Occam's Razor

I pre-ordered some software for me and a friend.  One was ordered from Best Buy and one was ordered from Walmart.  I promised that whichever arrived first, I’d give to my friend and I’d get the other one.

Now I’m wishing I hadn’t promised that.

The software from Best Buy was here two weeks or so ago — which was a day or two after it was released to the public.   The one from Walmart, however, is still M.I.A.

In viewing the package tracking, I’m simply amazed.  Walmart’s notes on the item are:

Will arrive between Monday, 01/22/07, and Wednesday, 01/24/07

Riiiight. Unless they are also sending me a time machine, I think we’ve got a problem…

Orlando is two hours away from me. Jacksonville is probably, I dunno, four hours away? So it makes its way towards me on the first couple days after I order and then it slowly drifts further and further away. How can this possibly make sense?

Hopefully you can understand my confusion on this…

• Jan 16 2007
  Mail Retrieved From Shipper
  Received at UPS Mail Innovations Origin RPF (Carol Stream, IL)
  Processed at UPS Mail Innovations Origin RPF (Carol Stream, IL)
• Jan 17 2007
  Transferred to UPS Mail Innovations Destination RPF (Orlando, FL)
• Jan 19 2007
  Received at UPS Mail Innovations Destination RPF (Orlando, FL)
  Manifested – Postage Paid
  ELECTRONIC SHIPPING INFO RECEIVED (JERSEY CITY,NJ)
  Your mail piece has been transferred from UPS Mail Innovations to the United States Postal Service.
• Jan 20 2007
  ENROUTE (JACKSONVILLE,FL)
  Entered USPS Facility – BMC (JAXVILLE, FL)
• Jan 29 2007
  ENROUTE (MEMPHIS,TN)

I just don’t get it. No matter how I look at it, it simply makes no sense. I wrote Walmart to let them know I wanted to cancel the order. If I knew it would take over two weeks to get an item I pre-ordered with them, I would have simply gone to the store and picked it up days after it came out.

Oh, and when the heck did UPS and USPS begin doing hand-offs to one another? Crazy!

[By the way: Geek points go to whichever poor soul can guess which software I pre-ordered]

While attempting to transfer rent money to my roommate (aka my brother), I ran into this oh-so-helpful dialog from the bank….

Was it successful?  Did it fail?  Who knows.  At least they narrowed it down to one or the other, though, right?

Not exactly something you want to see when you transfer a bunch of money….

Certainly it has to be a joke…  It’s almost like the bank has regressed so far technologically that they are now at the point where they will begin asking, “I like you. Do you like me? Check ‘yes’ or ‘no’”.

Feeling brave, I also decided to check my online bill payments that I have set up. I wasn’t sure what the scheduling was on that.  Well, clicking the “Online Bill Pay” link brought me to the following screen:

You’ve got to be kidding me!  Apparently, the Bill Pay system is outside of the main bank system, so now we’re looking at errors on two systems… Wow.  What are the chances, huh?  I was tempted to write the bank, including the screenshot, and inquiring as to whether the server’s impotency is affected by my account’s interest… but I decided it probably isn’t worth it…  I really just want to switch to a better bank.

UPDATE:

I just tried to log into one of my main web hosting providers and got the following error:

What is going on here?!?!?!  Is this some sort of delayed reaction to Y2K or what? Geesh!  I guess they are focusing so much on 24/7 uptime of my servers that they can’t be bothered to make sure their own keep working…

Sorry I’ve been somewhat quiet on the blog front lately…  I’m in the process of cashing out my 401K and have been trying to give myself a quick crash-course in stocks…  After I put away a bit for a “rainy day fund”, I’ll have about $10k to play with for stocks.  I’d really like to have about 10 stocks… but I don’t have the cash to get a hundred or so shares of each stock right now, ya’ know?  So I’m trying to figure out whether it’s worth getting a handful of shares of each stock or if I want to get a lot of shares for a few key stocks right now and expand my portfolio later.  Hrmph…

I’m attempting to address a lot of my needs the way any good geek would — with technology    Rather than the traditional trending analysis stuff I’ve seen, mine will be much more simple.  I plan on using it for two main purposes… First and foremost, I want it to be used in tracking my losses… That way, if a stock is slowly sapping my money and the rest of the market is pretty steady, I’ll be able to switch my funds somewhere else.  Secondly, I’m looking to tie it in with online news, communities like Digg, etc. so I can stay informed about what’s going on with the companies, get a feel for popular opinions of the company value, etc.   Don’t know how useful any of it will be, but it should be fun.   I’d also like to match it up against larger stuff like mutal funds and whatnot.  If the stock isn’t even noticed by “the big boys”, it is probably a more risky bet than one that is….

I’ve been playing with SQL Server 2005 a bit more lately.  It took me a little bit, but I finally got remote connections to work — thanks to Josh who I bugged with repeated “Try it now” requests….  heh.  For some reason the SQL Server Browser service wasn’t handling requests properly or something…  In the end, the only way I was able to get connections in was to have the connection made to the specific port number.  Only a minor inconvenience, I guess, but I really wish they’d make it less of a pain to do that stuff right out of the box.   Then again, maybe that’s a good thing… from the security side of things.  By default, SQL Server 2005 isn’t even set up to allow remote connections or use TCP/IP… Great for local development, though, I guess.

I’m still trying to get a hang on the new interface with 2005, though.  I had grown so accustomed to using Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer separately.  It still seems really foreign to me right now — doing it all from one interface.  I wasn’t a huge fan on Enterprise Manager to begin with, but now the tools just seem so much more bloated.  I’m going to try and get a copy running at work so we can start porting over some small stuff…  Maybe my opinion of it will change after that.  We’ll see.

I was planning on writing up some SQL posts, but I couldn’t decide on a topic.  Anyone have any suggestions?

I have way too many domain names…  Just with the ones I could remember, my current count is around 23…

Last night, I decided it was time to write something basic for managing them better.  I’m not worried about things like response-time, uptime, etc.  Really, the only thing I care about is the expiration dates on them.. and, maybe, having some way to make sure they didn’t somehow get transferred away from me.

Currently, my app is pretty small and simple.  It reads a list of domains from a text file.  This list is a combination of sites that belong to me and sites I’d like to have someday.  Eventually, I’ll include a way of distinguishing the two.  Upon loading, it queries the appropriate whois server (based on the domain extension) and parses out the expiration date.  From there, it calculates how long until I need to renew.  If there are any domains expiring soon, it will highlight them and pop up to show me the list. Otherwise, it just quietly closes.

My next change will be to store the expiration dates along with the domain name.  Only when it starts getting close to the expected expiration date (or the user requests it) will this stored value be refreshed.  If the last time I queried the domain, it told me that it expires on, say, 5/3/2008, I don’t have any need for checking that value on subsequent program loads… at least not until, say, 4/15/2008…  This will help keep the program execution time down and will let it focus only on stuff that is likely to have its information changed soon…

Also, I may add in something for expired domains… so if one that I’m tracking happens to have its registration lapse, I can have a quick way of registering it (whether through just a link to a registration site or something more convenient like an automated registration script).

I’m sort of having fun now on RentACoder (RAC).  I’ve been taking on some pretty small sized bids just to get the hang out things.  There’s some really weird requests now and then.  It’s interesting, though, because a lot of the time the people requesting stuff have no idea what they really want.  So when someone asks for, say, five separate reports that show essentially the same thing, I will challenge that a bit and make sure that is indeed what they really want and that they have a need for it.  And then there are projects that just seem to have no real value to them, but that in and of itself is sort of a motivation to do it, if that makes sense.  As an example, one guy wanted an application that would read a list of URLs from a text file and then load all of those sites one by one in new browser sessions.  How weird.  Maybe he has a few favorite pages that he goes to every day and he’s looking to schedule this so they are ready and waiting for him when he wakes up or gets into work.  Or perhaps he’s trying to use it to abuse query strings on some sites so he can spam them with comments.  Heck, he could even be using it to attempt to fluff stats for traffic, ads, etc.  Who knows.  I don’t really care, either, for the most part.

So far, the hardest part for me has been when I bid on a project and come up with some way of doing it in my mind and then the person chooses another bidder.  It can be frustrating.  I guess it’s good training, though, in the long run… since it forces me to learn how to turn on and off my development mind.  Normally, I sort of just come up with whatever plan seems to make the most sense for the situation and then run with it.  If it proves to be more involved or time-consuming, I’ll re-evaluate… Otherwise, I’m usually done with the project before most people would normally be anywhere close.

Stu’s got a few side projects lined up for me, apparently.  He’s having me write programs or come up with suggestions for new ways his company can do certain things.  Initially, he’s paying me out of pocket, but I think if there’s enough noticeable benefit from it, I think he’ll probably get recognition for taking the initiative to fix a lot of these issues that have been around for ages at his company and I may have an opportunity for larger scale or longer term projects over there if the need arises.

I migrated my blog to WordPress 2.1 tonight.  There were a few small issues, but things seem good now.

It’s got some interesting new features along with quite a lot of bug fixes.  Their plan from now on is to mimick a release plan similar to that of Ubunto, so the next minor update will be at the end of April.  At least with the minor version releases, I can use a diff file.  I am not a big fan of these full release installs.  Always afraid I’m going to break something.

If you run into any issues with the new version, though, please let me know. Thanks.

A developer by the name of Don Park has created a new way of identifying users. His method turns their IP address into a unique image.

Within his blog, each commenter gets a cool generated image to represent their identity. Don has provided people with a simple webservice to use on their sites, if they want to use his technique as well. His creation was mentioned on CodingHorror this morning along with a port of the code to .NET 2.0

I don’t really have a use for it just yet, but it sounds interesting, for sure. I like that it somewhat hides the identity of the person while still uniquely tagging their connection.

I ended up turning down the bid I won on RAC for that SQL Server Backup project.  It ended up being that the guy was using MSDE and, eventually, would be using SQL Express and simply wanted to back up his databases locally.  I’ll admit, that made things a lot less interesting.  I had nearly finishing making something to handle that on SQL Server 2000, but doing that on one of the desktop based SQL environments (MSDE or Express) would’ve been way too large of a rewrite for only $30.

I used to do a lot of locally run applications to do helpful stuff, but now that I’ve been spoiled with server-based solutions, a lot of the local stuff just seems so…. cheap, you know?

Scheduling backups of MSDE databases via some application running in the system tray that emails someone via an external SMTP server just strikes me as an application I don’t want to get involved in.  I do have standards, you know?  At least for stuff I’m going to work on in my spare time.  After all, time is money…. but my free time is worth more.

UPDATE:

I just got a reply back from the guy whose project I declined.  He made a comment about how unprofessional it was to back out on him, since he’s already put funds in escrow and that I’ve now made him waste 2-3 days on the project.  What the heck? He only even accepted my bid a few hours ago!  So I wrote back in order to clarify things:

There’s a 24-hour grace period where the coder may choose to decline a project for any reason without penality.  You can read more about it in the Seller contract.  I already submitted this to RentACoder so they can send your funds back.
As for your 2/3 day loss, I’m not sure if I follow you. You accepted my bid tonight and, one hour later, after I found out the environment you were running under, I responded saying I would not be taking on the project and declined the bid through RentACoder.  I’m sorry if you view an hour of waiting as unprofessional.

In any event, the whole point behind the grace period is for this sort of situation. SQL Server and MSDE/Express both use SQL tables, but solutions for them vary greatly at times.  My proposed solution to you, which was server-based, used code I already had ready for you, which is why I agreed to a low bid amount.  Building the project from scratch for MSDE/Express changes the development time to more than I wanted to invest on a $30 bid.

Thanks.

I feel bad for the guy, but is it really that big of a deal? Not really…  Apparently, he didn’t know about the Grace Period thing.  And he agreed that I had some valid points, so things ended alright, I guess.

I don’t even remember why I ordered it, really, but Amazon shipping me a copy of Dreaming In Code a couple days ago.  I finished that book by Linus Torvalds quite a while ago, so I’m happy to have something new to read in between projects.

Also, somewhat in reference to the post title, I had some further inspiration for that SQL Backup program I was making.  I still don’t think the project needs a custom solution, but if that’s what the person wants, that’s what they’ll get.