I'm back on the market again. Armin and I are planning to do some personal contracting for a while, investing a fair proportion of the money we earn into an international marketing campaign for Cobalt, and growing an international reseller network.

I've learned many lessons building OffByZero and our three products (OBZTime, OBZVault and Cobalt). I'm looking forwards to applying them in my next contracting role ... I think the experience of building a profitable startup from the ground up will have a profound effect upon the way I approach things.

Interesting times ...

Persistence is important when starting a business; that's true of marketing too. Here are two (anonymised) lengthy contact logs for two clients. This one lead no-where:

... whereas this one lead to a presentation and a likely sale:

The interesting thing is that you never can tell ... some contacts that seem very promising initially don't pan out, and others that seem quite cold initially turn very promising in short order.

Armin brought Gotye to my attention - makes great coding music ...

From his blog ...

Ummmm, let’s see- I’m recording vocals and various instruments in this barn south-east of Melbourne:

Oh, and I’m using these thingies- stone wool, felt-covered tube traps that my dad made. They’re great for sorting out the acoustic issues known as “barniness”

Love it! :-)

So it turns out Palm is still hopeless when it comes to customer support. Windows 7 was released ages ago, and there is still no option to download a Windows 7 version of Palm Desktop.

I thought I'd call Palm support and ask them about it. Oh, that'd cost $12. How about I email them? Nope - they have discontinued email support in favour of live chat. Well, that's alright ... except that it's a Windows-only solution that only works properly in IE. According to Palm:

Palm uses a secure chat application from LogMeIn Inc.. This chat application downloads and runs automatically in most browsers. Firefox and some other browsers prevent running of applications from the browser for security reasons. We will be changing to a seamless solution for Firefox users shortly. Thank you for your patience.

So I have to pay to call them, can't email them, and their online chat solution requires me to download and run a Windows executable. I tried that, and nothing happened ... I ran the executable, got a wait cursor, and nothing else for over half an hour.

Right, time to try a different route ... maybe I could call their Australian press contact, and ask whether there's any news about an upcoming Windows 7 release? I took a look at the Australian contact details:

So I called Recognition PR and asked for Sarah. I was told that she no longer works there, and besides, Palm no longer maintains an Australian PR presence and it's all handled from the US.

So far: no Windows 7 download, paid phone support only, online chat broken, obsolete Australian contact details.

I thought I'd try calling the US office. I did so, & went through to sales. I was greeted by an automated message which informed me that "sample administrator is not available" and asked me to leave a message. Second time around I went through to hand-held technical support, which politely informed me that I'd have to pay for the privilege of asking a human being when Windows 7 support was planned.

So, my next step was to try the Palm forum. However, my login was denied - I assumed I'd forgotten my password. I requested an email password reset, only to discover that I'd remembered my password correctly. Palm has changed their forum software, and is manually migrating accounts upon request:

Hello XXXXXXXXXXXXXX,

Your account information is listed below.

If your password has a value of 0, please reply to this message stating that you'd like your account updated for our current forums. This process should take less than 1 business day.

Login: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Password: 0
E-Mail: duncan.bayne@fluidscape.co.nz

So, now I'm waiting for Palm to turn on my forum account, so I can ask about Windows 7 support. I thought Palm displayed bad customer support in the past, but now I can see that they were just warming up for the current crap-fest.

According to Google Analytics, many visitors to this site arrive after searching for Palm Pilot related keywords. If you're one of those people, please accept my condolences on having purchased a Palm in the first place.

Update 19th January 2010: I originally bought the Zire from Dick Smith Electronics, so I just sent them an email in the hopes they might know. Fingers crossed ...

Update 19th January 2010: I re-downloaded the Windows chat client, and this time it worked (perhaps I missed the security dialog the first time around?). According to the CSR, the Palm Desktop software works on all 32-bit Windows 7 versions, but not 64-bit. Palm is working on 64-bit drivers but won't be drawn on whether they'll be released, let alone an actual date.

So I visited the Microsoft Partner website today, to profile our Cobalt software licensing solution. To my surprise I found that it is broken in both Firefox and Konqueror ... in fact, it is broken in any browser except Internet Explorer on Windows.

I fired the Microsoft folks a bug report. They replied very quickly:

... we suggest you to use Internet Explorer (IE) as your browser when accessing partners sites which also includes the Microsoft Partner Channel Builder.

I am really sorry for this inconvenience that you are experiencing.

Prompt, polite and friendly support - my experience is that most companies could do with taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book when it comes to support - but not exactly a helpful solution.

Just use IE? It'll be 2010 tomorrow. Firefox is now the most popular browser in the world.

Microsoft has been evangelising a standards-compliant approach for years. They've even supported Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight. In fact I've been to a Microsoft event here in Melbourne where an evangelist was citing Moonlight as an example of how Microsoft doesn't want to create an IE-only Internet.

So how come the Partner site has been broken for nearly two years?

I've asked whether MS intends to fix the site, & if so, what the timeframe is. I'll update this post with details ...

Updated 31st December 2009: The same Microsoft staff member replied to say that she's escalated the problem to support. I must say I'm very impressed so far; I hadn't expected such short turn-around times from support over the Christmas period. Let's hope the fix is as quick in coming ...

I just received an email from someone called Rahul, who has succeeded in getting Dell to repair his XPS M1210 outside warranty. The laptop failed due to the notorious GPU fault common to those models.

I sent their technical support an email last Wednesday and had a reply next day suggesting that my system was out of warranty so they can not help. I replied back quoting the different case numbers where they fixed the system even after the warranty has expired but they did not bother replying. So called the XPS hot line today. At first the person I was talking to was very blunt to put it mildly. He straight away said that there was nothing much he could do to help because it's been quite some time since even the extended warranty has expired. Then I said I know people who got their systems fixed outside the extended warranty. He said he was not interested in other peoples' cases and insisted that there was nothing he could do.

Then I asked him why I was being treated differently and he said he could not comment on that, that's when I asked him to put me on to his supervisor. He put me on hold for next 10 min, came back and said that they would repair my system this time free of charge (change the motherboard, heat sink, thermal pads and fan) and any future repairs would be out of my pocket.

...

My system was fixed and now works fine. Motherboard, heat sink and the fan were replaced.

I've updated my warranty repair case numbers to include Rahul's case number. It looks like quoting some or all of these case numbers is a great way of getting your XPS repaired.

Here are some case numbers, including my own, some gathered from NotebookReview.com, and some emailed to me directly. Each case number represents an XPS that was repaired for free outside of the warranty period as a result of GPU failure.

Several people have reported success by quoting some or all of the case numbers when dealing with Dell representatives.

United States of America

• Scott - 633668288
• Nick's - 631589518
• Ollie - 637788486
• Naveen Nimmala - 637608694
• LAN MAN - 639036103

Australia

• Duncan Bayne - 2032568
• Rahul - 3424916

I will update this list as I discover more case numbers. If you have one of your own, please email me and I'll add it.

So at the moment I'm taking a look at Visual Studio 2010 - basically test-driving a few features including the test suite and built-in refactoring tools. I thought a good way of doing this would be to build a simple weight & balance calculator for a Robinson 44.

Anyhow, while reading the operating handbook to get an idea of the weight & balance calculations, I came across this gem:

I can't help but wonder who might be happy operating in a fault-intolerant environment like aviation, but still need a helpful safety bulletin explaining that letting their passengers head-butt a rotor whirling at near the speed of sound might be a bad idea.

This guy perhaps?

The following is a brief list of instructions for getting Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) set up on an MSI Wind u100 in a reasonably child-friendly fashion:

1. Get the Ubuntu 9.04 ('Jaunty Jackal') UNR image and install it according to these instructions. Do not try 9.10 ('Karmic Koala') - at this point it's broken (which should come as no surprise to those who've tried Karmic).
2. Uninstall Pidgin and Evolution using Synaptic.
3. Create a user for each child who will use the device, and turn off unwanted priviliges - in particular "Administer the system". Leave WiFi connection privileges alone (kinda misses the point of a netbook if you disable that).
4. Install DansGuardian (and Squid and ClamAV) according to these instructions, stopping once you've completed Step 3 (i.e. before you start configuring WPAD).
5. Configure your system to use localhost:8080 as your proxy for all users according to these instructions.
6. Make Firefox proxy settings read-only according to these instructions.
7. Observe that everything stops working when you reboot. Squid isn't clever enough to pick up changes to resolv.conf that NetworkManager makes when it connects to a WiFi network. The fix is to create a dispatcher script in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d that restarts Squid when it receives an 'up' message. Seriously.

The dispatcher script I'm using looks like this:

#!/bin/sh -e

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "$0: called with no interfact" 1>&2
  exit 1;
fi

# restart Squid so it can see the new interface
case "$2" in
  up)
    /etc/init.d/squid restart
    ;;
esac

Anyhow, on the list of things to do is to figure out how to route all HTTP traffic through DansGuardian using iptables, so as not to have to depend upon Firefox and other apps honouring the system proxy settings.

I can't help but see a commercial product here: a remix of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but designed from the ground-up to be child-safe. Perhaps it could even use a separate apt mirror, loaded only with child-safe apps? I mean, I got very lost several times figuring this stuff out and I do this sort of thing for a living.

We just shifted from using HTTP GET to HTTP POST for some of our web services; in this case, we are POSTing from a .NET 2.0 application to a Ruby on Rails server running on Lighttpd (a.k.a. lighty).

This resulted in an HTTP 417 error.

This is caused by the Microsoft .NET WebClient class adding an expect header into the POST, which in turn causes Lighttpd 1.4 to fail. The fix (as explained by Phil Haack) is to make the following call before POSTing:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;