Alice Samples

We were pleasantly surprised when we received our last order from alice.com and discovered a small, stylish brown paper bag with some free samples of some new Tide detergent packs and some hand towelettes as well. We’ve used them all and we definitely plan to purchase some of the products that were included. If you haven’t yet, you should definitely give it a try. It’s a big time-saver for us.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

@slb and Maria after their 5k

Ann Margaret finished in 34:20 and Maria finished in 46:10. Proud of them both!

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Sometimes, You Can’t Wait for Apple to Fix It

   <div style='padding: 5px 5px 10px 5px; margin-top: 5px; border: 1px solid #ddd; background-color: #fff;line-height: 16px;'>       <div style="float: left; margin-right: 5px; overflow: visible;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jxpx777/zrXF6fRZi8fkCo7YbCuEKapEWVSkVeS8ZkAEC7WG162Ko8EnwZGyNHSVYhx5/KillComputedRatings.scpt' style='color: #bc7134;'><img src='http://posterous.com/images/filetypes/unknown.png' style='border: none;'/></a></div>       <div style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;line-height: 16px;">Click here to download:</div>       <b><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jxpx777/zrXF6fRZi8fkCo7YbCuEKapEWVSkVeS8ZkAEC7WG162Ko8EnwZGyNHSVYhx5/KillComputedRatings.scpt' style='color: #bc7134;'>KillComputedRatings.scpt</a></b> <span style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;">(1 KB)</span>       <br style="clear: both;"/></div>      <p>I’ve been wailing about this silly bug in iTunes for a while. Basically, iTunes tries to be cute and calculate a rating for unrated tracks based on the album rating or an album rating for unrated albums by the rating of individual tracks. If you use smart playlists that have rating or album rating in the criteria, iTunes can’t actually exclude any of those calculated ratings from the predicate that creates the smart playlist. So, if you rated an album a **** overall but you haven’t yet rated the individual tracks in the album, all of the tracks that are unrated will have a **** calculated rating. Create a smart playlist with rating at least **** and you’ll end up with those unrated tracks in your playlist. Awesome, huh? <p /> I was sincerely hoping that iTunes 9 would fix this stupid bug. (To prove how stupid it is, you can look at the Applescript dictionary for iTunes. There’s already a flag for whether the rating or album rating is calculated.) Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. According to Apple, the engineers are aware of the bug and will fix it… well, whenever they get around to adding that little BOOL check I guess. <p /> In the mean time, I got tired of waiting. Since the problem is that the ratings are calculated rather than actually set, I ran a dumb Applescript to set the rating and album rating to every track that had a calculated rating for either of those items to 1 rather than 0. (Ratings are on a 0-100 scale.) The tracks still show as a zero star rating or album rating but now they don’t pollute my smart playlists because they’re no longer calculated. Here’s the script: <p /> </p><pre> <br />tell application "iTunes" <br /> repeat with t from 1 to count of every file track of library playlist 1 <br />      set thisTrack to (file track t of library playlist 1) <br />        if rating kind of thisTrack is computed then <br />         set rating of thisTrack to 1 <br />     end if <br />       if album rating kind of thisTrack is computed then <br />           set album rating of thisTrack to 1 <br />       end if <br />   end repeat <br />end tell <br /></pre> <p /> It’s pretty stupid really to have to do this and have to do this for new tracks, but it’s fast enough for me on my paltry 25GB collection until Apple decides they want to fix it.      <p style="font-size: 10px;">  <a href="http://jxpx777.posterous.com">Posted via email</a>   from <a href="http://jxpx777.posterous.com/sometimes-you-cant-wait-for-apple-to-fix-it">jxpx777's posterous</a>  </p>

Popularity: 5% [?]

Devs Getting Their Pizza On at Gino’s East of Chicago

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Untitled

   <div style='padding: 5px 5px 10px 5px; margin-top: 5px; border: 1px solid #ddd; background-color: #fff;line-height: 16px;'>       <div style="float: left; margin-right: 5px; overflow: visible;"><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jxpx777/pfW8ucLvCkOstLJh8rPgwB000nm0W2DGTll7Pyn696Y9n7Kb3zfWRp5uMwDl/IMG_0105.mov' style='color: #bc7134;'><img src='http://posterous.com/images/filetypes/mov.png' style='border: none;'/></a></div>       <div style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;line-height: 16px;">Download now or <a href='http://jxpx777.posterous.com/3868813-0' style='color: #bc7134;'>watch on posterous</a></div>       <b><a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jxpx777/pfW8ucLvCkOstLJh8rPgwB000nm0W2DGTll7Pyn696Y9n7Kb3zfWRp5uMwDl/IMG_0105.mov' style='color: #bc7134;'>IMG_0105.MOV</a></b> <span style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;">(2402 KB)</span>       <br style="clear: both;"/></div>      <p>Man was not meant to watch football like this.  </p>      <p style="font-size: 10px;">  <a href="http://jxpx777.posterous.com">Posted via email</a>   from <a href="http://jxpx777.posterous.com/3868813-0">jxpx777's posterous</a>  </p>

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Programming Style: Two Booleans, Three Possible Cases

Quick programming style question. If you have two boolean values and want to have a different outcome for each alternative and the case where both are true, how do you do it?

Here are the two options I have come up with.

First, a straight if-else if-else block like this: Update: I have updated this first option to reflect Dave’s comment below.

if(foo && bar){
    //do foo&bar stuff
} else if(foo){
    // do foo-only stuff
} else if(bar){
    // do bar-only stuff
}
//perform final computations

Second, nesting if clauses like this:

if(foo || bar){
    //set up assuming foo && bar
    if(!foo){
        //remove foo-specific stuff
    }
    if(!bar){
        //remove bar-specific stuff
    }
    //perform final computations
}

Or perhaps there’s a better way that I haven’t considered. I’d be interested to see how you handle this. Let me know in the comments or a post on your own blog.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Consumer Power Thanks to the Internet

Recently, I realized how much power the Internet gives to consumers. I had two experiences yesterday that bring this point home.

The fall semester begins in a little more than a week. I went to the book store at school to find out what the required texts were. The software engineering book was $121.60 new and the database systems book was $118.00. I popped my iPhone out of my pocket and browsed to Amazon.com. In less than five minutes, I had located the books and purchased them. Grand total: $140. Victory number one.

Victory number two began when I found out I was going to C4 on a student scholarship. I started making travel arrangements. I checked Expedia and Travelocity first. Travelocity was by far cheaper than Expedia and the price was good, so I decided to book the trip. But every time I clicked through to what I suppose should have been the final page, it redirected me to a fresh search. I tried several times over the course of two hours until finally, I called Travelocity. (“Your call may be recorded.” Please, God, tell me it was.) I got someone on the phone who was obviously located a couple continents away. I explained to him that the website was not functioning properly and that I needed assistance booking the travel. He said, “I can help you with that, but there will be a $25 charge for booking over the phone rather than through the website.” I explained to him that I shouldn’t have to pay that fee because the website was malfunctioning. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have called. He maintained that the fee was non-refundable. So, I asked to speak with his supervisor. “Sure, you can speak to the supervisor, but he will tell you the same thing.” He put me on hold.

While on hold, I brought up Orbitz.com. I found the exact same flights and hotel accommodations for $6 more than Travelocity’s price before the $25 fee. “That’s fine,” I thought to myself.

When the supervisor came on the line, I reiterated the situation. “Website borked. Please waive fee.” The supervisor rattled off some script about prices changing constantly and that the fee could not be waived. When he said that, I clicked submit to book the travel on Orbitz.

I explained to him that since he (or Travelocity, it doesn’t matter which really) was not willing to waive a $25 charge that I should not have to pay anyway, they were foregoing the entire $830 sale. (Ann Margaret is going as well to do some shopping and such.) Not only that, but the bureaucratic (The archives show how I feel about bureaucracy.) attitude of Travelocity’s representatives means I will never do business with them again. Marketing research tells us that it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer. Something tells me that for Travelocity, acquiring a customer to replace me will be much more expensive than $25. I wonder if Travelocity thinks the loss of a customer for life is worth $25. I seriously doubt it.

What is interesting about this is that if it weren’t for the Internet as we have it today, I would have had nearly no leverage. If I were sitting in a travel agency office and they tried to foist some fee on me, I could threaten to go to another agency. I could. But unless it’s particularly egregious, I know (and they probably do too) that I’m not going to waste my time going to another agency. But what if I had the other travel agent in the same room saying, “Oh, we won’t charge you some stupid fee.”

In both cases, I was able to “visit the competitor” without any real effort. I was able to retrieve competing offers in both cases without physically changing venue. Moreover, I was able to make good on the usual threat to go with another company immediately. The Internet affords consumers leverage that was simply not available in the past.

Popularity: unranked [?]