So I’m strolling through the mall (mostly to get out of the rain), minding my own business, when suddenly I pass in front of the video game shop:

Store Manager: Excuse me, young man!

Me: Yes?

Store Manager: You asked about Wii pre-orders earlier, right?

Me: Yep, thats right.

Store Manager: We started taking them today.

Me: Oh, lovely.  Can I put one in?

Store Mananger: Certainly.  What is your name and telephone number?

Me: Patrick McKenzie, 555-1234-5678. 

Store Manager: OK.  Would you like a call on release day?

Me: You’ve got to be kidding me.  I mean, no, I won’t need the call, thank you. 

Store Manager: OK then.

Me: …

Me: So this is the point where you ask me to sign up for a $500 bundle including $200 of games that you would not otherwise be able to sell and pay all of it as a deposit, right?

Store Manager: Oh, you silly Americans and your sense of humor.

Me: Wait, you mean you let me pre-order just the console, without putting any money down, and you guarantee that it will be available on launch day?  And this for the hottest product this year, which folks are probably pitching tents for as we speak in downtown Tokyo, the level of anticipation for which is so high that South Park made an episode about one of their characters wanting to by cryogenically frozen to avoid having to wait for a month?

Store Manager: I’m sorry sir, I hadn’t realized you didn’t know what “pre-order” meant.

Me: I guess I didn’t.  Thanks for clearing that up.

“Hmm, I wonder why I’ve gone three days without a sale.  I don’t suppose it could be that my trial version got corrupted again.  *click*  Well, that answers that question.”  Time to have a quick chat with GoDaddy and figure out what the heck is going on on their side, because I’m positive that that file was good an hour after I uploaded it.

Update: See Nick Hebb in the comments for something I didn’t think to check for.  This won’t work.  Ahh well.  I’ll leave it up for posterity.

I guess I shouldn’t be mentioning this but, hey, I’m a giving type of guy. One of the best decisions I made during the creation of Bingo Card Creator was cutting my web site designer out of the budget and going with a design by Sang Nguyen which I found on Open Source Web Design. This is my advice to anyone who is wondering how to cut a major expense item out of their budget while not compromising the customer experience much — I am positively thrilled both with my design and with the amount of work I didn’t have to do to get it running.

There has been a discussion on the Business of Software boards recently about whether paying a web designer is a good idea. Cards on the table time: I think not, unless you are getting a site which has functionality in addition to eye candy, an under-market rate, or a web design which positively sings to you. Here is my trump card for the superiority of oswd over a designer: the designer won’t give you a PR8 link to your site for nothing. I just discovered oswd will do that. Granted, its not a maximally effective PR8 link — it will eventually scroll from the front page of links (faster as more people come to know about it — at the moment it appears to be close to the best kept SEO secret on the Internet ;) ), so it won’t be at one click of depth from the front page (!) for forever. But hey, which part of “free PR8 link” are you complaining about?

… it WILL be your trial executable, without fail.  Murphy’s law.  One freaking byte on disk got corrupted at some point within the last week and I just found out about it today, by someone who was kind enough to write in and say “Heya, this won’t install, says the file is corrupted.  And I downloaded it three times”).  One quick download later and I was able to reproduce the error, which is funny because I haven’t uploaded anything to that directory on the server in literally weeks.  Did a quick hex diff and, boom, one byte out of place, which called NSIS to say “Uh oh, checksums don’t match, I’m out of here”.  *sigh*  Well, better to know about it and be able to fix it than to not know about it, right?

I never touched Unix in my life before going to college, but it was the development environment of choice for most of the upper-level coursework at school (lower level was Windows + Emacs… not a combination I would recommend given the excellent Java IDEs which exist right now, incidentally), and so I’ve gotten very used to having my good friends ls, grep, wc, and gawk available on my machine.  I use Cygwin to have them available on my Windows box, because while Linux is a lovely operating system in many ways I rather enjoy having iTunes and games available.

Anyhow, I had a task yesterday: I have a local copy of my website.  All of the pages have a very similar structure because the navigational elements are embedded in static HTML.  However, this didn’t use an official templating feature because NVU doesn’t support any, which means updating the navigational elements means updating approximately twenty pages by hand.  There was one particular snippet of HTML that I wanted to change to another, globally.

Normally, I would do this in a gawk script (you can do just about anything in a gawk script), but it gets a little messy:

BEGIN {

startTag = “<a href=\”guarantee.htm\”>Money-back Guarantee”

replacementTag = “<a href=\”guarantee.htm\”><img src=\”images/money-back-guarantee.htm\” alt=\”Money-back Guarantee\” \\>”

}

($0 !~ startTag { print $0}

($0 ~ startTag) {

gsub(startTag, replacementTag, $0);

print $0;

} 

Anyhow, that is the way to do it in gawk.  Define your regular expression to search for, print out every line that doesn’t match it and do some surgery on the ones that do.  Note that you’ll have to run this on every file in your web directory, with the easiest way probably being a bash script, and output the results.  However, if you output to the file directly it will generally end up empty for reasons that I have never bothered really understanding, so you probably want to have another quick shell script to output it to a temp file and then copy over the original.  Something like, oh,

for file in *.htm do

  gawk -f myscript $file > temp.htm

  mv temp.htm $file

done

But that is two scripts, and two scripts is too complicated!  Enter sed, a handy little stream processing utility.  Sed is perfect when you just need to do a quick substitution for a regular express:

sed -e “/myregularexpression/myreplacement/”

There, you’re done.  Or in my case, you have to finangle the regular expression into a string, which involves quite a bit of escape characters, but it still only took about 30 seconds.  This saves about half of your typing time versus doing it in gawk, and you can’t accidentally bork the matching logic (something which is easy to do in gawk — forget the ! before the ~, or execute the (string ~ regex) block before the (string !~ regex) block, and you’re screwed.

Of course, you could always write it in Perl.  That would probably take a single line and look like your cat had just tap danced across your keyboard.  But if you want a simple, intuitive way to do fairly powerful data processing, you’ll see sed is your man…  err, I mean, you should see man sed.

… perhaps I haven’t overdefined my target market.  On the one hand, one of the nice things about making Bingo Card Creator pretty much built around the assumption that my user is a teacher is that its very easy to consider possible features and marketing campaigns in that light.  I can make assumptions, like assuming that she (I can assume she is a she!  Sort of a rarity in software development, I would think) is not as comfortable using her computer as I am using mine.  I know how she spends her day (she visits Bingo Card Creator during planning periods, lunch, or when lesson planning at home at about 9:00 pm), I know what her key problems are, I know that she absolutely melts when I say my favorite character in Harry Potter is Hermione (totally true, incidentally), and I more or less speak her language (I know what a manipulative is, for example, to pull a random word out of my search queries for this week).  All in all, I’m in a good place to be with regards to my target market.

But my target market isn’t the whole of people who could use Bingo Cards.  I sell a few copies (impossible to know how many, of course — I can only guess based on customer information provided, email addresses, support requests, that sort of thing) to folks who are not teachers but nonetheless click through 100% teacher-oriented advertising copy to buy anyhow.  I have had repeated purchases from folks organizing corporate events, where my icebreaker bingo idea is a natural fit.  And today I got, lets see if I can anonymize this a little… OK, pretend there is a National Association of Skateboard Punks.   There isn’t, to my knowledge (apologizes to the NASP if there is), but a customer about as non-elementary-schoolteacher as NASP wanted Bingo Card Creator for some advertising needs.  Now, I had certainly been of the opinion BCC was a one-use program (it makes bingo cards, and does nothing else, by design), but I know of folks who are currently using it to make worksheets, track patient progress in rehabilitation, make customized placemats (print the card, mount it, laminate — apparently crafty-types use computers now), and now advertise SkatePunkz2k6, the annual get together for the discerning skate punk.

I am considering, after my project calms down at work and my life returns to some semblance of normal, retooling the website a bit to accomodate these multiple user groups.  Minimally, I would like to have one “neutral” presentation which doesn’t assume teacher-hood for the program, and probably one pitch for corporate-types planning for the annual retreat (Synergize your best-of-breed team-building paradigm with Bingo Card Creator and achieve six sigmas of internal customer empowerment!).   Hopefully it will lead to a bit of natural market growth without losing my main focus on the educational market.

(Well, I suppose that technically all of my sales are international, since I’ve never sold a copy in Japan.  Be that as it may, the business is headquartered in the US even if I’m not, or at least thats my story and I’m sticking to it when it comes to taxes and banking matters.)

Bingo is popular throughout the English speaking world (and in some points beyond, too), so its not too shocking that I have a few customers from outside the US.  Probably, oh, off the top of my head 10% or so.  I was unsatisfied with my previous level of service for them, chiefly because I had the prices listed only in dollars and this both confused the Australians (hey, I could just have easily have been an Aussie uISV, and there is nothing in my website to tell you differently — doh) and costed all of my customers currency exchange fees when dealing with Paypal.  I hate currency exchange fees with a burning passion in my soul, having been burned by them plenty (Bank of America will happily ding you for 3% a transaction).  So I decided to price my product natively.  There are a couple of issues here.

VAT: Ahh, I love the smell of overly-complicated growth-killing Eurocrat mandated regulations in the morning.  VAT, for value added tax, is a freaking gigantic consumption-esque tax you have to worry about if you sell in Europe.  My position on VAT is simple: I’m a small businessman, I have never set foot in Europe, and I do not want to deal with the hassle of collecting this tax.  I give my customers one method (using eSellerate), which has them pay the tax (something like 20% of the purchase price!) and one method (Paypal) which doesn’t.  They can worry about their own local laws.  Incidentally, with respect to my local laws, I’m scrupulous about not actively selling in Japan (because I don’t have the legal structure required to remit Japanese sales taxes yet — thats 5%, incidentally), and I will pay sales tax on all of my orders in Illinois.  I don’t know if Illinois will be very happy that I don’t ask for people’s address unless they ask for a CD, but I’m highly unlikely to pass the minimum dollar amount for tax reporting anyhow.

What to charge folks: I got out Google’s currency converter, plugged in $24.95 in the various currencies, rounded to a convinient number in whatever direction was required, and then chopped off 5/100 of the local currency.  My guiding principle was to be mostly fair without sacrificing the convinience of round numbers, which as I recall results in the Brits paying a wee bit more and the Aussies paying a wee bit less relative to the USD than other customers.  However, I’m pretty sure all of my international customers benefit in that I absorb their currency conversion costs through Paypal rather than them absorbing it through their banks.  (This is a matter for me of a few dimes worth of profit per sale, less than nothing really, but its a small thing you can do to really endear yourself to a fraction of your customers.  I’m all about that.)

I’m thinking of officially incorporating myself next year, but there are some non-trivial issues with incorporating in Japan (“Proof of 3 million yen worth of business capital…  hmm, well, can I count all the money I spent on college as human capital?  Because thats the only way I’ve had nearly $30,000 at any point in my life.”)