Innova Partners / Loosely Typed in Ohio

General I Hate You, Apple Customer Service (Updated!)

Posted by Jon Canady on October 23rd, 2008

Final Update!: A gentleman from Apple Executive Support (I think) just contacted me regarding the case. He was very courteous about the whole thing. I told him the honest truth: that I’m no longer completely enraged but that I just expected someone at the Apple Store to be able to help, or for my return to be given preferential treatment (since it’s a return), but he mentioned that it’s a custom order thing with new hardware. He said they were investigating whether or not they could get something expedited out for me, and I appreciate that. It’s a little weird that I had to go this far up the chain to get an expedite, but it looks like things are in good shape now.

Update!: It turns out that “a day or two at the factory and then overnight shipping” means 7-10 business days. When questioned, the official response from the “AppleCare Support Admin” was “well, it takes a while to build the unit, and we have to ship it from China.” Then why the hell did you say overnight? Also, see the comments for various people trying to defend Apple’s policy.

Like any good Mac tool, I ordered the new 15″ MacBook Pro the day they were announced. I could rationalize the purchase ’till next week, but the bottom line is I wanted a spiffy laptop and I ordered one. I even custom-configured it with a larger, faster hard drive!

That last bit’s important. For want of this hard drive in my defective unit, Apple Support completely shit all over me.

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General OWASP AppSec 2008: Day 3

Posted by Chris Green on September 24th, 2008

Today brought us the real meat of the week, conference day one. This is my first industry engagement and I found it quite easy to get registered, figure out where things are happening and understand the lay of the land. Quite a bit happening all at once; three different presentation tracks, a bustling vendor area, many coffee-and-tea stops (which I used frequently!), people moving all around, and just a lot of good energy around the building. To keep this on the lighter side, I’ll bullet out what presentations I chose with a quick comment.

DHS Software Assurance Initiatives: A thorough discussion on integrating security into the SDLC with government best practices. Keyed me into a lot of materials I’d like to read!
HTTP Bot Research: This was a great talk on botnets, past present and future by shadowserver. A lot of time was spent on the Georgia conflict and looking at the first botnet attack from the U.S. and the second from Russia. I really enjoyed it!
Get Rich or Die Trying - Making Money on The Web, The Black Hat Way: This was my (and Jon’s) favorite talk. It was a veiled comic presentation that hammers home business logic flaws.
Using Layer 8 and OWASP to Secure Web Applications: Two of the City of New York’s security guys lead this presentation on how they’ve developed their software development policies and practices.
Industry Outlook Panel: Several big names in corporate security discussed their thoughts on a variety of topics. I really wish it was a double session, 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time.
OWASP Testing Guide - Offensive Assessing Financial Applications: This was presented by a jet-lagged no-BS Brit who laid out some good testing primer.

cough

OWASP Live CD: This turned out to be a lot less on the live CD and a lot more about a beta email phishing project loaded into a VM image. It scared the devil out of me, very powerful software. Apparently scared a few other folks too as it may not ever get released because it works so well.

Finished the night up with the (ISC)2 cocktail hour (free booze!) and they announced a new certification, the CSSLP.Then we took a walk to Times Square again which is infinitely cooler at night (duh).

Back in and getting rested for tomorrow. Can’t believe it’s nearly Thursday already!

Goodnight from Grand (street)!

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General Great opportunity for a salesperson

Posted by Matt Scantland on September 15th, 2008

Looking for a great career in technology sales and marketing? Join the team at Innova Partners, the very successful healthcare software company in Columbus.

You’ll have an important role with imebase, our new on-demand product for the healthcare industry. As our first dedicated imebase salesperson, you’ll have a big impact in helping us develop our sales and marketing program, while developing your skills in selling Software-As-A-Service, a model that will come to dominate the software industry over the next decade. You’ll be supported by an excellent development and operations team, and will have ample marketing budget and support.

We offer a great work environment in Downtown Columbus; a fun, talented group of employees; and an opportunity with a new product that will improve your resume more in the next two years than practically anything else you could do. We also offer 100% paid health insurance, a great base salary, and a commission structure that will make you a lot of money if you can sell.

Responsibilities:

Developing and managing relationships with customers
Respond to incoming leads; generate outbound leads via phone, email, web
Achieve sales goals, while creating satisfied and referenceable customers
Demonstrating imebase via the Web

Required Skills/Experience:

1-5 years of quota carrying software or technology sales and account management experience.
Consistent increase in earnings and commissions throughout sales career
Strong written and verbal communications skills
Great customer references
Solid computer skills and interest in technology
2 or 4 year University Degree
High energy
Great attitude and overall nice person

Send an email if you think you’re the right person.

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Design, General, Open Source Goin’ ’bout things tha wrong way ’round?

Posted by Kent Broestl on August 7th, 2008

I was trolling the internet tonight (I want a nice ajax-y image gallery for Drupal — thumbnails on one side, nice big picture on the other), and I came across this interesting article:

Project outline and UI Design for an AJAX-powered Image Gallery Module

Okay, let’s leave the fact that he’s using ’scribd’ aside… This presents a rather novel approach to problem solving:

Step 1: Acknowledge the existence of a problem and quantify it.

Step 2: Define the UI to solve the problem.

Step 3: Hammer out the technical side of everything, keeping the problem (step 1) and the UI (step 2) in mind throughout.

Step 4: Profit!

Okay… I just threw Step 4 in for giggles.

This is a huge issue in Open Source (I love my Debian box, but I gotta admit my Mac does things more elegantly…) and for Drupal specifically. Anyone who has used Drupal for more than about a month knows that it can do pretty much anything. (Make some toast? You bet. Just install toaster.module) The problem with Drupal is finding which particular switch, in which arcane location, is going to fix whatever problem it is that you have.

And let’s face it: Being nerds usually means that we fixate on Step 3 a lot more than we fixate on Step 2.

And yes, I prefer the term ‘nerd’ to ‘geek’. Ask me why some day.

Which brings me to the second bit of light reading for the evening, courtesy of the kind folks over at Smashing Magazine:

7 Essential Guidelines For Functional Design

Yeah, a lot of it is stuff we all know already, but it still stands as a decent reminder of how to get things done, and how to evaluate if we’ve succeeded in our goals.

Oh… and I eventually had to punt on the ajax-y gallery, and went with this one. Jury’s still out. I welcome suggestions.

General I Hate You, Apple Customer Service (Updated!)

General OWASP AppSec 2008: Day 3

General Great opportunity for a salesperson

Design, General, Open Source Goin’ ’bout things tha wrong way ’round?

General AT&T, seriously?