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In a conversation recently with a new ecommerce site client we were discussing how they planned to charge for shipping their goods. The client postulated charging customers shipping based on order total. This brought to mind a recent shopping experience at Crate and Barrel.

Crate and Barrel has a remarkably clean and easy to use site. Anyone wanting to know how to do an ecommerce site correctly, could learn a lot from their site. My only problem is their method of charging for shipping could be eating into their cart totals.

On my order, I had selected some kitchen toys and a few additional dishes I needed. With one set of refrigerator containers I thought it might be nice to have two sets for those weeks when running the dishwasher might be a stretch. Great! Order total: $54.90. Login to my account, select basic shipping option. Whoa! Shipping is $11.50 on a $50 order! That seemed a little expensive for the handful of small items I was purchasing. Shipping info, click. Ahhh, shipping cost is based on order total value. Less than $51, shipping is $8.50, over it jumps up to $11.50 and continues on up from there.

I hit the handy back button, remove one set of refrigerator dishes from my cart and check again. Shipping is now the quoted $8.50 for an order less than $51. Finalize the order and we are done.

Do you see what just happened? They lost an extra sale based on their shipping quotation and I saved $12. What’s more, a thoroughly great shopping experience was slightly tarnished by the perceived overcharging on the shipping. Twenty-three percent of order total for shipping is a little much.

I know some vendors use inflated shipping and handling to fees to help kick in a little extra for overhead, but I wouldn’t expect that from a tier one site like this. I really doubt this is there intention either. This is just how some decided they would set shipping charges. But, the perception is still there, and online, perception is all you have.

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I previously complained about miscellaneous bugs in the new Mail.app that came with OS X 10.4.4. In some IMAP accounts I was seeing a full directory listing of my hosting account, web files, misc files, mail; everything that was in my home directory. This had been bugging me to no end. On top of that Mail was becoming increasingly slow to respond after some operations. Opening Mail Preferences sometimes took five minutes at full system load.

After trolling around Google looking for possible fixes I came across several discusssions about removing Mails index file which forces it to rebuild from scratch on the next launch. I shut down mail. Navigated over to ~/Library/Mail and moved the index file Envelope Index onto the desktop. The file was nearly 30 megabytes. When I reopened Mail, the import messages wizard ran for over 10 minutes importing the 50K odd messages available.

To my pleasant surprise, much of the inconsistencies I had been experiencing were gone. No longer was every file in my home directories listed as mail messages on some accounts. Mail.app was 100% more responsive. The Envelope Index file was now only 11 megabytes.

While trying to fix these issues previously, I had experimented with several different settings of the IMAP Prefix Setting under Advanced account settings. This no doubt, contributed to the munging of my mailboxes, with various folders named INBOX and mail floating around on some accounts.

Before performing this fix, I standardized each account with what I thought to be the correct setting for the IMAP prefix. On accounts I never had problems with, I left the prefix empty as Mail.app was apparently talking to those servers correctly. On accounts where I knew mail to be stored in the ~/mail folder, I supplied that as the prefix. On a few other accounts that were acting odd, I used INBOX as the prefix. This prefix setting is so that Mail.app can understand how to talk to the different types of IMAP servers out there. In a perfect world, they would all implement the spec properly. But in the real world? Come on.

Another setting I found that may speed up some of Mail.app’s issues is the Keep copies of messages for offline viewing also under Account -> Advanced preferences. I changed this from All messages, but omit attachments to Only messages I’ve read as indicated by several sites to help increase Mail’s performance. I’ll update on this setting later if I can tell any further performance speed up.

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Good security consists of multiple layers of procedures and applications, all with the goal of keeping unauthorized users out and ensuring properly authorized users have access to only the things they should. With public internet servers and web applications this can mean things such as:

• Ensuring users create at least moderately secure passwords
• Instituting mandatory password changes on a monthly or quarterly schedule
• Regular security audits
• Firewall and firewall maintenance

Another layer not usually thought of is obscurity. If they can’t find it, they can’t exploit it. That being said, obscurity by itself isn’t very secure. It only takes one malicious user to find what has been hidden and all hell breaks loose. Multiple layers of security build upon each other more than just through addition. They add orders of magnitude more security to the system as a whole.

Most web applications support changing the default install directories. To keep prying eyes out of your data, move PHPMyAdmin into a directory with a random name. Move the admin directory for an applications like, ZenCart. If you are use these admin URLs frequently, the URL will be saved in the history of your browser and always accessible. If not a simple bookmark can help you remember.

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Television crime shows throw this word around all the time. From the context, you can guess the general meaning. I took a closer look and found this from Wikipedia:

An allele is any one of a number of viable DNA codings of the same gene (sometimes the term refers to a non-gene sequence) occupying a given locus (position) on a chromosome. An individual’s genotype for that gene will be the set of alleles it happens to possess. In an organism which has two copies of each of its chromosomes (a diploid organism), two alleles make up the individual’s genotype.

An example is the gene for blossom color in many species of flower — a single gene controls the color of the petals, but there may be several different versions of the gene. One version might result in red petals, while another might result in white petals. The color of an individual flower will depend on which two alleles it possesses for this color gene, and how the two interact.

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I found this today on Blog Maverick while searching for something else and thought it was worth a mention.

The Path of Least Resistance

It was Aaron Spelling I believe who said that “TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom”. Which is another way of saying that its easier to watch TV, than to sit there and do nothing.

Which describes exactly how people make most of their choices in life. They take the easy way. They take the path of least resistance.

There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time.

In every case, all things being equal, we choose the path of least resistance.

Except for the truly lucky (ie. Mark, Bill and others), we all must spend about one quarter of our time working. Some of us work 10 or 12 hour days a the time. My question is what for? Self employed? Building a business to get ahead one day? Or working to keep the boss happy and just pay the bills.

Fill another one quarter of our time sleeping and half of the time we have is gone. What am I doing with that half today?

Is more of our time spent on things we actually want to do or merely filled with time wasting tasks?

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Add this to your crontab:

Adjust /path/to/files to your directory of choice and 30 to the number of days to keep.

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