Contact Us Through our New Contact Form on perceptus.ca

January 9th, 2011

We did a largish update to our corporate homepage, perceptus.ca.

There are little changes here and there such as a new background graphic, some updates to the copy, and some changes to the layout.

The most important bit, which really was the catalyst for the change, was our  new contact form, complete with reCAPTCHA to keep the spam to a minimum.  The contact form is actually a test page for us, it’s designed to be highly portable, and you’ll see it on most of our critical websites very soon.

We might even publish the class file – it is far  better than the top few  contact form scripts in PHP that turn up on a search on Google.

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Disappointing Out of Box Experience of Gateway Netbook… in 2011!?

January 6th, 2011

Every once in a while I get a reminder of why Apple is able to make 10 times as much money per computer than everyone else.  The end user experience is incomparable. From the moment you walk into an Apple store, through to the point where you use the device, someone has thought about your experience.

I just had the opportunity to setup a brand new (entry level) Gateway netbook.  There’s nothing special about it. It has an Atom processor and Windows 7 Starter edition. After opening the box, plugging it in, and following the on screen prompts, things seemed pretty good.  Then, it required a reboot to finalize the settings.

It took literally 30 minutes from reboot until I was able to login.  Literally.  It felt like 10 times that long.  I wasn’t really watching what it was trying to do, but whatever it is, it is embarrassingly long.  There aren’t any install options, this netbook is exactly the same as the  rest in the pile, so virtually all of this time should have been done before it left the factory.

So, that’s my first impression of that computer, and Gateway. Sitting around and waiting.  And no, this didn’t include the Windows updates that I did later in the evening.  Actually, this reminds me of the time I setup a Gateway laptop for a client – that was a disaster also, IIRC, I had to drive around the neighbourhood trying to find blank CDRs in order to get past the required initial backup – they had included some low end blank CD’s, one or two of them were bad!

First impressions count.

 

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Posted in annoying, Apple, computers, user experience | No Comments »

Print-Bingo.com Pricing Change

January 1st, 2011

Happy New Year!

We’ve hinted at this for years, and we’re finally doing it today. Print-Bingo.com Premium Access account upgrades are now $12, but we are also  officially increasing the access term by 50% to 3 years. Previously, it was $10 for a 2 year term.  The 2 years expiry was never enforced, and we currently have no plans to enforce the 3 year expiry.

A few thoughts on our pricing and term length change.

The price has never changed since print-bingo.com was launched in 2005. If we estimate an average inflation of 2% per year, we have lost 10% of our revenue after adjusting for inflation.  Further, as a Canadian firm, where our operating expenses and salaries are paid out in Canadian funds, we’ve had a large hit from the rise in the Canadian Dollar over  the US Dollar – but that’s a problem for all Canadian exporters, not just us *.

 

On the feature side, when print-bingo.com was originally launched, an upgrade gave you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 200 pages per run of standard numeric bingo cards.

Yes, that’s really it.

We did not have customizable bingo cards, design saving features, draw chips, randomized draw lists, or serial number features initially.  These were all added over time as the user base of the site grew.

Today, an upgrade to print-bingo.com will get you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 1000 pages per run of standard numeric cards, or the customizable word bingo cards
  • Generate and print randomized Bingo calling cards to quickly call your game.
  • Generate and print calling chips for drawing your terms from a hat or box.
  • Generate bingo cards with serial numbers to help you ensure that cards have been generated by you.
  • Keep your saved or emailed Bingo card designs indefinitely (vs. 30 days for guest users).

I think that we offer much better value now than we did a few years ago.

About the 2 year versus 3 year terms.  When print-bingo.com launched, we had no idea if it would be worth our while to run this site indefinitely. So, we picked a length of time that we were sure that we could promise our users.   Now that our site is well established, we’re pretty confident that we can increase our guaranteed length of access  by 50% to 3 years – even this is probably conservative.

* For the curious, our first sale was on 2005-08-10 at 13:55, at that time,  USD 1 =  CAD 1.214.  At the time of writing (late December 2010), USD 1 = CAD 1.00644 .

 

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Posted in announcements, business, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

PHP PEAR HTML_Template_IT Eats Dollar Signs

December 29th, 2010

Sigh.  We discovered a bug in our recently reworked tools.perceptus.ca (“PWT”) site.

We have a simple, custom, partial MVC system that runs a few of our smaller websites.  That system uses the PEAR HTML_Template_IT package to do the final template rendering. We ported PWT to our MVC to make future site changes much easier.

A week after going live with the changes, we found a baffling bug.  The tools were eating the dollar sign and dollar amounts (but not the decimals) from the input text. E.g. “$103.00” would get returned as “.00”.  Not good.

Apparently, HTML_Template_IT defaults to processing all text with regex.  Not cool.

There might be a historical reason for this, but for new users, this has got to be confusing. Plus, this is NOT mentioned in the intro documentation: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.html.html-template-it.intro.php

We’re not the only ones caught by this: http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=50.

The fix is to initialize and set the use_preg option, like this:

$tpl = new HTML_Template_IT(‘./’,array(‘use_preg’=>true));

I have glanced at the package pages, and while this behavior is  documented it is buried quite deeply in the documentation.

This also explains a typo we had years ago on a static page that had the text like $5 in it.  That time, we just changed the copy to read 5 dollars and got on with life.

 

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Posted in annoying, PHP, programming, tools.perceptus.ca | 1 Comment »

A Web Based Adding Machine

December 13th, 2010

We have Perceptus’ Web Tools at the top of mind lately.  We’ve created another new tool, our minimal web based adding machine.

Have you ever had a half-hazardly formatted list of numbers to add up (maybe from an email?) and you didn’t want to do this:

  • open up Excel (or other spreadsheet program)
  • create a new file
  • paste the values
  • tidy them up so that they are  recognized  as numbers
  • create the SUM() function

Well, we have, and now we have created a tool to save us, and hopefully you, some time.

Visit our new web based adding machine tool and try pasting in a set of numbers like this:

10
-7.8
8 000
(92)
30.1

And be impressed when you get results like this:

Add	Running Total


+0	0


+10	10


-7.8	2.2


+8000	8002.2


-92	7910.2


+30.1	7940.3

Impressed?  Did you notice that it handles negative numbers in (brackets) magically?  Or how about that awkward space in “8 000”?  We’re pretty proud of ourselves – even if you’re not impressed.

Comments and feedback is always appreciated!

 

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Posted in annoying, numbers, tools.perceptus.ca | No Comments »

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