No love from Google Checkout
Ok. . ..ok. . .I missed posting last week.
I have a good reason.
Honest.
Well, at least in my mind, it is.
I’ve been working with one of my clients to get another website live, which happened successfully last weekend. I spent a good part of the last couple of weeks creating the go live checklist and going through a couple of dry runs before the actual go live. Of course, everything went without a hitch from my side.
What’s your takeaway? If you want an uneventful launch (if you don’t, maybe you don’t need to be doing this), spend some quality time creating a go live checklist. Then, take that checklist and do a dry run, updating the list with items you may have missed. Wash, rinse and repeat until you feel like you have everything covered. Then, on the day you go live, update the checklist with anything that you may have missed or gotten out of order. That way when you do your next go live, you’ll have a starting point to create a new checklist. I’ve been following this method for a number of years and the only time I’ve had issues is when I didn’t follow this formula to the letter.
This weekend, I’ve got a number of projects to work through. . .initial port of a very successful iPhone app as an Android app, do some testing of the pre-alpha version of Terrastore, install MongoDB and figure out a way to quickly and efficiently load ~10GB of unstructured data in under 3 minutes and finally spend some time giving serious consideration to Appcelerator Titanium for iPhone and Android development for a couple of client’s mobile applications.
The other big thing that I’m working my way through right now is upgrading a client’s app to support Terracotta 3.1.1 from 3.0.1. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but we had used the Spring elements in the 3.0.1 config and that is no longer supported in 3.1.1. However, it hasn’t been too bad, but there are still a couple of sticking points I’m working through. Based on what I have seen so far in the conversion, I absolutely *love* the Ehcache visualizations that are provided in the developer console. It should help considerably in tracking hot and cold caches. We’ve written some monitor scripts to know this data, but it was only at a Tomcat (L1) level. Now, we’ll see how it’s getting hit as Terracotta sees it. So far, very cool.
Here’s my horror story for the week. The short story, a long time ago, I had an AdWords account shutdown by Google for not having quality landing pages. (That’s another story unto itself.) This past week, I tried to purchase a subscription using Google Checkout using the credit card that was associated with my disabled Adwords account. I was able to place the order, but my card was declined. I called my card issuer and they said they were not seeing any charges coming through from Google. Then, I startd emailing Google Checkout for more info. After about 5 days, they replied with some generic verbiage. I replied to that email and I got back a much higher quality email stating that I should contact Google Adwords to see what they could do on their side. Now, I’m stuck in that email pit. If your payment doesn’t process in 7 days with Google Checkout, they cancel your order. This is really a pain not only for me, but for the publisher I’m trying to give money to. Hopefully this is resolved soon. It’s hard to believe that there is not a phone number that I can call to try to move this through a little faster, but I understand why they don’t do it. At this point, I won’t be using Google Checkout anymore, which is sort of a bummer because I really like it. I’ll let you know what happens once it is resolved.
If you are looking at Android development, you really need to get a CommonsWare Warescription from Mark Murphy. What’s a Warescription you may ask? It gives you access to all of Mark’s books and all the associated updates for 1 full year. The price? $35.00. As of today, that means 3. . .count them. . .3 books on Android development. It also gives you access to Mark’s “office hours” where you can chat with him using Campfire. I haven’t taken advantage of the chat yet, but after this weekend, there’s a really good chance I will. If you are even a little interested in Android development, you need to head over to Mark’s site at https://commonsware.com/Android/ (Note: I pay for my Warescription of of my own pocket and I’m not getting anything in return for this glowing review 🙂 Are you happy FTC? )
Finally, I’m still trying to figure out my LOTY (language of the year) to learn for 2010. I guess Objective C turned into my 18 month language, so I really need to get on the ball and make my decision. I’ve narrowed it down to Scala and Clojure. There is going to be a Pragmatic Studio Clojure Training in Reston in March which looks like it might be the bomb. It’s being conducted by the the guy that created the language (Rich Hickey) and the guy that wrote the book on it (Stuart Halloway). I saw Stuart at the RTP No Fluff conference this year and was very impressed.
I’m also going to be going heads down with Android development in 2010, along with keeping up my ObjC and Java development.
2010 is shaping up to be another brain twisting year and I’m really looking forward to it.
If you have any questions or comments about anything I blogged about today, please leave a comment below.