Category Archives: Uncategorized

Even geeks need to call for help sometimes, and when we do, it’s rarely for something that can be solved by turning the machine off and on.

The sort of software problem which trips up professional programmers tends toward the complex, and often comes in configurations that require encyclopedic knowledge of everything from NTFS and IIS permission settings to DNS routing maps to understand. It’s not something that lends itself to adequate resolution by having some underpaid drone read off a script, or tell the user to check out the support forums for ideas.

Another feature of enterprise-level software? It ain’t cheap, often costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, often with license renewals every 12-18 months. Over a ten year development lifetime, it’s not uncommon to lay out four or even five figures with a software vendor for a single piece of development software.

So when you’ve just dropped a grand or more on an development package only to get told that doing anything beyond posting a question in the forums is beyond their ability to support, it’s a frustrating experience indeed. But sadly, too many makers of software geared toward developers think this is an acceptable way to go.

Luckily, there are still a few companies which seem to take support seriously, and I’ve had occasion to do business with all three of them in the same week.

…

Installers

The Windows installer-creating software field desperately needs shaking up, with behemoth InstallShield very comfortably occupying the mediocre throne, atop $699 “express” versions to create very simply products, up to $4,999 “Premiere” editions (with suggested $1300 annual “Gold maintenance” support plan!) for creating full-featured programs.

We’d tried using the Express version years ago before discovering that it was inadequate to the task of installing–much less patching and updating–ComicBase. We wound up switching to the ill-fated Wise Installer, which did a respectable enough job, but whose company was bought and sold like a paid woman at a biker rally, ultimately being discontinued.

Attempting to move to a something more modern (capable of installing .Net 4.5, for instance), we made an extremely ill-advised investment in a cross-grade to InstallAware, only to suffer through such anguish-inducing customer service that we were ultimately left with a dead loss on the $1000 we paid, and not even left with an installable version of the installer tool (!). There’s a future blog entry–if not a couple of chapters in a book on how to alienate customers–in covering the saga.

Having been previously burned, we were wary of the den of scum and villainy which seemed to comprise the Windows Installer tool market when we discovered Caphyon Ltd. who makes a product called Advanced Installer 12.2. Accordingly, we gave their product a full test during the 30 day demo period, using it to recreate the surprisingly complex ComicBase 2015 installer package (which must install all manner of system files, .Net Framework components, thousands of graphic files, and other bits and pieces).

Unlike some of their competitors, Advanced Installer didn’t claim to be able to read in the existing .msi file we use now (InstallAware claimed to be able to do this, but failed to make a usable installer from it). As such, we basically had step through the entire complicated installer process from scratch, while looking at a copy of the old Wise installer for reference.

Surprisingly, we were done within an hour, and without any of the interminable “compressing files” and “scanning files” lags which bedeviled the original creation of the installer using Wise.

Unfortunately, we ran into a fatal error when attempting to build the final installer, so we reached out to Caphyon’s tech support for assistance. We got an email back within a few hours asking to examine a copy of the installer file, which we promptly sent over. Within half a day, we received back a fixed version of the installer file, along with a request to help them investigate further to make sure no future customer ran into a similar problem.

It’s worth noting that at this point, we hadn’t even become a customer yet, yet they resolved our highly technical problem efficiently and with speed and professionalism. This is the way that support for professional-class products should go, but too often does not.

Kudos to the support team at Caphyon. (And may the others in this space learn from them as they hopefully steal away your underserved customers).

According to some folks–politely known as “psychopaths”–the above cartoon is a perfectly good excuse to commit murder. Hell, in their anally-inserted world view, committing murder over this is practically a moral commandment.

These people are barbarians. Savages. And yes, Islamists.

“Nice People” — a group to which I often deem myself to be a member — try to avoid irritating people unnecessarily. And we certainly try not to poke offense at other people’s religion. It’s rude. It seems classless. And frankly, who needs the grief?

So it is that when the so-called “Religion of Peace” ™ decided to wage bloody war on the West, we “Nice People” fell all over ourselves trying not to be confrontational. We very respectfully blew the hell out of countless wanna-be martyrs and jihadists, all the while pretending that this had little or nothing to do with the core doctrines of a whole religion. It was utter nonsense, but we all pretended to believe it, lest we cause offense to our Muslim friends and neighbors who weren’t psychotic nutjobs bent on murder. Like I said, we’re Nice People–and Nice People try not to cause offense.

But it turns out that being nice isn’t always the way to avoid conflict. If someone insists that something about the very way you are is offensive to them, you have a choice: either tell that person you’re terribly sorry, but he’ll just have to go fuck himself–or decide that you’re willing to live your life constrained by what the other fellow considers offensive.

Nice People, when confronted with this situation, typically decide that a little bit of self-censorship is a small price to pay for keeping the peace. And, within a broad spectrum of American societal norms, I don’t have a problem with this. After all, we can all agree that it’s rude to swear in public, talk about sex in front of children, or parade around naked on the street. At the same time, in a free America, we’ve had huge and earnest disagreements about whether or not people should be free to do exactly those things–and not always just on the Berkeley campus.

But now we find ourselves faced with a menace to exactly the sort of freewheeling give and take that makes life in the West meaningful. We have a huge number of people who’ve essentially said, “You’ll do things our way, our we’ll kill you.”

My friends,  my fellow Nice People, it’s time to stop being so damn Nice.

It bears mentioning that mere “niceness” isn’t the only reason we’ve let things get to the state where free-thinking Americans are afraid to call our these Islamist miscreants for the oppressive scum they are. A lot of us, quite frankly, are afraid.

Sure, we’ll bravely mock Christians all day long with “artistic” pictures of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung, or crosses submerged in urine. We’ve also got a best-selling Broadway play, “The Book of Mormon” which takes the piss out those wacky (and ridiculously wholesome) Mormons in a  savage way. And for this, we applaud. We’re not so nice here. By sanctioning this sort of offense, we’re “edgy” and “brave”.

But point out the horrific problems with Islam–the repression, the treatment of women, and the sheer bloody trail of terror that follows it wherever it gains a majority, and suddenly we’re tripping all over ourselves to be the polite ones.

Let’s be honest for a moment. This isn’t about politeness. It’s about cowardice.

Because unlike those zany Mormons or those repressive and evil Christians, we all think that there’s a pretty good chance that someone who gets their 411 on what G-d wants from a Koran  will decide that he’s had quite enough of our B.S., and is going to try to kill us.

And make no mistake, the threat is real. As the obnoxious and brave staff of Charlie Hebdo found out so recently, as did any number of other Westerners who dared to be Western enough to think that they had actual freedom of speech. Stand up for it, and a nutcase may try to kill you. So decide if you think it’s worth it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had it. I’m sick to death of cowtowing to the so-called”Religion of Peace” and its fanatical followers. I don’t actually get up in the morning and think, “how can I offend someone today by saying something inconsiderate”, but G-d damn it, I’m not willing to sit here and let the craziest person in the room dictate the terms of what can be said in the West.

If you’re reading this from America or a country in Western Europe, congratulations. We were born in freedom, and most of us have never actually had to fight for it. Thankfully we have people like the ridiculously courageous Pam Geller at the American Freedom Defense Initiative–who showed her mettle with her provocative–and clearly needed–Muhammad cartoon contest this past weekend. It was a contest meant to prove a point about the low state of free speech in America–and explosive punctuation to this was added by two would-be mass murderers who showed up to try to slaughter the infidels who dared draw a fucking cartoon.

(As it turned out, the best illustration that day, as some wag put it,  was the chalk outline left around the two jihadis thanks to a sharpshooting cop providing security for the event.)

But if the rest of us wish to remain free people, we can’t afford to let the Pam Gellers and the Geert Wilders of the world do the work of defending liberty for us. We need to relearn the art of telling obnoxious prudes–especially the psychotic ones–to fuck the hell off.

At the very least, we should cut the “tut-tutting’ about being offensive when we discuss people like Geller and Wilders. Whether we would say what they say or not, their courage is what allows us the freedom in our own lives to express ourselves. Because if you think freedom of speech is only about the freedom to say socially approved things, you’re already a slave–and a moron.

Nice People of the World, it’s time to stop being so Fucking Nice.

Recently, my iPhone 5 started bogging down in an epic way–it would take forever to launch apps, often stalling out entirely and requiring multiple tries to even get apps to launch. I tried restarting, shutting down other apps, etc. and nothing worked.

I started seriously wondering whether this was an evil plan that Apple had slipped into later versions of iOS 8 to punish folks who’d declined to drop a couple hundred bucks to upgrade to an iPhone 6.

As it turns out, the culprit was a newish setting under Settings > General called “Background App Refresh”. The purpose of this setting is to allow apps to pull down new content when you’re on a wi-fi network, and is no doubt a lovely thing on some level. But, between Dropbox, Chrome, FaceBook, Instagram, Mailbox, Messenger, and a dozen other apps, it was murdering my phone.

I turned it off, and my phone was instantly back to normal. You can control this setting on an individual app level, so perhaps later I’ll experiment with turning off various apps to figure out the biggest culprits. But for now, I’m just happy to have a reasonably working phone again.

This is a short blog about solving a nasty problem with using Bootstrap’s Modal Dialogs with ASP.NET and Master Pages.

Most examples for using Bootstrap’s very robust dialog support go something like this:

Page Code:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" 
  href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.4/css/bootstrap.min.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" 
  href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.4/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/includes/js/jquery-min.js"></script>
<script src="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.4/js/bootstrap.min.js">
</script>
</head>

<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
        <asp:Button ID="btnShowModal" runat="server" 
            Text="Show Modal" 
            CssClass="btn btn-primary btn-info" 
            data-target="#pnlModal"
            data-toggle="modal" 
            OnClientClick="javascript:return false;" />
        <asp:Panel ID="pnlModal" runat="server" role="dialog" 
           CssClass="modal fade">
            <div class="modal-dialog">
                <div class="modal-content" runat="server">
                    <div class="modal-header">
                        <button type="button" class="close" 
                            data-dismiss="modal">
                            <span aria-hidden="true">&times;</span>
                            <span class="sr-only">Close</span>
                        </button>
                        <h4 class="modal-title">
                          Bootstrap Modal Dialog in ASP.NET</h4>
                    </div>
                    <div class="modal-body">
                        <p>
                            This is the body text
                        </p>
                    </div>
                    <div class="modal-footer">
                        <button type="button" 
                         class="btn btn-default" 
                        data-dismiss="modal">Close</button>
                    </div>
                </div>
            </div>
        </asp:Panel>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Pushing the button shows the dialog, and everything’s ducky. But try the same thing in an ASP.Net app with a master page and nothing happens.

Why? The answer comes down to the “data-target” attribute of the invoking button, which is meant to tell Bootstrap the panel to activate:

<asp:Button ID="btnShowModal" runat="server" Text="Show Modal"
 CssClass="btn btn-primary btn-info" data-target="#pnlModal"
 data-toggle="modal" OnClientClick="javascript:return false;" />

The problem is that in an application with master pages, the actual rendered name of the pnlModal div will likely become something like “ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_pnlModal” and Bootstrap won’t be able to associate it with the necessary JavaScript to show the dialog so the button does nothing.

To solve this, you just need to set the data-target to pnlModal’s clientID (the rendered name). Since data-target isn’t a standard, supported HTML attribute, you can use the Attributes.Add method to set it via the Page_Load event of your code-behind as follows:

Code-behind Code (VB)

Protected Sub Page_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) 
   Handles Me.Load
  If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
    Me.btnShowModal.Attributes.Add("data-target", "#" & pnlModal.ClientID)
  End If
End Sub

…and you’re good to go!

Credit: This post builds upon KHComputers’ excellent contribution about Bootstrap Modal Dialogs in ASP.NET at VBForums

As per my previous post, I’ve been devoting an inordinate amount of time to trying get Atomic Avenue‘s vast list of comic titles to be accepted for Google’s shopping listings. The chief impediment to this has been Google’s automated content filters, which ban outright any product containing certain words.

In the hopes of (a) helping anyone else who’s treading down this path and (b) embarrassing Google into revising, or at least not placing so much blind faith in their automated filters, I’m presenting this as an ongoing list of words that will apparently get your item banned from Google Shopping.

Note: The speculation as to cause is my own; Google will not disclose the reasons, although attempting to place individual keyword ads gives different error messages as to why they were rejected which offers some help in narrowing in the probably causes.

Animax (for us, a ThunderCats clone comic series, or the name of a Japanese animation company; for Google, apparently restricted because it’s the name of a pet medication).

Archer [& Armstrong] – Best guess: they don’t have an issue with the inoffensive Valiant title, but that the word “Archer” sounds like a weapon to them.

Antabuse – For us, an indie comic featuring, well, ants. For Google, apparently restricted as a medicine name.

Belladonna – As in Brian Pulido’s Belladonna. Also the name of a deadly poison, which best guess is causing it to be banned as a medicine name.

Black – Unbelievable. For us, this bans innumerable comics, including Black Widow , Black Ops, The Black Knight, and even Batman: Blackgate. What Google has against the word “Black” is anyone’s guess.

Muse – As in 10th Muse or any number of Liefeld-esque spin-offs. Apparently also the name of an ED treatment.

Pandora – For us, another bad-ass female with her own comic book. Not banned because it’s the name of a streaming music service, apparently, but because it’s the street name of some sort of herbal mixture that you can smoke as a “legal high” in Britain under the name, “Pandora’s Box”

Rage – As in Beneath the Valley of the Rage, or the onetime Avengers character.

Revenge – As in Revenge of the Sinister Six or Dracula’s Revenge

Sentinel – As in Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty. Best guess: because it’s also the name of a pet anti-tick collar.

Spawn (and any variants, including Curse of the Spawn). I’m lost on this one.

Sword(s) – Interestingly, there seems to be a strange line drawn here. Titles involving “Sword” are banned utterly; Titles with “Swords” are disapproved as well, but occasionally offer the option of requesting a manual review.

Try this one on for size: Slip a 3-year (!) contract into a single sentence in the middle of a business internet service install agreement. When customer tries to drop that service after 2-1/2 years, threaten them with massive penalties for cancelling early. Offer to waive those fees if the customer extends the service they’ve had for several years at the customer’s second location, by signing a new 3-year contract there.

But it turns out there’s one the final “gotcha” — the service extension has to be from the same business division (“Comcast Business Internet”) — not just the same company (Comcast). Oh, and did we mention that the business internet group’s starter plans cost twice as much money for a third of the speed as the plans offered by their residential division.

After weeks spent talking with their many tiers of customer support, including liaising with their special group set up by the “VP of Customer Satisfaction”, Comcast was apparently unable to work a deal by which a longtime customer of their business division–trying to become a longtime customer of their residential division–didn’t get punished in the process.

Got the bill today: $964.43. Right below:

“Thank you for being a valued Comcast customer!”

Last session, the California Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decreed that all businesses–no matter how small–must now give paid sick leave to their employees. Effective July 1st, 2015, all employees now get 1 paid hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked.

Sounds great, no?

Unfortunately, they failed to pass a corresponding provision which automatically made California businesses 3.33% more profitable. Instead they’ve essentially decreed that labor costs for all California employers have gone up by 3.33%, provided the employees ever get sick–or simply “get sick”.

We’re a tiny business, and we’ve always played it straight with our employees, so we asked them what they’d want us to do about this one. Surprisingly, nobody was in favor of taking a 3.33% wage cut, and I think they realized that there was a distinct lack of Scrooge McDuck-style piles of gold in the office which we’d been rolling around in on our breaks. So the 3.33% cost increase wasn’t simply going to come from some our of petty cash as we wheeled gold ingots from the secret vault.

No, new legislated costs like this would have to come out of our operating capital, show up as deferments or cuts to new hiring, or get raided from my kids’ all-too-inadequate college fund. There’s no free lunch here, no matter how much our glorious betters in Sacramento might like to declare such in their great benificence.

In the end, we decided that the meager paid holidays at the company just became unpaid holidays, in approximate proportion to the number of new “sick days” that had magically been created. It sucks for everyone, and I’m a little heartbroken to have to give up on paid time off between Christmas and New Years–a perk we’d been proud to make happen since we had a single employee working out of our living room years ago. It just didn’t seem right to force folks to work over the Christmas break, and we were proud to be able to give our folks that time off. After twenty years, that tradition just ended.

Then there’s the effect on the relationship between the employees and the employers. When paid sick time isn’t part of the employment deal, wondering about motives is rarely an issue. If you called in sick, we sent wishes for your speedy recovery, and tried to juggle things at the office as best we could to keep things running without you. No work meant no pay, so we didn’t need to question your motives too much, if ever.

Now, the incentives have changed, and frankly, any employee who doesn’t take every hour they’re entitled to is the sucker.  I guess we all get to look forward to endless rounds of calls which start with “<Cough!> <Cough!> Gee, I’m feeling sick today and can’t make it in…”, along with the mutual looking the other way and trying not to wonder whether we should feel bad for the employee, or vaguely resentful they were shirking.

So let’s see: more distrust between employees and workers, less predictable work schedules, pro-forma sick-call acting sessions, and cancelled holidays.

Great law, folks. Well done. Well done indeed.

My family and I are starting to plan out a road trip from San Jose through the Southwest, going as far as Texas. I’m hoping to take son Neil on some college tours, view the Houston Space Center, hit Universal Studios and a few other things, but if any of the folks reading this have suggestions for amazing local things that we shouldn’t miss, please drop me a line at pbickford@human-computing.com.

Thanks!

-Pete

Facebook has become a minefield of political vitriol, where all too frequently, I have to brace myself for some random bit of highly heated (and repeated) political propaganda making the rounds whenever I want to merely stop by and see what my friends are up to.

Most of the time, there’s just no sense getting into things with friends–after a youth where I delighted with mixing it up with friends over matters politic, I’ve gradually come to recognize the wisdom that politics, sex, and religion are not topics for polite conversation.Nobody’s mind ever gets changed in an online political discussion, and the discussions that follow inevitably generate more heat than light–and risk straining friendships held together by too-delicate strands strained by time and distance.

Every so often, however, I do the foolish thing and respond to some new political meme being circulated by a friend I consider generally reasonable, in the hopes that I can point out that some “shocking new study” originated by an advocacy group is little more than lightly disguised propaganda before it gets circulated enough that it passes into group memory and morphs into common knowledge. After which point, it will be repeated endlessly, no matter how many times calmer heads point out that there’s no basis in fact for the now “unshakable fact”.

In the best case, wading into these things gets folks to slow down and consider for a moment whether 1 in 3 women on college campuses is actually raped; whether 1/2 the garbage in the world is actually generated by America, etc. etc. etc. We never run out of invented and easily disproved statistics which much of the world is absolutely certain are true, because people they trust told them so. The malevolent bastards in politics and the media invent phony “wars on women”, “attacks on the environment”, “racist conspiracies” and countless other crimes against all that is good because they know that the mere thought of someone doing such things makes us angry. Any when we’re angry, we seldom stop to think whether the attack in question is actually what they say it is.

Politicians lives are built around spreading despicable nonsense like this, and the more they can rile us up and get us mad at “those evil <members of the other party>” who apparently exist to commit every societal ill for the sheer fun of it, the more we get out to vote for them, the more we send them money, and the more we pass their crap along on Facebook.

At least (most of) the politicians–and their adjuncts in the various media outlets which act as their propaganda arms–know that the full truth is at best far more complex, and too often, completely the opposite of what is being stated. They lie for the power it brings them, and they like the fact that it pits normal folk against each other by labelling half of them as enemies. It’s called “energizing the base”. J.A. Schumpeter put it best when he famously stated, “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”

But for the “civilians” who are not professional members of a political party, advocacy group, or media outlet, we’re far too uncritical when we pass along things that we’re told are true by these same outfits. We trust that the media have actually vetted the facts, so we’re outraged by the insensitivity of friends who might have managed to get a different part of the story in our increasingly partisan and one-sided media culture.

Too often, when friends say something we disagree with, we don’t ask, “What makes them say that? Have they heard a version of the story we haven’t?” but instead assume that however well we thought we knew them all these years, they must have secretly been, “one of THOSE folks” who are ignorant/evil/racist/homophobic/etc. all along. In a worst case, friendships of years have been dismissed in an instant over opinions on some political talking point. More frequently, folks simply “tribe up” with similar-minded folks and repeat each other’s never-questioned viewpoints, or learn to shut up and not say anything at all. In all of these cases, the politicians win, and normal people lose.

We shouldn’t play their game. If you hear a fact that’s “too good to check”, ask yourself how the other side would argue their point of view. In today’s world, even major media outlets will monolithically present only one side of a story, and much of what we “know” about a side’s point of view comes not from listening to that side, but by listening to what ideological opponents of that side say their point of view is.

As an example, ask a Tea Partier what he cares about, and you’ll hear a lot of talk about controlling government spending and adherence to constitutional law; Ask a member of far left what Tea Partiers stand for and you’ll hear a lot of talk about hating blacks and poor people. Similarly, ask a Democrat what they care about, and you’ll hear talk about empowering the underprivileged and controlling the abuses of business; ask a member of the far right what Democrats care about, and you’ll hear about class warfare, taxation, and using the power of government to reward special interest groups. When the news media you listen to report only stories which sound exactly like the talking points of the people standing against one group or another, you’re not likely being fed a straight story.

Over time, you’ll amass countless “facts” put out by these same media which support the narrative, and if you never do the legwork to authenticate them with either original source material or the statements of the other side, you’ll find yourself hitting the “Unfriend” button the next time an acquaintance with a different view on plastic bag bans voices a concern, since only a monster could not want to ban plastic bands when you know that a gigantic mass of plastic bags the size of Bulgaria is killing the whales After all, the Surfrider foundation had that heartrending animation of the whale beaching itself on the floating refuse island, and you’ve heard numerous media outlets confidently report that we’ll destroy everything if we don’t “Ban the Bag”. The same outlets never take down the whale animation after the scientist behind the “100 million tons of plastic garbage in a giant floating island”  theory later recants and revises his estimates down to something more like 7,000 tons…oh, and it seems the sun was breaking that up into tiny particles, much the same way it disintegrates any plastic toy left out on my back deck for a couple of summers.

My latest wade into the treacherous waters FaceBook politics ended on a happier note than some. Cooler heads kept the conversation respectful, although it was clear that our worldviews–shaped by the media we’d been fed–couldn’t have been more different. And although politicians and their media counterparts seem to exist to tear people apart, I’m reminded that there are still things: family, kids, or a shared love of Rush albums–which bring us together–even when the same folks would normally be on the opposite side of the latest political meme-war.

Politicians are evil bastards. We should always be willing to stand up for what we believe, but we lose our humanity when we let ourselves be so easily manipulated by people whose job routinely involves playing games with the facts to gain power.