Well, that went badly - turning on anonymous comments meant the moderation queue filled with spam very quickly ... so now I've changed it so only logged-in users can post, and kept moderation turned on.

I've been hit by a lot of automated spam recently, so I've changed the comment policy: anyone can post (including anonymous users) but all posts are moderated. I'll see how that goes ...

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 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 ...

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?

In case you didn't know, Optus provides free Wi-Fi in Federation Square. Very handy, even if it does seem to be WWW-only (my IMAP connection doesn't work, e.g.).

I recently received a few emails from Craig, who managed to get Dell to repair his dead XPS M1210 free of charge.

This is one awesome little machine. It ran well until last week. Then it blinked off. Ironically, it sat for two days and wouldn't boot, the power test indicating the video card being the culprit. But on day three it booted up and ran without a glitch. Then yesterday, it died again. That's when I saw the article you had contributed to.

Accordingly, I bit the bullet and contacted Dell, held my ground for almost an hour, to avoid the up front troubleshooting charge. I was sympathetic with the support agent who sounded so exasperated because he didn't have a clue what the GPU glitch was. He got so frustrated playing the gopher intermediary between me and his own staff, he finally put me through the extended warranty group. Now ACT II.

The $199 test charge and $399 repair I finally negotiated down to a flat $391 with tax. And being that I'd will have a warranted unit afterwards, I'm pleased. As an afterthought, If I hadn't jumped the gun, I could have just reinstated the lapsed warranty, and then called technical support.

...

CANCEL that last email to you.

I tried one more time and reached XPS Tech Support. I found a list of case numbers online that had success getting their M1210s included in the recall. I referenced one of the case numbers to them.

Dell said that my machine is so far out of warranty that even if they extended the warranty one year it would still be out of warranty and not covered. Nevertheless, they agreed to repair it free of charge.

I have posted a list of case numbers here that includes the numbers mentioned by Craig, as well as my own case number and those of people who have emailed me. Each case number represents an XPS that was repaired for free outside of the warranty period. It's definitely worth following Craig's example and quoting those case numbers when requesting repair of your XPS M1210.

So far, I'm very impressed with Stack Overflow. It's a great source of information (many of my more obscure development-related Google queries wind up there), and a good way to promote yourself while helping build the already useful repository of information and advice.

My original plan was to post regularly on Rails Forum, but to be honest Stack Overflow appeals more. There's a broader range of technologies represented there, and the reputation system gives me a direct incentive to continue answering questions. So, I've added a little Stack Overflow block to the right-hand column of my blog, & I'll see how my time & motivation goes w.r.t. growing my reputation.