Notice that the subject is “Opt-out Functionality”, so presumably they’re testing some system functionality related to users opting out of their newsletters.

From reading the text, it seems they’re testing the passage of data from one organization (Omniture) to another (Responsys) with the purpose of what? re-marketing!

WaterField Designs iPhone Wallet

I’ve been using a trusty leather WaterField Designs zippered wallet for ages (the black one, shown above in the middle). Inside, I’ve always kept about eight to 10 cards, and a bit of cash.

What I noticed, though, over the past few years is a tendency to also keep my iPhone inside the wallet as well. This presented one problem: The iPhone fits so tightly, that when I pull it out, any cash bills I have inside tend to come out with it.

Apparently WaterField owner, Gary WaterField, had the same problem, and was in the fortunate position to do something about it — creating the WaterField iPhone Wallet (pictured above on the left).

Just slightly bigger than its predecessor, the new wallet solves the pulling-the-cash-out problem by including a felt divider that sits between the iPhone and the cash.

Additionally, the wallet has a clear plastic siding that allows the face of the iPhone to be viewed and manipulated without removal.

All in all, very nice upgrade!

The Timbuk2 Mission Cycling Wallet

When out cycling, I’ve always carried my WaterField wallet (with iPhone inside) in the back pocket of my jersey. This wasn’t ideal:

• One tends to sweat a lot in this hot Spanish climate, and I hated the thought of getting my nice leather wallet all icky. And wrapping it in bag or cover was clunky.

• Second, pulling the phone out presented a couple problems, including the cash falling out, and potentially dropping it with sweaty hands.

So I was also excited to see the new Timbuk2 Mission Cycling Wallet (above, right) arrive in the mail today.

The wallet is made for cycling, and seems to be mostly sweat-proof. It tightly holds the iPhone inside (even with my incase Snap hard-shell cover attached). Addtionally, like the new WaterField wallet, it has a clear plastic siding that allows you to use the phone without removing it. That’s going to be handy! (Except, of course, when I want to take photos. Which, as it happens, is a lot!)

Finally, it’s got three slots on the outside, providing just enough capacity to carry my ID card, a debit card, and a bit of cash.

But, as with all things, there’s still room for improvement.

Frequently, in our three-year-old “Cube” coffee maker, the previously-used capsule remains stuck in the capsule chamber. About the only way we’ve seen to get it out, is to start the coffee process, and open the chamber while the high-pressure water is flowing, which usually results in the old capsule being ejected and cleared away.

Sometimes, though, we put in a new capsule without having noticed that the previous capsule is stuck. At this point, you can’t close the chamber. Removing the new capsule involves removing the used-capsule container, and with a finger inserted from beneath, trying to pop the new capsule out the top (and catching it in the air before it falls back in!)

Hopefully, Nespresso will solve these problems in their future models.

Why haven’t I just stuck with HandBrake in the first place? One reason — its UI for batch converting videos sucks. Unlike all other products, you can’t just drag a bunch of videos into HandBrake. No, you have to chose them one at a time, and manually add them to the HandBrake queue.

Why haven’t I stuck with one of the other products? Because none of them have presets that are as good as HandBrake’s, and I couldn’t be bothered to learn the FFMPEG syntax. For example, all the presets in something like RoadMovie will change the resolution of the encoded video. HandBrake’s “Normal” preset will preserve the video’s original dimensions.

This weekend, with the help of Super-Makalu Justin Driscoll (@jdriscoll), I finally created a batch processing system, based on HandBrake. This article documents the setup.

What you need

• (HandBrakeCLI). This is a version of HandBrake that can be run from the command line. Don’t expect the “doc” folder that comes with this utility to actually tell you how to install it. That’d be asking too much. Fire up Terminal, navigate to wherever HandBrakeCLI is, and move it to your /usr/bin directory with this command (you’ll be asked for your admin password).

  sudo mv ./HandBrakeCLI /usr/bin

• Hazel. Hazel is a System Preference utility for the MacOS X, that allows you to schedule regular actions to be made on the contents of folders. Download and install.

• This bash shell script, which you can copy and paste later from Pastie.

Basic idea

I have the following folder structure:

  /Users/mhenders/Hazel/Videos/input-ipod
  /Users/mhenders/Hazel/Videos/out-ipod
  /Users/mhenders/Hazel/Videos/processed

We’re going to tell Hazel to watch the “input-ipod” folder, and whenever it finds a new video file, to process that file with HandBrakeCLI, and then move the original into the “processed” folder.

Details

• Once Hazel is installed, add the “input-ipod” folder to its watch list.

• On that folder, create the following rule with two steps: (1) the first runs an embedded shell script (passing each video file to HandBrakeCLI for processing) and, (2) when done, move the original video to the “processed” folder, which you can later delete or whatever.

One setup, all you have to do is drop videos into the “input-ipod” folder, wait a few moments, and watch Hazel kick into action. I set this up on our 8-core iMac at home, and watched it blow through 100 videos. Yeah!

Caveats

The Hazel embedded script will fail if the original video has spaces in the name. So be sure to change “My Home Video.mov” to “My-Home-Video.mov” before dropping into the input folder. I haven’t taken the time to sort that out yet, but will update this blog when I do.

Enhancements

You’ll notice that I’ve named my watch folder “input-ipod”. As you can imagine, I have other input folders named “input-appletv” and “input-normal”, for dropping videos I want processed with HandBrake’s “AppleTV 2″ and “Normal” presets. I modify the Hazel embedded script accordingly for those rules. A complete list of HandBrake’s presets can be found here.

Hope this article helps others wanting to do the same. If you do, I’d love for you to drop a “Hello” message in the comments below.

Last year, I purchased 11 licenses of the Backblaze online backup product for Makalu. Even then, the experience of working with the Backblaze people was a little odd; for example, I had to go through the process of getting a quote from the sales guy, which turned out to be precisely 11 times the cost of a consumer single-license. Whatever.

We moved forward, had our corporate account setup, installed the software, and begin receiving monthly usage reports from Backblaze.

A year later, we’ve decided that we can get by with four, rather than 11 licenses. (Dropbox has made Backblaze redundant for us, to a certain extent.)

I email Backblaze asking how to remove licenses, and they explain that I need to login, access a certain account page, where I can remove accounts. I don’t remove the accounts immediately, but make a note to do so before the 1-year term expires.

In the meantime, I start getting renewal invoices and automatic payment reminders from Backblaze, naturally for 11 licenses.

A few days before the renewal date, I login, and remove 7 of the 11 accounts, as per the instructions provided. Having removed the accounts, I was presented with an interface to pay for the remaining four. Which I did. Done.

A few days later, I receive another payment reminder for 11 accounts. I replied explaining that I’ve already reduced the number of accounts, and paid for an additional year of service, and could they please stop these automated reminders.

The reply I get is this (paraphrasing):

Thanks for paying! Unfortunately, since you paid online and not using the automated invoice, we’ve converted your account back to a consumer account, and you won’t be receiving usage reports any longer.

Awesome. Nowhere in the account management and payment interface is it mentioned that to retain corporate status, you must not pay within Backblaze.com itself. And I simply followed the instructions I’d been given!

I followed up, explaining this, and asking them to do whatever’s necessary to get my usage reports going again. I’ve not heard back. (When Tim Ferris had an issue with Backblaze, the CEO immediately followed up, in Twitter. I don’t think I’ll be so lucky.)

And if that story wasn’t good enough, I’ll leave you with this Twitter transcript from yesterday:

After something like that, how could I ever confidently ask them a question again? Quite honestly, I think I could have gotten more useful information asking Siri.

Anthony also happens to sell a set of wire-framing templates for Fireworks, Illustrator and OmniGraffle that a colleague requested I purchase.

It seems that most sellers of digital goods these days use the services of Quixly.com, whereby you pay for the product using PayPal, and are instantly given a download link delivering the product.

Anthony doesn’t use Quixly. As a professional in the field of user experience, he sends his customers off to PayPal, and then shows them a page saying he’ll email you a download link as soon as possible. (Perhaps the academic field of cognitive science warns about the side effects of instant gratification.)

The following day, still having received nothing, I email Anthony asking if he could please send me the download information at his earliest convenience. He replies saying something about how the “download email got blocked”, and provides me with a link.

That’s when the fun began.

Turns out the download link isn’t a download link, but rather a pointer to SendSpace, one of those sleazy-looking “use us to share your big files with others!” services.

We’re greeted with a screen proposing to purchase, at minimum, a one month access to SendSpace. Expecting to have been given a download link, this is monetarily a little jarring.

The second thing we notice is the big blue “DOWNLOAD” button at the top. Don’t press that, because it’ll trigger the download of a “SendSpace Download Manager” application, for Windows.

We’ll try clicking “Regular Download”. Apparently it’ll be 6.5 times slower than “Premium Download”, but at least we won’t have to pay anything.

Naturally, clicking “Regular Download” doesn’t download anything, but rather takes us to another download page. Along with several more ads, this screen contains the word “Download” (in English and Spanish) no less than six times. I take a guess that “Click here to start download from sendspace” is the right choice.

Oops. This page, in addition to containing a fake video ad, a frowning piece of lego, and a brain exercise, also reports an error:

“The download has been updated (error: #10). You may download the file. If this persists, try disabling your anti-virus program, or add sendspace to your whitelist.”

Disable my “anti-virus program” or “add sendspace to my whitelist”. WTF? Clicking the same link again results in the same error, over and over.

Starting to get a little irritated, I email Anthony reporting the problem, including a screenshot of the error, and asking if he’d just kindly email me the archive (it’s only 10MB).

Here’s the response I receive from Anthony, the cognitive scientist:

It seems like you have a file protection program on that’s blocking you. This isn’t a sendspace issue. Try clicking the link in the blue box with the icon that says “Click here to start download from sendspace”. That should do it. If not, turn off your file protection program so you can download the file.

Anthony presumes I didn’t read the error message, or perhaps didn’t understand it.

It’s not an issue with SendSpace. It’s an issue with me. Try clicking the download link again. That should work. And if it doesn’t, try disabling my “file protection program”.

I’m starting to get angry. So much for user experience.

I email Anthony back explaining that (1) I’m on a Mac, where there’s no such thing as a “file protection program”, (2) I’m obviously clicking the download link, as that’s the only logical thing on the page to click, and (3) I really don’t like wasting my time, so would he please just email me the software I’ve paid him for?

Anthony finally decides to do the right thing, and emails me the archive.

Unfortunately, when I open it, I discover that the Fireworks and Illustrator templates are there, but not the OmniGraffle templates. Sigh — those are precisely the ones I need.

I report the situation to Anthony, explaining that the OmniGraffle templates were the only ones I actually need, and could he please send me just those.

Once again he responds with an implication that I’m an idiot:

I just checked the file I sent you. They are in the folder labeled Omnigraffle with the extension .gstencil.

So obviously I don’t know how to correctly open a ZIP archive, and understand what contents are enclosed.

I ask Anthony why on earth he’s making this so difficult, and explain that if I report missing files, either I’m right, or I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, it costs him nothing to simply resend them. But if I’m right, then his email accomplished nothing other than wasting more of our time.

And since he obviously doubts everything I report, I also include a screenshot of his archive contents:

He sends me the OmniGraffle files, with the response:

That’s fucking weird. I’ve never had this happen with anyone else. Attached are the Omngraffle files. Let me know anything else is missing.

Well that makes me feel better about the whole situation — Anthony finds it “weird”. No concern for having wasted my time, but please do let me know if anything else is missing.

I could care less if it’s weird. I could care less if it’s ever happened with anyone else. It’s happened with me, a customer, who has paid him money.

It’s surprising to me, that nowhere in his academic studies of cognitive science (with a specialization in human-computer interaction) did he learn the simple lessons of (1) use your own products/processes, (2) don’t waste your customer’s time, and (3) above all, don’t presume your customers are idiots.

My encryption needs have always been simple — I’d like to selectively encrypt files that I keep on a company-accessible server, and I’d like to be able to occasionally encrypt the text of an email message. I could do this easily with earlier versions of PGP — around version 6, and back when PGP felt like small company.

But then they turned their sights on the enterprise, and everything has gone downhill since.

• Required paid upgrades (for example, to be able to use PGP on a new OS version) began offering less and less additional value.

• Features went from simple to complex. One PGP version changed its approach to email encryption, no longer involving selectively encrypting/decrypting mail, but rather highjacking entire protocol streams in the background. It took me a while to recover from that mess.

• It became impossible to get support. Your options nowadays are wading through a knowledge base swamp, whose contents were about 5% Mac, of which about 95% was outdated, contracting an expensive support package, or posting to a “Community Forum” where you’d get boilerplate responses from people you were never quite sure were associated with the company.

• The company website became ever more complex, full of products and packages that seemed targeted to dorky middle-managers of large enterprises who sit on “security” budgets they need to spend before year-end, and feel good about telling their boss they’ve purchased some “Enterprise Vaults,” “Endpoint Protection” and maybe a “Ghost Solution Suite”. I mean, seriously, just hop over to Symantec.com and poke around.

And now there’s the current issue — Mac OS X Lion compatibility.

Lion has been out since July. I’ve bought every version of PGP since maybe 4, and so PGP have had my email address on record for more than 12 years.

Do you think I received an email from PGP prior to Lion’s release advising me to be careful about upgrading, since they’re not going to be ready with a PGP update? Nope. Nada.

Do you think I’ve received any emails from PGP with a status update about a Lion-compatible version? Nope. Nada.

Do you think if I visit the Symantec website and search on “Mac PGP Lion”, I’ll find useful information? The first hit is, “Is Norton Compatible with Snow Leopard”.

But, YES! Turns out, there’s actually a link to an article mentioning that a Lion-compatible version has just been released! PGP Desktop 10.2.0 MP1 is Lion compatible, and they recommend everybody download it. For a fleeting moment I feel hope (along with the irritation of realizing they could have emailed me to mention this).

Anyway, all that’s left now is to figure out how to download it — since they obviously wouldn’t bother providing a convenient link on this page.

I’m told to download it from my “Symantec File Connect account” — whatever that is. No link. No mention of what that might be. There’s a “Login using SymAccount” in the sidebar, but that’s not it.

Google. Ah ha. It’s talking about the “Symantec Licensing Portal”!

Login there, and it’s an enterprise experience cesspool nightmare. Click “Version Upgrade”, and I’m being asked for my “Upgrade Notification ID”. Click “I don’t have an Upgrade Notification ID”, and I get an error, “We are unable to retrieve your Version Upgrade.” Of course.

Click, “Available Products”, and I’m presented with a list of — no joke — 629 products. Six hundred, and twenty nine. Can you imagine that? The company has 629 different products.

This is why Steve Jobs did so well — he simply countered an equally powerful, but strategically negative force at Symantec, to keep balance in the universe.

Anyway, to make sure my day doesn’t get any better, PGP for Mac is, of course, absent from that list.

“License Management”, “Move License”, “Upgrade License”, “Get Software”, “Get a Key”, the options in this “portal” are legion and bewildering.

I eventually find a link called, “Manage my licenses”, and — finally — I get a list of my products! Two are listed — PGP Desktop Professional and PGP Desktop Home, version 10 with perpetual licenses.

But when I enter their Serial Numbers into the “Get Software” prompt, I get an error, “We are unable to process your request at this time. Your product may no longer be available for download or physical shipment.”

WTF. So which is it? An error that you can’t process my request? Or, that my product isn’t available for download? And what’s with may; you don’t know whether it’s available or not!?! And anyway, I’m looking for the upgrade!

Click “View Details” on one of my listed products. Error — ”License History not found !!” Of course. (And they obviously find that concerning, as noted by the double exclamation points.)

Click, “Customer Support”. Link to another website. No, I’m not an “enterprise customer”. Click “Visit Customer Care Information Center” (I thought that’s where I was.) Try “Submit a Request”, and I’m taken to the “SymAccount Login”.

The first positive experience of the day — almost shocking: my licensing portal login works there too.

Found a place to submit a request, and tried submitting one. Error — “Category Required Level has not been met.” Of course. Figured out what that actually meant, and finally got my request submitted.

Nearly a full hour of my time lost.

They’ve promised that a member of their “professional staff” will personally respond within 48 hours.

Just wonder if this is all by design. I’m guessing this experience would make a dorky enterprise middle-manager’s day. Given little otherwise to do, this experience involved nearly five errors to follow up on, and a great excuse to do nothing for the next 48 hours, waiting for a response from the Professional Staff at Customer Care!

Update: Oct 10

After posting a note on Symantec’s community forum, I got a reply from Tom — a technical support representative. He said I need to raise a support ticket at mysupport.symantec.com, after which they’d put the patch in my account at pdc.pgp.com. (Can you believe that — two more portals! How many do they have?)

Anyway, I wasn’t so lucky that my logins to License Portal and SymAccount Portal would by chance work at the MySupport Portal. After figuring out how to get in there, I went through the process of raising a support ticket.

Unbelievable — Only after having gone through the process of writing up a support request (including specifying all kinds of information through drop-down menus), I’m told that to continue, I need to enter either my “Tech Contact ID”, “Support Number” or “Tech Case ID”.

OMG. I have no idea what those are, nor where to get one. And, of course, there’s not a word of advise about what to do if you’re stuck.

And so that was that. No support ticket. And more time lost. (For what it’s worth, the tech support guy — Tom, bless his heart — did express his wishes that things were going more smoothly for me.)

The saga continues…

Update: Oct 11 — Closure

I finally got a reply from Symantec. Apparently when I bought PGP version 10.1, I only purchased a year of “Upgrade Assurance”, which has now expired. So in order to get Lion compatibility, I’ll have to spend another $99 to purchase a license for version 10.2 — which adds nothing other than Lion compatibility.

Left with no choice, I headed off to the Symantec store. I challenge anyone reading this to visit store.symantec.com, and try to find PGP for Mac. Just kidding, don’t bother, you won’t find it.

Tom, the helpful tech support guy, sent me a deep link into the store, to a page that does exist, but has apparently no navigation path from the root. Whatever.

Clicked “Purchase”, paid my $99, added the dashes between my phone number, since their system isn’t smart enough to figure out any other format, and placed the order.

My download started, and I got an email thanking me for my purchase of:

PGP for WINDOWS!!!

I can hardly believe my eyes. I’ve just purchased the wrong thing. My mind is immediately imagining a return into the awful enterprise Symantec cesspool to try to get this sorted out.

But, turns out, the download kindly also includes the Mac version. Whew! I guess they did the Windows thing in a final effort to mess with my mind. Good on ya, Symantec!

So now I’m off to decrypt decades of PGP-encrypted files, and then will remove this product from my drive — forever.

Update: Oct 13 — Uh, not quite closure.

Symantec weren’t about to let me off the hook so easily. No no no. Less than 48 hours after getting a fresh $99 from me, for PGP Home — the kids version of PGP — Symantec struck again.

After upgrading my MacBook Air to 10.7.2, it bricked. Can’t login. Try to login, get the dreaded gray circle with a line through it.

After an hour of troubleshooting, including a restore from backup and re-update to 10.7.2, I gave up and headed for Google.

This article reports that the culprit is PGP. Why PGP “Home”, without Whole Disk Encryption, installs kernel extensions is simply beyond me.

Rebooted from a backup, fired up Terminal, removed every shred of PGP (someone was thoughtful enough to document that) on the machine, and was finally able to successfully login again. Go Symantec!

Background

I have MarketCircle’s Daylite running locally on my MacBook (running OS 10.6.7), exclusively using an offline database. Nearly every day, I add information to this database, primarily from Mail.app via MarketCircle’s “Daylite Mail Integration” (DMI) plugin for Mail.

At home, I run Daylite Server on a Mac mini. Daylite, on the MacBook, synchronizes with this server over the local network when I’m at home, and over the internet when I’m in the office. Years ago, one had to periodically initiate this sync manually; but somewhere along the way, Daylite released an update so that offline databases would automatically keep themselves in sync with Daylite Server.

This setup has been working fine for me, for years.

Upgrading to Daylite 3.14

About a month ago, I was notified that an upgrade was available for both Daylite and the Server — to version 3.14. (I was previously running 3.13.) As required by the installer, I first went “online” with Daylite on the MacBook, prior to upgrading either the Server or Client.

After upgrading, I went “offline” again with Daylite on the MacBook (the Client), and (if I recall) was told that a new offline DB would be created since my existing one had been “reset”.

That went fine, and I’ve been using my offline database on Daylite on the MacBook now for well over a month, adding new information, and updating existing information, almost daily.

The problem

Today, I connected to the mini with Screen Sharing, to have a check on the status of things in the Server. To my horror, I noticed that Daylite Server didn’t show any offline database present for my MacBook, which would indicate that Daylite has NOT been successfully syncing its offline database to the server during the past month.

I tried to manually “Go Online,” and received this error:

Investigations

I inspected the logs on both the local client, and the server:

• LOCAL: Offline Client.log contains this, which doesn’t show any errors at all:

2011-04-08 08:18:29.416 DLOfflineSyncClient[64941:207] @}->-- Daylite database sync starting. --<-{@
2011-04-08 08:18:30.027 DLOfflineSyncClient[64941:207] INFO: Starting sync for 'mhenders@mini-2.local:6113/makalu'.
2011-04-08 08:18:35.385 DLOfflineSyncClient[64941:207] ><{{> Daylite database sync finished. <}}><

• LOCAL: generateConsoleOutput.log contains something that does look like an error:

Fri Apr 8 10:42:20 MacBook Daylite[65289] : offline document received offline sync error
Fri Apr 8 10:42:20 MacBook Daylite[65289] : ERR: Offline sync failure - code 0

• SERVER: Looking on the Server, at the “Server Logs”, I see precisely two entries:

2011-04-07 23:23:24 +0200 DLServer - Interrupted by exception (may have lost connection): '*** -[NSConcreteData initWithBytes:length:copy:freeWhenDone:bytesAreVM:]: absurd length: 4294967295, maximum size: 2147483648 bytes'.

2011-04-07 23:23:23 +0200 DTSLocalSync - Timed out waiting for auth that didn't come (user 'mhenders').

Current situation

The current situation is that I’m stuck, and have nearly a month’s worth of updates in a local offline database, for which there is apparently no server counterpart.

This is a terribly concerning situation. During some previous Daylite update, I found myself in this same situation and was told in the Daylite forums that there is unfortunately no way to restore a server online database from an client offline database.

In that situation, I had to manually reconstruct the additions/modifications to the offline database in a new offline database — time consuming, and error prone. Fortunately, I had caught the problem early; not so this time. This time, I’ve got more than a month of new data in this offline database. Manual reconstruction would be impossible.

Complaints

I have some serious concerns about this situation:

1. First, why on earth hasn’t Daylite alerted me during the past month, that its attempts to synchronize with the Server have been failing?

2. This has now happened twice to me. Given that it is possible for an offline database to get out of sync with the server, why doesn’t MarketCircle offer some means to restore a server from an offline.

3. A long time complaint I’ve had with MarketCircle, is the feedback that their products give the user. Look at that first error message above: “Check the logs.” Well, how about telling me where the logs are? It was really difficult to find them. “Check with your database administrator.” As a single user, running both Client and Server, am I really in such a minority that the application can assume that everone has a “database administrator” around?

I wrote up a detailed post for the MarketCircle forum, but apparently I used a “trigger word,” and the post has gone into “moderation,” saying no more than “If or when we accept the post, we’ll let you know.”

I’ve also opened a ticket with MarketCircle support (#69102), and have my fingers crossed that they can help.

I’ll update this post, as things progress.

Update 2011-04-08 — Problem Solved

After raising a ticket in the support area of the MarketCircle site, I tweeted a plea for help message to Matthew (@metroing), who replied that someone from tech support at MarketCircle would contact me.

Aaron from tech support contacted me asking for screenshots and log files, after which he determined that for some unknown reason, the server offline had gotten deleted. The only solution would be for him to connect (via a screensharing tool) to both the server and my client Mac.

We agreed on a time, he connected and an hour later I was back up and running. That’s great support. I remain an enthusiastic, happy MarketCircle customer.

Although Daylite doesn’t flag the user when sync errors occur, Aaron pointed me to the green light in the bottom right corner of the screen, that will turn red when sync problems happen, so at least I have a quick way to determine (at an early stage) if these problems ever happen again.

Take a big breath, and read this slowly — “Don’t Auto-Lock” is “On”. Disabling Auto-Lock will prevent screen locking during a Skype call.

So, do I currently have Auto-Lock disabled by having this setting “On”? Or would I turn this off to disable the enabled “Don’t Auto-Lock”? Jeebus.

Why couldn’t these people have simply labeled this setting “Auto-Lock” and having the default setting to “Off”?