david.steadson.com

Now, first of all let me get out of the way that this is not an attack on Mitt Romney or his campaign. This is an “attack” on internet pundits and the tendency of people to simply accept and repeat what they read on the internet, if it fits the narrative they want to believe.

Earlier today a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link to this blog post - Obama Campaign Not Using Verification System – which then references a blog post on Powerline, a well known website for supporters of the US Republican party, titled DUBIOUS DONATIONS ILLUSTRATED (ILLEGAL CONTRIBUTOR EDITION).

The posts take the Obama Presidential Campaign to task for not preventing potentially fraudulent “donations” on their website. My friend expressed disbelief and concern that this was true. Despite not being American (nor living in the US) I take an unhealthy interest in US politics and her post tweaked my interest so I read the first post. The post referred to Powerline’s John Hindraker’s successful attempt to donate to the Obama campaign with a fraudulent name and address. One paragraph stood out to me though, indeed one word (my bolding)-

 Trying the same experiment over on the Romney website likely would not work, because the address verification system would determine that there is no “Illegal Contributor” living at the State Penitentiary associated with the credit card.

“Likely“? Wouldn’t it be relatively easy to test? So I did. I went to the Romney campaign website and clicked on the donate link. I put in my credit card number, expiry date, and CCV, and donation of $1. I didn’t put in my own name and address in though. Instead I put in -

Name Steve Jobs
Email romney@steadson.com
Phone 1-800-694-7466
Employer self-employed
Occupation entrepreneur
Address 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA 95014

The Romney campaign response?

Followed by a nice email -

Complete with a receipt -
So the Romney campaign happily accepted my donation, a donation from a foreigner, sitting at a computer in Sweden, using a VISA card from a foreign bank account, and using a fake name and address of a dead person.

What was that about rocks and glass houses?

The whole thing is really a beat-up of false outrage. I’ve worked with ecommerce for many years and am familiar with how the systems work. AVS, address verification systems, work by matching numbers in the address registered with the card to the numbers in the address submitted. They’re to help merchants avoid being defrauded and shipping goods or services to someone using a stolen or otherwise unauthorised credit card. In the case of donations there is no such risk of being defrauded. The card holder can submit a claim to their bank and be refunded, no goods have changed hand, nobody loses out. On the other hand, implementing AVS costs money, money that most political campaigns would rather use for other things. The only real reason for them to implement it is to avoid blog posts like these.

PS I’ve emailed the Romney campaign and advised them of the donation and that they should refund it in order not to fall foul of campaign finance laws.

PPS The email, a reply to their donation email and where they suggest corrections be sent … bounced -

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Sent: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:41:28 +0200
Subject: RE: Thank you for donating!

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

digital@mittromney.com
Error Type: SMTP
Remote server (208.65.145.3) issued an error.
hMailServer sent: .
Remote server replied: 554 Denied [CS] [b28759f4.0.524876.00-2155.762984.p01c12m003.mxlogic.net] (Mode: normal)

A 554 Denied error likely means their system thought my email reply advising they should give me a refund was considered spam. Sigh.

Most competitive F1 race in a long time. Going to be a great year #bbcf1

testing wordpress to twitter to wordpress ….

A few months ago I tracked down an old friend of mine, Daniel Strandberg, on Facebook. I met Daniel when I first moved to Stockholm some years ago. I was single and spending too much time on SprayDate. I don’t quite recall how we connected – I think through some of the girls I chatted to on that site. Daniel and some others were being proactive and organising gettogethers – group meets at the park, that kind of thing. We hit it off well and drank a bit too much at a few too many bars, and after I met Michaela, Daniel and I lost touch. A few emails exchanged here and there, a fika in town. He was a good guy and I enjoyed his company, so after a few other old friends had made contact with me on Facebook, I looked him up , found him – and clicked Add as Friend. A few weeks passed with no reply and I thought no more of it.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I saw a status update from a mutual friend – Daniel had drowned on a holiday in Crete. So sad, only 36. His facebook page is still there, regularly updating as his devastated girlfriend posts her favourite photos of him … and haunting me with a forlorn message – Awaiting Friend Confirmation.

How long his profile will stay up I’ve no idea.  Will Facebook decide to delete him for “inactivity”? Will he be forever immortalised, photos never showing him age, as time takes it’s toll on the rest of us? How long will I be Awaiting Friend Confirmation?

The internet continues to change our world and even our manner of thinking in as yet unknowable ways. How will having the legacy of our life forever defined on the web change us? With prospective employers googling us, police catching crims on facebook, and the internet archive storing it all for prosperity, what does the internet say about you, about me, about us? What does a prospective employer or date think if they can’t find you? What will our children and grandchildren think as they read our rants and whines? Will Facebook give them the keys to my account? What will they think of Daniel, forever Awaiting Friend Confirmation.

Maybe by then they’ll know one thing. Google does not know all. Facebook does not know me. Facebook does not know Daniel. He was my friend, and I was his. I need no confirmation.

Like most people I was shocked when I heard President Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. My first instinct was to ask “for what??!?!?!?”. The more I think about it though, the more I realise how much Obama has done.

Now, remember this is not an American view, it’s the view of an Australian, and a european-based one at that, but think about it – just by getting elected Obama completely changed the direction of the world’s sole superpower. From our perspective (the world, not America’s) the last 8 years has seen the US turn from a force of good in the world into one of, well, not evil, but certainly not good. It was a country that was using and endorsing torture. It was a country that was supporting imprisonment without right to a trial. It was a country that had invaded a country under false pretenses and re-ignited the cold war with Russia. It was a country that was attempting to “lead” not through leadership, but fear.

All of that has now changed. America is once again the most admired country in the world. Instead of picking fights, the world’s sole superpower is now working to prevent fights.

How could you contribute more to world peace than that?

I’m developing a health & fitness/wellness website using Joomla and I wanted individual users to have a personal calendar where they could record their training appointments etc etc. While there’s a variety of “event calendars” available, they’re all focused on providing the website owner with the ability to promote “events” and have members register their attendance. I simply wanted calendar functionality. After searching around I finally found JCal Pro. While it was still an event focused calendar it was advertised as offering private calendars. So I handed over my $29 and installed the component.

My initial impression was I liked the component and it was better looking and laid out than the competitors, I was a fan. However, when I tried adding events, there was no option for them to be “private” unless I was logged in as a site administrator. All events added by regular users were public and required approval by an administrator. I went through the instructions multiple times and still couldn’t get it working.

So on September 20 I posted a message on the JCal support forums requesting help. After a day or so I got a response from the developers, Anything Digital, that they were looking in to it and then a follow up saying they’ve confirmed it was a bug and I could expect a fix in 24-48 hrs. So far so good, bugs happen, I can accept that, I was still a fan. But then things started to go downhill …

I waited 48hrs for the fix … nothing. So I posted a “bump” reminder message on the forums to get an update.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. No communication at all. I posted another message on their forums asking for a response and letting them know I was starting to think about asking for a refund and that so far I’d have little option to write a not very positive review on the Joomla Extensions catalogue.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. So I posted again, requesting a refund. Their official policy says “no refunds”, but I pointed out that a credit card chargeback would cost them more than a refund, so they may want to reconsider, and that continuing to advertise it as offering “private calendars” was false advertising. On September 28 I also wrote a review on Joomla.org describing my experience.

Another 24hrs went by and finally a response – more than a week after I was told I could expect a fix within 24-48 hrs. I was told that the fix was with beta testers and they also issued me with a refund and closed my account with them. September 29.

This was more than a little confusing. What I wanted was private calendars. I only asked for a refund after it seemed apparent they couldn’t provide them anytime soon and had poor support. If they had a fix and it would soon be available, I was more than willing to wait – all they had to do was tell me what was going on!

I was annoyed, but left it at that until today. Why? Well, yesterday my review on Joomla Extensions had now been approved by the Joomla.org site admins and was posted along with a response by Anything Digital claiming the issue was resolved with a link back to the forums (update: the review has mysteriously been removed). I thought, great, I still don’t have a solution maybe I’ll buy it again! So I went to the forums and got this response -

Sorry david_steadson, you are banned from using this forum!
Gave a bad JED review even though we refunded his money

This was completely false! I gave the bad review only after I’d waited a week for a response, and a day before I was issued the refund. Furthermore, when I went to the forums without logging in, there was nothing new in the thread except the acknowledgment it had been sent to testing. After looking around the site some more I found something even more irritating … they have indeed finally publicly issued the fix!

I still need a private calendar solution. What do I do? Give them the money again despite the bad experience with their support, including being outright dishonest in the statement above? Right now I don’t know what I should do. Their software is licenced under GPL which means anyone who has it is free to share it around, so I could just wait until somebody does that, but it could be weeks or months.

I like the software. I want to use it. I would have been a fan and written positively about them, but instead because of their lack of communication they’ve turned me into a foe, with a post like this on the internet for googlers to find for years to come.

UPDATE 2010-01-01: I now have the latest version of JCalPro version 2.2.7.441 and the Private Calendars functional still does not work, with users additions requiring administrator approval even for their own private activities.

Below is a video made for the Danish Tourism authority. The woman is an actress. The baby is not hers. It was a viral marketing stunt. It was highly successful in attracting attention, but is this really the image Denmark wants to project? And what kind of tourist are they wanting to attract? The BBC reports the “official” version of the ad has now been pulled, but it’s still available of course, as you can see below.

I’m currently building a multilingual health focused community site, FitTogether (note: at time of writing still under construction!). We’re using Joomla 1.5 along with a variety of third party components, including Community Builder, GroupJive and Kunena forum components. GroupJive allows you to create private and public groups that site members can create and join. It has the ability to send “bulletins” to group members, but no inbuilt discussion forum ability. That has been solved by integrating it with the Kunena forum component. But there’s a problem – neither Joomla 1.5 nor Kunena currently allow you to restrict access to forums to particular site members or groups of site members.

This functionality is planned with Joomla 1.6, but as is often the case, I needed a solution now. Fortunately I managed to come up with one and I thought I’d share it.

The solution uses Stephen Brandon’s powerful MetaMod module. MetaMod allows you to enable various “rules” on a Joomla page for turning modules on and off, writing particular messages, redirecting – whatever you can come up with. Using MetaMod I created a rule that checks to see if the logged on user is a member of the GroupJive group connected to the forum he/she is trying to view. If they are not then it redirects them to another page. It does the same if anyone attempts to view the parent category. This step isn’t necessary if the parent category is unpublished in Kunena.

To enable this solution, download and install MetaMod and publish it on the Kunena forum component page. In my template I publish it with no title, in the footer, and with class -nobox so that it’s effectively invisible to users. In the module itself I set the following PHP code -

//
// Block access to GroupJive Forums
//
$group_catid=21;
$redirect_url='/';
$catid = JRequest::getVar("catid");
//Redirect if in main group category
if ($catid==$group_catid)
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
// check if forum is in group category
$query="select parent from jos_fb_categories where id=".$catid;
$db->setQuery( $query, 0, 1 );
$row = $db->loadObject();
$parent_id= $row->parent;
if ($parent_id==$group_catid)
{
$username = $user->username;
$gj_query = "SELECT username FROM jos_gj_users
INNER JOIN jos_gj_jb ON jos_gj_users.id_group=jos_gj_jb.group_id 
where category_id=".$catid." and username='".$username."'";
$db->setQuery( $gj_query, 0, 1 );
$gj_row = $db->loadObject();
$gj_username = $gj_row->username;
if (is_null($gj_username))
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
}

There are two things you need to change in the first few lines of code. $group_catid should be set to the Kunena category ID where your having GroupJive create forums. $redirect_url should be set to wherever you want the user to end up instead of the private forum. You may want to setup an error message page. In the future I think I’ll set mine to redirect to the main groupjive page with an error message stating the forums are private and they need to join. Alternatively I might simply redirect back to the page they came from. That’s it!

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

If you’re in business, or participate in community groups of any sort and haven’t read marketing guru Seth Godin’s book Tribes yet – do it now. It’s a brilliant book offering insights into the realities of marketing today. It’s not about selling products or services – it’s about building and leading communities, building and leading tribes. My favourite book of 2009.

For the past year I’ve been involved in developing a social networking type website where we wanted the ability to do a “radius search”, ie you could for example ask for a list of all site members who live within 10km of you, or all health food stores etc etc. The site is being built on the Joomla framework using Community Builder. One of the reasons we went with this combination rather than dedicated social networking software, or  a dedicated social networking Joomla component like JomSocial was because of the availability of a “Community Builder Zip Code Radius Search Component” (for searching members) and a “Mosets Tree Radius Search Component” (for searching a directory of businesses) from a company called ZipCodeShop.

Alas, our experience with ZipCodeShop (ZCS), despite starting well, has not been a good one. I contacted them and told them I was looking at buying both components, and they were more than helpful. I purchased the ZCS Community Builder component, for US$99, and started trying to implement it in my site. I sort of got it working, and for 2 days ZCS support via email were extremely fast, and extremely helpful – though they did continue to ignore requests to be given access to their support forums. The component itself was encoded and hardcoded with a licence linked to my domain name. This concerned me as we had plans to change the domain name, but they assured me it would be no problem to do so. After a couple of days I was still having a few problems, and they informed me a new version was coming the following week, and that prices would be increasing - so I should buy the Moset’s tree version straight away. I elected not to do so.

That was in February. Since then I have lodged more than a dozen support ticket requests and followups through their online ticketing system. I have sent numerous emails directly. I have left messages with their Live Online Support. I’ve even tried several international phone calls. Nothing. I would be concerned they had gone of business, or the principles had some serious health issues or similar, but at the end of April a message appeared on their site stating they were upgrading their site and the new one would be up at the end of the week. At the end of the week, the message disappeared but nothing else changed. Thus, I’m left with an encoded component who’s bugs I cannot fix, and which I cannot easily customised for my purposes, as I was assured I could.

Sadly, posts on Joomlapolis indicate my experience is not unique. I left further messages last week advising ZipCodeShop I would be doing this blog post, but there has been no response.

In the meantime I’ve developed a replacement component to the ZipCodeShop radius search component using the excellent Fabrik development framework, available at www.fabrikar.com. For those who have been left wanting by ZCS I’ll try to blog about my solution in the next week.