(Published to the Fediverse as:
MMS Photo Upload to Facebook #etc#facebook#mms How to MMS photo Upload to Facebook via the hidden personal upload email address.)
Software licensing is a tricky art - too little security and you leak revenue, too much and you leak customers. I worked on several license management systems at Ç-Dilla and Macrovision so I've spent far more time than is healthy thinking about this problem.
In general I think the best system is one that helps keep honest users honest. A speed bump that itches the conscience but doesn't get in the way of legitimate customers getting their job done.
I just migrated to a new computer and have finished several days of installing software and drivers. This is never a fun task, but I've been through it a few times and keep all my license information on a NAS drive to reduce the pain.
WinZip has a great trial model. The product is fully functional and nags you just enough that you'll eventually pay. I've been a customer for years, and as I moved to Windows 7 I emailed to ask about upgrade pricing. I got a prompt response and was up and running in no time.
I didn't need to upgrade. The old version of WinZip installed just fine using an existing license key.
ScanToPDF from O Imaging was a different story. The license is locked to a PC, and there's no way to move it automatically. You have to email them. It then gets worse - there's an "administration charge" to move a license. So as a paying customer I have to wait for the UK office to respond to email and even then I can't continue to use the product I've paid for.
I'm sure it's in the small print somewhere.
But the impact is that ScanToPDF has lost a customer, an advocate (I've suggested the product to others in the past, never again) and infuriated me enough to throw up a negative blog post. Is the administration charge really worth it?
At Catfood I use very simple license keys locked just to an email address. I'll refund any purchase with no questions asked. I'll issue new licenses as needed to keep customers happy. I have an online service to retrieve lost keys.
The products get pirated immediately, and finding a key generator doesn't take a lot of sleuthing. I don't care about this at all, because happy customers recommend products to their friends. Pain-free licensing is absolutely key to happy customers. Don't fall into the trap of putting your energy into complicated licensing and enforcing procedures. Add a new feature instead.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Licensing Fail: WinZip vs. ScanToPDF #etc#licensing#drm ScanToPDF's painful licensing process makes me mad enough that I ultimately open sourced a free alternative.)
I was a micro-ISV (µISV) for years before I heard of the term. It was coined by Eric Sink
to describe a one man software shop, and is now generally used for any small software company.
There isn't much market data available this far down the long tail so I've spent some time analyzing PAD files to see if I
could answer a few questions.
PAD is the Portable Application Description specification from the Association of Shareware Professionals.
It's used to describe software for submission to download sites. How useful these sites are is another question — read
Scott Kane on this if
you haven't already.
I spidered all the PAD files listed in the ASP directory, downloading data on 76,066 products from 39,861 µISVs (companies / people / publishers). It's not a
perfect data set as there are PADs that aren't software and µISVs that don't use PAD. I've also heard that some people are developing web apps these days. But here goes…
Where are the µISVs?
Overwhelmingly in the US. Other countries with more than a thousand listed are the UK, Russia, China, India, Canada, Germany and Australia (in descending order). Most countries have at least one µISV but the numbers fall off pretty quickly.
How much do µISVs charge for their products?
$29.95.
About a third of products are free and a third fall into 9 price points (all ending in 5). I found over a thousand different US Dollar price points overall.
The most expensive product was a $150,000 Green Living site license from South Beach Software
(an order of magnitude more expensive than the runner up).
How large are µISVs products?
There's not much action past 20 MB. Most downloads are between 1-2 MB. There's an interesting little spike around 14 MB. I guess this is a popular framework,
possibly Java? The largest download was almost 1.5 GB.
Are µISVs still releasing downloadable software?
This is a tough one to get at because PAD files just tell you about the most recent version, not the release history. The chart really
shows a last update distribution for the products in the PAD catalog.
There's a large number of products last updated in mid-2008 with nothing comparable in 2009. Could this be a drop-off in PAD usage?
A shift to web apps? Maybe final releases before the recession hit leading to less spare cycles for side projects (my µISV certainly pays for
beers rather than mortgages).
How many products do µISVs publish?
This final chart shows that most µISVs have just one product. Of course in some cases there might be a brand per product and still a single entity — it's impossible to separate
this out from the PAD data. The largest number of products from a single µISV is 616.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
State of the Micro-ISV-osphere #etc#asp Data on micro-ISVs - small software publishers - generated from association of software professionals PAD files.)
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Tuesday, November 15, 2022.
This is a joke metric that I first proudly displayed on Catfood Magazine back in 1997 (it's broken on the archive of the site). Everyone had a hit counter back then, but as far as I know we were the first site with a non-hit counter.
The dirty secret was that the counter just showed the world population. The readership was a rounding error.
My new count of non-visitors uses the US Census Bureau's world population estimate and subtracts unique visitors from the Google Analytics API. The count is cached for an hour so it doesn't slow the page down too much.
"The world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022..."
And the 8 billion number is being widely reported today, however my current unread count is a paltry 7,932,915,881. That's because the US Census world population estimate is a lot lower, by over 66.8M people. That's approximately France!
(Published to the Fediverse as:
How many people don't read this blog? #etc#ithcwy As of the last update to this post, 7,927,037,899 people have not read I Thought He Came With You in the past month.)
Them: Hello, my name is Phil, how can I help you today?
You: My DSL connection is slow.
Them: Okay, I can help you with that, have you...
You: My first thought was that the Linksys router that's been working perfectly for five years has gone wrong. So I connected my computer directly to your off-brand modem with the same result. I then thought that the problem must be with the computer, so I reinstalled it from the manufacturer discs and rebooted about seven times.
Them: Let me connect you to my supervisor...
Them: Tap, tap, tap, oh, we seem to have switched your service back to the basic package. Tap, tap, tap, fixed.
Sometimes it's fun to argue with support. Sometimes you just need to short-circuit the idiot script to get through to the person who can fix the problem.
I think it's time for CAPTGUAs or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Geeks and Users Apart. A quick puzzle or two that bypasses the first couple of levels of support.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
How to get technical support without spending hours on the phone #etc#support How to bypass the first few levels of tech support and talk to someone who can actually help you.)
I'm a Joel Spolsky stalker at the moment - after Stack Overflow DevDays last month I spent three days this week at the Business of Software conference in San Francisco.
It was an incredibly high value conference, in terms of both speakers and attendees. Next year it will be back in Boston, which sucks for me, but I'll make every effort to attend.
I was really excited to see Geoffrey Moore speak. An old boss once bought a crate of Crossing the Chasm for everyone in the division to read. It's still the best business book I've ever read. At the conference Moore spoke about innovation - specifically differentiation (get out of the competitive set), neutralization (get back in to the competitive set) and optimization (productivity gains). All three are essential, but you're shooting yourself in the foot if you spend too much time on neutralization - "Best of breed is a suckers game". His thesis was to do the bare minimum needed to stay competitive and then pour resources back into differentiation.
A theme of the conference was on motivating yourself and others - how to build a great company/culture. Several speakers talked about carving out time for creativity and fun. Carsonified evidently operates on a four day week. I've spent the last couple of years on a six day week... lots of food for thought here.
I convinced myself to attend this year after watching some of the videos from the 2008 conference. These are available on the Business of Software Ning - I'd recommend joining and checking them out. Hopefully videos from this year's conference will be posted soon.
Zumbox is trying to take the paper out of the postal system.
It's a laudable goal, if it takes off it would stop me from feeling that I need to do this:
Signing up is easy. Enter your mailing address and Zumbox send you a letter with a verification code. Once verified you can start sending and
receiving mail online. You can mail a few people for free, bulk mail is five cents per recipient.
Of course you'll only receive mail that has been sent to you via Zumbox. It's not a mail scanning service (like Earth Class Mail)
so you end up with yet another mailbox to check.
Zumbox is trying to help businesses go paperless. This includes bills and other necessary communication. It also includes junk mail.
My experience so far is mainly junk mail. I did get a circular about recycling from Gavin Newsom but otherwise just a stream of special offers.
This is a big problem because Zumbox provides very little control over email notifications:
It's all or nothing. Either I get a daily email reminding me to go look at junk mail, or I get no notification at all (and might miss the next thrilling
update from Gavin).
Most of my bills and statements are already paperless via email. This isn't as secure as Zumbox, but I'm not sure how much of an advantage
this is as I really just need notification.
I really want to like Zumbox, but right now it's just another source of spam.
Overvalidation is unhelpful error checking, usually caused by an over-zealous engineer with insufficient domain knowledge.
My blood pressure has suffered from two cases of overvalidation this week.
I bought a new NAS — the Linksys NAS200 to set up
RAID 1 with a couple of 1TB drives.
I was delighted to discover that the NAS could
send email when it detects a problem or starts running out of disk space. Except it couldn't because someone decided that an
email server could live at port 25, or at port 1024 or higher.
My ISP blocks port 25 - maybe to cut back on bot spam, maybe because their support staff are bored and lonely.
This is far from unique and it's common for email providers to offer an alternative port. Which is almost always port 587.
I tried to put a bug report into Linksys but their support pages effectively said "dude, you paid $89 for this box, go talk to other losers on some forum".
The NAS problem can be solved by redirecting a port on my router. I haven't figured out how to deal with Technorati yet. After spending
seemingly months moving their datacenter they've evidently done some work on their blog claim process. I created a new blog yesterday
(Webcam Updates, to remove some clutter from the main Catfood Blog)
and went over to Technorati to claim it.
When you enter a URL like "http://www.site.com/blog" it's automatically changed to "http://site.com/blog". Which is a different URL.
I 301 redirect any "catfood.net" url to "www.catfood.net" to prevent getting dinged by Google for duplicate content. Technorati's claim
process fails if there's a 301 redirect.
I guess I could remove the redirect, complete the claim and then hope that I can put the redirect back without breaking Technorati.
Possibly when my blood pressure is back to normal.
Please, by all means do some validation – "giraffe" is most certainly not a valid TCP/IP port – but don't overvalidate, and don't assume
that your mail server port or preferred URL convention is some kind of universal constant.
I started using bDule today after reading about it on Techcrunch. It seems to be very nearly the perfect twitter client for me - decent multi-account support, Facebook integration and reasonably snappy. Also, and this is really important for me, it's not oppressively black.
The group feature isn't quite there yet, it doesn't list all my friends and there's no way to edit a group after you create it. There's also no spell checker and getting the right layout is unnecessarily awkward. It's still in alpha so there's good reason to hope that these problems will be addressed soon.
I wonder where the name comes from. It makes me think of a certain casual game where you swap gemstones around until you're ready to chew your eyeballs out. I'm the lastperson to talk about puzzlingsoftware names though.
bDule is WPF/.NET3.5 so only runs on Windows XP or better. It also seems to suffer from the same creeping memory usage that plagues other desktop Twitter clients. I really wish someone would start offloading the stream into a database. I've got nearly frustrated enough with this to write my own Twitter client a couple of times, but it's not exactly an uncrowded market.
