Damn credit card company

I received a call today that my credit card had been declined for a charge that happens every 2 weeks. I go online and see that the bank has a note to call them because there is high risk activity on the card. This is 2 days after I call them to straighten out the last mess. There were only 2 charges on the card since then and both of them with merchants I've used before. My guess is the last guy I talked to forgot to take the fraud alert off my card. At least I wasn't at a restaurant or store and have to go through the embarrassment of having my card declined. Idiots.

Email program wars

I've been using email programs for the last 15 years on an almost day to day basis. While I definitely don't hold the record for how long I've been using them, I have been using email for almost the entire era since the Internet became popular (graphs I've seen show 1994-1995 is when there became a huge influx of users). Over that time, I've used a number of email programs and worked with a bunch more through my NotifyMail program. For a very long time, I used Eudora (1992-2002, I think) and even had the opportunity to be on the development team for a few years. Eudora had a ton of features and has an extremely loyal following. I gave up on Eudora a few years back because I wanted to have a central address book and Apple's Mail offered that along with iSync. Mail doesn't have all the features that Eudora has, but frankly, I can't even recall what I'm missing. Also, Eudora's interface was years out of date and user interface is extremely important to me.

Recently, it was announced that Eudora was going to be re-born as an open source project and I've seen people real happy about this. I just don't understand why. Mail does a fine job for 95% of the Mac users, but some people are just stubborn. If you think people are stubborn about Eudora, I received an email today with the following at the top: "Claris Emailer 2.0v3, January 22, 1998". Whoa, using an 8 year old email program is almost asking for trouble as lots of things have changed and matured with respect to email.

There will never be pleasing everyone, especially with software.

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.

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.