Category: Uncategorized

I read two great blog posts today.  One by Wil Wheaton, and one by Joel Spolsky. 

Wil’s post was about taking the time to take care of yourself, not just living for your job or to help others.  Its something I’ve thought about every now and again: how can you help other people if you are dried up because you don’t take time to replenish your reserves?  Check it out here.

Joel’s post was about great customer service.  Its a pet peeve of mine so I won’t dwell on it for long, but he makes some good points that I think most companies don’t pass on to their support people.  Its a long read, but its pretty good.  Check it out here. 

Joel’s article actually mentions a company (Land’s End)that he has had awesome service from.  It is funny how certain companies seem to stick in your mind.  I remember them from about 1998 (when I was in varsity). I was helping out at the Sanlam Future Business Leaders Week by managing “sound/media” for various venues which meant that I got to listen to a bunch of really interesting speakers.  One of whom was “Brian Gardiner” (my apologies if I have spelled that incorrectly).  I first met Brian when he came to lecture at Rhodes University in the Infomation Systems department (my dad was the head of the department at the time, I was in school).  I think that in 1998 he was at Internet Solutions, and while I don’t remember much about his talk, I do remember that he mentioned Land’s End.  He was talking about doing business over the internet and mentioned how awesome their service was even though he was a customer in a different country to their main market.  At that time there probably weren’t too many large companies selling products globally via the internet.  But I do remember him telling me that they had done some great work in keeping him happy when he’d had problems.  Its good to see that they have kept up that customer service value going strong.

Continuing in the saga of the home acquisition story, I’d like to ruminate on how handy technology can be.

Back in the day, faxes were “all that”.  And while I still think they’re useful, I am really appreciating e-mail and fax to email.  In the quest to obtain  home loan you end up having to send and recieve a lot of faxes.  But, thanks to fax to e-mail a lot of this schlep goes away.  (I have a fax-to-email account from CyberFax)

The process for the bond application went as follows:

1. Christie and I have to fill out a “Fica” declaration form and fax it to the bond originator
2. We both have to send a copy of our ID books
3. We both have to send a copy of our last 3 months bank statements
4. One of us have to send through some proof of address.
5. We both have to send through a copy of our last salary slip

The only thing in this list that was actually faxed off is the form that we filled out.  (I was too lazy to scan it in and e-mail it.)  Both of us have electronic copies of our ID books, both of our banks faxed our statements to my fax-to-email account, SABC faxed me a statement with my physical addess on it, my salary slip is e-mailed to me so I just printed it to PDF, and Christie faxed her copy to my fax-to-emal account.

Then in one e-mail, I sent all of these electronic copies of to the bond originator.  No hassles with writing cover letters, printing things out, and waiting by the fax machine for ages until it sends successfully.  Just a few phone calls, and one quick e-mail.

It really was quite easy.  So by Tuesday next week we should know if we have a bond or not.  Yay!

I saw this personality disorder test on someone’s blog and couldn’t resist taking it… Here are my results:

All of my disorders are < 50% and the test creator says the following about the “Schizoid” disorder:
“I don’t think Schizoid personality is a valid disorder, some of the smartest people in history were schizoid because they occupied a remote end of the intelligence bell curve. Schizotypal personality can encompass highly original thinkers as well as totally insane people so I think it’s a flawed type. I think the remaining eight disorders are generally valid.“

To: Grant Jackson (FusionReactor)
Cc: Shaun Green (WBS)
Subject: FusionReactor support Rocks! (not so with WBS’s support)
Hi,

I’ve spent the past two weeks beating my head against the desk while I wait on hold or deal with bad support from WBS’s helpdesk.  In the past 2 weeks my PC keeps being disconnected from iBurst and then failing to reconnect. (I get error messages saying either that my username and password is invalid or that the server took too long to respond)  For two weeks I’ve been told “Check your MTU settings”, “Reboot your PC” or “Reboot your iBurst modem”.  This morning I had had enough, and I was about to start shouting to anyone who would listen that I was fed up with the situation.

Then I remembered that when I’d signed up with FusionReactor the guy who dropped off the modem had said I should call them if I had support problems.  So I gave FusionReactor a call.  I spoke to Craig and I was blown away.  Here is a “support person” who spoke with knowledge and understanding.  Once he had my username he almost immediately said “I see you have a problem” (because he could see how regularly I was being disconnected).  While I was talking to him he would say “Oh, I see you’ve disconnected again” or “You’re back online again”.  Something small, but it told me that he was using some system and had information at his fingertips.  He asked the right questions, listened to the information I told him, and actually understood the implications of what I was saying.

The WBS Support response up till today had been as outlined above, but today I was told by Porschia (who I’d spoken to twice before) that the disconnection problem has been around for a long time and that while its been minimised its not solved.  She seemed to think that I should accept that and she didn’t think that the fact that its only started happening to me in the past two weeks and it only seems to happen when I’m processing website logs on my PC (which does a number of DNS requests and other checks) could be useful information.  But when I told Craig that he seemed to understand that something must have happened in the past 2 weeks to cause it (which the WBS guys didn’t seem to get).  So when I suggested that perhaps WBS was disconnecting me because the network thought that the many DNS requests in one small burst were “malicious” he actually considered it as a viable possibility.

Heck even if he was lying to me, it worked.  I trusted what he said, and that made me feel like I was in good hands with FusionReactor. Eventually I found that our local network guys had disabled my windows firewall, and perhaps there was something involved there that was causing my disconnections.  So Craig promised to check up further on his side, and I said I’d let him know if it gets better.  I was happy, I had a solution and I had a provider who genuinely cared and helped.

Grant I wanted to let you know this because I was *REALLY* impressed. I’m cc’ing this to Shaun because I’m hoping he’ll send his guys on whatever training you sent your guys on. Or perhaps he can convince the HR department in WBS to learn something from FusionReactor’s HR department so that they hire more qualified people to represent them to the public.

I’m going to pass on the message to the guys who I’ve referred to FusionReactor, and I’ve blogged about the incident so that hopefully people who read it will see some light in the otherwise dark tunnel that is iBurst support.

From
  Paul

About a year ago I posted an entry about a “game” that was pretty frustrating to solve.  You were locked in a room and have to find your way out… Well thanks to Splattermail I found out about more of these “Takagism” puzzles.

Aparently they’re all makde by Toshimitsu Takagi and here’s the list of the games:

The Crimson Room

The Viridian Room (Solution)

The Blue Chamber

Unfortunately this time I haven’t searched to find solutions to all the games… but you can buy hints/solutions online on the game website. 

[Update: Solution found for Viridian Room]

This is one of the most level headed “*nix vs Windows” posts I’ve seen in a long while.  I found it via Craig’s blog.

Ok, so maybe my last blog post was a bit premature.  I made it to the meeting only 50 minutes late – just in time for the second session.  Unfortunately it was not very well attended, however that was very fortunate for me.  Because I got asked a question and I knew the answer, so I got a cool book – Microsoft .Net Compact Framework (Core Reference)! I’m not sure who sponsors the books – I’m guessing its Microsoft South Africa – but I’m seriously thankful to whoever it is that sponsored it! 😀

Mario spoke on Serialization, and the bit that I did see was pretty good.  His code was well done, and he definately knew what he was talking about.  I guess I’d put it as a level 300 talk in Microsoft’s ratings. (I’m not too familiar with what constitutes what level talk, but it was pretty in depth which puts it above a level 200 but not down to assembly code which makes it less than a level 400)  He spoke pretty well – I kinda got lost once or twice but then I wasn’t sure if it was because I missed the first bit, if I was just being stupid, if it was just because it was late at night after a long day, or if it had anything to do with what Mario had said.  I think I might just have to try and get hold of his VS.Net solution so that I can step through all the code to try and resolve the few outstanding questions I have.  (I’m still not 100% sure why the XML Serialization created two identical objects in the one scenario when the Runtime/Binary Serialization didn’t… well, I think I know why the XML did its thing, but I’m so not sure why the Binary one didn’t do it)

After hearing good feedback about Mario’s last talk, I decided to make some mental notes during the session so that I could keep them in mind when I do my talk on Reflection in June.  His code was incredibly neat, well commented and pretty much exactly what I’d like my code to look like.  I think I’d like to use the space we have to present in differently…

There were very few people there, and we all sat in the one half of the room… So from left to right (as you faced Mario) you had Mario in the corner behind the speakers podium-thingy, then a large empty space where the projector was projecting, and then us just right of center.  Now with the late hour and long day I actually found it kinda difficult to concentrate, especially when the podium is kinda in the dark, so its not that easy to see the speaker.  So any time when he spoke for too long my eyes kept wandering towards the big VS.Net that was being projected on the wall – which actually was rather un-inspiring.  I’m not really sure how I’d change that because its kinda a pain to keep changing between VS.Net and some other screen just so that you can answer someone’s question in full and not have their eyes wandering around.  But I think I’d either ask the guys to move over to the same side of the room as what I was standing on, or I would walk out from behind the podium when I wasn’t using the computer. (But then I wouldn’t want to end up standing in the light of the projector and casting a horrible shadow on the screen behind me so I’m not too sure how that would work either)

I must also start practicing so that working on someone else’s pc isn’t a hassle – looking at the size of the font and how little code could fit on the screen, I’d get lost quite quickly.  So I think I’ll do a run through with my PC in 800×600 mode just to be sure that I can have some experience.  (I’m not saying that Mario didn’t do this, its just that I noticed that the screen seemed to fit far less code on it than I’m used to, so I need to be prepared for that)

I also think I’ll try and pre-prepare some questions to ask people before I even arrive at the talk so that it doesn’t become a “Guess which number I’m thinking of” game. (Not that this happened tonight either, but I’m just planning) But this is getting off the point of the post… 

The talk was good, I learned a bit more about Serialization than what I knew before I went there, and I got to chat to some other developers.

Ok, so this blog comes out of some selfish motives…  I found out what book is being given away at today’s SA Developer user group meeting in JHB.  Its one that I’d really like to read, but I’m probably going to be very late and even if I did somehow know the right answers I probably won’t win it anyway. (The question they ask is usually related to the talk, so if I miss a bit of it I might not know the answer when the question is asked)

So… That got me thinking.  I have books that I’ve not read, or books that I’ve read an age ago but haven’t read in the past while.  I’m sure that other developers are pretty similar.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could pool our book resources… then any of the developers in my area could see that I have “Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition”, and one of the Microsoft “Patterns and Practices” books sitting at home, and if they wanted to read one of them, I could lend the book to them.  And if I saw that someone had a book on writing code for the .Net Compact Framework (which I do want to read about since I just got a nifty smartphone) I could ask them if I could borrow it.

Then I remembered a site I heard about an AGE ago that did exactly this… I joined but it had very few south african’s so it wasn’t much use.  But what if the SA Developer User Groups joined and put up their personal libraries to be shared.  Since most of us either know or know of most of the other SA Developers it would be a fairly low risk loan process.  So here’s the idea… if you’re keen on sharing DVD’s/Books/Music check out MediaChest!  They already have groups for Johannesburg and Pretoria/Centurion.  (Currently there are 2 people sharing in each group – me and one other guy who I’ve never met) But if we could get the SA Developer User Group to use it, we could have a great set of Developer resources, and non-developer resources too!

What do you think?

I just saw a blog by Rudolf about the Code-off that’s gonna happen in November.  He linked to an SA Dev post about it.  Sometimes I really wish blogger’s would have a “location” displayed somewhere in their blog because I was getting all excited about entering, only to find that the post on SA Dev says its an SA Dev Western Cape initiative, so us poor souls in JHB can’t enter.  (Well, I guess we could if we were to fly down for the day, but that would just not be worth it)

Come on Gauteng/JHB SA Dev leads, lets get us some of that Cape town initiative and get something going here too. 😛

In a post by Isabella v., she mentions that CNN has captioned a picture of a bunch of kids running in a road smiling (with flames and smoke behind them) “Iraqi children run from a fiery explosion”.  While its accurate, in that they’re running, the casual observer would read into it that they’re “running for their lives”, “scared”, and “fearful”.  None of which is actually depicted in the picture.

I’d love to know why they’re all smiling, or why CNN would use it in that context without explaining the “apparent” contradiction.