Simply Awesome

Yesterday I posted about my experience with the Errata submission process at Wrox.  I promised an update and this is it.

Within an hour of my submission, I received an email reply from someone in the customer service department.  It turns out that my observation about the missing figure had already been noticed.  If I would have looked harder, I would have found the replacement figure in the form of a JPG file in the downloads section for the book.  I still believe that it should have been listed in the errata section - after all it IS an erratum.

I also received an email from Jim Minatel.  It seems that the comment functionality of my blog was down so he emailed instead.  I was very satisfied ith the service I got from everyone involved and am happy to say that I have had my faith in Wrox restored.  I'll continue to buy books from them when I have an opportunity and I will continue to hold them to a high standard of excellence - as I do with everyone I recommend.

Let me preface this by saying that I understand people make mistakes.  I make them all the time.  I expect mistakes in technical books.  This is NOT a rant about the quality of any particular book or technical books in general.

Today I was reading a particularly interesting section in a technical book and ran into a figure that was clearly incorrect.  After making sure it wasn't simply a case of the figure reference being off by a number or two, I decided to take a browse over to the Wrox site for the book and check out the Errata page.  This is where my journey becomes very frustrating.

Problem #1 - When I search for a book using the exact title, I expect it to be the FIRST hit, not the fourth.

Ok, so I find the title, bring up the book's page, and click on the Errata link.  So far so good.  I'm a little troubled by the fact that the book has only a few items listed - I know I've run into more errors than this and I'm only in Chapter 2.  Either I'm the only person reading the book or something is broken with the errata process.  I click on the "errata form" link.  I expected to get to a page that clearly indicated that I was submitting an errata for a particular book.  Instead I'm at a generic "ask a question" page.  I thought this was strange enough that I went back and searched for a completely different book to see if the link itself was broken.  Nope - all the books take you to this generic page.

At this point I'm starting to see the issues with the Errata submission process.  I'm imagining some English major doing an internship getting an email and yelling at her screen something like "I'm glad that you noticed that 'obtuse' was misspelled on page 578, but IN WHICH F**ING BOOK?".  So, I try to help the intern out and provide the book's title and printing number along with my errata submission in the "ask your question" box.

I move on to the next *required* section which requests that I enter a category.  I eventually find an option for "figure error" which seems to fit the bill.  Selecting this enables a text box where I can put in the book's title and ISBN number.  The text boxes are empty.

Problem #2 - Don't make me enter data which you have no excuse for not knowing.  I clicked on a link on your website that contained all the information you are requesting.  Don't make me do your work for you.

Problem #3 - x1000 when we're dealing with a web development book.  Perhaps you should read some of your own books from time to time - you may learn how to make a website that doesn't suck.

Deep Breath.

Now, I click the submit button.  Feeling rather pleased with myself that I took the time to report the errata in spite of all the challenges.  Oh, what is this - they want me to create an account?  This is optional right?  Nope.  They want my address and phone number to submit a freaking errata?  Fail.

Problem #4 - When someone is trying to help you out, you should be thankful and appreciative.  This should not be viewed as an opportunity to pad your marketing database.

Against my better judgment, I filled out the silly little account creation form.  I didn't give any real information except for my email address.  Submit.  We're finally done, right?  Wrong.

I get redirected to yet another page that gives me some troubleshooting steps that I can perform myself before submitting my question.  The first on the list - Have you checked the Errata page for this book?  Congratulations - you just bought yourself a blog post.  Epic Fail.

I did get an email saying that I'll hear from someone in "support" within 24 hours.  I'll update if/when my submission ever makes it to the errata page.

Updated here.

I've been very impulsive lately.

As I mentioned last night, my HD DVD player lost it's ability to upconvert standard DVDs.  This morning I received a sign from a higher power that I could not refuse.  Walmart is offering a $100 gift card with the purchase of a PS3.  Now, the sale ad makes you think that the gift card must be used to purchase Blu-ray disks, but at least in our case, we just got a standard walmart gift card which we can use on anything, including the diapers we would buy from walmart anyway - so for us, it was very close to getting a PS3 for $299.  Not a bad deal at all.

I was very pleasantly suprised to see that the PS3 has built-in WiFi.  I'm downloading the latest firmware right now.  Not having to buy yet another standalone wireless dohicky was a huge win.

The other positive suprise was blockbuster.com's ability to up-convert my entire queue to blu-ray with a few clicks.  I guess they are gearing up for more people to take the plunge.  They certainly didn't have a similar option when I first got my HD DVD player.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Ok - I admit that I chose the wrong side in the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray war.  That's the risk you take when you are an early adopter.  I'm cool with all that.

Now, the one thing I could take solace in was the fact that my Toshiba A20 was still a reasonable upconverting DVD player.  Sure, it takes longer to boot the damn thing than all of my computers combined, but once it is running, it does a good job - until today.  It seems that it has lost the ability to spit out audio on the HDMI line.  Of course, I need HDMI to upconvert.  With the component connection, I get great audio - but a 480p picture.  Grr.

It appears that the blu-ray player may need to be purchased sooner than expected.  I'm not about to buy a standalone upconverting DVD player.

I just installed the Release Candidate of Firefox 3 on my MacBook and my Vista bootcamp partition.  My first impression is that it looks very shiny, but I'm not sure I can last log without a google toolbar version that is compatible.

Over the past two weeks, I've been adding a bunch of new tools to the old toolkit.  First was Ninject, which I decided to take out for a spin after seeing Nate's excellent talk at the Cleveland Day of .Net.  That started me down a grand path of goodness.  I had been using xUnit in yet another attempt to get unit testing off the ground.  I had tried in the past, but kept failing when it came to doing anything complex.  It turns out I was trying to do dependency injection by hand - and failing miserably at it.  With Ninject, a lot of the resistance to developing for testability is removed and writing testable code and the unit tests that go along with them are easy/fun/addictive - you pick the adjective.

With my new found passion for unit testing, I looked for other tools that could help.  NCover was a natural fit - not only am I striving to always have green unit tests, they need to have a high level of code coverage.  Fast forward a couple days and I discover NDepend - quite by accident - and fell in love with the extremely detailed and insightful metrics.  The most recent addition to the toolkit is testdriven.net.  It brings all the tools together in a nice convenient right-click package.  I'll have to re-evaluate things once ReSharper 4.0 goes RTM and xUnit supports it, but for now, my toolbox overflows with goodness and programming is fun again.

Last week, my cable company performed a massive channel realignment in my area.  Of course, we'd been receiving literature about it for months.  The only problem was that there was no specific date mentioned.  We had a technician tell us in early March that it would be done "by the end of the month".  Whe the change finally did come, it came in true cable company style - with absolutely no warning.  In my case, it managed to take down my cable modem which left me without internet for the better part of a week.

Given the complete lack of warning, coupled with the dead internet connection, it was no surprise that my TiVo had no idea that all of my channel numbers had changed.  Once the internet was back up, I forced the TiVo to phone home, expecting to get the lineup change.  No Dice.  As of yesterday afternoon, the TiVo was still showing and recording from the incorrect channels.

If you've read this far, you're probably guessing that this is a rant about TiVo's poor customer service.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I opened up a support ticket online yesterday afternoon.  I didn't expect to hear anything, especially since it was a national holiday.  The auto responder email said that a linup specialist would get back to me in 5 to 7 business days.  To my great suprise, I got a response within an hour.  The response was helpful, courteous, most of all - solved the problem completely on the first try.  It turns out, TiVo was completely ahead of the game - my TiVo had downloaded the new linup weeks ago and was just waiting for TiVo to hear from the cable company so that they could activate it.  TiVo never got the notification - which frankly didn't suprise me.  Better yet, TiVo anticipated these situations and provides an "advanced options" function on the linup selection to allow you to activate the linup on demand.  It's great when the system works transparently - but when it doesn't, it nice to know that you have a company that has the support and technology to get you up and running with the minimum of downtime.  Thanks TiVo.

Between the internet outage last week, and the trip to Detroit over the weekend, I have not had much uninterrupted time to explore the new MacBook.  Now that Lilly and Mary Beth are sleeping, I'm finally getting a chance.  I'm reading "Switching to the Mac - Tiger Edition" which is a very easy read and is not too out of date - so far.  I have a Leopard specific book on the way too which should be here soon.

So far it has been mostly smooth sailing.  I do find myself missing the page up/down and home buttons and haven't quite memorized the keyboard shortcuts, but I think that will be something I can overcome.  The single-button mouse has been a non-issue since I use a blutetooth multi-button mouse most of the time and command-click is becoming second nature for those times when I don't bother taking the mouse out of the briefcase.

Sleep mode is an absolute treat.  I don't know if it is the "newness" of the machine - I hope not, but this machine goes into and out of sleep mode with ease.  It's the first laptop I've ever owned where I had to turn off the "go to sleep mode when shutting the lid" option within a day of owning it.