I tested a live transaction today and went in to the paypal account to void the purchase. I was presented with the following screen:

Yes… you are seeing that right. There are two cancel buttons at the bottom!

What would be your best guess as to which button would void the transaction? And, what on earth is the Edit button for?

It was my guess that it was the button on the right. This led to the following screen:

Wow! I got it right. So, as instructed I clicked continue. At this stage it says the transaction has been voided. In my opinion it would be perfectly acceptable (and expected of most users) to leave at this stage or click something else without causing a problem.

To my amazement… clicking continue leads to this screen:

Wow! Yes I’m back at that first screen again. In fact, clicking the cancel button on the right is an endless loop. Clicking the Cancel button on the left finally led to this screen:

Given that there is actually hard cash at stake here this sort of logic issue is simply unacceptable. For a company that has almost unlimited budget there’s no excuse for it.

It would appear that this area of the site has been worked on by two separate developers in isolation, possibly wearing blind-folds.

The culmanation of technical issues and poor customer service we have experienced of late would make PayPal a very difficult service to promote with any level on conviction.

Debit cards are working fine, but as soon as we try and make a transaction with a VISA credit card we get this…

It just fails. Is anyone else having this problem? This is really baking our collective noodles and is affecting live clients…

One of the security features I’ve implemented is an integrity check for the data being posted across the wire. I won’t go in to the details of it but all I need to say is I’m using MD5 to compute a hash of the posted data.

My trouble came tonight when trying to get an MD5 generated in .NET to match the one being passed to it by PHP. In PHP the md5 function is very basic, but it’s a bit more involved in .NET.

Finally though, I found the solution. Here’s the code:

It would seem the key thing to get them to match is to use the UTF7Encoding. Most of the MD5 examples around the web for .NET though seem to indicate you should use UTF8.

I’d be interested to know if this is the right way to go about cracking this nut, but for now, it’s the only way I can find.

I, too, was surprised as I believed it to be fairly common knowledge that if you set the Display Language for Google Mail to US you gain access to the latest functionality being rolled out by Google. I remember that when I first signed up to Google Mail there was a note adjacent to the language drop-down indicating this point.

However, I have not found any reference to this in or around Google Mail since… which leads me to believe it is something only indicated at the sign-up stage.

As of this post, new functionality includes smarter management and colour-coding of labels.

Anyhow, this post is in case it’s not as common knowledge as I previously thought…

If you read my post on password generation using twitter you will know I’m currently working on the process of adding users to the system. A neat little user experience trick I like, that you’ve no doubt seen elsewhere, is to check the availability of a username as the user is typing.

Looking up the username on the server and returning a response via AJAX is pretty simple (especially with JQuery), but every time the function is called a lookup on the user table is processed. Therefore, we don’t really want to do a lookup every time the user presses a key.

The first solution to the problem of this could be to add a ‘check availability’ link next to the username field, but this is a bit… erm… scrappy. The best option would be to wait until the user has stopped typing for a while. Well, thanks to a great little jQuery plugin called TypeWatch this is a doddle.

Here is my code. You’ll need jQuery and the TypeWatch plugin to make this work. Assumptions - my username field is ID’d Username, the AJAX query returns the text of the availability and puts it in to a span ID’d usernameAvailability.

I received a response from a guy called me Jeff asking about showing photos in facebook and the photo tag. Well, Jeff, here’s the code. As you’ll see, there’s nothing to it! I’m not sure if this will help but feel free to post a comment (or anyone else) and I’ll do my best to answer.

 <?php
// the facebook client library
include_once 'fbclient/facebook.php';

// this defines some of your basic setup
include_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$facebook->require_frame();
$user = $facebook->require_login();
$facebook->require_install();

$friendsPics = $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT link

FROM photo

WHERE aid IN (SELECT aid FROM album WHERE owner IN (SELECT

uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1=$user))");

$friendsPicCount = count($friendsPics);
srand(time());
$randomPicID = (rand()%$friendsPicCount);

$thepic = $friendsPics[$randomPicID];
echo "<fb:redirect url=\"$thepic[link]\"></fb:redirect>"
?>

As with most back-ends, our system has user accounts that need login credentials. One of the things I’ve always hated about managing users (Email, FTP, Web - doesn’t really matter) is trying to think of good strong passwords. So, I wanted to add a simple password generator to our user management system. I’ve done this many times before using word lists, random characters etc but this time, I thought I’d be a bit more new web about it!

Twitter exposes the public feed of the last 20 twits as XML or JSON (see the Twitter API doc) which is a great source of totally random content.

The idea behind the password generator is to take this feed, find 2 random words that are long enough and then put them together. I’ve chosen to also put some digits on the end for a bit of added security but that could easily be tweaked.

Take a look:

It’s actually quite addictive to see what password it might serve up next. As yet, there has been no potty mouth, but I can see that a bad word filter could be necessary.

The suggest link is just a bit of Ajax to call the server side method.

The only slight issue with the twitter public timeline is that it’s global, so you don’t know what languages might be contained within. To make sure I only pull back english words, I’ve just used a simple reg-ex on the XML feed which looks like:

preg_match_all('/ ([\\w]{5,15}) /i', $publicTwits, $words);

There’s something satisfying about getting other people to generate the passwords for me! Happy twitting!

The exact question was this:

We’re developing an interesting app at the moment, and in an attempt
to make it as easy to use as possible we’re looking at other peoples,
erm, “backends”…

So for example, I really like Basecamps simplicity, although it
doesn’t look that polished, etc…

Just wondering what opinions, recommendations others on underscore
have? What’s your favourite interface or stands out the most?

A little glib maybe, but nevertheless I think most people know what I mean… I had about 13 responses to this question and only one of them did not try to define “backend” to me… LOL, fuck me. Thanks for your fine input guys. LOL. Honestly, have I missed something?

Next time someone asks me for a fag outside a pub, I’m going to call a meeting with everyone else outside and make sure that the unsuspecting blagger (sorry sponger, sorry I mean, cigarette less person), knows exactly what a fag really is (and of course is not) and then ignore him/her.

If it wasn’t for the fact that we are developers/designers ourselves, I’d be pulling the old “how many developers does it take to change a light bulb?” joke…

Anyway just to clarify what a backend is for everyone - here is what I think I learnt:

The front end is the website thing that anyone can see? And the bit they login into, to change their details or to do something is the admin bit? The access database and the frontpage bits are the backend?

So for example, Basecamp has a front end and an admin tools bit (which bit is the bit before you sign up?), and a back-end bit that we can’t see; and another bit that the Basecamp people use to make any of their global changes? Do they (the Basecamp people) use a front end or a back end or the admin bit? I’m so close, i know it.

Glad that’s cleared up then.

With the design we focused on the luxurious; with a confident style that immediately let’s the user know exactly what the site is about. We utilised their recent brand overhaul and made it the centrepiece of the site.

Placing the booking form on nearly every page to makes sure that the visitor knows what is expected of them at all times if they choose to proceed, and while this seems a little risky, the response so far has been an improvement.

Hambledons are very happy with the simplicity of editing the content and the ease at which they can upload and display images in such a pleasing manner (the zooming rocks).

Overall a happy customer with a useful website that’s improving their business. lovely.

I’ve written a subject in an outgoing email, pressed tab to start writing the body and despite the cursor showing up in the body the text I now write is still in the subject… It’s driving me bonkers.

Please Apple I don’t want to return to Firefox for day to day stuff, please fix this asap.

Interestingly the admin for Wordpress seems to work now, which is great. As I find more stuff, I’ll post, I’m kind of hoping this is me being deficient in coffee or something…

Update: It seems to be something to do with the shift key… Apart from that, it seems to be just me… Anyone else having similar problems?