MindlessCode.net

This letter I wrote them says it all:

Hello,
I have been using the USPS Shipping Assistant software for just over a year now to print labels with delivery confirmation for our small home business. The software has always worked well, and delivery confirmation on all packages is a huge bonus for us and our customers.

A few days ago I received an email saying you were going to discontinue the USPS Shipping Assistant software in favor of your web based “Click-N-Ship” software. I assume this means that I will no longer be able to print labels from the Shipping Assistant.

In light of that information, I decided to try the web based Click-N-Ship program. My simple review: “Miserable Failure”.

First off, the web interface is unusably slow. Either the files are huge, the server is on a very slow link, or the server is overloaded. The second problem was the amount of time it takes to produce on label. I clocked it (inclusive of network time):
Time Required to produce one Label:
Shipping Assistant: 45 seconds (Copy in address, enter weight, select ship date, submit label, load up PDF file and print.)

Click-N-Ship: 2 minutes (Load website, sign in, hit create label, enter in return address, enter in shipping address, enter in weight, enter in ship date, post office zip, answer is this package 85 inches or more, click next. Wait 7 seconds for page to load. Select service type. Click next. Wait 5 seconds for page to load. Repeat for next label. Click Continue to print labels. PDF is generated and loads up in my PDF viewer. Click print.

It is impossible to tell Click-N-Ship not to create a receipt in the PDF. This is a problem because we are using the labels from Label Universe, and wasting a label for a useless receipt is too expensive for us. So, now we are printing the labels onto plain paper, cutting the paper in half, throwing away receipt, and taping the label onto the package.

I cannot view history right after I create a label. This means that I don’t know the tracking number of the package unless I copy it out of the PDF while it’s still open. If I don’t remember to do that, I need to manually type in the number from the label. Ugg.

And other such gripes. Click-N-Ship has obviously not been well tested under Firefox, it feels much too clumsy. I am on a 786kbps DSL connection, and Click-N-Ship feels slow to me–I pity the poor people on a 56k dial-up connection.

What do I want you to do? Don’t discontinue Shipping Assistant. It works well for me any 100,000’s of others, and we don’t need any sort of broken web interface. Why did you decide to discontinue the Shipping Assistant, anyway?

Looking forward to your reply,
Taj Morton, Wild Garden Seed

Grrr… Sounds like a good project to learn Qt/C++ in. Maybe I should write something open source and see what happens.

DRM ‘manages access’ in the same way that jail ‘manages freedom.’

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Great point. (* tmorton, who is frustrated by ATRAC3 on Sony’s MiniDisc.)

A beta of Autopackage 1.2 is slated to be released sometime this weekend and we are going to need lots of testers! Swing by and let us know you want to help test. Thanks!

Mike has setup Planet Autopackage and Isak created the design. It’s running off the Planet aggregator software. Hello, Planet Autopackage!

These people design websites? Their own page is just one big Flash file which is impossible to navigate on. I think this sums it up (on their “Design” page):

our websites are simple, easy to navigate, and provide just the right amount of information

NOT! It’s #C5C2D5 on #9C99CD, not exactly contrasting colors. “Easy to navigate”, hmm…where are my <a href> links? Why doesn’t my back button work? “The right amount of information”–when you’re charging $15/page, I guess so.

That doesn’t really inspire confidence. The other pages they designed are pretty much the same, lots of frames, JavaScript, front pages with nothing but an image, etc. I hate to say it, but it looks like it came out of one of those “You can learn to design webpages in 24 hours and make lots of money!” books that were so popular in 1999.

It’s kind of sad, I guess. They took our Community Theatre page (load if you dare!), and didn’t reall improve it. I hate webpages that resize my brower window. I don’t really need a website telling me what time it is–I have a clock right on my task bar, you know–I bet you do too. The old webpage looked so much better, in my opinion. Of course, I didn’t like the old one too much either, but this new design makes the old one look great.

Oh, I should really stop now–this post is lame, bad, and terribly critical of a local web designer who is just trying to design sites. Sorry, and I should really go to bed.

Just one more thing: NationStates looks like sort of an interesting game–give it a try.

Well, having broken my tape recorder at Booher Camp (by dropping it off a tall counter onto a hard floor), we’ve decided to move up to (drumroll!) digital recording. We bought a Minidisc MZ-RH910 from Sony (I know–shame on us), and it’s OK. The recording is great, it looks nice, and it’s fairly easy to use. The bad part is the music on the Minidisc is encoded in Sony’s propritary ATRAC3 format. The only way to get recording off the disc is to use Sony’s “SonicStage” program–which is awful, and only works on Windows. Windows sees it as a Mass Storage Device, but, alas, the audio is encrypted. This means no downloading from Linux or Mac.

The other bad thing about it is although it claims to be an “MP3 Player” (according to the sticker on the front), it seems you actually need to encode your MP3s into ATRAC3 using SonicStage. Lots of work for getting your damn songs onto a Mindisc. Double work since all my music is ripped from CDs in OGG format. That’s two lossy conversions from another lossy format–yuck.

This means that I’m looking for this:

• MP3/Vorbis Playback
• Recording in a lossless format
• Not too short of a battery life (Preferibly a NiMH battery)
• Not outrageously expensive (Not > $350)
• Linux support (Mass Storage would be nice)
• Not a laptop (It shouldn’t weigh too much!)
• Builtin FM transmitter?
• Line in for Mic

The Neuros II 80GB seems pretty nice, but it’s kind of bulky and has a Lithium Ion battery. It’s a little spendy (about $100 than we payed for the Minidisc + 3 Year Warranty), but probably what I’d end up going for if I don’t find anything else.

This is what we’re living with now:

This seed is drying by the stove–and makes a great obstacle to trip over.

More seed drying up above.

It must be November, the seed drying time of year.

Also, I got SupremeServer to increase my quota without having to screw around. They’re a great company if you keep on trying. At first, they wern’t going to increase my quota saying I need to screw around with pulling my data off the server, canceling my account, then recreating my account and putting the data back on–I would be on the same server. Then, this morning they contacted me saying “Oops…you’re on the right server, we’ve updated your account.”

Nice!

Apparently if I would have waited 2 days to sign up with SupremeServer, I would have gotten 20GB of disk space and 400GB transfer, instead of what I’m getting now–which is 60GB of transfer and 5GB of space…at no extra cost. The only way for me to get the enlarged package would be to cancel my current account, get my money refunded (I’ve got a 30 day money back deal), register again, and then set everything up again (everything=websites, SSL, email, crontabs, etc)… *sigh*

…and other marketing photos:

UPS Tracking Page. Portland is 2 hours north of Albany, *not* 1 minute.

And Amazon being smart, as usual.

Fall has finally come here. The trees are bare, it’s COLD, it’s raining all the time, and it’s freezing every night! Ahh…fall–that means that winter comes next!

I’ve moved the Wild Garden Seed and Gathering Together Farm website from D4Hosting back to our original home at SupremeServer. This means that I don’t have to worry about if the website is working or if the server is going to get broken into…and all the hassles that has to do with running your own server with lots of other people on it.

Sure, it’s not going to be the same–I don’t get all the bandwidth and HDD space I want, It costs more, I don’t have scp or sftp (how stupid!), public key authentication, or all that other stuff. On the plus side, I get someone to run the server for me, daily backups, SSL is all is taken care of, etc etc. I think I’ll be happy.

If you sign up, be warned that they claim to charge $360 a year for SSH! That’s more than a whole year of hosting on their largest plan! I didn’t see this price until I had signed up. When they called to confirm the order, I told them to cancel my account. They called back about 5 minutes later saying “Oops! It’s only $30/year”. $30 still is a lot to charge for SSH–but *shrug*.

I was able to set everything up and test without waiting for DNS to resolve by setting /etc/hosts to map the IP to hostname. I got everything working and then released it the website into the wild.

Everything should be working fine–if you see something wrong, let me know at tajmorton@gmail.com.

You’ve probably already heard about it, but this has more info on it, and also about how it does “phone home”. There’s also a comment from “xcp support”, the company who wrote the program.