June 2006 Archives

Both the Treo 650 and the iBook have built-in Bluetooth, so I was looking forward to being able to sync the two without needing to drag around another cable. However, for some reason, I couldn’t get it to work.

iSync’s instructions said that I needed to install Palm Desktop and the appropriate iSync conduit first, but it still didn’t work after that.

Searching around, I found the following instructions (slightly edited), which worked for me as well:

Suppose you’re an employee at Wal-Mart’s jewelry counter. Suppose someone comes up to the counter with a watch, and the band of said watch is very nearly in five pieces. The customer says, “please replace this.” You say, “ok, feel free to shop around — it’ll take 5-10 minutes.” The customer walks away.

Do you:

A. Replace the watch band

B. Replace the battery

You guessed it. I now have a fresh battery in the watch I can’t wear.

I really need to program in a doohickey (technical term) that sends me an E-Mail any time a customer gets a system error… :-(

Someone at the company I used to work for did that, and while in his case it generated so many E-Mails that he had to filter them out (to be fair, it was a much more complicated program than mine), at least it doesn’t lead to blissful ignorance followed by a bucket of cold water when you happen to run across an unreported showstopper bug over the course of a normal day’s work.

Update (June 30th, 10:45pm): I’ll now get an E-Mail whenever there’s a server error. Because I don’t know when to let well enough alone, I’ll also get an E-Mail whenever there’s a page not found error or a permission denied error (the former of which, at least, will probably get filtered into a folder that I’ll look at once a week or so).

(Rediscovered while going through old E-Mails.)

I spent a good chunk of the weekend reading various web sites about personal productivity, mainly by simplifying aspects of life that are more complicated than they need to be. I imagine 43 Folders is a site where people who want to be more productive can waste a lot of time, particularly on their first few visits, but I think I have most of the site read now ( :-) ) so I can get back to work.

One of my favorite links from the weekend must be this one on seventeen different ways to tie your shoelaces, though the various articles on improving your E-Mail flow (mostly on or linked from 43 Folders, so go there if you’re looking for them) were also very good. Not terribly new, but good reminders.

Down to seven messages. Two are waiting for replies, one can’t be handled until the end of the month (and I don’t have a better place for it), and four need to be handled at work, and I’m currently at home.

I finally took care of an E-Mail that’s been in my Inbox since last September (and you think you procrastinate!). The oldest message is now from May 1st, and four of the seven came in during the past week.

A few more old folders got deleted, and one got moved to Archive/Historical (stuff I might want to look at again in context some day, but which certainly aren’t used on a day-to-day basis).

In the realm of “things that just work”, I typed “from:05001 to:bos” into the maps.google.com search window, and got exactly what I wanted — driving directions (or, more specifically, the time estimate) from my general vicinity to Logan Airport in Boston. No mousing required, no tabbing required, no drop-downs, and no extraneous options. Nice.

I think some of my best programming days are those where I don’t have anything in particular in mind to accomplish. I just look around at the program and say, “Hmm, I wonder how I can make this better…”

Over the past week or so, that’s resulted in:

• A twelve-fold improvement in the time it takes to view a large mailing list

• … not to mention a bunch of prettifying changes on the same page, including a nicer-looking tab-like alphabar

• A more intelligent process to determine which subset of a mailing list to show to a user (it used to just show the “A” page by default, without checking to see, for instance, if there were actually any As, or showing just the As, even if there were a total of five contacts in the database).

• A redesigned customer list page. Architecturally, anyway. I didn’t do much prettifying on this one yet.

• A way to delete user accounts (like the ones generated by spam-bots looking for unescaped registration forms that they can use to send spam), complete with confirmation page.

• A way to view letters for one particular user (I’ve been able to view user-specific jobs for quite a while — one letter can be sent multiple times, resulting in several jobs — but never really cared enough about viewing just the letters for a particular user).

• The addition of the Content-Length header when downloading previews and other files. Really, I have no idea why I didn’t put it in when I first wrote the code, since it’s so trivial, but apparently I hadn’t. It’s there now.

• Some additions to the mailing list importer to match on fields introduced in a recent version of TntMPD (which I just added while writing this post, incidentally).

I also just picked up the book Ajax in Action, which should open up the door to a whole lot of fun pretty soon.

Back to reading. :-)

Apparently, a lot of Emacs programmers (well, at least three now, but they seem to think there are more, and I don’t have any reason to doubt them) have their Caps Lock key reprogrammed to act as Control instead. I think I’m going to experiment with that, even though I don’t suffer from Emacs Pinky — I like the idea of just having to move my left pinky over half an inch from the “a” key instead of down two inches and over a bit for a very common keystroke. And I never use Caps Lock.

With MacOS X 10.4, this swap can be done in the System Preferences (though, interestingly enough, the caps lock light on my iBook still lights up, even though it’s no longer serving that function).

On Windows 2000, this can be done using a little downloadable tool from SysInternals or by editing the registry in a somewhat more complicated way than a typical registry hack. I’ll probably still go with the registry-editing version when I get around to making the change at work.

Voice-activated telephone menus are among the worst inventions ever. Right now I can’t think of anything that’s worse, but I’m sure that’s just proximity speaking.

Verizon: [introductory message, including a list of options, “billing” being the second one]

Me: [touch-tone 2]

Verizon: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say one of the following…

Me: billing

Verizon: I’m sorry, I still didn’t understand. Please say one of the following…

Me: billing (with more frustration)

Verizon: Ok, are you calling about the phone number […]?

Me: Yes

Verizon: I’m sorry, please say just yes or no.

Me: Yes!

Verizon: Ok. Are you calling about technical support, your account, or …

Me: my account

Verizon: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say technical support, my account, or …

Me: my account

Verizon: I’m sorry, I still didn’t understand.

Me: [click]

Me: [call back]

Verizon: [introductory message…]

Me: [touch-tone 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]

Verizon: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand…

Me: [touch-tone 0 0 0 0]

Verizon: I’m sorry, I still didn’t understand…

Me: [touch-tone 0 0 0 0 0]

Verizon: Please wait while I transfer you to a customer service representative.

That got me to someone in tech support, who transfered me to billing, and everything went fine after that.

What, exactly, is wrong with saying “press 2 for billing” or even “say billing or press 2”?? Or even, horror of horrors, taking away the “press 2” altogether, but still letting it work (which other systems have done, thereby keeping me from having to remind myself that the person I eventually get on the phone isn’t the one who wrote the software).

I know my accent isn’t so bad that a clearly enunciated “yes” could be mistaken for a “no”, which is the only other valid option. Basic linguistics, people! If you must inconvenience your customers by taking away a simple push-button prompt in a vain attempt to sound friendlier, you can at the very least differentiate a yes/no prompt by looking for either a sibilant or a nasal, or as close as you’re going to get over the phone’s bandwidth.

(grumble, grumble, grumble)

“No, Reepicheep,” said the King very firmly, “you are not to attempt a single combat with the dragon.”
— Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I think that’s my favorite line in all the Chronicles of Narnia.

Today was actually two anniversaries:

1. Wedding Anniversary (Four years!)

2. Solely Self-Employed Anniversary (One year!)

The first was rather understated, since Christine is currently visiting her parents, clothes-shopping with her mom, watching movies, and generally having a good time down in Massachusetts. (She had some vacation time to burn before next week.) We chatted for a while this evening, though, and she’ll be back tomorrow night.

The second went completely forgotten until a little while ago, which is amusing considering how momentous the event was a year ago. :-)

Looking back, I’m very happy with how the year has gone, and love my job. I had lunch a few weeks ago with a friend who still works at the company I quit last year, and I don’t have even the slightest desire to go back to that company (or any other, for that matter!).

In other news, I quietly introduced bulk mail to my offerings at prayerletters.us today, and will be announcing it more prominently in the near future. That should open up some possibilities for customers with larger mailing lists who are currently avoiding the service because of cost. We’ll see!

(Faithful readers may remember that I spent New Year’s Eve reading IRS auditors’ case studies — and enjoying them — proving that I am beyond hope of ever having a life… Well, on Memorial Day weekend I reinforced that by being thoroughly caught up in the Postal Service’s Domestic Mail Manual. For the uninitiated, that’s the 1,200-page rulebook describing everything anyone would ever want to know about how to send any form of mail within the United States. My new mostly useless trick is the ability to read, write, and validate USPS barcodes… by hand…)

The primary hard drive in my desktop dropped dead today. That’s inconvenient. I was hoping to have a productive day of web site redesigning, not a maintenance day of taking apart computers and doing CPR (Cylinder and Partition Resuscitation).

The good news is that the drive is only mostly dead, and I’ve been able to recover all of the really important files without needing to restore from backup. It was also nice enough to wait until I’d finished the day’s mail before keeling over.

Looks like now’s a good time for me to switch to using RAID on the machine!