Kodak Gallery Upload Problem – “Internet connection failed”

June 4th, 2008

So, Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada have outsourced their digital photo processing to Kodak Gallery (which itself was formerly Ofoto).

It was time for me to develop some vacation photos.

I wasn’t about to upload 200 images one at a time, so I tried their “Kodak Gallery Upload Software”. I try to avoid installing custom software for menial jobs like this, but it’s unavoidable this time.  Some competing services have nice Java based bulk uploaders, I think Future Photo was one of them… but that’s not the point of this post.

After the quick install of “setup.exe” (why couldn’t they customize the name just a little?), I tried to login.  And I and got an error: “Internet connection failed”.

A few searches of the web, and a few retries, I was still out of luck. By fluke, I opened Internet Explorer, and noticed that it had been left in offline mode for some reason.  I use Firefox 95% of the time, except when testing web sites, and IE only websites.

Fixing IE to be “online” then trying the Kodak upload software again worked on the first try. My theory is that Kodak either reads some IE settings, or uses the IE engine in the background.  So, Kodak, kudos for trying, but you have some work to do on presenting useful error messages or documentation on the web.

Now all I have to do is be patient while the software spends the next few hours uploading my pictures…

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PSI’s free English to Chinese Dictionary v. 2 is released

May 4th, 2008

A couple months ago we released the first minimally useful version of our free Chinese to English dictionary.

Well, after a couple months of use, it was decided to re-do it, this time keeping the full Chinese characters. Now you’ll have a chance of being able to use it to order from a Chinese only menu! Unfortunately, it now requires that a Chinese font be installed also, but you can steal a copy from your desktop.

If the first version was minimally useful, this version is generally OK.

So, get your free copy of our CEDICT based Windows Mobile English to Chinese Dictionary now.

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Posted in chinese, programming | No Comments »

Mother’s Day Bingo Cards

May 1st, 2008

The most important day of the year for my Mom is coming soon – Mother’s Day!  This year, May 11th, is the day for flowers, phone calls, and brunch for Mom’s in Canada and many other countries.

To celebrate, we’ve just created our custom bingo card design for Mother’s Day themed bingo boards.

So, print your own custom Mother’s Day Bingo Cards at print-bingo.com.  Be sure to customize them with your name, your Mom’s name, and your Mom’s Mom’s name…  because, you can at print-bingo.com!

Entry level access is free!

Hi Mom!

(I don’t think she reads this blog… but that’s OK.)

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Posted in bingo cards, family, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

A bit of downtime the over the last couple days.

April 17th, 2008

Quick note to all who use the various Perceptus web sites, particularly our bingo card site and our hosted survey site:

Our virtual private server hardware was upgraded.  A couple hours of downtime occurred.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience.  Unfortunately, our provider did not give us much of a warning. Things seem to be up and running, but a bit slow – I think that will fix itself soon.

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Posted in downtime, papayapolls.com, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

How to Properly Use 3rd Party Web Services

April 4th, 2008

Today I got an email marketing message from Fido, my cellphone provider.

Probably.

Unfortunately, Fido used a third party email and contest manager that makes me unsure if the email is real or a scam.

The email “from” line looks good: fido.communication@fidomobile.ca.

But it’s trivial to fake a “from” line.

The email “reply-to”: fido.communication(xxxxxx)@mail.konversation.com

I removed the x’s which I suspect are unique to my email address and used for mail list management.  It doesn’t really matter.  Is this address confidence inspiring to the non-technical user? Nope.

Worse, the email is about a contest.  In the email there is a link to enter the contest:

http://kmkapp01.konversation.com/Fido/eNewsletter/Default.aspx?langue=en

What is Konversation.com?  And why should I enter my phone and other info into a website that doesn’t even spell conversation properly? (That’s a joke, I realize it’s a cute mispelling used for a website name).  Sure, there are Fido logos in the email and on the web page.  But who knows?  I’ve seen fake bank websites that also look authentic.  It’s easy to copy logos and verbage.

In the end, I decided to skip this contest.  Who knows if it’s a real contest or not.  Besides, I never win prizes anyway.

What should companies do?  Use their own domain for everything because they’re much harder to use fraudulently.  If they choose to outsource bulk email, use a provider that can use “bulkmailer.example.com” for their messages.  For contests?  “contests.example.com”.  For surveys, “surveys.example.com”.

In fact, that’s exactly what we offer with the custom survey domain feature of PapayaPolls.com.  We have several clients who host surveys using a subdomain of their primary domain.

It works for everyone.  The end survey respondents are confident that the survey is legitimately from our customer.  Our customers are happy that their survey respondents are confident, and thus willing to answer the survey.  And we’re happy to have paying customers.

So there you go.  A rant and an advertisment for one of our websites all rolled into one.  Not bad for a Friday afternoon.

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Posted in marketing, papayapolls.com | 7 Comments »

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