• Another run in with AOL

    I had another run in with AOL today. I got bounced mail from a customer with the following error messages in it:

  • Disappointment with Leopard Delay

    Like many people, I'm quite disappointed that Apple has delayed the release of Leopard until October. Many of the features that Apple is touting look really cool, and I want to use them! While major OS updates take time to get them right and we all want to see a stable release, it would seem that a company as large as Apple could get the resources to do such an upgrade in the time they promised. Apple's "excuse" is that they're working on the iPhone and resources have been shifted to it over Leopard.

  • Unusable iTunes User Interface

    I'm not sure what Apple has been thinking in its recent updates to iTunes in terms of user interface. The changes have taken the product many, many steps back in terms of usability. Just the other day I installed a new DVD drive in my dad's iMac and when we were testing it, I went into iTunes to burn a full DVD to see what happened. I created a new playlist with 3.75 GB of music, changed the iTunes preferences to burn a data CD/DVD and clicked burn. A few minutes later, I tested the DVD in my machine and found that it only had 551 of the 1054 items in the playlist. My dad mentioned I needed to check all the items in the playlist to burn them; I did this and got the full DVD. No where in the interface does it say that only the checked items will get burned; the burn button tooltip says something like "Burn Playlist to CD/DVD"; it doesn't say "Burn only the checked items in the selected playlist". That was my first problem.

  • Opened my own store

    My software sales have been doing well in the past 12 months which meant that my rate for eSellerate went up (the initial rate is a teaser rate). I could handle the initial rate even though it was a bit steep for the pieces I use, but the new rate was a 50% increase and that really hurt. So on Sunday, I started figuring out how to put up my own store. I looked at a few eCommerce solutions and settled on Zen Cart. I then setup a merchant account with PayPal as it was easy, had decent rates, and I never see the credit card numbers. Today I finally got the pieces together to integrate my registration codes into my store. To make people feel safe, I bought an SSL certificate (a wildcard one). I really didn't need one as I don't see credit card numbers, but I think it was worth the investment. There is still more work to be done to the store, but I think it is good enough for now. So without further ado, I present my web store.