A notable exception to this is Steve McLeod and his Poker Co-pilot who did go to release and who has managed to create a pretty successful product and business as reward for his efforts.  Congrat’s to Steve!

You may also remember that in November last year, after struggling with the terrible and bug ridden implementation of COM inside Delphi I switched to .Net and Visual Studio.  Since then CodeGear have a .Net version of Delphi that looks reasonably good, but I’ve decided to stick with VB.Net and C#.  Yes, both and yes it works very well for me.

Since November 2007 we’ve had a lot of issues with nature (bushfires), a bit of surgery that made my right hand temporarily useless and of course recoding everything into .Net takes a lot of time, given I was a .Net newbie at the time I started.  On the upside I released PerforMixer which I might add is yet to make a sale on the internet, as predicted by me so no surprise there, but encouragingly it’s now had 17 separate IP addresses searching for serials, working codes and torrents.  That’s encouraging because 17 people feel strongly enough about it to steal it and so far, at least for those 17, it’s resisted attempts at tampering.  Will be interesting to see how the Partial Key Verification system survives in the less than opaque environment of .Net compiled code.  In addition to this we put CDROO online this week and while it’s still working it’s way up in the search engines we have had several sales to date – and thank you to those ISV’s who purchased so early on in the sites career!!

In the meantime we’ve been doing a heck of a lot of background work in MixAction.  To say it is an altogether different product to the one shown here last June is an understatement.  It’s even undergone some changes since earlier this year.  But I’m pleased to be able to say I’m now confident I can get it out into full beta (again!!) by the end of July 2009.

To Keep Me On Track

Because I found the whole June 2007 thing enjoyable and the regular daily blog posts a great tool for staying focussed I’ve decided to try to do the same thing starting Monday 15th of June 2009 through to July 29th 2009.  If I fail to do so this time, given the enormous lead up I’ve had, I’m going to be pretty peeved and invite one and all to let me have it in the comments section of this blog! 

No, I still honestly believe time periods of 30 days etc are generally bad news for development cycles.  In this instance I’m literally bringing the pieces together into the UI and connecting them with glue and code.  So I’m not reversing my stand on this.  Rather I’m simply forcing myself to stop iterating without a release.  It’s way past time I did that. So here goes… 

So, barring hospitalization for Swine Flu, or something equally bizarre, my goal is July 29th which was the day I hatched out some, almost, 46 years ago.  A present to me, in a sense I guess.

Let’s see if I can do it.

On a final note, Automatic have released WordPress 2.8 update.  So far I’ve updated all my sites, except this one.  Sunday evening I’ve set aside an hour to ensure I get the update done, experience so far has shown it’s fairly painless with one or two recalcitrant plug-ins here or there.  I’ve left this blog till last as it’s my busiest site and for some reason weekends have been more busy on it recently than weekdays.  So Sunday night (early morning in the USA, arfternoon in Eurpope) this blog will be offline for a short time, hopefully no longer than around five minutes, if the other sites are anything to go by.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Never judge a book by its movie. – J. W. Eagan

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• About (0)
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After signing with Microsoft’s BizSpark ISV program last November and switching across to VisualStudio .Net after 13 years with Delphi I’ve been delighted with the productivity VisualStudio has afforded me.  VisualStudio 2010 has a bunch of new features so while the hand is healing I’m going to fiddle with a few of them inside a Virtual Machine.  I’m expecting a few bits and pieces that will target Windows 7 features and some expansion on Vista features.  Hopefully in the UI stakes too.

With any luck in the coming days I’ll be able to share some of those new features here.

From what I’ve been able to tell the feature set to be included is:

• An “enhanced user experience” – a shiny new IDE design
• Tools for Windows 7 development
• .Net 4.0
• SharePoint development inside Visual Studio
• Enhanced Web development capabilities
• One-click deployment and support for poor old Silverlight
• Cloud development support, with Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
• Updated database support for a variety of MS and non MS databases.
• Parallel programming
• Enhanced support for ALM (Application Lifecycle Management)

Jason Zander, general manager for Visual Studio in Microsoft’s Developer Division, posted on his blog (see previous link) in detail about some of the changes they’ve made, particularly in relation to user feedback.

Note the public beta is probably going to become available sometime following the MSDN release.

Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks. – Groucho Marx

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At the time I meant to mention, having kept tropical fish since I was a kid, the image on the default desktop wallpaper of a Siamese Fighting fish.  Non fish keepers might not grasp the significance of this selection of imagery.  Though it’s certainly not a secret as a quick Google search reveals.

The significance is this.  The Siamese Fighting fish has the scientific name of “Betta”.  The image displayed on the Windows 7 desktop is that of a morph of Betta splendens which is the result of careful hybridization from the relatively drab colours of the wild species within the Betta fanciers circle. 

Now, there’s also a rather interesting fact about the Betta species as a whole.  The males do the nesting and egg care, they will fight any male (of the same or related species) on sight and will kill any female not prepared to mate with them.

Did Microsoft intend that with the imagery as well?

Perhaps not, but the aquarist in me has got to ask! 

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic. – Doris Egan

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So it came as a surprise to read across at the 37Signals blog about GetSatisfaction.  Please Click Here in order to read the full details as to how the company GetSatisfaction affected their company, and no, I’m not a 37Signals customer or even a regular reader of their blog.

Not to be outdone as a regular arrogant and destructive SOB I figured what the hey – this is certainly a good example of what not to do for ISV’s.

OK.  Read the 37Signals post?  I don’t want to rehash the details here.  They are covered well enough in the blog post linked above.  The point I want to make is this.  Businesses used to deliver to their customers a modicum of respect through something known as a “Gentleman’s Agreement.”  Basically this meant it was taboo to directly do anything that negatively impacted on another business, such as disparaging a competitor, using their logo or brand (Trademark anybody?) in a manner that would give a member of the public or another business the impression they were dealing with that company when in actual fact they weren’t.

What this means is that the rare company that did engage in these tactics flopped.  You felt that if they had no respect for anybody else they’d not respect you or your property either.  So you ditched them if you were their customer or you avoided them for the future if you were not.

That’s what I’ll be doing with the company GetSatisfaction.  I don’t deal with people who are not “gentlemanly” – read – “ethical”.  To pretend that you are some kind of official outlet for another, plagiarise their logo and mention their name everywhere – and then – demonise them in the sense that you accuse them of:

“Company XYZ has not yet committed to an open conversation about its products and services.” 

Hang on – say what?  GetSatisfaction is acting like some kind of “open community” here on some kind of ideological social crusade but GetSatisfaction is first and foremost a commercial entity that sells it’s service to companies as a venue for offering customer support on the internet.  This is qualifies for dirty, scammy and downright unethical in my book.  Dirty because it’s a low blow to the very companies they seek to make their clients by popping the quote above in small text by way of disclaimer.  Scammy because they are indirectly implying they represent the companies in question when they do not through the use of logos and company name repetition (the target company, not their own company name) and unethical because it’s looks like a chapter out of an episode from Bastards Inc –

Ewen at 37Signals states:

“The problem is that GS pages look, act, read, and feel official. And for some companies they are. GS is a useful tool for companies that choose to use it. But check out the difference between a page for a company that chooses to use GS and a page for a company that has no idea what GS is. Tiny tiny differences I bet 9 out of 10 of people hitting that page would never notice.”

Now that’s unethical on the part of GetSatisfaction.  Indeed it qualifies as downright “bastard” in my book.

SHAME on GetSatisfaction.

Don’t resort to this technique folks.  It’s pathetic and low.  Believe it or not some people (many people) do have a moral sense and do comport themselves with dignity.  My suggestion to GetSatisfaction founders is this:

1. Attend some classes on the basic principles of business ethics.
2. Familiarize yourself with trademark law.
3. Study customer and consumer reaction beyond seeing how you can take advantage of it.
4. Get a bloody clue!

I urge ISVs – micro and beyond – not to resort to this in their marketing.  Shine because you are ethical.  Offering an open community for the purposes of support and indeed to shine a light if needed on a lack of support from companies is a worthwhile goal – but to utilize it in a manner that gives the direct impression that the consumer is dealing with the company when they are not, to use that companies logos and business name over and over (Google food?) to support that suggestion is crappy, cruddy, scammy and unethical.

Don’t be a bastard!

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. – Al Capp

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Anyway.  I use Tortoise for one single reason.  It stores my source as physical files and folders.  Years of using source control has made me leery if not down right adverse to storing source inside, for example, a database.  It’s Murphy’s law when it comes to storing data of the magnitude of software source code.  For the Micro ISV the available tools are more akin to maintain control of reams of “source” spaghetti than “control”.

But beyond this I actually don’t enjoy using Tortoise that much at all as it doesn’t fit well, in keeping IMHO, with most source control systems, for the needs of a single operator or small software shop. 

Yes – there are other tools like Perforce, Eric Sinks  Source Gear and others.  These are indeed fine tools.  But they tend to be over and above my needs if not indeed making me run through hoops a small ISV honestly can’t justify running through.  Don’t get me wrong here.  I’ve worked (and led) teams using source control.  In teams I’m 100% behind how these tools work.  They are necessary and a God send IMHO.  But for a developer working solo they are over kill if not downright frustrating and time consuming.

But there’s a gap here.  A light footprint GUI based, directory based source control system that plugs into Visual Studio or Borland Delphi etc is to my mind needed.  I’ve looked at dozens of solutions, for many years I used FreeVCS written in Delphi until the fools across at Project Jedi (the “masters” of including commercial code inside their “free” open source libraries it would seem) turned it into an unreliable piece of nonsense.

What’s needed is a tool aimed at the Micro ISV to my mind.  Something that starts at around $100 US dollars.  Took at least 12 months to write (yeah – no 30 Day sprint stuff for this kind of stuff), stores source in physical locations (server or local) and “virtually” checks source in and out.  Yep – you read that right.  Virtually checks it in and out.  Read only directories are a pain in the posterior on local and even local server systems with solo developers in mind.  How many solo developers are going to “accidently” delete their source repository (which for a solo is about the only reason for actually marking a file read only at the operating system level) and if they do (after all the Windows prompts) then they should probably be looking at a different career anyway!

A tool like this would require extensive consultation.

Yep.  You’d have to ask numerous ISV’s about their thoughts.  You’re going to have to harden yourself to many saying another tool like this is not needed.  Some are not going to see the benefit of it being aimed at small shops.  Some are not going to see the benefit of source control at all! 

If you ask on the BOS forums you’ll be crucified for your “stupidity in even considering it.”  Take heart though – most of the anonymous replies you’ll get along these lines are from idiots who’ve either never released a product as ISV’s or if they have it’s a total flop.  The emptiest vessels make the most noise.

You’d have to think “flexible” options to meet the basics required as no two developers are going to want quite the same thing.  I said I believed the tool was needed, I never said it was going to be easy.

Finally – it’d better look shiny and not a relict of 1998.  GUI design has come forward light years since then.  You’re competing against FOS here (in particular), you’re going to get cloned if you pull this off so you’d better raise the bar in as many places you can – GUI is one place where FOS suffers an Epic Fail time and time again (and I love it!!) and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.

It should support Amazon EC3 or Azure as a location for a repositry and archived zips or similar would make an huge amount of sense (safer than databases too) for storage.

Skip using a database.  XML is probably an option worth exploring here IMHO.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. – Anatole France

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Today’s blog post however is of specific interest to ISV’s, both micro and huge.  It’s showing their analysis of links between websites.  It’s rather stunning, if not scary.  Note – normally I do not just publish stat’s that don’t have detailed analysis data published with them.  However I trust these guys implicitly (they are leaders) and to be honest in this instance their word is well worth considering.

OK.  Consider the chart below published on their blog today showing website topics that tend to link to malware or badware sites (all images are Copyright Websense Security Labs and Amy Steier) from their web analysis (their article is worth reading too):

Now, ignoring the obvious in the blue area for the purposes of this article, you’ll notice the purple area “Freeware and Software Download” as well as the green “Information Technology”.  Amy writes:

“At Websense, our analysis leads to one clear conclusion: bad leads to bad.”

Apologies for no percentage or other numerical values here, this is the only data they’ve published for this.   But their contention is quite clear in the trend shown in the pie chart above. 

She continues:

“You’ve probably heard that freeware is risky. Our link analysis overwhelmingly supports this. It’s a death trap for machines and networks. If you are in the habit of downloading freeware, you will, without a doubt, eventually find something malicious or illegal.”

Well, actually no.  I’ve not “heard freeware is risky.”  But I’m assuming her customers have, or the readers of her blog have, and if not then they have now. 

So why is this pertinent to ISVs? 

Simple.  Our almost religious dependence and support for software download sites.  I’ve written here time and time again that if you use download sites as part of your marketing strategy then you’d better be prepared to pay the piper when it comes to guilt by association whether it be from search engines blocking you because you link or web threat trending companies telling their customers that going to these sites is a risk.

If you really give a damn about your company and comprehend that it’s a “company” you’re running, not a product you make at the weekend and sell via a car boot sale (download site) be careful linking or associating in anyway with sites whose sole justification is to harvest Google advert income or phishing or malware distribution – or both.  If you can not guarantee it 70% you can’t afford to have your software there, or your website link to it. 

Get real – this is a business, not a nature walk with your prep teacher.  If we learnt anything at all from the spyware/adware debacle of the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was this.  Good products are destroyed overnight through being sullied by schemes they had no control over.

Scott Kane

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Across on her Blog a Google Checkout user “Amy” has told of her recent experience with Google and her use of Google Checkout – how Google has closed her account, won’t give reasons why and has decided it’ll keep her US $2300 odd dollars to boot.

Have the Google Checkout folks been reading the “PayPal Guide For Online Processors” or did they come up with this scam themselves?

I say “scam” because lets face it – if your bank sent you a letter like this (in most “Western” countries at a least) the company would be in violation of so many trading, credit and banking laws the lawyers would have a ball.  Yet, somehow Google thinks it’s immune.  Google legal people have been heard in court whining “It’s not fair.  What if everybody took Google to court?”

Err – Hello!  Mattress to base!!!!

As Amy said she logged into her Google account (screen shot on her blog here) to find Google essentially saying:  “$2300, account closed and sorry, we can’t give it back to you and don’t have the cheek to ask why.”

Unusually, for an article like this, there’s a bunch of good replies in the comments section, even one from a Google employee (and an ex Google employee) that speak volumes.  The ex employee rightfully pointing the the level of fraud to be dealt with when one is a bottom feeding payment processor.  Because lets face it, when it comes to payment processing Google is bottom feeding.  You pay for what you get and until recently that meant you paid virtually nothing to Google to process your payments.  Of course your customer has the right to charge back, as advertised to the customer by Google, for 24 hours.  No doubt an attempt to “protect” people from companies not related to good old Google.  But who the hell is protecting those companies from Google???!!

An excerpt from Amy’s comment section from one reader:

“A once great company led by two noble young chaps, now investors have got the best of them. I known Page and Brin must toss and turn at night sometimes to see how their little baby has grown up into a rude, stingy, conniving, thieving copyright infringer of a company. it’s sad”

While another appeals:

“So many great, brilliant guys/hackers there, bringing out startups, products everyday there in USA. Can’t someone create a better system to beat paypal? Whats with wasting time inventing all this Twitter or FriendFeed useless apps? Can’t someone talented enough put his knowledge to good use & make a system that would help millions of innocent users & save from PayPal?”

There’s a market there, if somebody can capitalize and build it.

So this whole Googly stuff is a one off, isolated – right?  Nope:  http://tiny.cc/PXjHT

At the end of Amy’s comment section Amy has updated her post with this:

“Anyway, quick update… I got a form letter email from Google saying “During a recent review it has come to our attention that your merchant account ID [my id] was closed due to a technical error.”

She finishes with:

“More detailed follow up post coming. But don’t think I think this is justice served. It’s incomprehensible that this is the only way to get my money back. Not everyone has the wherewithal or support of the community to write or get attention for a blog post about getting ripped off. And no word on the Adsense money. Although it’s from a while ago, I’m still pissed.”

I don’t use Google Adsense or Adwords or anything except Google organic search.  This is why.  I don’t trust them. 

Yesterday, prior to reading Amy’s article, I installed a new machine for my wife.  She wanted a faster machine, a Vista Aero interface and took IE7 up to IE8 for her.  She, like I, use the Google toolbar inside IE.  It’s the only toolbar I install or allow on machines I manage.  Said toolbar inserted into the taskbar a new application, perhaps innocuous enough, but without my consent.  Taskbar mind, not the browser toolbar, boldly labelled “Google”.

Hey Google.  Message this.  Shove that idea where the sun don’t shine.  I don’t like applications that install things into places I don’t specify, I delete them and I setup policies to prevent their use on my systems.  I certainly don’t want corporate branding on my Windows taskbar.  It’s my machine, it my Windows license that I lease from Microsoft.  Google toolbar duly deleted.  Wow – maybe they should write a book.  “How to trash a good brand name in 3 easy steps.”

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. – Anthony Burgess

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Above are the Askimet stat’s for this blog since it began last year.  In fact this month is the first anniversary of the blog.  You’ll see from the table above that Askimet has been pretty busy here.  But even with Askimet, an excellent tool, I found I was still processing a large amount of Spam and Ham daily by hand (not reflected in the stat’s above, missed by Askimet).

Until I installed “Bad Behaviour”, a WordPress plug-in I blogged about this time last week.  The number of Spam and Hams to this blog since installation – one week?

None.

Number of bot blocks?  223 at the time of writing.

One of the MAJOR offenders in this is people using a Scumware product called AddSenseBoy.  Google it, I’m not going to give them link juice here.  I mentioned in the last article that Plimus were acting as the payment processor for these scam/spam/splog artists.  Plimus are no longer advertised on their site as their payment service – in fact nobody is, you have to “contact them”.  However it seems that Plimus are still their Affiliate management service.  At least they still link to Plimus under their “Affiliates” link for joining their affiliate scheme.  Perhaps a link to a discontinued service, I’m certainly not going to be logging in to Plimus to find out.  You can find out more about this whole deal here: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/366/RipOff0366936.htm  If you Google a bit you’ll see why this has got my goat in respect of Plimus.  It seems their proclivity for ignoring emails is not restricted to just me as an anti-malware organization seems to have discovered too.

Anyway, if you’re running a WordPress blog and sick of the hits from bots, even if they fail in posting keep in mind you still pay for their bandwidth usage, then give Bad Behaviour a try.  An interesting side note on this, no proof if it is related, is that feed subscriptions increased by a few hundred a week since I installed this.  Without A/B testing I can’t prove any link, but given that the resources of the server have been reduced it’s possible it may be connected.  Would make an interesting experiment. 

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates… When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, ‘Do I know you?’ – Steven Wright

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Anyway, in common with most blogs this one has Askimet installed.  Askimet is a great tool that catches 90% of the garbage submitted by bots, spammers and sploggers – even the human kind.  However the remaining 10% can still be a bloody nuisance.  Middle of last year I tried to install a plug-in called “Bad Behaviour” into this blog.  At that time I had some issues with the version of PHP and it wouldn’t’ run.  As I’m on a different server now I tried it again and it works a treat.  At the time of writing this Bad Behaviour had blocked 52 bot access attempts in 24 hours (that’s how long it’s been installed).  That’s 52 slams into the web server, the database, RAM and CPU if they had not been blocked.  It works by not adding IP addresses to .htaccess but relies on patterns and a nice interface to a database of known spammers.  The great thing is that their spam attempts are not only blocked but added to the database so that other users of the database (other unrelated websites) get the benefit of blocking them too.  Kind of digital Gaffa tape for spammers. 

For the spammers who may read this – please go and choke on an apple core, you and the world will be better off!

For the rest of us – if you’re running a WordPress blog give Bad Behaviour a try.  I even managed to get rid of the average of three to seven human entered spam’s and splogs I get on a good day (far worse on days when you write something that gets syndicated on some social network sites) that Askimet flags as spam, but doesn’t simply delete.

UPDATED: Just in the time it took to write this very brief post and publish it the block count rose from 52 blocked attempts to 61.  We pay for these scumbags in CPU cycles, RAM and bandwidth.  TIP: The number of blocks on this blog can be seen at bottom left of the footer of each page.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. – Vince Lombardi

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A fair enough question.  The answer is simple enough.  February ended up being a complete write off for so many reasons I can hardly believe it myself.

Lets See – What Went Wrong Here…

1. Four solid days of record breaking temperatures above 45 degrees C setting not only temperature but length records.
   It’s extremely hard to code under those conditions
2. Saturday 7th of February – temperature records for Melbourne smashed again at 47 deg C locally.  (117 deg F for those used to Imperial measurements) which led to…
3. What is considered to be the worst bushfire in the written history of the world passed through my local area, killed 210 with over 30 people still missing.  Some of whom will probably never be found as the heat was so intense.  In fact it was estimated by scientists to be the equivalent of 960 Megatons, which for the curious is around 640 Hiroshima sized nukes or 3 low yield hydrogen bombs, or just short of a high yield one.   This event lost me ten days as I was unable to return home.  For the victims directly affected, such as my sister and her family their home and for 20 of her neighbours their lives.
4. Due to reasons I won’t go into I received a bloody great hole in my left shoulder blade requiring six stitches while all this was going on.
5. On Monday the 2nd of March I had to again make the decision to “leave” as conditions turned towards the worst again with the authorities turning to texting residents with “fight or flight” advice affecting my own suburb again.  Having been in a wildfire I can assure you that “fight” is not an option to be taken lightly.  Thus losing another five days.

So that’s what happened to the March release date.  It came and went.  For the next few weeks I’m going to hold off with release predictions while I get myself back into the routine.  But effectively, when it’s all said and done I pretty much lost the month of February.  

However…

In some respects it wasn’t an entire waste as far as code goes.  I got a lot of experimentation done, I needed that time and my shoulder, combined with logistics (it’s hard coding in somebody’s kitchen) made serious work impossible.  Having said that I may have a little surprise, another application, in the coming weeks that I was able to spend some time working on.  Something requiring less intense concentration and for our company, a little side-line within the semi-pro audio area.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory. – Paul Fix

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