them instant access to that resource. In addition, and by default, if a folder contains images, they are displayed in a very cool gallery format.

Signing up for an account gives you 2GB storage. If you recommend friends and they sign up, you get additional free storage. Larger storage options are available for a reasonable fee.

I now have Dropbox running on my workstation, my Windows laptop, my Mac laptop, and now my iPhone. Brilliant.

Here’s the deal. I do all of my design and development work on my local PC. Once I have finished a piece of work, I upload it to a staging server where it can be reviewed by the client. Once the client approves of the new work, it is uploaded to the live, production server.

The problem is my local machine, which runs WinXP and Apache, is painfully slow. Not because the machine itself is slow (it’s souped up with lots of speed, CPU, and Memory), but something else. When I load a page locally, it seems to take forever; the same page on either of the external servers loads within seconds. I should note also that this slowness appears primarily on Firefox.

I’d been Googling for this for a while until I came across this (http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/06/17/fixing-firefox-slowness-with-localhost-on-vista.aspx):

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing.  To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true.  This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

Kudos to the guy who figured this out. My pages load beautifully now. I went the extra step and disabled IPv6 on the whole machine.

Oy, when I read this I realize how truly geeky I am.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately, posting some inane things, but mostly writing about experiences from my work. And I’ve really enjoyed finding all the applications you can add to Facebook to make it more useful and more integrated with other services. This morning, I found an app that grabs all the photos (in their galleries, no less) from Picasa and displays them to a tab in my profile page. Because I use Photoshop Lightroom 2 to process my images and then directly export them to my Picasa web, I now am able to update Picasa while also updating FB with my photos.

But wait … now there’s more. It turns out this plugin I found doesn’t work so well, and also, only displays the photos and galleries in a tab in my profile, with no announcement on my wall that there are new pictures. And now I find something that is already built into FB that will accomplish this for me, without an additional application. Do this:

Go to your Profile page in FB
Click on the Settings button just below the What’s on your mind box
Here you’ll see a bunch of options for connecting to services like Picasa and Flickr
Just click on the service you want and enter the username used in that service
Done!

To further my aspirations for convergence of everything I hold dear, I even added my deli.cio.us bookmarks to my twitter feed so they also now will end up on my FB page. I am at one with the cyberverse.

There’s not much more to this application. You create related boxes and can move them about the screen. You can change the color scheme and either export it as an image or export it to the paid version ($6.99). For free, this is definitely worth trying out, especially if you’re like me and finding your phone a bigger part of running your business.

After some reading and phone interviewing, we (my client and I) decide on First Data. They have a stable platform, lots of sample code in different languages to get your connectivity started, and they just are beginning a joint service with TeleCheck to offer batch check processing (ACH).

We laid out our requirements to First Data in several meetings and conference calls: our in-house system manages tuition and billing charges, monthly it sends this batch to the vendor to process all the charges against parents’ cards and accounts, and then we receive back into our system the status of all charges for reconciliation (Approved, Denied, Declined, etc.). It seemed like the perfect solution; all automated and tight.

This was the service and functionality that was sold to us. Shortly after the implementation phase began, however, we discovered that they have no such capability for returning to our system the status of the processed charges. You can imagine our reaction. (This was the differentiator between them and their competition. Sage, for example, is very clear that they cannot support this.) We’d already put in place all the hooks for passing our data to them, so we were in deep at this point. A week of calls and emails followed with the result only that our sales person was new and didn’t understand what we planned on doing, even after all the meetings and descriptions and specs. The short of it is that they lack the capacity to fulfill the promise and have no intention of satisfying our expectations.

For the short-term I wrote a script that takes a downloaded report and pipes it into our system so that we can have monthly reconciliation tracked. It works, but it is not automated and not ideal. Strike one.

The second incident comes from the sample code they make available to customers to connect to their system. While the code is sound in that it does indeed provide hooks for connecting, it is flawed in structure so as to let test transactions through as real transactions. How did we find this out? By sending thousands of dollars worth of tests through only to find they actually got processed. A true nightmare. Fortunately, we were able to clear out the check transactions quickly because they take several days to process, but the credit cards went through instantly. Fun. Days spent on the phone with banks reversing charges and calling parents to clear the situation. Strike two.

The third incident stems from the fact that for all check transactions Telecheck requires a valid driver’s license for the account holder. We have been billing our parents for several years (there is an established relationship), so Telecheck was able to waive this requirement for us. Until this weekend, that is. Some technical error at Telecheck caused the system to be unavailable for several hours. When service was restored, our transactions began to fail because no driver license information was sent along with our records. Again, after several calls and emails, it appears the service department is unaware of our waived requirement and now needs to take it “under review.” This “review” has been going on for four days now, and meanwhile our transactions continue to fail.

So I ask you, is this the support you expect from your vendors? Once the promises are made and the contracts signed, they wash their hands of you? If I could, I’d pull up stakes and move on in a minute, but it ain’t that easy. I’m restraining myself and trying hard to attract the bees with honey rather than my piss and vinegar, but it’s tough. This affects my relationship with my client (though he’s been very good to me about it). I put this service right up there with overstock.com and Sprint.

The take-away? I did everything in my power to mitigate the circumstances that affected my client’s system and his ability to run his business.  This is his expectation of me. I’m confounded that First Data does not share this philosophy.

Update 4/24/2008, 9:00AM: We’re on Day 7 now.  We get nothing from First Data but emails asking us to test again (although surely they must know it still does not work), and excuses and promises. We are 7 days down and they have done nothing. You decide.

Update 4/24/2008, 2:00PM: Their brilliant engineered solution is for us to put a dummy driver’s license number and state in the required fields. It works for now, but I imagine it will break when someone changes or removes it.

Update 4/24/2008, 5:45PM: First Data decides the dummy data hack isn’t such a good idea afterall. Now they want to port us over to another “product.” Not really sure what that means yet.

We released a major new site rebuild this week and had the unfortunate experience of having the system running on IIS 6.

How do I hate thee, IIS? Let me count the ways …

URL Rewrites. This is the functionality that turns a URL like this: index.php?id=564, into a pretty URL that looks like this: /running-wordpresss-on-iis-sucks/. This second method is preferred not only for search engine exposure, but also because it is easier on the eyes, easier to remember, and is immediately recognizable when sent via an email. This is simple to do when running WP on an Apache web server because you can simply set it in WP (customizing the structure of the link to use dates, titles, etc) and forget it. But IIS has no sense of URL rewriting. You can redirect a file by going into the server settings and configuring it by hand, but that is unacceptable when managing 1,000+ documents/posts/pages.

The lack of rewriting also affects paging (when the server returns multiple pages of search results and the URL needs to support a structure like this: /?search=why-does-windows-suck/page/3).

I spent many days looking for and programming my own solutions. None that I could find solved all the problems created by the missing functionality. I’ll save you the details, but I finally found one that worked:  WordPress URL Rewrite by Binary Fortress. It is a simple ISPAI .dll extension that you point your IIS server to. There is one .ini file where you can identify the root-level directory where you want to start rewritiing, and then a second section where you can list exceptions. The exceptions was critical for this project because we needed to leave in place e-commerce functions that run on IIS).

And then there’s 301 redirects. Windows IIS does not support this either. Why is this important? Because when you rebuild or redeign a site, even though the content in the system remains the same, often the permalinks are going to be different (some of them, anyway). In order to maintain your good standing with the search engines, you need to redirect those old pages to the new ones, or at least to another page that exists on the site. If search results from Google are returning pages on your site that no longer exist, your ranking suffers. Apache allows you to create a .htaccess file, which is a simple text file that the server reads to map those changes (it’s simply a line-by-line list of old pages and news pages). But IIS has nothing this simple. In IIS you need to go to each page in the file structure, right-click on it, go to it’s properties, and then set it to map to another page. Again, for a site with 1,000+ pages, a nightmare.

These may sound like trivial quibles, but this is a fundmental issue when you’re knee-deep in a redesign/rebuild. The alternative, when possible, is to run Apache on the Windows server.

The mission of The Northborough Group is to provide services that help businesses manage information better and to use that information in a way that supports defined business goals. The Northborough Group enables:

• business analysis and functional specifications;
• design and development of internet and intranet sites;
• data modeling, mining and migration;
• open-source systems integration;
• custom development that provides context for your data.

We also specialize in content management systems (CMS) and the information structures required to build them properly (for example, meta data and taxonomy). In addition, we partner with other experts in the field to better serve your needs.

Visit our web site at http://www.northboroughgroup.com. Check out our blog, which keeps you current with our projects but also provides insight into industry trends and provides technical how-tos. In addition, click through our portfolio to see the projects and systems we have created. And best of all, click on Contact Us and tell us what ideas you have and how we can help make them reality.

My email is cmurray@northboroughgroup.com. You can always reach me at 508.294.6732.

Now that school for me is close to complete, I intend to use my time otherwise spent studying and writing papers to delve back into making music. My mission is to gather some of my old equipment now stored in a closet (mixing board and some outboard effects) and combine them with a PC-based recording system. I looked at a lot of stand-alone recording systems, but the prices are high and I already own really great recording software. This also seems to be the way studios are going, software based systems on very high-end computing platforms.

So, I began looking around at PCs that were up to the task. I thought first of building my own PC. I’d heard that you can buy all the components and a case and build a new PC for significantly less than a major brand. While that is true, the system I configured and priced would still have cost near a thousand dollars.

I spoke with my brother Keith, who has made many purchases from eBay. I looked around on eBay and found some really kicking systems for astonishingly good prices (I kept thinking of the Crazy Eddie commercials of my youth: ‘Noooobody Beats Crazy Eddie!’). I wrote to several of the vendors to ask how they could sell these things so cheap and the answer, predictably, was that they make so many of them that they get their parts at discount rates. Another reason for the low cost is because most of them come with no OS installed, like Windows or Mac OSX. (I have a Windows XP Pro disk so this is not an issue).

So I took the plunge and ordered a custom system with the following specs, all for around $400 (I already have the monitor, mouse, and keyboard):