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Shouldn’t have gotten out of bed

Today is one of those days that I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed. It started with a fraud alert placed on my credit card then one bug after another. I went to look at a bug assigned to me and after I got the application launched (I had to go in circles to clear out the preferences and everything else, which I should have done before I started), found out that one of the components kept crashing. It kept crashing because a framework it needed wasn’t there. I tracked this down to a bug in Apple Remote Desktop 3.0 where it mangles some symbolic links. So after working around that mess, I fixed my bug with one line of code, very simple. Next I went to look at some memory issues. This lead to a crash which brought up our crash reporter which apparently wasn’t working. After awhile of checking the server and the code, found out that the crash reporter was crashing, curiously in the same place the app I was trying to debug was crashing. Seeing where the issue was, I typed:

env CFZombieLevel=3 /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari

into Terminal and went to https://store.apple.com (any https site would do) and low and behold, I got the same crash. There appears to be a bug with either the CFZombieLevel (which I need to check for memory leaks) or in the low level SSL code. So I had to report that as a bug to Apple. That brings me to now which is 7 hours after I started working. I’ve fixed one bug today which is a pretty poor performance. This is all on top of not feeling great.

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My credit card company sure is on top of things

This morning I tried to renew my jConnect account and it didn’t accept my credit card due to some technical problem with their system, so I kept trying. The system finally accepted my credit card. No more than 30 minutes later, I got a voicemail from my credit card company saying that there was suspicious activity on my card and that I had to verify the charges. Apparently each time I tried to update my credit card information, jConnect send through a $1 authorization. They did this 3 times before sending my actual charge. This pattern of small, repeated authorizations apparently triggers a fraud alert on the card. Unfortunately the voicemail credit card company left for me directed me to an automated system that asked me to verify the charges one by one which was a problem because while I only authorized 1 of them, if I said no to the other ones, my card would have been cancelled and it would have been a royal mess. So, I logged into my account, called the number that was listed and talked to a human who removed the fraud alert.

Having had to replace my credit card twice in the last 5 years, I’m very careful about using virtual account numbers (a service my credit card company provides that gives me a new card number for each online transaction) and make sure I always check my statements. If you’ve ever had to replace a credit card (one card was stolen and the other time, the card number was used fraudulently), you know how much a pain in the butt it can be. I’m glad this was only a minor scare and I knew the cause right away.

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Never trust a bank

On Friday I went to the bank to deposit a check for my business; I made a mistake and put in my personal ATM card and deposited the business check into my personal account. I noticed my mistake almost immediately and went right into the bank to straighten it out. They couldn’t get my check out of the ATM and give it back to me, so they transferred money from my personal account to my business account for the amount of the check. I thought that was the end of my mistake. I happened to check my statement online today and found out that the bank (properly) rejected my deposit as the check was made out to my business and debited my account for the deposit. So I called the bank and they said within 7-10 days the check should be mailed back to me so I can try the deposit again. This is fine, but I wish I was told this before I made the transfer as I got real close to overdrawing my account. Now I have to write a check from my business account to my personal account to reverse the “fix” I made on Friday. It’s unfortunate that my little mistake has caused me such a major headache.

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A little UI tweaking can go a long way

The other day, I sent my latest program to a friend of mine to test and he asked if I wouldn’t mind some constructive feedback. I’m always hesitant to get user interface feedback as last time I did (from an Apple UI guru), I was in the host seat for well over an hour getting what I thought was a good user interface ripped apart. Anyway, I told my friend that as long as it didn’t involve brushed metal (the look that Apple is using everywhere in excess), I’d listen. Over the course of a day or so, we exchanged instant messages and email and I was amazed to see the transformation. While I thought my program was technically solid, I wasn’t all that pleased with the user interface before; it was very utilitarian. My friend’s ideas along with some of my own sparked by his comments turned my program into something that I’m extremely pleased to show off (when the time comes).

User interfaces will never be perfect or to everyone’s liking, but a little effort and a little different perspective can go a long way.

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Another reason to hate time change

I’ve never been a big fan of switching back to standard time from daylight savings time as it gets dark sooner and the long days of winter are ahead (OK, I live in San Diego and winters aren’t all that bad, but I’m more of a late spring/summer kind of person). On the news last night, they reminded us that this will be the last time change in October as next year daylight savings time ends one week later. What problems will this cause? Well, for every device that has time zone information built into it, for example Palm handhelds, they’ll either have to issue a software update or everyone (in the US) will have to create new time zones with the correct start and end dates for daylight savings time. Furthermore, all the synchronization software will have to be updated to handle this. Talk about another headache for me. Time zones are enough of a problem in software without them changing.

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Poor emergency response times

San Diego has consistently been ranked as have poor emergency (fire/medical) response times with average response times being somewhere around 10 minutes or so. For a major city, this is pretty awful. We saw this first hand today. We took our dog to Dusty Rhodes park in Ocean Beach (there isn’t a dog park near us) and as we were sitting there, I heard a crash, looked up and saw the tail end of a multi car accident on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Lots of people went over to see if they could help and several dialed 911. The first fire truck didn’t arrive on scene for somewhere around 15 minutes after the accident, then an ambulance arrived more than 5 minutes after that (we saw the ambulance come around the park and it took about 3-4 minutes for it to drive around the park with the traffic). Next, the police arrived maybe 5-10 minutes later. It’s really a good thing that no one had injuries and there wasn’t a fire, because the delayed response could have been disastrous.

Our city (which has no money) is in dire need of more emergency resources. It is a real shame that our politicians create the pension crisis and has put our great city is such a financial mess that we can’t even afford to put more emergency personnel on the street.

On a side note, the accident was a Cadillac Escalade that rear ended a Subaru Forester. The front end damage that the Escalade sustained was severe while there didn’t appear to be much rear end damage on the Subaru; it had its windows shattered and it looked like a non-functioning wheel, but no apparent collapse. I’m not sure how a speeding Escalade that significantly outweighs the Subaru had so much damage.

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Debug Logging in Shipping Code is not nice

During some development today, I had to install the scanner drivers for my HP 6110xi all-in-one device. Knowing that scanner drivers have been consistently horrible for the Mac, I decided against installing on my main machine (which also serves as my development machine) and instead installed it on one of my test machines. Well, it is really sad to be right in this case. The 101 MB download for the HP scanner included a whole lot of crappy software. As I was debugging my application, I write a bunch of stuff to the Console and as I was watching the Console, I saw lots of stuff like this:

2006-10-21 16:30:34.134 HPEventHandler[204]: DebugAssert: Third Party Client: (NULL != m_lock && 0 == errno) Can’t create semaphore lock[/Volumes/Development/HP/Mac-Sirani/mac-software/components/HPEventHandler/Sources/Core/HPTMNotificationManager.cpp:62]

appear, as well as debug statements showing the scanning process. I didn’t enable any special logging or anything like that. I wonder how much debug code shipped with the driver and bloated it? It really is a good idea to turn off the debug logging when you ship a product or at least turn if off and make it an option to turn it on in case you need to have a user send you something.

With the rush to get products out to market, quality has gone to the birds in a lot of products.

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Learning new technologies (Apple technologies, that is)

For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to learn various Apple technologies such as Core Data and Bindings. However, it hadn’t been until last week when I finally had a chance to start learning them as well as Image Capture Framework. I came up with an idea that I’m excited about and started work on the project last week. Since I’m supporting OS X 10.4 and later, I can use Cored Data and Bindings (bindings go back to 10.3.9 or so). I always have trouble learning new software stuff if I don’t have a use for it; now that I have a use for it, I learned both technologies in a matter of days. I’m pretty impressed with Core Data. It works well and I haven’t found anything to really dislike about it, yet. Bindings, on the other hand, sounds great in theory, but sometimes just doesn’t work how I want it to work. So, I spend a lot of time trying to jam a square peg in a round hole until I give up and go back to the way I did it before. This isn’t to say that bindings are useless, they’re just not for everything.

On to Image Capture. The sample code made it look easy and scanning was working real well until I tried to muck with the contract, brightness, etc. It appears that none of the settings work (at least with my scanner). So I start poking around and figure out that most scanner apps on my machine are using TWAIN instead of Image Capture. OK, so I wasted another day realizing that Image Capture Framework (for scanners) is broken or I’m not using it right (the sample code produces the same results as my code). TWAIN seems to work OK, until I try to have 2 scanners on my system so that I can detect them. Took me 30 minutes to figure out that the EPSON Perfection 1250 drivers that say that work on Intel Macs aren’t universal binaries, so they work in Rosetta applications, but not native ones. My other scanner, a DocketPORT 465 does have native drivers (that’s one of the reasons I bought it). So my code worked fine, EPSON is just behind the times. On a side note, it’s amazing to me that scanner vendors still are clueless after all these years…they make crappy software and always have.

Anyway, a few more technologies under my belt and it wasn’t all that painful. Stay tuned for my latest product which has managed to get me excited about programming, again!

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First Impressions of the Sony Reader

I managed to get my hands on a Sony Reader yesterday as I’ve been itching to get one for awhile now. The digital ink technology is very intriguing and I wanted to see and use it for myself. First off, the price tag of $350 is a bit steep to make it a generally accepted consumer gadget, but I’m a technology person so I added it to my collection.

When I first started it up, it had a nice selection of excerpts of books as well as some classics like George Orwell’s 1984 (which I’ve never read). Since I knew out of the box, it wouldn’t work with a Mac, I hooked it up to my Mac to see if the reader would mount as a USB mass storage device. Unfortunately it didn’t. Why Sony did this, I have no idea as the PSP mounts as a UBS mass storage device. So, Mac users are stuck using SD cards or MemorySticks which is fine, however, you can’t remove the pre-installed books without Windows. I fired up Parallels and was pleasantly surprised to see the Sony Connect software work fine on it and link up to the Reader over USB. Like most Sony user interfaces I’ve seen in the last decade, the Sony Connect software is just awful. While it tries to mimic iTunes, it fails miserably. You can only drag and drop books on certain places (you can drop a book onto the reader, but not the Books category on the reader), has annoying alert dialogs confirming deletes that take up the entire screen, and has no way to “eject” the Reader even with the warning on the Reader’s display not to disconnect.

So if we ignore the crappy Windows software, how does the Reader do? Well, the books that ship with it are great as well as some RTF files that I transferred to it. The display is amazing and these books work quite well with page turning that is quite speedy. However, one of the reasons I got this was to read technical info that usually comes in PDFs. The Reader’s PDF viewing has some issues. First off, it is dreadfully slow. It can take 10+ seconds to turn a page. Second off, it reduces the page without being able to zoom/scroll. So, after cropping some PDFs (Preview lets you crop PDFs), I was able to read the 8.5×11″ PDFs on the display, but it was still slow (I had to rotate the display and then I could view the PDFs in 2 halves). Not content to accept this fate, I started playing with some tools and found the free/open-source HTMLDOC which converts web pages into PDFs. Since the initial documentation I wanted to read is also in HTML (however it is in multiple pages), I gave HTMLDOC a whirl using some settings others have posted. Using the following settings:

htmldoc --webpage -f book.pdf --textfont Helvetica --fontsize 18 --left 1mm \
--right 1mm --top 1mm --bottom 1mm  --gray --size 5.24x6.69in --textcolor black\
 --footer . --header . --browserwidth 800 --no-embedfonts

and then specifying 1 or more web pages, I was able to generate PDFs that are easily viewable on the Reader and pages turn quickly. To top it off, it shows the images which RTF wouldn’t get me. While this isn’t an automated process (yet), this does show me that I can get decent content on the device. In addition, Project Gutenberg has lots of titles that I can put on the device. There are been some talks on websites about RSS Feeds to PDF which would be real cool, but I haven’t seen anything for the Mac.

I’ll have to keep using this to see how much I really like it, but who knows, maybe I’ll read more!

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Software registration schemes; the good, the bad, the ugly

I’ve worked on a number of consumer products in my career, some with registration schemes, some without. What is the purpose of a registration scheme? Are people trying to prevent piracy? Are they trying to keep the honest people honest? Or is there some other motivation? For me, it is about motivating people to purchase the software when the demo has expired (in my shareware world). With some of my products, people use it, like it, and forget that the software is even working, so they forget to register. A registration scheme here has proven to be quite effective on my NotifyMail program. I had another program called PhotoCapture that had no registration scheme (I was young and dumb) and asked people to send me a postcard if they used it. I know it was used on various websites back in the day, but only got a handful of cards. That method clearly didn’t work.

I worked on one product that had such sophisticated registration that it made the product hard to use. That and the fact it was buggy lead to its downfall. So is there a happy medium? In many cases, yes, as long as the software is useful and used frequently. In my opinion, if a product is used infrequently (there are some products that a demo version suffices for some), its value goes down to me and then maybe it needs stronger protection. I was playing around with a program yesterday that I had tried months ago while working on writing something that had a similar concept, but worked in a completely different way. Since I had tried the app, the demo expired and I couldn’t play with it or reset my demo period. After about 3 minutes of poking around with Interface Builder, I discovered a serious flaw in their registration system (Interface Builder is a free developer tool that is available from Apple and ships with every Mac). They had 4 buttons on the registration screen that popped up; register (brings up a dialog to enter your code), purchase (takes you to a website), quit, and try. The try button was grayed out because my demo had expired. So in Interface Builder, I duplicated the try button, linked it to the tryAction, hid the original try button, and then ran the application. Oops. Now I had a working version of the application that I simply had to hit the try button each time I ran it. A simple code/design change could have fixed this. Instead of having a quit and a try button that were separate, have one button that had the title change depending on if the demo had expired and then have the action linked to “dismissRegisterDialog” where code behind that would determine if it should quit or should run in demo mode.

Of course I won’t say which app this was, but a few more minutes with the registration code could go a long way. I don’t think most developers should spend a ton of time on registration schemes as they will be broken by hackers anyway. I think it’s important to make it hard enough that the casual person, even developer, can’t break it. I definitely don’t put in registration schemes that are hacker proof, but they seem to work good enough. In my next product, I think I may take a different approach.