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Signup Catch-22...

OR: How not to implement website sign-up.

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a large file. Rather than trying to do it via email, he used a new service -- SugarSync -- to forward the file to me. This is one of several "store and forward" file services, designed for people who want to exchange large files securely and don't have their own public-facing ftp or alternative download sites. Some of the alternative services that I've already used include Pando, and YouSendIt. They all seem to offer similar services: free accounts with low transfer rates; paid accounts with higher transfer rates; and free receipt of files.  They all require that you sign-up for the account: free or paid. Notification is often done via email, although Pando installs a small program that monitors your account.

I received the SugarSync notification email, clicked on the link, and signed up following their requirements. It was all pretty standard: you sign up, they send you a confirmation email, you click on the link embedded in the email to confirm that you actually requested this account, and you're good to go. Until you click on the link in the confirmation email, you've got an account but you can't use it.

All that went according to plan, but then I didn't receive the confirmation email. I went back to the site and they make it very easy to request another confirmation email and also suggest that you check your spam folders just in case. I did all that (several times, actualy) and still no confirmation email. After checking and re-checking that I had entered my email address correctly, I went to their website to get some help... and here's where the Catch-22 fired.

1. I tried Support, but you must be an approved user to use the Support pages!
2. I couldn't find an email address that I could use for requesting help; I tried support@sugarsync.com and am still waiting for a response.
3. I tried to follow the instructions associated with their entry about not receiving a confirmation email (see http://support.sugarsync.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=1073). In this post, they instruct you to "Submit a Ticket" but, of course, you have to be logged in to perform this action, as they immediately re-route you to a login screen.
4. I thought I would try their Discussion Forum (not something I usually like to do because of often poor response in these types of forums) and then found this complaint about lack of support, posted on August 25, 2009, and still with no 'official' response.
   
5. And there's no phone number on the site.

Doesn't look too promising.

Unfortunately, I've seen this pattern in the past: someone gets a good idea and implements it on the web. They put up a nice app, reasonable functionality, positioned properly, and they start to get some traction. Unfortunately, they just don't have the right level of support to make it work. ALL software has bugs, no matter how good your developers are, or how good your testing is, or what development framework you use: there are ALWAYS bugs.

It's a huge mistake to either assume that there won't be many/any bugs or to not plan to actively support your users and fix those bugs.

Too bad... this is one service that I'm definitely writing off my list.

Form input time waster...

Why is it that often when you open up a page on which there is an input form, you have to manually move your cursor to the first field before you can actually start entering your data? I.e., you have to either TAB to the field or move the pointer and click in the field. When you consider all the forms that are on the web and all the people that use these forms, this is incredibly inconvenient and time-wasting.

For example, 1and1.com does place your cursor properly when prompted for a webmail or customer login, but not when you are working on the forms to manage your site. And, when I go to Amazon, I'd like to type in the name of the book I'm searching for, but first I have to click on the search box before I can start entering my text. The Office Depot shopping site does a nice job of putting your cursor into the "quantity" field when you go to a catalog page... just type in how many you want and move on.

I find this really irritating: if there's a form on a web page, it's a pretty safe bet that they want you to add some data into some of the fields...right? So why don't they start you off in the right place?

It's actually quite easy to do: it just takes a call to whatever command is available in the web development framework (it's called "setting the focus" to that field) when displaying the form and your user is ready to go. Once I realized this, I added this to my own 4MyPasswords site.

Why can't everyone do this? Sure would save a lot of time...

What kind of 'management' is this...?

Many of you already know about the program wmiprvse.exe -- it's a part of the Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation feature. It's supposed to help your windows system run better, but it has a problem -- a big problem. It frequently starts sucking up 50% or more of the CPU, sometimes only briefly but sometimes for hours at a time. I know this from personal experience as well as from the many many postings there are on the web (here's one example) asking about how to fix this problem. I haven't found any satisfactory answers yet.

One post suggested this was because there was a bad network card on the network, but I have yet to find pointers on where to find the information that is being analyzed and how to find the errant network card... or whatever else is happening.

One problem with wmiprvse.exe is that you cannot simply terminate the process: if you do, say with Task Manager, then it immediately comes back and jumps right back up to the magic 50%+ CPU utilization. Even reboots aren't guaranteed to fix the problem and who wants to reboot their Windows machine and lose even more time?

Well, a few days back, I found a work-around. It's just a band-aid, I know, but I'm happy to be able to use it. The fix is to suspend the wmiprvse task. The way I do this is through the Process Explorer utility offered by the SysInternals folks -- this is just one of the many excellent programs that they offer (and in a nice little ironic twist, they're now owned by Microsoft so the problem and the solution are all in the family).

Once you have Process Explorer installed and you see that wmiprvse.exe is doing it's CPU-sucking thing, just find it on the Process Explorer list, right-click it, and select the Suspend option. The task stays in the system, but doesn't get any CPU cycles, unless you Resume the task.

At this point, I've had wmiprvse.exe suspended for over 3 days. Occasionally, I do a Resume and see it hit 50% and then just re-suspend. There aren't a bunch of error messages in the event log, so... no bad things seem to be happening to my system and I'm getting full use in spite of wmiprvse.

Thank you, SysInternals... nice stuff!

Thanks, Microsoft... NOT!

It seems as if the latest set of Windows XP updates don't work as well as one would like. I've already run into two time-consuming problems and I'm hoping it won't get worse now that Windows 7 is in manufacturing.

1) The first was an update (don't know which one) that reset many of my internet security settings. The result was that FireFox and IE both stopped downloading files and IE kept saying that my setup was insecure. It took me quite a while, but I finally figured it out: Go to "Control Panel | Internet Options | Internet" and click the "Custom Level" button. What I found was that the options under "Miscellaneous" had been reset to "Disable" instead of "Prompt" as they had been. Once I found and fixed that, I could download files again.

2) The second was the disabling/breaking of scanners. I've had all-in-one printer/faxes for quite some time and use them heavily through PaperPort. All of a sudden, it stopped working: the error message said the scanners weren't setup, even though they previously had been. It wasn't a PaperPort problem as two other machines with the same setup but wihtout PaperPort also couldn't scan documents, even using the vanilla Windows software. No amount of fiddling fixed the problem -- the only thing I could do was completely uninstall the printer/fax software and re-install from scratch. At least that did the trick.

Not a very productive few days, as the problems had to be analyzed, and then 3 machines had to be fixed. I don't scan on my Vista machine, but I'll bet they didn't have a problem.

Sheesh!

More GREAT customer service...

Recently I purchased a new Brother color printer (Model# HL-4040CDN). I've wanted a color duplexing printer for some time now so that I can print some of my marketing collateral, but they've always been too expensive. Well... this one was on sale (brand new) at Office Depot for $225.00 and I just couldn't pass it up: competing models from HP were in the $500 and up range. Every thing went fine with the setup until I went to print booklets using Fineprint, an awesome print utility that I've been using for years and wrote up some time back.

Imagine my surprise when the booklets came out wrong! Fineprint has a great little feature that allows you to easily print two-sided (duplex) documents even if the printer doesn't support it automatically. It runs through a series of tests, gets information from you, and then controls the printing so that you put the pages back in for the second side in just the right way - very nice! With automatic duplexing printers, they figure out how to set the duplex parameters on-the-fly so that everything works out fine.

Not on this Brother, however: no matter what I did, the pages always "flipped" in only one way that worked some of the time and not others (without getting into too much of the gory details, pages can be flipped on the long edge or the short edge, which makes a difference for portrait or landscape mode). I worked with fineprint support (they're great) and Brother support and finally realized that the Brother printer was not accepting dynamic printer commands to change the page flipping parameters: the current driver allowed you to manually change them, but that's certainly not what I expect from a modern printer with automatic duplexing.

When Brother tech support told me that it was working "as designed" and that I'd just have to manually change the settings, that was the last straw. I wrote a letter to the President of Brother USA, explained the situation and pointed out how unacceptable this was.

A few days later, I received a call from an customer service advisor in the President's office and was assigned to a technical advisor. We started working together to describe the situation so that the developers could understand what was going on.

To make a not-so-long story shorter, I now have a new version of the printer driver which properly handles all the automatic duplexing features that I expected from this printer.

Now that's what I call service! Thank you Brother.

GREAT Customer Service... Priceless!

I recently checked in with Timebridge, a relatively new scheduling app that I had previously signed up with and forgotten about. I found that I had two accounts, setup under two different email addresses. I wanted to cancel one account and add that email address as an alternate to the account I was keeping, and -- as usual these days -- there was no way to cancel online: I had to send an email. I used their generic form to request assistance, and resigned myself to the usual delays or complete non-response that I've experienced in the past.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a response within 30 minutes! Not only that, but it was actually an intelligent response, not some canned "We got your email, now sit back and wait..." mumbo-jumbo that you usually get. The fellow (Lior) actually gave me the option of deleting the unwanted account or consolidating it into the one I was keeping. Now that's help! I said 'consolidate' and within another 60 minutes it was done: I had one account with two email addresses.

BTW, Timebridge is a great little scheduling app which (in its free incarnation) let's you contact folks, offer them meeting alternatives, and gives you back information as to who accepted which dates/times. Very helpful for teams that don't work together on a Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Exchange server. The paid versions offer web conferencing and conference calling services.

Highly recommended!