Removing Devices

 Rants, Technology  1 Response »
Oct 142013
 

I’m on my third Android phone now, and appar­ently there is no way to delete the pre­vi­ous phone(s) from my Google Account. The Android Device Man­ager sup­port page tells you how to find the phone and wipe it, but I wiped them before passing them on to new homes. And I don’t care about their cur­rent loc­a­tions. You can hide a device from the list, but not delete it, and I’m puzzled as to why. Do they need a list of all pre­vi­ous own­ers of any device? Why?

And, the page to revoke access to Google accounts from these old devices still looks some­thing like this:

Google account revoke access page

and does­n’t tell you which device or account is meant by ‘Android Login Ser­vice — Full Account Access’. I guess I could turn off each one in turn and see which I need to turn back on, but it should be pos­sible for Google to put some identi­fy­ing inform­a­tion there to help with the pro­cess, even if it’s only the date on which access was requested. 

Syncing Google Calendar and Tungle

 Rants, Technology  No Responses »
Aug 232011
 

I came across this weird prob­lem recently, where my Tungle account (tungle.me/laurenwood) was only syn­chron­iz­ing some of the events on my Google cal­en­dar. I checked they were set to the right cal­en­dar (yes), marked as busy (yes), and still could­n’t find the answer. 

This is an issue that quite a few people have had. Appar­ently what’s going on is that Google cal­en­dar sup­ports three types of avail­ab­il­ity for events: free, busy, and tent­at­ive. In the UI on the browser and on the Android they only show the free (avail­able) and busy. BUT, when you cre­ate an event on the Android cal­en­dar, it’s assigned the “tent­at­ive” status. I have no idea why, since I added those events to the cal­en­dar myself, they’re not invit­a­tions that I still have to accept or decline. And the fact that there appears to be no way to change the status once the event has been cre­ated just makes it worse. I tried chan­ging the status manu­ally to “busy” in both the browser and the Android cal­en­dar app but that did­n’t work. The only thing that did work was to delete the event and recre­ate on the desktop.

For­tu­nately tungle imple­men­ted a fix — you can choose to mark the sup­posedly tent­at­ive appoint­ments as “busy”. Here’s hop­ing any oth­er apps I may wish to sync with my Google cal­en­dar also imple­ment this feature.

Problems Importing Into Canada

 Rants  17 Responses »
Aug 182009
 

I’ve often wondered why so many U.S. online com­pan­ies won’t sell to people liv­ing in Canada. It’s a smal­ler mar­ket, to be sure, but not trivi­al, in fact big­ger than most U.S. states. I’ve recently dis­covered a large part of the reas­on — Canada’s import pro­ced­ures and tax laws.

Tim’s blog costs a reas­on­able amount to keep going, so we thought it might be nice to come up with some way to defray some of that. His pho­tos are pop­u­lar, so we figured to do some­thing with that, prefer­ably using drop ship­ping so we don’t have to invest in an invent­ory of things that might not sell at all. The idea, after all, is to make a little money, not have invent­ory sit­ting around that nobody wants. With drop-ship­ping we col­lect the money, send the order to the com­pany cre­at­ing the item, and they ship it dir­ectly to the end customer.

I try to do the right thing in terms of pay­ing taxes etc, so I star­ted phoning the rel­ev­ant agen­cies to find out the answer to one big ques­tion: how do I make sure the end cus­tom­er isn’t charged the Cana­dian sales taxes (GST for Canada, PST for BC) twice, while still allow­ing the com­pany to ship to them directly? 

The answer is: you can­’t. Not leg­ally, any­way. By law, if I sell some­thing to someone who lives in Canada, I have to col­lect the GST (and PST if they live in BC). When the item comes across the bor­der into Canada, if it’s shipped dir­ectly to the cus­tom­er, they have to pay it again. Leg­ally I can­’t not col­lect it on the grounds that they will pay it, and leg­ally they can­’t not pay it on the grounds that I already col­lec­ted it from them. I could engage a cus­toms broker to do this, but they’re far too expens­ive for me to con­tem­plate at this stage. The only leg­al way for the cus­tom­er to avoid pay­ing the taxes twice is if I have the item shipped to me, and then I ship it on to them. Which increases the cost of ship­ping, increases the deliv­ery time, and neg­ates much of the point of drop shipping.

Now I’m try­ing to fig­ure out the options. There’s the option of selling only to U.S. people, which seems weird since I live in Canada. There’s the option of telling Cana­dians that their deliv­ery will take a lot longer, since it has to be sent to me and then I’ll send it on (and I do have oth­er things to do with my time). There’s the option of recom­mend­ing they use some ser­vice that does this for them. And there’s the option of giv­ing up on the whole endeav­our. None of those options are par­tic­u­larly appealing.

Help­ful com­ments and sug­ges­tions are welcome!

DVDs and Regions

 Family, Rants  1 Response »
Mar 202009
 

I admit to find­ing it amus­ing that Barack Obama’s gift to Gor­don Brown of 25 clas­sic Amer­ic­an movies ended up illus­trat­ing one of my hot but­tons — Mr. Brown could­n’t watch the Region 1‑encoded DVDs on his Region 2 play­er. Here’s Tech­Dirt’s take on the story (link from Volk­er Weber).

I have been in many dis­cus­sions with wet-behind-the-ears idi­ots in con­sumer elec­tron­ics stores who par­rot the Hol­ly­wood line that region-encod­ing is just fine and reas­on­able. Ask­ing them why send­ing DVDs from the US to Europe is bad and should be stopped meets with a “huh?” answer. Ask­ing them why my tod­dler should not be able to watch DVDs sent to us from friends in Aus­tralia eli­cits more of the same. 

Even­tu­ally we bought a DVD play­er that plays from oth­er regions as well, mak­ing it pos­sible for me to buy Ger­man-lan­guage DVDs suit­able for my chil­dren (not easy to find in Region 1 encod­ing). To my mind, the fact that the regions were set up to put Mex­ico in with Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and shows how non­sensic­al the whole concept is. I really don’t under­stand why so many DVD man­u­fac­tur­ers auto­mat­ic­ally region-encoded the DVDs rather than mak­ing them region-free, and I’m pleased to see that even though Blu-Ray repeats the whole region idiocy, many man­u­fac­tur­ers are in fact mak­ing their Blu-Ray discs region-free.

I assume at least part of that response is due to the wide avail­ab­il­ity of DVD play­ers that don’t worry about regions, and the avail­ab­il­ity of instruc­tions to mod oth­er DVD play­ers. There’s an inter­est­ing write-up of the law case against Sony in Aus­tralia as well, which points out that “retail­ers of DVD play­ers are not bound by the terms of the CSS licence and the accom­pa­ny­ing tech­nic­al specifications”. 

This whole thing is one of the reas­ons I was so con­cerned about the copy­right legis­la­tion Canada’s Con­ser­vat­ive gov­ern­ment was try­ing to have passed last year. It cur­rently seems to be stalled, so I can show my kids their Ger­man-lan­guage DVDs, and DVDs from Aus­tralia, with a clear con­science a while longer.

Contributing

 Family, General, Rants  1 Response »
Oct 292008
 

Tim has a post where he advises developers to con­trib­ute to open source pro­jects so that hir­ing man­agers will look favour­ably on them. I have some prob­lems with this, as do many of the com­menters on his post. 

First off, I agree that con­trib­ut­ing to open source pro­jects is admir­able and to be encour­aged. There are, how­ever, a num­ber of developers who work for com­pan­ies with employ­ment con­tracts that say, more or less, any­thing vaguely code-related that you come up with while employed by us is ours, not yours. Which means con­trib­ut­ing any code to any out­side pro­ject is liable to cause prob­lems, or at least a cer­tain num­ber of hurdles. There are oth­er ways of con­trib­ut­ing to any com­munity that are argu­ably just as valu­able, such as tak­ing part in organ­ising events such as loc­al con­fer­ences, volun­teer­ing at loc­al centres that teach people how to use com­puters, assist­ing users on web for­ums, or teach­ing at loc­al com­munity col­leges. Con­cen­trat­ing on writ­ing code for open source pro­jects seems restricting.

The second issue is that it’s dis­crim­in­at­ory against those who simply don’t have the time. Work­ing single par­ents suf­fer par­tic­u­larly from this issue, but any work­ing par­ents of school-age or young­er chil­dren have the prob­lem to some extent. By the time you’ve picked the chil­dren up from school or day care, fed them and the rest of the fam­ily, cleaned up, taken them off to sports/music/whatever, helped with home­work, and done the laun­dry or whatever oth­er chores are neces­sary for that day, all you really have energy for is to unwind and relax. Espe­cially if you sus­pect that the tod­dler will sleep as badly as pre­vi­ous nights this week, wak­ing you up at mid­night, 4 am, and 6 am. When you have to be awake for the day job, as that’s the one that’s cur­rently pay­ing the bills, stay­ing awake into the wee hours isn’t an option for those who need more than just a few hours sleep a night to func­tion prop­erly. No mat­ter how pas­sion­ate they are about coding.

In my case, the pro­ject I’m work­ing on for my day job is the one I think about in spare hours at night and at week­ends. If I were writ­ing code, I’d be writ­ing code for that pro­ject in pref­er­ence to an unre­lated open source pro­ject. I don’t think that atti­tude should be pen­al­ised by hir­ing man­agers either. 

Company Websites 101

 Rants, Technology  1 Response »
May 072008
 

I’m not in mar­ket­ing, so I’m not going to pon­ti­fic­ate on how com­pan­ies should design the look and feel of their web­sites, nor on what they should say on their web­sites. But there are some really basic things that com­pan­ies should do to make their web­sites more usable, at least to a first degree. 

Item 1: don’t make your cus­tom­ers tell you where they live until they need to, nor what sort of ser­vices they’re inter­ested in. Case study: Rogers, a pur­vey­or of wire­less phones and oth­er tele­com ser­vices. The first screen you see at rogers.com makes you choose between res­id­en­tial and busi­ness ser­vices. If you click busi­ness, it assumes you live in Ontario. If you click res­id­en­tial, you then have to tell it which province you live in. Every time I pay my wire­less bill online, I have to go through the same rig­mar­ole. Can­’t they fig­ure out some way of giv­ing people the basic inform­a­tion and then let­ting them choose which sub­set of the site they want? Telus (anoth­er telco) does the same thing, you have to tell them which province you live in before being allowed into the site. Bell Canada (a com­pet­it­or) does this bet­ter. Not per­fect, they have this weird dia­log box float­ing in space, but it’s bet­ter. The login for people with accounts who want to pay them quickly is right there on the first page, unlike for Telus or Rogers. Maybe they should spend five minutes some time and fig­ure out who uses their sites? Or make their exec­ut­ives try to pay their own phone bills online?

Item 2: assume that some people will be lazy, and not want to type the “www.” all the time. Case study: Shop­pers Drug Mart, a Cana­dian drugstore/pharmacy. If you go to www.shoppersdrugmart.com, you get to the site. If you type shoppersdrugmart.com into your browser, you get “Unable to con­nect” as the serv­er rejects the con­nec­tion. This strikes me as bizarre and lazy; it’s not that hard to set up a serv­er to accept both types of address, and user-unfriendly to not do so.

Item 3: if you run a store, set­ting up a web site, advert­ising it, and then put­ting no con­tent on it is a waste of time. If you can­’t think of any­thing else to put on your web site, put your phone num­ber, your loc­a­tion, and your open­ing hours. A few words about products and/or ser­vices you provide would­n’t hurt either. Case study: too many, and they all make me won­der why they bothered.

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