Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Accidental Technologist

ABC Family – Terrible User Experience from a Company Who Should Know Better

Somehow I was added to an email list from ABC Family, specifically Freeform. This is a channel that airs children’s TV shows. Much of their content is terrible but I’m not their target audience.

I have been receiving emails about new programming being added to their lineup. Our daughter is now 18 and outgrew what they have to offer, so when their latest email came in, I decided to unsubscribe. Here is their message to me:

2018 01 10 14 44 09

This is terrible! This is a terrible experience as a user. Here’s what bothers me:

  1. I’m trying to unsubscribe from their mailing list. The title indicates I am being added to another list, a Do Not Email list. What?
  2. They’ve recorded my request. Why? Don’t procrastinate, do it now.
  3. They need up to 10 business days to remove me, add me, or whatever for processing. 10 days? How are they handling my request, carrier pigeon? We’ve all belonged to email lists before, we know how unsubscribing should work..it should happen NOW.

This single interaction with ABC Family has stuck in my mind for a while. It has left a lasting impression.

Leave a positive lasting impression with your customers. If they decide they don’t want to do business with you any longer, don’t burn the bridge..maybe they’ll be back at some other time. Maybe they will recommend you to a friend. If you burn bridges, they will be gone for good.

#

Complacency kills. →

Matthew Dicks explaining so well, what we should all already know and strive to do:

There is always someone better than you. The bar is always higher than you think. When you stop looking for and striving for that higher bar, you are doomed to remain far below it.

Failure to seek out people better than you results in complacency, and complacency is the worst. Complacency produces mediocrity and a false sense of security. It results in an inability to see the scarcity of resources and increasing levels of competition in this world.

It’s true in the field of technology as it is in the rest of our lives. There are always better, smarter developers from whom we can learn. There are better and brighter people in every aspect of our lives, whether it be a better parent, better spouse or better handyman. We can learn from everyone; don’t assume you know the most.

The Best User Experience is the Simple User Experience

Bunn

We recently started using a Bunn coffee maker. The design of the unit is really simple, no fancy controls to figure out. No time to keep resetting after the power goes out. No keeping track of how long we have left until it automatically shuts off. Just fill with water, turn on and in about 1 minute, a fresh pot of coffee. It’s the best morning brewer we’ve ever had.

The simplicity of Bunn is immediately apparent when opening the box. This is what we were greeted by when we opened the box.

The software we create, regardless of platform, should be this simple. Show me how to get started. No long and boring tutorials here, no complicated user on-boarding. I think we can all learn a bit about user experience here from a brick and mortar business.

Fixing Missing Sublime Text 3 Package Manager

I’ve been a big fan and long-time user of Sublime Text 3. Recently, I ran into a problem where Package Control stopped working. When I say, not working, I mean behaving as though I never installed it.

Attempting to install or remove packages was not even an option any longer. All menu items relating to packages was gone..yet by all accounts, Package Control was still installed.

NoPackageManager

This had been working in the past and as far as I could remember, it worked recently. I figured either an update to Sublime Text 3 had broken the Package Control or maybe another package had caused some problems.

I tried reinstalling the Package Control but nothing changed.

After much trial-and-error, I discovered an interesting section in user settings (Preferences -> Settings), name Ignored Packages. What?

IgnoredPackageManager

I could see the Package Control package was ignored. I removed it from this section and restarted the editor.

YeahPackageManager

Checking Package Control now reveals it’s running as it was before. I have no idea how this happened but I’d venture to guess a bug in a Sublime upgrade at one point.

I hope this fixes this really annoying problem for someone else.

Tip: Save Typing ‘bundle exec’

If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, you probably type the words bundle exec numerous times a day. I finally got tired of it and decided to do something about it.

In the context of keeping it simple, I use the ‘alias’ command and add to my .profile. I know there are more Rails recommended ways of solving this problem via binstubs but I rather not use that approach.

My solution is simple, add an alias to my .profile like this:

alias be='bundle exec '

Keen observers will notice the trailing space after the command. This space allows for alias chaining and can be helpful.

The resulting shortcut allows this:

bundle exec rspec

To this:

be rspec

The ‘alias’ command is super useful and has many applications to help remove repetitive typing tasks.

Installing RMagick on macOS Sierra

I ran into a problem recently on macOS Sierra, trying to install the RMagick ruby gem. I was using ImageMagick 7 installed via HomeBrew, with this error:

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing rmagick:
 ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
current directory: /Users/rbazinet/.rvm/gems/[email protected]_admin/gems/rmagick-2.16.0/ext/RMagick
/Users/rbazinet/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20170203-49311-bi1omy.rb extconf.rb
checking for gcc... yes
checking for Magick-config... no
checking for pkg-config... yes
checking for outdated ImageMagick version (<= 6.4.9)... no
checking for presence of MagickWand API (ImageMagick version >= 6.9.0)... no
checking for Ruby version >= 1.8.5... yes
checking for stdint.h... yes
checking for sys/types.h... yes
checking for wand/MagickWand.h... no
Can't install RMagick 2.16.0. Can't find MagickWand.h.
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary
libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more details. You may
need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
 --with-opt-dir
 --with-opt-include
 --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
 --with-opt-lib
 --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
 --with-make-prog
 --without-make-prog
 --srcdir=.
 --curdir
 --ruby=/Users/rbazinet/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/$(RUBY_BASE_NAME)
To see why this extension failed to compile, please check the mkmf.log which can be found here:
/Users/rbazinet/.rvm/gems/[email protected]_admin/extensions/x86_64-darwin-15/2.3.0/rmagick-2.16.0/mkmf.log
extconf failed, exit code 1

After a bit of trying to install the gem by setting the C_INCLUDE_PATH to the location of the MagickWand.h file, the gem could still not be installed. A Google search revealed the solution. It seems the RMagick gem (v 2.16.0 as of this writing) is not compatible with ImageMagick 7.

The StackOverflow articles points outthe necessary steps to get it to work:

Install version 6 (uninstall existing imagemagick if needed):

brew install [email protected]

Since this is keg-only, you should then force-link it:

brew link --force [email protected]

This installed imagemagick version 6.9.7-4 for me.

Afterwards, the gem then installed successfully. I am including the version numbers for future readers:

This solution worked great and RMagick installed without having to jump through any other hoops. Hope this helps.

Fix Ruby Malloc Error on macOS Sierra

After upgrading my iMac to macOS Sierra I have experienced a few issues that I thought I’d document here, both for myself and to help others.

Problem

The latest issue I found when trying to run a rails console command for a client application. The result was a hung terminal session and this message:

ruby(50426,0x7fff96cd43c0) malloc: *** malloc_zone_unregister() failed for 0x7fff96cca000

I’ve never seen this one before and with the terminal session hung, I had no real way to debug. Thanks to Stackoverflow, the solution was pretty simple.

Solution

What I found pointed to the Skylight gem version (0.8.1) I was using. Changing the version 0.10.6, bundling and running the console again fixed the issue.

I wondered about the root cause the issue though and did a bit of research to see if I could figure out why this one gem caused such a failure. Knowing what I know about the Skylight gem and being developed at least partially using Rust, I started there. Looking at the Skylight gem source, there is indeed references to using Rust.

A bit of spelunking Rust issues revealed there were some issues with earlier macOS Sierra betas. I was using 0.8.1 of the Skylight gem, built before Rust was fixed. One in particular looked very suspect.

Everything is working great now. I hope this helps someone with this really odd error.

Fixing Nokogiri Installation on macOS Sierra

Nokogiri seems to be the source of many problems on my Mac and after upgrading to macOS Sierra, I wasn’t very surprised to have problem.

Problem

You may get an error similar to:


ERROR: Error installing nokogiri:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
Using pkg-config version 1.1.7
checking if the C compiler accepts ... yes
checking if the C compiler accepts -Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future... no
Building nokogiri using packaged libraries.
Using mini_portile version 2.1.0
checking for iconv.h... yes
checking for gzdopen() in -lz... yes
checking for iconv... yes
************************************************************************
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Building Nokogiri with a packaged version of libxml2-2.9.4.

Suggesting using system libraries with:

gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries

Which leads to other less than helpful suggestions.

Solution

It seems after the macOS upgrade and moving to Xcode 8.0, command line tools were not installed.

I was able to get Nokogiri installed by first installing the Xcode command line tools:

xcode-select --install

Then install Nokogiri using the system libraries:

gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries

I hope this helps someone trying to solve a problem that seems should have been solved better by now.