For the last week or so, a work crew has been tearing up the road outside my house. It turns out that this was Central Hudson Gas and Electric, installing a new natural gas line. This project showed me that CHG&E’s management has no clue when it comes to treating customers right.

Rudely awakened, dropped by voicemail, made to wait at CHG&E’s contractor’s whim for most of a day, a garden trampled and dug up, a ruined lawn, all because of what seems to be an institutional lack of common courtesy and decency aforethought.

First off, I have to say that individual CHG&E front-line employees I’ve dealt with have almost all been very helpful, courteous, and a benefit to the company. However, it’s obvious to me that CH’s management has some serious customer scorn going on.

To put the following tale into context: In January 2011, in the middle of a week of deep freeze, somewhere between 800 and 1,000 natural gas customers in Kingston lost service because a gas regulator froze up from cold and precipitation. I was one of those customers. The weather wasn’t particularly cold or particularly wet for the area; I can only assume the regulator was not well-maintained. It took a few days for CH to restore gas service. During that time, like many other Kingston residents, I was without heat, hot water, or the ability to use the stovetop to cook. CH’s employees busted ass to restore service, but the important thing is that they shouldn’t have had to.

So, the current work.  I understand that CH needs to replace gas lines, and after January I’m all for modernizing the system. However, when someone comes and paints up your sidewalk with dig-safe markings, and then commences to dig a foot-wide trench across the mouth of your driveway, it would be nice if the perpetrator gave you some advance warning.

On Saturday, more than a week after the work started, I get a letter dated the previous Wednesday from CH. A “Gas Operating Engineer” from the company deigns to tell me that the gas main, and the service lines to the homes, are being replaced by a contractor. Because my old house has an indoor gas meter, they will need to get into the house to turn off the gas and pull the new pipe.

“A representative will contact you during this process in an effort to schedule your service replacement that will allow us to minimize our construction time and its impact on you”, says the letter. “All areas impacted by construction will be restored to their prior condition.”

Okay, so I guess we have to move some stuff around in the basement to free up access to the gas meter, which is buried in a corner. We make plans to start cleaning up, but because we haven’t been contacted about scheduling yet and we already had weekend plans, we didn’t make tons of progress toward that goal on Saturday or Sunday.

Fast-forward to Monday morning. 7:10 a.m. The doorbell rings. It’s the contractor.  They’re ready to replace our gas main, can they come in and look around in half an hour or so?

This, apparently, is Central Hudson’s idea of “scheduling.”

The contractor doesn’t like it when I say “no.”  He doesn’t want to take “no, not today” for an answer, not even when I point out that (a) we have had no notice of when they were going to do this, (b) we aren’t prepared, and (c) having just been rudely awakened we have not yet showered and prepared for work. He finally allows as how maybe they could start at 9 a.m. after we shower?

Notice how this ignores the question of who will remain around to give them access to the house. Lucky thing for them that I had the day off—especially considering that at 7:25 a.m. they’ve already got a four-foot-deep hole in the sidewalk and the street.

I try calling the engineer who sent the letter. I get voicemail. I try calling CH’s customer-outreach specialist per their website, and get voicemail. Okay, I try the main customer-service number.  I’m told that the office doesn’t open until 8 a.m., so the people who could address the issue aren’t available.

At 8:05 a.m., I’m still getting voicemail. I try calling the office of the senior vice president of customer services, Charles Freni; the voicemail system tells me in a strange robotic voice that the function is not valid and hangs up on me.

By 8:20, I call the CEO’s office. I’m just talking to the secretary when Alana Mikhalevsky, the Operating Supervisor for Community Relations & Consumer Outreach, calls me back. I explain the situation to her, and she agrees that the situation has been horribly botched. She tells me she’ll make some calls, get in touch with the right people, and get back to me.

That’s the last I hear from Alana today.

The clock hits 9 a.m. and keeps on going; no one working outside bothers to come talk to me. By 10:15 a.m., I see the foreman and a presumptive CH employee looking at paperwork on my front steps. I go out to talk with them. No one apologizes. They ask if they can come in now. I let them in, and they tell me that it shouldn’t take long, the gas should be back on by around noon.

They don’t turn the gas off until noon.

Around two o’clock, they tell me they’re having problems. It seems that the gas main has a right-angle bend in it under my lawn, which means they can’t simply pull the new plastic pipe through the old iron pipe. This doesn’t particularly surprise me, given the topography of the lawn: the service enters the basement about three feet below ground level, and the yard slopes downhill about two and a half feet before reaching a two-foot retaining wall in front of the sidewalk.

This means they now have to dig up my yard and front garden.

I have the pictures of them digging out the gravel from behind the wall that forms its drainage, and the dirt from the yard, and commingling them into one pile. Of them stepping all over the plants. Of them piling tools on the other plants.

It takes them some time to unearth the elbow and replace it. Meanwhile, the apparent CH guy leaves. The workers are now on overtime and frustrated by the 90°F-plus temperatures. The older guys have some care, but the younger workers don’t seem to have much respect for what they’re doing to someone’s property and hard work.

Meanwhile, the stepdaughter and her friend (who lives with us) come back from a walk, and tell me that the contractor’s flagman has been wolf-whistling at them whenever they go by.  Classy. (They later tell me that while they were later walking to my girlfriend’s workplace, the work crew’s truck drove past them and the lot of them did it again, apparently including the foreman.)

Eventually, they get the gas line hooked up, and they put the dirt and gravel back into the hole (not in any particular order, that I could see), and when they come up short, the worker starts taking shovelfuls of dirt out of my other garden to make up the difference. When they’re done, I have some very traumatized plants, garden edging that used to be straight and is now a wavy approximation, a bare patch of lawn, gravel all over the lawn, and no gas service because they aren’t qualified to turn it back on and the CH guy has fled.

Around an hour later, a CH serviceman shows up to unlock the gas shutoff, turn it on, and watch my stovetop light up again.

This isn’t what I expected, and if I had a true choice for energy service, I’d be choosing someone else.

What should have happened?

• CH should have sent out notifications well before they started ripping up the road, and they should have started making arrangements for access at that point.
• The contractor should have verified with CH that the homeowners had been contacted and had replied before ringing doorbells at 7 a.m.
• The contractor shouldn’t have started digging up sidewalks before confirming access to the house.
• If the contractor is going to start work at 7 a.m., the customer-service line should be prepared to take calls about the contractor’s work at that time. A supervisor should have pager or cellphone contact information for the engineer in charge of the project.
• CH’s voicemail system should not default to unceremoniously dropping calls to executive offices outside of business hours.
• When sending notifications about work, the letter should include usable contact information, not the company’s main line where you can be put through to the voicemail of the engineer who is out in the field someplace.
• Alana should have followed up with me at least once during the day to make sure that things were progressing okay.
• After I spoke with Alana, CH should have made sure that one of their engineers was on site, if not their manager, and they should have come immediately to my door and offered an apology in person.
• Since I had already been greatly inconvenienced, and had put my life on hold to allow CH to do the work on their unannounced schedule, CH should have made sure that they had employees on site to take care of any problems or necessary work as quickly as possible (such as turning the gas back on).
• The contractor should have come to me before digging up my garden, giving me the opportunity to save plants, note any problems with my irrigation system, etc.
• The contractor should have taken care to preserve the construction of the wall, including the gravel fill, and should have used a tarp to prevent the gravel from spreading into my lawn.  At a minimum, they should have raked up the gravel.
• It goes without saying that they shouldn’t have dug up my other garden.
• I would have expected them to at least tell me that someone would be by to finish putting things right with my lawn, such as reseeding it.
• It would have been nice if they’d asked for a broom to sweep up all the dirt they tracked into my house with the multitude of comings and goings. Okay, it was just the cellar stairs, but it would have been excellent customer service.
• There’s no excuse for contractors wolf-whistling at passing women, especially those that might be underage. They’re lucky I didn’t see it happen myself, or I would have called the cops.

In the past I’ve written about my esteem for Cook’s Illustrated. They make it easy to be a great cook.

Tonight, however, Cook’s has lowered their reputation with me considerably, by trying to scam me out of my money.

I got a telemarketing call from them.  They wanted to reward me for being a valued subscriber by sending me their “Summer Grilling” special, and another book.  The young man on the phone said it was free, but upon close questioning allowed as how the other book was a “free trial,” and if I decided I didn’t like the book I would only have to pay for it.  Is it okay, he asked, for them to go ahead and send it?

My reply:  Sure, send it… but understand that I have not ordered anything and if Cook’s decides to send me anything in the mail without my having ordered it, I’m keeping it and I’m not paying a dime for it.

The call ended quickly thereafter.  You see, Cook’s Illustrated wanted to sucker me in by sending me the book, hoping I’d keep it so they could bill me for it later… even if I simply forgot to send it back.

Every month, my subscription copy of Cook’s comes wrapped in extra pages detailing the latest book they’ve published, offering it to me at a low rate. In the fine print, one discovers that ordering the advertised book actually signs you up for a book-of-the-month club, where you’ll start getting volumes in the mail as a “free trial” unless you return them or cancel.  I thought that was a shady way to do business; the fact is I would have ordered several cookbooks direct from Cook’s if it weren’t for that bit of legerdemain.

This phone call, however, was a straight-up con job.

The sales rep went to great lengths in how his words were phrased, and in the speed and manner that they were presented, to gloss over the fact that this was an attempt to get me to “order” a book-of-the-month-club subscription.  If I weren’t already aware of this type of scam, I might have said “yes, send me the free stuff!” and then, when the bill arrived later, be told that I was on a recording having “placed the order.”

Even if Cook’s didn’t intend to pull this, it still comes off as incredibly shady.  The offers every month around my magazine tell  me that it isn’t just an overzealous telemarketer—it’s something Cook’s has decided to do to make money.

I don’t begrudge Cook’s finding ways to stay afloat.  But this is dishonest, and beneath them.

And it has me seriously considering dropping my subscription at the end of my term.

Few people are aware of Title 39, United States Code, Section 3009.  That’s the part of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that covers unsolicited merchandise.

In the United States, if you receive merchandise in the mail and you did not order it, you have no obligation to return it or pay for it. You may keep it.  You can mark it “Return to Sender” and the Postal Service will send it back at no charge.  Or you can throw it out.

This law was passed to prevent shady organizations from sending items to people via mail, and then billing them for things they hadn’t ordered.

Under this law, sending that bill is now a Federal crime.

Unless.

39 U.S.C. §3009(d):

(d) For the purposes of this section, “unordered merchandise” means merchandise mailed without the prior expressed request or consent of the recipient.

What Cook’s telemarketer was trying to secure was the “consent of the recipient” for the unordered merchandise (the cookbook).  That’s the out.

And it’s a damn shady end-run around the law.  I’d expect it from a fly-by-night encyclopedia company, not Cook’s Illustrated.

Shame on you, Christopher Kimball.

Cook’s Illustrated should immediately cease using this underhanded sales tactic. They should be up front about their “book of the month club,” and they should cease cold-calling subscribers to get them to sign up.

For that matter, if Cook’s is going to make sales calls, they should pay attention to the Do Not Call Registry. Although the law doesn’t prevent them from making calls where there’s an “existing business relationship,” a wise company will note that people who are listed on the Registry don’t like being interrupted by telephone sales pitches, and that calling them anyway will usually lead to a reputation hit.  Send mail instead—the Postal Service could use the cash.

Or perhaps give up the book-of-the-month stuff altogether, and just rely on a compelling product at a good price.

While visiting New Jersey this weekend, I stopped at the Williams-Sonoma store in the Short Hills Mall.  Williams-Sonoma is an upscale kitchen-accessories store.  The Short Hills Mall is an “ultra-premium” mall, the sort of place where the anchor stores are Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s instead of JCPenney and Target. What should’ve been a premium shopping experience turned into a frustrating trip that makes me unlikely to visit that store again.

I’ll admit I’ve always had a mixed opinion of Williams-Sonoma.  They carry some nice items, but they also carry a lot of useless things.  True “gourmet cook” cookware is mixed with the culinary equivalent of the motorized tie racks you see in department stores around Christmastime—useless and tacky things that mostly appeal to frustrated gift-givers.  A savvy shopper can find better deals at local restaurant-supply and cooking stores (such as my local favorite, Warren Kitchen & Cutlery).

Anyway, I needed a new steamer.  Grandma’s old collapsable steamer insert had finally completed its utter collapse, and I’ve been steaming vegetables a lot more lately.  I very much like All-Clad cookware, and Williams-Sonoma carries a good range of All-Clad.  So, into Williams-Sonoma.

I found the All-Clad 3-quart steamer set. That’s pretty much what I was looking for.  They had two of them, apparently identical, on display.  Now all I need to do is buy them.

Williams-Sonoma, being upscale, doesn’t keep cookware stock on the display floor.  So the first thing was to get someone to help me.  There weren’t any employees near me, so I headed to the central checkout desk.

It took a little while to get help, because the checkout was a bit understaffed for the crowd that Sunday.  As I waited in line, I did notice employees milling about, occasionally helping other people.  I think they might’ve been more effective at the checkout.

I told the employee at the checkout that I wanted the All-Clad 3-quart stainless steel steamer set.  She wasn’t clear on what this was, and got on her walkie-talkie to ask for help. After a confused moment or two, she asked me to come over to the display and show her what it was that I wanted.

We finally wound up with three employees standing around the All-Clad display, looking at the floor sample and trying to explain over the walkie-talkie, in loud booming voices that carried throughout the store, what it is they were looking for to some mystery person in the back room.  ”It’s a steamer set, it’s like a pasta pentola but smaller,” one yelled into her neckline.  (The cord-mounted microphones of their walkie-talkie headsets made for some odd body language.)  After a few minutes of trying, and failing, to explain to each other which product they were trying to sell, another employee took the tag off the shelf and went back to the service desk.

At the desk, she looked up the SKU code on her computer. Directing the faceless back-room man to look harder, she told me “the computer says I have five of these in stock, so there should be at least one back there.”  Her tone of voice expressed doubt, and made it clear that she could very well have none.

It was then explained that it wasn’t in their stockroom on this floor, and their back-room man would have to check the other storeroom on the other floor of the mall.

I was then left to my own devices for about ten minutes as everyone left to help other customers.

After about eight minutes, I was strongly considering just walking out.  I’d already spent three times longer in this store than I’d expected, almost all of it waiting for the employees to get their act together.

As the fellow finally arrived with my pot, it was unceremoniously dropped on a sales counter, and no one made any acknowledgement to me.  All the staffed registers were busy, so I waited, mostly patiently, for one to free up.  The one that opened first was the one right next to the box with my steamer in it, the one the fellow had delivered it to.  The woman staffing it asked for the next customer, and someone who had approached the desk well after me darted in with her items.  The employee didn’t say a word and started ringing her up.

When the next register opened, I asserted myself with extra vigor and got rung up.  Good thing, too; the reaction to the box sitting on the counter was “oh, is this yours?”

One high point for Williams-Sonoma: Instead of putting the large, heavy, square-cornered cardboard box into a plastic or paper bag that would be sure to fail before I reached my car, they instead gave me an inexpensive but reusable shopping bag, similar to some cheap types of reusable supermarket shopping bag but larger.  While this must be an added expense for the store, it’s a good call given the nature of their merchandise and their premium brand positioning.

Summary: How Williams-Sonoma Short Hills Failed

1. Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. When I go to a premium store like Williams-Sonoma, I expect that the sales help will at least know all the products they sell that require assistance to purchase.  If I ask for a three-quart stainless-steel All-Clad steamer, they should know what I’m talking about, or know what to ask to clarify it.  A blank stare and a request to point at it is not a premium experience, it’s a Wal-Mart experience.
2. Let’s say that again: Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. If you have to tell another employee “It’s like a pasta pentola, but smaller,” you really have a training issue with your staff.
3. Inefficient stock-keeping. At worst, the floor employee should’ve been able to read off the SKU to the back-room guy and get the item out front quickly.  Places like Sears have had stock-keeping systems that quickly direct the warehouse folks to the right shelf to fulfill a customer order for decades.  Williams-Sonoma has no excuse for needing to hunt through two storerooms to find one pot.
4. Inaccurate computer records. If the computer says there are five pots in stock, there should be five pots in stock.  There should be no reason for the staff to be unsure of their inventory, especially when the inventory is kept solely in a back storeroom.  Do they have that much employee theft going on?
5. Yelling is not a premium experience. Using walkie-talkies can enhance customer satisfaction by making employees more efficient.  However, if you’re a premium store, you need to buy premium walkie-talkies so that your employees can communicate clearly and calmly.  You need to train employees on communications etiquette.  Having three people surrounding you yelling into their lapels like over-caffienated Secret Service agents does not make you feel like you’re being pampered for the money you’re about to spend.
6. Long waits are not a premium experience. If you’re a high-end store in a high-end mall, you need to have smooth procedures and sufficient staffing to be efficient and quick at customer service.  Customers with disposable income are often impatient.  Sometimes, if you have a high-demand item like an iPad, you can get away with lines.  However, there’s plenty of places to buy pots.  Cookware purchasers are not a captive audience.
7. Waiting customers get precedence over walk-ups. If you have someone who is waiting for you to get your act together and find an item so they can give you money for it, that person is always the next in line.  They have already made it through the queue to ask for the opportunity to pay you.  Now you owe them the courtesy of expediting the rest of the transaction.  The moment the item reaches the checkout stand, acknowledge it, acknowledge them, and make it clear to the line that this person is next.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a customer service issue at a mass-merchandiser like Target or Wal-Mart, where many of these inconveniences are to be expected because you’re getting a low price due to lower overhead.  This is a premium store at an ultra-premium mall.  People go here because they are willing to pay more, and they expect better service as a result.

If stores take the route that this Williams-Sonoma did, they’ll find themselves losing business.  If you can get better customer service by ordering from Amazon or another online vendor, why would you bother wasting your time waiting for the guy in the back room?

I read today that the font foundry Monotype is now offering a service providing over 2,000 fonts for use on Web sites.  This sounded like great news—one of the things I hate about trying to make a decent web site is the horrid state of web typography.

Of course, it’s too good to be true.

Yes, there is a beta service offering 2,000 free fonts, if you add tracking JavaScript to your page.  It’s free until the beta period ends.  Then, you have two options.

1. Transition to a “free trial” account, which still includes 2,000 fonts, but injects advertising onto your pages.  According to the Terms and Conditions, you have no control over the content or nature of the advertising.
2. Pay an unspecified amount of money for an account.

Monotype won’t say how much the account will cost.  Apparently, it will be based on page impressions. I suspect it will be substantial.

The article also mentions FontShop. They offer pricing for their product.  If you want to use their FF DIN Web font, that’ll cost you $384.  That steep price doesn’t include the font files to install on your personal computer; those are sold separately for $282.  Yes, they want more money for the font that you can only use on your website, as opposed to the font file you can use on your computer and in print.  No quotidian blogger in their right mind is going to cough up this sort of money for a font.

A more reasonable service that offers large quantities of web fonts from smaller foundries is Typekit.  They offer a reasonable library of free web fonts.  However, there are strings attached:

• You can only use them on one website
• You can only use two Typekit fonts on that website
• The bandwidth used by your viewers downloading the fonts can’t exceed 5GB/month
• You have to add a Typekit badge to your website

Okay, if you don’t want to do much other than choose a headline and body font, this could work, except for one thing:  What happens if you get Slashdotted?  Typekit says they won’t cut you off, but they will call you up and expect you to start paying for bandwidth. Every time someone hits reload, it can cause the font to get sucked down again, burning bandwidth.  Since you don’t have control over Typekit’s JavaScript, this may be difficult to control.  Although Typekit’s first paid tier, “Personal,” is reasonable at $24.99/year, the bandwidth limitation is still troubling.

I understand that it takes a lot of talent and time to create a font. However, I think the foundries are generally being silly with their pricing.  If you want to charge me $40 per typeface, and count each weight and slant as another chargeable typeface, fine—but grant me the right to embed the font on my website, too, at that price.  Worried about piracy?  Fine, set up your own DRM-laden hosting, but don’t charge me extra for it: roll it into the price of licensing the font.  Send me the OpenType file so I can use it on my computer, and write Word documents with it, and give me access to your server for embedding.  (And trust me not to just serve up the OpenType file.)

I often hear type foundries complaining about piracy. I have no doubt that fonts are frequently pirated.  I think that they’re pirated because they are so often overpriced as far as the consumer is concerned.

Desktop publishing brought typography to the masses. Everyone has access to high-grade layout tools nowadays.  Even Word, pathetic as it is for page layout, offers capabilities far in excess of your average print shop from 1960.  The Mac and the LaserWriter were as big a revolution as Gutenberg’s press.  Before Gutenberg, books were owned by the very wealthy, because of the massive expense involved in manually copying a book.  Today, paperbacks are considered disposable by most people.

It no longer costs a lot of money to create good design… except for the cost of fonts.

The record industry complained about digital music piracy for years.  Then Steve Jobs convinced them that it would be more profitable to sell songs at 99¢ each—that people would willingly pay a fair price, especially if they weren’t locked into buying more than they wanted.  As a result, iTunes has made a lot of money for the music industry.

The movie industry started out selling videocassettes for $90 to $120, soaking the rental stores for all they were worth.  They fretted about rising piracy of videotapes.  When they knocked down the starting sale price of videocassettes to $20, it became much easier to buy a reasonably-priced copy of the movie than to go through the hassle of pirating it.  Result: Windfall profits for the movie industry.

As much as I’ve complained lately about Atlassian, they deserve a lot of credit for enlightened pricing: They offered their flagship products with a limited license for personal use at a very reasonable price.  Paying $5 or $10 for JIRA or Confluence is practically a no-brainer.  The license is useful enough to be worth the money for personal use, but doesn’t siphon off corporate sales.  No one was going to pay hundreds of dollars to play with JIRA at home… but a great many people were willing to pay $5 or $10.  Atlassian is donating that money to worthy causes, but they didn’t have to.  Rather than seeing these sales as “money left on the table” where they could theoretically have sold high-priced licenses, they saw that these were sales they were never going to make at full price.  Each starter license sold is $10 they weren’t going to make, and it brings new users who could become product evangelists for them.

So: Font foundries, wake up!  Charging hundreds of dollars for web fonts may bring you some profits, but you’ll be leaving lots of blogger money on the table instead.  You could be offering low-cost licenses for bloggers and making even more money.  You just have to do it so that it’s priced fairly, doesn’t interfere with the editorial content of the pages, and has predictable costs even if the site gets slashdotted.

Be like Typepad, but without the bandwidth limits.  Or, at least, with a clear idea of how many page views you get for a given amount of bandwidth, and an exception for the occasional traffic spike when one meme gets picked up by social media.

I love JIRA, I really do, so long as I never have to do any administration to it.

I’ve got a JIRA instance set up as a household to-do system.  Today, I tried installing JIRA 4.1 as a test instance, upgrading from version 4.0.  It turns out I won’t be making that upgrade for real any time soon, as 4.1 breaks many of the plugins I need for my JIRA workflow.  If I upgraded, I’d cripple my setup beyond usability.

Unfortunately, Atlassian has chosen to leave many obvious and necessary workflow actions out of JIRA, instead relying upon third-party plugins to provide them.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Atlassian didn’t change their plugin API more often than Tiger Woods picks up new sexual partners.

Okay, so I figured I’d at least upgrade to version 4.0.2; I’ve been putting that off for too long.  It’s anything but an easy process, especially when you’re running the EAR/WAR version instead of their “standalone” that comes with its own Tomcat instance.  They don’t have a standalone build for FreeBSD, so I don’t really have a choice.

Although the process is really convoluted and something only a Java wonk could love, it wouldn’t be so bad except that JIRA’s plugin system is so horrible.  JIRA plugins are generally Java .jar files.  There are two kinds of JIRA plugin now, Version 1 and Version 2.  It’s not obvious from looking at a plugin what kind it is.  You have to either go to Atlassian’s plugin repository and find it there, and the page will tell you what version the plugin is… or you have to extract the plugin and go digging in XML files trying to find a setting that will exist only if it’s version 2.

Depending on whether it’s version 1 or version 2, the plugin has to go in one of two widely different directories.  If it’s version 1, it goes in a directory that will need to be wiped out when you upgrade JIRA.

What’s so bad about that?  It’s also the directory that houses dozens of JIRA’s own .jar files, and there’s no way to tell which ones are part of JIRA and which ones are plugins.  In fact, there’s no way to tell what plugins you’ve installed short of doing a file-by-file comparison with a clean JIRA installation of the same version.

Better document that JIRA installation really well as you do it…!

It gets better! Some Version 2 plugins won’t work from their new, plugins-only directory anyway! You won’t find this out until they fail to work, and then you dig through the log file—which Atlassian so thoughtfully creates in whatever working directory you happened to be when you started Tomcat—and see a message that you have to copy the file to the old directory!

Of course, if you merely copy the file, as directed by the error message, you’ll get another warning that there are two copies installed so you can’t use either…

Did I mention that every time you add or remove a plugin, you have to restart Tomcat?  If you don’t have some really rockin’ hardware running your JIRA instance, that’ll bring you a minute or two of downtime.  It’s annoying with three users in one household; it’d be a bloody outrage if I were supporting a large company with this.

What’s particularly galling is that Atlassian’s other major product, Confluence, does plugins so well.  You can search the Confluence plugin repository from within your Confluence instance’s administration screens.  You can see which plugins you’ve installed, and if they’re out of date Confluence will tell you so and offer you a link to download and install the latest version.  There’s even a web-upload link to install .jar files from outside of the Atlassian repository.  Atlassian knows how to do this right.  They just haven’t bothered with JIRA.

So, I do my upgrade.  This entails backing up the current JIRA instance to XML, creating a new database for the new JIRA, installing the new JIRA instance, copying over a number of settings files, tweaking my Tomcat settings, copying over plugins I’d backed up previously, restarting a few times to get the database loaded and the plugins in place, etc. etc. …

…and then the bloody thing doesn’t show any of my workflow actions, because I’m one plugin short.  It doesn’t even clearly tell me “hey, you have workflow actions that don’t seem to be defined” anyplace useful.  It just doesn’t show me any workflow actions. When I go into my workflow editor, the only clue is that some workflow actions look like

Type: class
Class: com.googlecode.jsu.workflow.function.UpdateIssueCustomFieldPostFunction
Arguments:
field.value = Yes
field.name = customfield_10040

instead of

The Needs Parts of the issue will be set to Yes.

Notice how there’s also no hint whatsoever as to which plugin you previously had that’s now AWOL; you’re left to figure that out on your own.

After finally figuring out which plugin was missing—the one that implements the ability to change the value of a field other than the default ones provided with a generic JIRA install—installing it, starting, finding no improvement, finding the log error saying it’s in the wrong place, moving it, restarting… I finally have my workflow actions back, and I’m an hour behind on my other tasks for the day.

Then there’s the security patch. The boys at Atlassian had a rather embarrassing security breach recently. It highlighted a number of XSS attacks against JIRA.  None of the code currently available for download includes the fixes, so you have to apply the patch.  For EAR/WAR installs like mine, this involves:

1. 1. Extracting the patch files on top of the source for JIRA
   2. Rebuilding the WAR file
   3. Stopping Tomcat
   4. Copying the WAR file into place
   5. Backing up your existing Version 1 plugins, which Atlassian doesn’t bother to mention in the instructions, so hopefully you understand this consequence of what they do tell you
   6. Deleting the Tomcat work directory, because otherwise Tomcat may cache the old .jar files
   7. Creating a new Tomcat work directory by hand, which Atlassian doesn’t mention; if you don’t, Tomcat will appear to start but won’t actually run anything…
   8. Deleting the old jira directory, because otherwise Tomcat may not unpack the new .jar files, which isn’t mentioned in the patch directions but is mentioned in a troubleshooting section under new installs for when you upgrade and find upon restart that you haven’t, in fact, successfully upgraded
   9. Starting Tomcat
   10. Waiting for Tomcat to start JIRA
   11. Stopping Tomcat
   12. Reinstalling the Version 1 plugins
   13. Starting Tomcat

That’s one of the more convoluted “security patch” procedures I’ve ever had to deal with in over 15 years as a professional UNIX systems administrator.

If you’re thinking of buying JIRA for your business: If you can’t afford to hire a Java guru to be your full-time JIRA guy, don’t bother.  You will need someone who understands Java and databases and Apache Tomcat and your choice of operating system, and they’ll have their hands full.

[Edit: added one of the biggest examples i forgot while drafting this: the JIRA dashboard.]

I’m not particularly fond of Linux. I’ve used it, and it’s good for many things, but as a professional system administrator I prefer Solaris, or FreeBSD, or even Mac OS X (as a UNIX). Why? A great many of the Linux enthusiasts I’ve had to deal with have suffered from what I call Shiny Object Development Syndrome (SODS).

SODS is characterized by a tendency to concentrate on developing new features that are pleasing and attractive to the developer, with a complete disregard to the usefulness, usability, or basic function of the product itself. It is particularly prevalent amongst open-source developers, particularly those who work on obscure Linux distributions.

Developers who suffer from SODS are often heard replying to legitimate user complaints with some variation on “you can fix it yourself if it’s important to you, the source code is available.”

Sometimes SODS infects an entire organization. When this happens to a company with paying clients, symptoms include: refusal to fix longstanding bugs; failure to supply updates to widely-deployed, stable versions when longstanding bugs are finally addressed; issuing updates that break existing functionality such as extensions, plug-ins, or settings.

Terminal company-wide SODS often reveals itself as intractable bugs pile up because the new shiny features beloved of the developers and the marketing department depend upon so much spaghetti code that it becomes impossible to fix all the problems without starting over from scratch. By this stage, the company usually begins to hemorrhage users as the cost of migrating to another platform becomes cheaper than dealing with the SODS-ridden status quo.

A good example of a company full of SODS is Atlassian.

They make a number of interesting utilities, such as the Confluence wiki and the JIRA issue-tracking system. These programs have a lot of neat features. Because they are commercial programs, big companies feel comfortable buying them—they’re not some faceless open source developer. While Atlassian does offer some nice “starter licenses” at $10 for 10 users, a corporate-sized deployment involves a substantial chunk of money, especially for a small business.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that you get better support than you would for an open-source product. In fact, your support experience will be full of SODS.

Confluence has been around a while. It’s a great place to put all your team’s technical documentation. But now comes the latest version of the software, and Atlassian has stopped supporting two of the most widely used “themes” for Confluence. (Themes are web-page layouts.) If you upgrade, your existing themes may become unusable. The replacement themes aren’t a drop-in replacement, so you’ll need to re-engineer your documents to get back to where you were. Apparently the old code was unsupportable.

That isn’t exactly customer focused.

At least Confluence is reasonably easy to upgrade. Shut down the existing instance, install the new one, alter one or two settings files to change where stuff is pointed, and you’re up and running. JIRA, on the other hand…

Upgrading JIRA is a system-administrator job preservation program. Even a minor upgrade involves dumping the entire JIRA database to an XML file, finding someplace to save it, and reinstalling JIRA from scratch. Atlassian recommends you attach it to a new database instance, while you’re at it. Once you reconfigure everything, from scratch, you can then reload all your data from XML. Obviously, this isn’t a quick process.

Hopefully, you don’t have a very large database of issues in JIRA. Otherwise, you’re going to have a very large XML file that will take a very long time to process, if your system doesn’t choke on it outright.

Don’t forget that you’ll need enough disk space for three copies of your data: two database instances, plus the XML. And that’s presuming you don’t want to back up your data regularly—to XML.

Did I mention that both programs are written in Java? Hopefully, your platform has a fast and stable Java Virtual Machine. (In my experience, such a thing doesn’t truly exist.)

Now that you’ve upgraded JIRA, you get to find out which of your vital JIRA plugins are broken. You see, JIRA doesn’t implement a lot of obvious and useful features. It leaves them for third-party developers to implement via plug-in Java code. Unfortunately, Atlassian hasn’t quite figured out what the plug-in API should look like, as of version 4.1 of JIRA, so there’s a good chance that any given JIRA upgrade will change the API and break your plugins. Broken plugins means broken workflow, which means JIRA is broken until you can find a fix.

Don’t contact Atlassian for that fix, though; they don’t support any plugin they didn’t write, and they don’t even support all of the ones they did write.

But what if you do find a legitimate bug in JIRA? Something that affects a lot of users, is highly visible, is an obvious bug in the program, and is clearly something that your expensive annual support contract should cover? For instance: in JIRA 4.0, if you use Mozilla Firefox, your JIRA Dashboard will fail after an hour of inactivity due to malformed security tokens. You’ll have to manually reload the Dashboard in your browser to continue.

Well, even with hundreds of users, many from Fortune 500 companies, clamoring for a fix on Atlassian’s forums, it took months for a fix to be identified. When it was, the fix was part of JIRA 4.1… which also includes sweeping changes to the user interface and, of course, API changes that break plug-ins. So, upgrading to JIRA 4.1 to get the Firefox fix is a non-starter for a lot of customers.

Atlassian released notes on how to patch JIRA 4.0… which involved downloading Java code and splicing it into the product. If you got adventurous and tried this, you wound up with a fully malfunctioning Dashboard. Atlassian’s response to date has been, to paraphrase, “Oops, our bad. Upgrade.”

Tone-deaf doesn’t begin to describe it.

A more classic example of SODS: JIRA 4.0 introduced an OpenSocial-based “dashboard” that uses JavaScript “gadgets” to display the user’s main interface with the software. Previous versions rendered the Dashboard in HTML created on the server, and it was reasonably speedy. Now, the OpenSocial dashboard looks pretty. It offers nerdnip like the ability to use widgets published by Google.

However, each gadget on your dashboard is a separate JavaScript that gets rendered by the client. The more gadgets on your dashboard, the slower it gets. If your browser has a poor JavaScript implementation (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer), your dashboard will be dog-slow. And you’re really in trouble if you are on a slow computer, like a PowerPC G4, or an Atom-based netbook, or an iPad, or… Talk about a twofer; you get all the limitations of a web app together with all the slowness of your thin client. To Atlassian, it’s apparently reasonable to require a 3GHz dual Core2 processor to get reasonable performance out of a web-based issue tracker client.

It’s not just JIRA, though. Atlassian’s online documentation is stored in a Confluence wiki instance. I tried reading the JIRA upgrade notes on my iPad. I couldn’t get past the first page, because Confluence refused to let me scroll. It seems that the new themes in Confluence 3.2 don’t play nice with Mobile Safari. Having a paid support contract, I contacted Atlassian customer service. The response? Here’s a list of supported platforms, if the iPad gets popular we might consider adding it.

Well, Safari is listed as a supported browser. I’m using Safari, albeit the mobile version. And is there really any doubt that the iPhone OS is a popular operating system at this point? Is it really unlikely that iPad users might want to use it to read their internal documentation?

It seems to me that, if you’re going to write a Web-based application like a wiki, the very first thing you should do is make sure you’re following the HTML standards to a T. Safari is perhaps the most standards-compliant browser on the planet right now. If your application generates pages that Safari can’t render, you’re very likely doing something wrong.

Atlassian’s technical-support JIRA instance is full of enraged customers. Colleagues of mine that depend on Atlassian software are regretting their decision after seeing what Atlassian’s support is like.

In the meantime, Atlassian rolls out release after release with shiny new features, some of which seem to have little use other than to look cool. This is Shiny Object Development Syndrome, the Internet equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

I think Atlassian should call a moratorium on the shiny-object features, and spend a few development cycles working their way through the existing defect list. Start listening to customers and addressing their needs, even if they aren’t sexy… and even if they don’t line up with Atlassian’s vision of where the product is heading. Spend a few releases fixing things so that the APIs don’t have to change with every minor version. Identify the top 10 most popular plug-ins and make them unnecessary: integrate the functionality, buying out the plug-in developer if you have to.

(For programs like Confluence and JIRA, the plug-in libraries are almost like defect catalogues: Here is a list of all the things your customers find lacking in your software, to the extent that many of them have written their own code to overcome the problem. Why not see this for what it is and let it inform development, instead of apparently ignoring plug-ins and breaking them without remorse?)

I would love to be able to recommend Confluence and JIRA. At work and at home, they’ve generally made my life easier.

But then it’s time to upgrade, or something breaks, and I remember that Atlassian has an advanced case of SODS.

I hope that they get some help before it turns terminal.

For now, I’d have to recommend that readers consider alternatives to Atlassian products. The total cost of ownership is too dear.

If you’ve read my article “The Art of Turboing,” you know that I’ve had run-ins with UPS before. Years ago, they didn’t offer package tracking for ground shipments.

Although UPS has fixed that, the tracking service they offer… Lies.

It lies often.

What’s the point in having package tracking if it’s so unreliable that you can’t trust it?

I know that Apple requested extra security for the iPad rollout. I can understand not wanting to advertise where a shipping depot might have a large number of prerelease iPads. But surely there was a way to do it that wouldn’t cause anxiety for thousands of expectant customers? This reflected badly not just on UPS, but on Apple as well. It seems odd that Steve Jobs, notorious perfectionist, would accept this kind of inattention to detail from a vendor.

My iPad was shipped from China on the 29th of March. UPS quickly showed it making its way to Alaska, and then to Louisville, Kentucky. It then sat there for days. OK, so far nothing too strange.

Of course, that’s the story now. If you had been watching the package’s progress, you would have seen a number of entries related to clearing Customs. They disappeared from the record a few hours after they appeared.

There was one cryptic entry entitled “UPS Internal Activity” that appeared for a brief while before disappearing. The most interesting part about that entry was that it had a timestamp 10 hours in the future.

At least that entry had a local location stamp. That was the only time that the tracked package appeared to move until it was actually delivered to me. As far as I could see, the package was stuck in Kentucky until being magically teleported into my hands.

At least UPS had two employees watching Twitter to reassure all the confused Apple customers.

FedEx gets this right. I don’t understand what’s so hard for UPS that they can’t master package tracking after all these years.

Certainly, if I have a package to send and I want to be able to track it, I’m not going to choose UPS after this experience!

The iPad did arrive safe and sound, eventually. I used it to compose this post.

I wanted to give Pilot Pens some feedback about their G2 pen line.  I like the pens—unlike recent UniBall gel pens, the Pilot G2 doesn’t suddenly stop writing for no apparent reason despite having plenty of ink—except for one small flaw.  The rubber finger-grip area has two small nubs from the molding process, and they’re usually just prominent enough to be annoying.  Nothing that can’t be fixed with a knife in short order, but if Pilot could improve that part of their manufacturing process, it’d be an even better pen.

Good: They have a customer feedback form on their website.  It even lets you fill in all the blanks with the keyboard, instead of being forced to pick up the mouse to select your state.

Bad: Sending in a message via the form gets this reply…

From: MAILER-DAEMON@as.pilotpen.us
To: (omitted)
Subject: failure notice

 Hi. This is the qmail-send program at as.pilotpen.us.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

 
<pilotpenservice@yahoo.com>:
66.196.97.250 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to pilotpenservice@yahoo.com 
cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. 
- mta219.mail.re3.yahoo.com

Worse: Immediately following up that message with

To: (omitted)
Subject: PilotPen.us Customer Submission
From: Pilot Pen <website@as.pilotpen.us>
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.73]
 
Your email has been received and will be responded to shortly

Please note our new contact information:

 Pilot Consumer Service 
3855 Regent Blvd.
Jacksonville, FL  32224
Tel. (904) 645 - 9999
Fax (904) 966 - 2974

Sincerely,
Your Friends at Pilot Pen

I’m not sure what the worst part of this interaction is:

• Using Yahoo! Mail for your customer service account after going to the trouble to buy a domain name, especially when you’re an international manufacturing company;
• Sending an automated message from a third domain (pilotpen.us) that sounds more like spam than legitimate mail from a commercial interest;
• Telling someone who e-mailed you at the contact link you set up that they should write, call, or FAX you instead;
• Not testing your customer feedback mechanism occasionally to discover it’s massively broken.

The experience sure made me feel less warm and fuzzy about Pilot Pens.

Terry Goodkind wrote a pretty good fantasy story some years ago, Wizard’s First Rule. This turned into a book series, The Sword of Truth.  Although the books weren’t all as good as the first—after the fourth one, there were some missteps—the series still told a good, thoughtful tale.  They also told a decidedly mature-audiences tale.

When I first heard that Disney/ABC was developing Wizard’s First Rule into a syndicated TV series, “The Legend of the Seeker,” I wondered how they would possibly handle some of the more, ah, exotic content of the book.

It turns out they handled it the way I had feared: by totally bastardizing the book.

The story starts off mostly the same as the book.  Some of the casting was inspired; the character of Zedd seems perfectly cast.  Kahlan, while not matching the physical description of the book, is played by an actress that seems to understand the character.  Unfortunately, the main character, Richard, was badly miscast… and badly rewritten.

In the book, Richard, the Seeker of Truth, is the kind of guy who pays careful attention to what people say and do, and his keen insight and willingness to speak truth is his greatest weapon—greater, even, than the magical Sword of Truth that comes with his appointed title. Richard is a young, but mature, man, noted for his imposing, masculine build.

The television Richard is a whiney brat of a young twenty-something who is more likely to annoy you with strident complaint than shake your convictions with a well-reasoned argument. He’s also short and light of frame, and wouldn’t be considered imposing by anyone weighing over 90 pounds.  The actor’s inexperience is sadly on display next to the rest of the regular cast.

Okay, so the casting was a bit… off.

Then there’s the plot.  In the first two hours, one major plot device of the novel is discarded irretrievably.  This is an omen.  By midseason, the series has not simply thrown away major plot points from the book; they’ve been violently raped and left to die by the side of the road. 

Potential spoilers:

• A group of characters that play a pivotal role in the second and later novels are introduced early in the TV series. Instead of being antagonistic to our heroes’ goals and blocked from the New World by a treacherous magical barrier, they’re a bunch of friendly nuns hiding behind a slab of rock.
• Kahlan, rather than being the last and most powerful of her kind, is but one of many of her kind.
• The pivotal character of Denna is brushed off in one episode.  Her reason for existing in the first place is ignored.  She’s a caricature, and her motivations are cardboard-cutout instead of the deep past given in the books.  Where she dies a highly meaningful death in the books, she gets to become a recurring character in the TV series.
• Darken Rahl.  The big bad guy of the book.  In the book, we learn why he does what he does, and just how depraved he is in pursuit of his goals.  On TV, he’s nothing but central-casting, chew-the-scenery unexplained evil.

I could go on with many little changes that aren’t necessary to the TV adaptation, but there’s one change, one episode that got me to delete the show from my TiVo’s Season Pass list.

Kahlan goes undercover as a Mord-Sith to help save the Mother Confessor.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know why that one sentence embodies the producers’ deep disrespect for the source material.  It’s totally implausible to the plot and characters of the book.

This is Sword of Truth in name only.

I blame Sam Raimi; it seems like he had a few leftover Xena and Hercules scripts that he wanted to recycle, and that couldn’t happen with Terry’s characters.

Mr. Goodkind doesn’t seem too thrilled about it, either, based on the fan sites.

By now, I shouldn’t be surprised, Hollywood’s First Rule of adapting novels is that they need to be utterly sodomized before filming.  (Ironic, given that the sodomy present in the novel was excised from this series…)

Hey, Hollywood: The reason a book series has so many fans, the reason it sells well, is because people like it.  Don’t try to make it better; you’ll fail.

I’m done watching Legend of the Seeker, and I’m done watching anything Sam Raimi produces.

In the most recent issue of RISKS Digest, Gene Spafford writes about his experiences with Samsung Blu-ray players. (A more detailed version is on his blog.)

It seems that Samsung published faulty firmware images for the BD-P1500 Blu-ray players on their servers.  When these BD-Live equipped players contacted Samsung and retrieved the update, the player was rendered unusable.

Gene says that Samsung is not offering a fix, and that Samsung is offering no restitution for bricking the out-of-warranty model.  In fact, if the fix—once Samsung develops or admits to one, if ever—requires the out-of-warranty unit to be sent to the factory for service, it would be at the customer’s expense.

Another, newer Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-ray player that Gene owns became non-responsive after a short period of ownership. He sent it in for warranty repair, and it has been “waiting for parts” for weeks.

I guess I won’t be buying any Samsung products.

Want to drive away customers?  An excellent method is to make a mistake that destroys a product they’ve already paid for, refuse to fix it expeditiously, and then charge them for the repair when you do get around to fixing your mistake.

I think Samsung should have immediately sent Gene a new BD-P2500 to replace his dead BD-P2500, and they should have given him a rebuilt BD-P1500 or BD-P2500 to replace the bricked BD-P1500.  That would be acknowledging that it was their mistake.

Instead, someone will wind up mentioning it to a particular kind of lawyer, they’ll become the figurehead for a class-action lawsuit, people like Gene will get a coupon good for $20 off their next Samsung Blu-ray player (if purchased in the next 6 months), and the lawyers will make millions.