Wow. That’s all I can say right now. I’ve been having an issue for months with my American Express card where about 40%-50% of my online orders with it just fail right out of the shoot. I haven’t been able to figure out why, and neither could they. I used the correct address, I used the correct phone number, and I was assured that leaving out the apostrophe in my last name when entering the cardholder name was not an issue. It was a huge giant mystery to everyone involved.

Thanks to crappy UI design by NewEgg.com, I was able to solve the mystery! See, unlike other stores who actually take the time to try to auth your credit card inline with the store flow, NewEgg does not. And to add to their crappiness, they also don’t email you when your credit card auth subsequently fails. You have to go to their site and wade through several screens to see an unexplained “Attention” link next to your order.  I was lucky enought to notice this, since I had ordered something I was pretty anxious to receive.

Oddly enough their crappy multi auth flow is what helped crack this nut.  Other sites I just switch cards upon failure chalking it up to the mystery.  They wouldn’t let me switch cards on the order, even after calling in…

They had also required that I create an account to order and apply a coupon code I received.  Somewhat fair if they want to limit the code, but I could just create another account, so that methoid is a really poor control.  Now, you all know me as Myk.  That’s how I spell my name.  My legal name is Michael, but when I create accounts, I use my common name, since that is how I prefer to be addressed.  That is what has been wreaking havoc.  I won’t go into details over the whole debacale about why I had to remove the apostrophe from my last name online due to even worse usability issues on major web sites (think SQL escaping folks…)
These stupid sites use my account information name (Myk OLeary) as the name they pass for the credit card authorization INSTEAD OF the specifically requested, and correctly filled out CARDHOLDER NAME (Michael OLeary) field I filled out in the order flow.  This abbreviated nickname is unfamiliar, and unused by more than about 6-10 people in the world.

So to all E-Commerce sites (especially large ones like NewEgg.com) - ask for and use the cardholder name provided during the order flow to get a credit card auth, not some randomly provided incorrect account name.  I mean, what if I was using my mom’s or my wife’s card to order???  Time to get your heads out of your butts and make your sites work FOR your customers instead of AGAINST them!!!

I have a couple of posts RE: Gnomedex in the back of my brain, but I wanted to throw out some contact information now if anyone wants to meet up.

Best way to reach me the whole weekend (or anytime for that matter) is to call my SkypeIn number @ (206) 855-5578.  If I’m on wifi and logged into Skype, I’ll get your call there; if not, it will forward to my cell phone.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that my name is Myk (pronounced “Mike”), I live in the Seattle area (Maple Valley to be exact), and that I’m a web application developer.  I have serious interests/leanings towards content and information sharing and retrieval.
I’m representing the company I work for (Pure Networks) and our product (Network Magic) and want to focus in on network usage, content sharing, and community/social networking environments.  I’ll be a bit more explicit in a followup post tonight after I get home from the registration party; right now I need to hammer out some bug fixes!

This "presentation" was made at Barcamp this past weekend and  epitomizes the economy surrounding Web 2.0.  It’s a really good comedic look at what makes up this trend.  Don’t get me wrong, there are good things associated with Web 2.0 (Circular Linking, Community, Asyncrous Content, etc…); but I’m tired of hearing people spout off about the success of 2.0 w/o really knowing what it is about that is successful.  That and it’s funny.

Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success

technorati tags: web2.0, comedy, barcampboston, boston, barcamp

If I found out one thing at MindCamp this weekend, it was the sheer power and elegance of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  The vast amount of functioanlity that is possible with such minimal coding absolutely blew my mind.

I’d been hearing about it peripherally for 6-9 months or so due to the whole Web 2.0 explosion. About 5 months ago I was at a PHP meetup which just happens to share its space with the Seattle Ruby Brigade.  One guy came over and many feathers were ruffled.  I was even more intrigued.  Since then I’d heard more and more about its power.  Now, this weekend, I saw some .rb source code for several projects and had to rub my jaw after picking it up off the ground.

So, what’s next?  Learning it of course!  I already have MySQL and Apache installed on my Powerbook (the new builds, custom buiilt - not the preinstalled ones).  I also have PHP built, but that doesn’t matter much for this learning exercise.

One of the first steps I go through when learning something new is lining up my resources.  In about 30 minutes, you’ll see today’s del.icio.us bookmarks of mine get posted to my blog by del.icio.us’ auto poster.  I have source code locations, download points, mailing lists, links, user groups, documentation, and more.

I’ll post up more entries as I go through the next steps of picking a project, designing it, coding it, etc. I’ll let you know what I like about Ruby, what is hard, what is easy.

I’ve been just a bit under the weather lately and haven’t had nearly as much time to prepare for MindCamp 2.0 as I’d hoped.  Heck, at this point, I’m just glad I feel even keeled enough to be able to make it.

So, while I have a few minutes of down time between bug fixes, I wanted to throw up a list of topics that interest me.  I may not have time to repost on the session ideas page, but I’ll try to.  At the very least this is my own mental list.

Even if you don’t have time to come, or geographically can’t, I suggest taking a bit of time to list out your own topics of interest.  Doing so here has got me thinking about all of them in a much deeper manner.

1) Auto tagging mechanisms.  Riya has done a great job at jump starting one side of this equation, but there is much more to go.  For example -  using the GPS EXIF data some cameras can embed to help auto tag photos with location data.
2) Micro tagging.  There might be a better (or existing phrase) that explains this.  Basically, it’s a way to tag tags such that they can express even more information.  For example, If I’m rating a restaurant on JudysBook, I could tag it as accessible, but then tag that tag with a rating that shows how accessible it is.  The concept isn’t limited to rating levels…
3) Content sharing and its interesting applications.  What is there on the spectrum between photos and videos that makes content interesting?
4) Social content recommendations based upon my own dataset.  For example, an app or site that takes as input my bookmarks, tagged data, OPML files, etc and kicks out recommendations to sites, media, content, etc that match profiles of other people with similar datasets.
5) Alternative data retrieval methods.  For example, I use zaptxt.com to SMS my phone when RSS feeds are updated.  I get some great deals off of Craigslist by doing this.  I know when there’s a new MacZot, I know what the new Woot! is, etc…  I have a filter that sends me information when and where I need it.  Now if I could only have a wifi enabled media player that auto updated itself with new podcasts… J
6) Taking smart playlists to the next level by allowing for smart formats.  For example, I’d love to create a “radio channel” in say iTunes that allowed me to specify that it would play a track from among my news podcasts on the 15, had say a mashup every 45 minutes, played a track from the Onion after every news cast, etc…  It’s smart playlists taken to the next level.  I think it’s possible using Mac OS X’s Automator, but I just need to create a few more iTunes actions first.  This is slowly climbing its way to the top of my must tackle list.
7) Data cleansing.  I recently used EatMyBrainz and ArtFetch for the Mac to clean up my library of horribly hacked mp3 files.  A lot of them were ripped by some of the first mp3 rippers created.  Most had no artwork, a lot were missing album, track and/or artist information.  Now, with very little interaction, almost my entire library is in a proper format with artwork.  I no longer have to try to remember exactly who sings the song “track 5″.

I guess they all in a way lead into the encompassing ideas of information storage, collaboration, and retrieval. How can I make my data more accessible to other people and myself without adding much more (if any) effort in facilitating that on any one person.  How do I automate my life and make things easier?

 I’m torn on this one.  There are core features that don’t work as well they should in favor of flashy Web 2.0 interfaces that are at the least very well implemented.  I’m thinking especially the day and time selection on event create - very nice.  I’ll give the public search another shot (see below) on a PC instead of Flock on a MAC and roll through some more of the site and give a more full report.

The interface is clean and very snappy.  I couldn’t stand to do a full run through, because the public search page kept jumping to the top of the page as I was scrolling down.  This makes this section (the one that I would use first to populate my calendar for me) useless.  It is a Beta, but my thoughts on this alone is to just sit back and wait.

The pros I was able to see before I gave up on the above:
1) share calendars with friends by email address
2) LOTS of public calendar - gym exercise schedules, pool schedules, sports team schedules
3) iCal published calendars can be imported and then made Google searchable (supposedly - the calendar I added this way does not show, but this may be a result of the fact that it is all "all day" events.) EDIT: as I was writing this, I got a script popup that told me the calendar failed to import.  No reason why though…
4) phone notifications for appts.  SWEET!!!!

Cons/bugs/missing nicetys:
1) the scrolling issue in public calendar search mode
2) quick add requires a fully qualified date (4-20-06) to create anything past tomorrow.  Not bad, but makes the feature less useful than it could be.  This should be a nice add when it fully works.
3) No clock - how do I know how the current time relates to my appts w/o it?  Even forum software has this feature.
4) No help resolving failed iCal imports

Google Calendar

technorati tags: web20, web2.0, google, calendar

Yet again, Joel Spolsky has a great piece of writing.  In this case, he describes the develoment abstraction layer.  It’s about how great companies are built around great development managers that allow developers to be, well, developers.  They don’t need to worry about all that businessy cruft that we find drudgerous and burdensome.  Here’s a great quote from the essay:

A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that’s so comfortable you don’t feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions…

The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software

technorati tags: joel, spolsky, dal, development, managers

I made a comment on the last post, but will offer up apologies to Dave Shea here as well.  The WP classic theme I was using is a great all purpose generalist theme.  Heck, I even choose to stick with it over the new 2.0 default theme after the upgrade/re-install.  I just thought that as a web developer, I needed my site to look more “designy” than this core theme.

I have been tweaking the Subnixus theme (link in the footer) to my liking and adding my old tweaks into the sidebar.

The most notable change there (save for it moving to the left side) is that the blogroll now is collapsed by category, and has been updated to my most up to date NetNewsWire OPML export.

There are still quite a few things on my list, but I like the way it’s going so far.  I’m still open to wants/needs/desires/thoughts.

Not my personal style or fashion sense (although some may argue that).  No, my blog’s style.  I hate it.  The text is too big; the font is wonky; the use of white space is mis-applied; the ad-sense ads are blocky and obtrusive; the tags block is wierd looking; etc; so forth; so on.

One would look at my blog and laugh at the fact that I spend my day as a web developer.  I know they will, becasue I just did. I feel that to give myself the credibilty I deserve, and to give my readers a more enjoyable experience here, that I need to pump things up a bit and add some frigging life to the site.

I have some ideas of my own, but I’m interested in what you as my readers think.  What blogs that you read in a browser have UI that you enjoy, what features do they have that you find indispensable?  What features do no blogs at all have that you would love to see?

I was reading the November PHP meeting minutes recently. Several changes are being made which will greatly benefit the PHP community, but could seriously trip up inexperienced developers and poorly written applications.

There are a great many changes, but the most imperative ones for all to get their heads around are the removal of three php.ini settings that if existent in a php.ini will disallow startup of the application. They are being removed, and are effectively being set to the equivalent of “off”. This is good news, as they should be that way now. Many people wrongly use these settings. Check your applications now and make sure they are not using these. If they are, buy a copy of the book “Essential PHP Security” by Chris Shiflett to find out how to re-write your code for safety and security. Not only is it a good idea, but it will be mandatory if your host upgrades to the version with these changes (looks now to be PHP 6.0)

MOST NOTABLE _FULL_ DEPRECATIONS:
register_globals
magic_quotes
safe_mode