PrimeDigit – A Design Blog by Will Shaver

I’d like to relay a story of what not to do. Perhaps with some humor along the way. We’ve had trouble with newegg.com’s website for quite some time at our company. The most recent time I was unable to order, I decided to let newegg know that I was spending my money over at amazon. So I wrote them a quick note via the their web service interface. Here’s the note I wrote:

I love giving money to newegg, but today I can’t. Seems that some combination of newegg’s shopping cart code and our corporate firewall prevent me from updating my cart. I can totally delete my cookies and start over, adding one item at a time to the cart. But today I wanted to order two of the same item, so I went to amazon. I’ll pay a little more, but at least then I can order them together.

I’ve tried the hosts file trick mentioned in your faq. I’ve tried under Chrome, Firefox, and IE8. I’ve tried it in a house, I’ve tried it with a mouse. I’ve tried it on a different day, I’ve tried it in a different way. I’ve tried it from a different box, I’ve even tried it while juggling socks.

Any ‘Update Cart’ operations timeout. After attempting to perform one I have to clear my cookies and start over.

Level of technical experience: I help build the Internet.

http://secure.newegg.com/test.aspx
E3SSL05 (172.16.21.145)
http://www.newegg.com/test.aspx
E3Web001

After the standard “we did get your email, the internet really still works” email message, I got a wonderful reply from one Lillian Hu (her real name, I’m sure) as follows:

Dear Will,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

I truly apologize for the unfavorable situation. Please kindly note that we are not technically certified; therefore we can not provide more information or suggestions about this problems. We do apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. Possibly this is a problem at the end of the item stock and we do not have available quantity for purchase. Again, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page. If you still need assistance, please feel free to email me directly and I will be happy to assist you.

Thank you,

Lillian Hu

So tell me dear readers – how does that relate to what I wrote? Even a little bit?

So I wrote back, trying to pass this up the ladder to someone with a little more technical training.

Somehow I think my humorous and loving note was lost on you. I gave my money to amazon.com instead.

Lillian replied at one in the morning:

Dear Will,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

I do apologize for any inconvenience. This situation is not normal. I would like to further assist this issue on your behalf. Please reply to this email with the screen shot of the problem you met with purchase, I will send report for you.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page. If you still need assistance, please feel free to email me directly and I will be happy to assist you.

Thank you,

Lillian Hu

Fantastic. I was hoping she would send report for me. Here’s my screenshot. Enjoy.

We’ll see if they manage to do something useful for me.

So sad…

Anyone have experience pulling down email and parsing it from an exchange 2003 server? Ideally c# code, but other code would work for reviewing concepts…

For the internal web-app that I’m building I want to be able to send an email with an attachment to a specialized username+234829529308@… sequence and have the attachment appear on certain webpages. This way instead of having to navigate to a specific file or folder users can upload documents to my server by emailing them…

Here’s a quick and egosurfing comparison of google and bing. Doing a non-quoted search for: will shaver

Google:

• Me
• Me
• Me
• Me, and others
• Not Me
• Me
• Me
• Not Me
• Not Me

Bing:

• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me
• Not Me

Hey, it isn’t *my* fault that “Will” is a common english word.

Boring conversation anyway….

If you’re trying to debug by building the MVC source and getting something like this error:

The type 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage' is ambiguous: it could come from assembly 'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Mvc\1.0.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.Web.Mvc.dll' or from assembly 'C:\Projects\mvccontrib\trunk\src\Samples\MvcContrib.Samples.UI\bin\System.Web.Mvc.DLL'. Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

Then Steve will help you solve the ambiguous reference problem.

Was fighting an annoying aspx / R# error for a couple of hours this morning. I’ve reported this as a bug to R#:
http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-96241

The basic problem: R# doesn’t highlight correctly if your Inherits directive is not fully qualified. Even if it is in an @Import directive or in your Web.config. The solution is to always fully qualify your Inherits page directive. Or for R# to recommend importing it or fully qualifying it or actually reading the web.config correctly. Go vote my issue up. :)

I’ll be spending the next two days at a Agile Open Northwest. If you’re at the conference, come find me. :)

Otherwise I’ll be blogging about anything I find especially insightful.

I’ve spent most of the past couple of days mapping a legacy database with NHibernate. Here’s how the design of this database probably went down:

Pointy Haired Boss: We’ve decided to cut costs by paying you per primary key instead of per hour.
DBA: Works for me.

Seriously. We have tables here with two varchars, one decimal, and one int ALL mapped to a primary key. So glad that I have NH to help me out here.

Simple enough, it looks like some standards nazi went through and renamed the Login to Logon in several places for RC1. Unfortunately it did not get renamed in the Web.config for the redirect on failed login url.

    <authentication mode="Forms">

      <forms loginUrl="~/Account/Login"/>

    </authentication>

Where it needs to be:

    <authentication mode="Forms">

      <forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn"/>

    </authentication>

But when I went to the asp.net forums to report this bug, I did the conscientious thing and tried to determine if it had been reported already. Searching for “RC1 logon login” yielded too many results. So I’ll wade through the tree view to only check the asp.net mvc forum. (2004 called, wants it back.) I then realized it was sorting by some kind of relavance instead of date. Where’s the date sort? Lets try going back to the “more search options” Ohh, thanks for clearing my existing search. Perhaps if I hit “back” instead? Still no luck. Ohh wait, there’s a big notice at the top of the search page:

Search will be undergoing maintenance to improve results on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 from 7pm – 10pm Eastern Time, United States.

Ohh. So this is the IMPROVED version? Sigh. I’ll post it here instead.