Tech

Links - 03/16/2006

Josh Evitt — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:07:00 GMT

Another list of random links I've found interesting lately:

Business
What's the Secret to Your Success? - Michael Hyatt, president of Thomas Nelson Publishing, gives his secret to success.
Y Combinator Startup Library - nice collection of resources from the Y Combinator team; mostly Paul Graham stuff, but other good links as well.
Entrepreneurial Proverbs - good ideas about starting up a business
Getting Real - 37Signals finally release their new book

Tech
Dual Monitor Gripe - Damien Katz complains about his dual monitor setup; some interesting dual monitor links in the comments.
Why Features Don't Matter - where less features equals a better user experience

.NET
Phalanger - PHP compiler for .NET (via David)
How Axosoft Sold $1.3 Million Worth of Software in 3 Days - interesting insight into the recent $5 OnTime promotion by Axosoft
Made in Express - win $10,000 by writing software using Visual Studio Express and/or SQL Server Express

Web Dev
A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript - fairly detailed overview of JavaScript

Podcasts

Josh Evitt — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:40:00 GMT

In the past, I've said that I didn't "get" podcasts. Mostly, I said this because most of the podcasts at the time were poorly edited, so you'd have vastly different audio levels, even within the same podcast. Other times, the podcasts just weren't very interesting, and in some cases seemed to exist solely to give the author the chance to tell inside jokes and pat themselves on the back.

However, over the past few months I've found several podcasts that I really enjoy and are very well done, and I thought I'd highlight those:

Programming
Polymorphic Podcast (.NET)
Hanselminutes (.NET and General Tech)
Ruby on Rails Podcast
CocoaRadio (Mac/Cocoa)
Code Sermon (General)

Business
StartupNation
Venture Voice

Tech
This Week in Tech

Excentrics World Re-opens for Business

Josh Evitt — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:09:00 GMT

When Matt Hawley went to work for Microsoft last year, he had to quit distributing and selling the source code to his excellent server controls. Today he announced that Microsoft is going to allow him to resume selling the controls! We use his free Unleash It utility at work and have been very pleased with it. Congratulations to Matt for getting the approval to resume selling his controls!

Outsourcing Article on SourcingMag.com

Josh Evitt — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 08:36:00 GMT

The article I recently wrote about outsourcing was picked up by SourcingMag.com. I spent some time fleshing out some of the details in the article, and the modified article can be viewed on SourcingMag's Web site. Read my original article here.

Outsourcing

Josh Evitt — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:41:00 GMT

I've recently published an article about my experiences with IT outsourcing, titled Outsourcing - A Year in Review.

Failure

Josh Evitt — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 13:32:00 GMT

Wil Shipley recently wrote a post titled Failure is Success. In this post he states that failure is something to be strived for and that nature is full of examples where failure is critical to success. An example he gives that resonated with me is that when weight-training it's critical to push the muscles to failure; otherwise, they won't grow stronger. For some reason, probably because I'm currently on a weight-training program, that statement really hit home. I have no problem pushing my muscles to their failure limit or pushing myself to my physical limits. As the saying goes, "No pain, No gain!" However, when it comes to pushing myself to my intellectual limits, I all too often stop short, presumably because of a fear of failure. Realizing that failure can lead to growth, even in intellectual pursuits, is a powerful concept. Perhaps the next time I reach my intellectual failure point, instead of stopping short I'll accept the fact that it's highly probably I'll fail and realize that that's ok and continue on.

Yahoo Support?

Josh Evitt — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 15:00:00 GMT

I've been a customer of Yahoo! Music Unlimited for about six months now. Up until about a month ago, I was really happy with the service. They have a great selection of music at a great price of $4.99/mo for the yearly plan. I use it all the time at work.

However, my problem lies with their customer support. Originally, I signed up for the month-to-month plan, which is $6.99/mo. After about four months, I decided I liked it enough to go ahead and sign up for a full year. Their music interface is fairly easy to use, but after that it gets really confusing. For example, IMing a song to a friend is not intuitive at all. The help system is almost useless. I searched for a way to upgrade my account. There was no information anywhere about doing this, so I decided to e-mail customer support asking if I could upgrade my account. The reply I received said (emphasis mine):

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Support.

We apologize for the inconvenience this matter has caused you. The feature you are mentioning is not currently available through Yahoo! Music Unlimited. However, we may include this feature in a future release. It is through user comments and feedback that we are able to continue to make improvements. We always have something on the drawing board, and many of our best new features have been suggested directly by users like you.

At this time, we would request you to please cancel your monthly subscription and then sign up for the yearly service.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Faye

Yahoo! Customer Care

On Oct 21, I received an e-mail from Yahoo! Music indicating a price change for transferring music to a portable device, effective Nov. 1. They were doubling the cost of the subscription to transfer music. I decided that it was time to go ahead and get the annual subscription. My monthly subscription was due for a bill payment on Oct 31, so I decided to wait until a little closer to then before canceling and renewing. On Oct. 29 without much thought and following the advice they gave me, I canceled my monthly subscription and attempted to renew for a year. However, I was unable to renew because my monthly subscription did not expire until Oct 31. All I wanted to do was renew my account for an annual subscription before Oct 31 to take advantage of the pricing at that time.

I immediately e-mailed their support explaining what I was trying to do. A while later, I received a reply that made it obvious that they didn't even read my e-mail. So, I immediately e-mailed them back re-explaining to them what happened and including the previous e-mail that I sent. At this point, I started getting a little nervous because I wanted to be sure that I was able to renew in time to receive a year under the previous pricing plan, which would save me about $60 if I wanted to transfer music to an MP3 player. I waited, and waited, and waited. I tried a few more times to renew my subscription with no luck. Finally, on Nov. 1 I was able to renew my subscription. Of course, conveniently, that was the day the new pricing scheme took effect so I have to pay $9.99/mo in order to transfer music to a portable device. I finally received an e-mail with a phone number for Yahoo! Billing questions, which is 408-349-5151 (which is not listed anywhere on their site that I could find and routes to India from what I can tell). I tried to explain my situation to the representative, but it was obvious that he didn't understand. He said he'd have a "supervisor" look over my question and get back in touch. I later received another canned response indicating that their was nothing they could do. I e-mailed, and then called again. Essentially, I was finally told that inside the e-mail on Oct 21 was a link to an upgrade site and I had to click that link and that they couldn't (wouldn't) do anything for me.

So, ultimately it was my fault for not carefully re-reading the e-mail before canceling my account. However, I just assumed that since they had already told me I had to cancel my account in order to upgrade, that that's what I needed to do. Furthermore, if they had read my e-mail sent on Oct 29 instead of sending a canned response, then maybe I could have known at that point that I just needed to create a new account and purchase the annual subscription. Instead, I'm left extremely frustrated by the whole (negative) experience and with a bad feeling about doing any further dealings with Yahoo.

Folder Size

Josh Evitt — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:49:00 GMT

David already mentioned this, but I thought I'd mention it too. One of the guys at work wanted a utility that would display the size of a folder in Windows Explorer, so I did a little searching. I found Folder Size for Windows, a freeware utility that adds more columns to the Windows Explorer interface. The columns that can be added include:

Folder Size
Folder Size Sort (same as Folder Size but formatted to sort properly)
File Count
Folder Count
Sibling Count

As well as several other useful features. Check it out.

MySQL and ASP.NET Part 2

Josh Evitt — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:44:00 GMT

David has posted his second* article in his series about using MySQL 5.0 with ASP.NET. This article introduces stored procedure support in MySQL 5.0 and how to execute MySQL stored procedures from ASP.NET. Read the article here.

* Read part 1 here.

Using MySQL with ASP.NET

Josh Evitt — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:11:00 GMT

David recently posted part 1 of a series of articles about accessing a MySQL 5.0 database from ASP.NET. Check out Using MySQL with ASP.NET - Part 1. In part 1, David explains how to set up the database and connect to it from ASP.NET.