Last weekend, among a whole schedule of other great presentations at the Startup Lessons Learned conference (you can watch the video here), the folks behind Dropbox had a presentation (video) about how they went about growing their business. Apparently search ads were too expensive for them (due to bidding up by other venture-funded firms in [...]
if (typeof window.Delicious == “undefined”) window.Delicious = {}; Delicious.BLOGBADGE_GRAPH_SHOW = false; Delicious.BLOGBADGE_TAGS_SHOW = false; Downtime severely annoys customers. Downtime annoys sole proprietors even more, because it has a funny way of invariably striking at the worst possible time. Apache has no respect for date night. So if you’re a small company without dedicated ops team, you [...]
Many thanks to Ivan for reporting this one: there is a significant bug in A/Bingo calculation of z-scores for versions 1.0.0 and earlier, which borks substantially all z-score calculations and in some cases can change whether A/B test results are reported as statistically significant or not. The bug is all of one character long: def zscore() #omitted [...]
I screwed up in a major way yesterday evening. This post is part of my attempt to fix it. This morning I woke up to an email from a paying customer saying that they tried to print cards but couldn’t. Specifically, they said that they were able to use the Print Preview feature, but that using [...]
I can’t say that the bug this post is about is my worst bug ever. Or even my most embarassing bug ever. But it is certainly my most costly bug ever. But first, a picture. You can click it to see the full-sized version. The above graph shows two years and change of monthly visitor counts [...]
If someone with Java 1.3 or 1.4 installed on their computer could please download the Windows free trial from the Bingo Card Creator site, install it, and tell me whether you get to the main screen or not, I would be obliged. I believe the problem was that earlier I had assumed, having set the compiler to [...]
I’ve had my best month of sales ever, but only 1 CD in that time. Typically about half of my customers get the CD. I had a vague feeling that there were fewer CD orders than usual this month but it didn’t raise any flags with me. Then I got a fairly typical email saying “How do [...]
… don’t forget to set the working directory for the shortcuts you create. I had assumed Windows would automatically default to the program directory. This is apparently not the case on some systems, and its been causing some extraordinarily quirky behavior for some of my users. (v1.05 and 1.051 use Java’s facility to locate the [...]
I just found this morning, through ironically the same customer that was having difficulties yesterday (this must be karma), that a key feature of my software has been disabled in the build on my website for the last 2 weeks. I had been seeing traffic higher than ever, double the number of confirmed downloads I [...]
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