Jitbit Software Blog

How To Bend The Universe

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:15:00 +0000

I know a Russian guy who's grandfather has bent the universe once.

Long time ago he worked at a plant and desperately needed a special kind of grindstone for his machine. The grindstone of a specific diameter and shape that he could not find anywhere, it's not something you just buy in a hardware store.

"I kept thinking and thinking about this grindstone" - he said - "It was the only question sitting in my head. I went to sleep and woke up with it. I really needed that stone, I would love to buy it, but where? And all of a sudden - I just found it. Just like that, lying on the ground near the bus stop. I've bent the universe."

via Roman

It's exactly like in sports - when your body follows your eyes. I played tennis for 10 years when I was a kid and my tennis coach used to say "Look! Look ahead. Look where you want the ball to be, your body will do the rest."

15 years later, on the racetrack, my motorcycle coach used to say "Look! Look ahead! Don't look at the tarmac, look into the corner and your body will do the rest and make the bike follow your look. Don't use the handlebar to turn, use your eyes instead".

Just like the body follows your eyes, the reality follows your thoughts. Keep thinking, keep trying. Keep visualizing your dream, turning a dream into a goal. Then add deadlines to your goal and make it real. Keep your eyes on the goal and your hands will do the rest.

Developing a Haul Truck (MS Employee Interview)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:05:00 +0000

I just had a Skype-chat with a close friend of mine who works at Microsoft. With his kind permission I'm posting some of the quotes below (translated by me):

"...you know, working on a gigantic project is somewhat annoying. And most projects in Microsoft - really are huge. It's like fine-tuning a small screw in a haul truck.

You can't just add some feature to the core engine and go home with a "yeah, I made something" feeling. Instead, you spend three weeks developing a couple of small things, spending 40% of your time in meetings, emails, researches etc. Then it's another 2+ weeks to test it, review it, polish it, discuss it (more emails & meetings). Then there are 24+ hours of deployment. And finally you see that some tiny thing has changed by 1% and, well, "this rocks". At least it's supposed to.

And that's my web-development team, which is considered to have a relatively FAST development cycle. Windows team is like three times slower, you're lucky to ship something once in two years. Not to mention the guys from some "Windows Installer Testing Team" - those guys are real samurais, I would never be able to work there.

...It's not that bad. I guess it's just the size of the "haul truck" that makes it this way. If you tune something wrong in a haul truck and send it back to the mines - it'll smash everything in sight and then blow itself up. Unlike tuning a bicycle, tuning a haul truck requires lots of thinking, lots of talking, lots of planning and lots of developing... This sucks to me though."

Another reason why I should buy from a small software company.

Looking for Product Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:09:00 +0000

Even being extremely busy constantly improving our existing products, we are now looking for new product ideas and decided to launch a contest.

If you have an idea of a great web-application (both hosted and installable on a server) or a desktop app that will ease your everyday work - please share it with us. The winner gets a free license for the product with free upgrades for lifetime, mentions on our homepage, copyright notices inside the product, and huge - I mean Huge - discounts for all Jitbit products. Please use our contact form to send us your thoughts.

If Games Had Super-Easy Mode

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:37:00 +0000

Hilarious video @collegehumor

Jitbit Turns Five Years (Thanks Ken!)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:26:00 +0000

I just realized, that this June is five years since I started Jitbit Software. Seems like it was yesterday. Actually, I started in 2002 as a tiny custom software development studio, but the "Jitbit" brand is only five.

Thats our website back in 2005. Have a look. We had three products in our line and were making much as ... $700 a month.

The first online order was in July, one month after the launch, which is considered a great success among the "shareware" authors. I guess this was a great motivator for me ("look, there's actual money here"). The order was for Net Profile Switch from a guy named Kenneth. I was so surprised that it worked and it was not some stolen-credit-card-fraudulent-guy, that I looked up the customer's address and even found his house on a satellite map. Thanks, Ken! Thanks for helping us start. Thanks for helping us going all the way from "one-man-in-a-garage" to becoming a member of the Microsoft Partner Program that offers industry-leading products.

Lessons learned:

Forget about software protection - software pirates are your friends, at least when you begin. People who use pirated versions - they never buy. So if you're coding some licensing system - just stop. You'll buy one when you'll start making money.

SEO is everything. Nuff said.

Keep trying. Your product may not work. Jitbit has a dozen of unsuccessful projects that never became bestsellers. Here's one of them. And even if a project has failed - don't abandon it. Make it a free and/or open-source product, let it attract that "link juice" for you. Make sure you get the most even from a failed product.

PS. I guess we should launch some birthday discounts now, shouldn't we? Stay tuned.

Jitbit Summer Coupon Discount Codes

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:21:00 +0000

Just a short note to let you know that you can get a discount. Enter this coupon code when ordering - "LOGO-JB" - and get a 8% discount for all our products (works till the end of this summer).

Android vs. iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:32:00 +0000

via greywulf.

Optimizing the Funnel

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:01:00 +0000

If you think of it - everything that a startup does (except for the actual software development part) is "optimizing the funnel".

It's all about making it easy for the customer to find, try and buy the product.

Designing a nice website and writing a definitive description for your product. Promoting and SEOing the website. Buying AdWords and sending out news hoping to attract the buzz - it's all about shortening that path: finding, trying and buying.

Here are some tips on how a mISV can improve the conversion rate:

Describe your product carefully. Work on the "bounce rate". Your product description has two tasks: a) - a visitor should be able to tell what your product does just by glancing at the text. And b) - tell what makes it different from similar products.

Offer .EXE not .ZIP downloads Not everyone is familiar with archiving.

Have a "launch me" checkbox at the end or your installer. This is a must.

Have this checkbox CHECKED by default!

All "download" links on your website should point to the actual file. Not some download page.

Don's ask for the user's email on the download page. Only if its a web-based product sign-up.

Keep your "sign-up" page neat (for web-based products), requiring as few details as possible. Have your friends and colleagues look at it.

"Buy" links should point to the actual order form, where users enter their payment info. But also keep in mind that this page is a place to slow down a bit and stay delicate - let users review the order, change the quantity.

Gmail SMTP

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:41:00 +0000

I'm so sick and tired of trying to make the Gmail SMTP-server work.

If you plan to use Google-Apps for your startup's outgoing email the short answer is - don't! I'm trying to make it work for 2 years now. Two freaking years. I even created backup accounts and programmed a dispatcher that switches between them, if the outgoing email count exceeds the Google-Apps limit... It just does not work. Even with a paid account.

Tons of errors, account suspensions due to bouncing emails, every 4th email throws an exception etc. etc.

This headache is over, I'm setting up an SMTP on our own server.

Thoughts on UI-design

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 09 May 2010 20:26:00 +0000

After reading Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash I have suddenly sorted out this point: "rollovers are bad, because there are no rollovers on a touch-screen".

Popping out context menus on "mouse-over" has always been a questionable solution, but now it's becoming bad manners... Are you still showing your pop-up menus on mouse "hover"? Stop. Now. iPad is just the beginning.

Identity 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:06:00 +0000

Web 2.0 is not about "let there be a browser-based Photoshop". It's not about AJAX, Flash or HTML 5. It's not even about social networks (well, may be it is - a bit).

Web 2.0 is when you stop saying "visit www.thing.com to know more" at the end of your commercial. And start saying "search for 'thing' on Google to know more" instead.

Search - is the way most people will (or will not) find your product. Some modern browsers don't even make a difference between the address-line and the search-field, it's just one box for everything (e.g. Chrome)

Here's what my business card looks like:

No "www...com", no address, no emails.

I used to speak at some IT-security events and when someone asked me for an open-source disk encryption software, I just said "TrueCrypt". No web-site address, no post-codes or emails. Just remember the name, Google will do the rest.

Moving SQL table text/image to a new filegroup

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:25:00 +0000

Another post for ASP.NET/SQL developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

When you move an SQL-table to a new filegroup via the clustered-index recreation procedure, only "elementary" datatypes are moved (like "int", "datetime", "varchar" etc). Text, image, varbinary(max) and similar columns (aka "BLOB-fields") will stay at their current location. If you click the "storage" settings for the table under the "properties" context menu item, you'll see that the "text filegroup" is the same as before!

The "text filegroup" can't be changed without re-creating a table. And I bet you've seen this phrase a million times while googling for a solution, right? Ok, we need to re-create the table and copy all the data into this new table. But who wants to do this manually? Drop and re-create a table with all the indexes, foreign-keys, primary keys, identities... Ain't there an automated procedure for this?

There is. But it took me hours to find it in "SQL Management Studio". Here are the steps:

0. In MS SQL Management Studio click "Tools - Options - Designer" and UNcheck the "Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation" box.

1. Right-click the table and select "Design" for SQL 2008 or "Modify" for SQL 2005.

2. Press F4 to open the "properties" window.

3. Make sure that you have the table (!) selected on top of the "properties" window.

4. Change the "text filegroup" for the table.

5. Wait! DO NOT save your changes. The SQL-server most likely will throw a timeout error for your large table.

6. Instead choose "Generate change script" and copy the resulting text to the new query window.

7. Run the query.

8. Be patient. I just ran this on our helpdesk database, for the table that holds 39 GB of data and it took more than 2 hours to complete.

Alice in iPad-land

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:43:00 +0000

Some say they will never give up paper books, the experience of holding a book in hands rivals no other. I somewhat agree. But here's some new experience:

Heading for NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:31:00 +0000

I will be visiting NYC in late May. Just booked the transatlantic Delta tickets.

Would love to meet any mISVers, startup-owners, entrepreneurs in the area and grab a beer or two... Send me an email, or a twitter message if interested. I'm free evenings of May 27 and 28.

What's so great about iPad?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 10:25:00 +0000

Eric Sink has recently posted a great phrase:

We're heading toward two classes of computers: one for people like me, and one for people like my Mom.

Exactly.

Apple's iPad has helped me realize something. Some day, only a couple of years from now, there will be people, who's first computer would be - an iPad.

Some day, 5-10 years from today, there will be people, who won't know what files or folders are.

What does this mean for startups, mISV's, programmers/entepreneurs? I guess - that they should forget about desktop apps in the near future. Target the Web.

Jitbit WYSIWYG-BBCode editor at CodePlex

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:27:00 +0000

Our free WYSIWYG BBCode editor is now hosted at CodePlex. Please update your bookmarks and spread the word. Contributions are more than welcome.

WYSIWYG BBCode @ CodePlex

PS. We also consider going open source with other free Jitbit products, like Log2Sql.

[Jitbit Blog]: New server, SSL support for hosted products

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:17:00 +0000

1. New server. Good Friday was a disaster. Our main server was down for a couple of hours. It had run out of the non-paged kernel memory. Thank God it was nighttime. And thank God it was Good Friday. But I've had enough. We are done with our current providers and we are in the process of moving to a brand new server, in a new datacenter (downtown Denver), with a new technology (Hyper-V instead of Virtuozzo) and a new operating system (Windows Server 2008 instead of 2003). I hope we'll finish things up in the next few days (fingers crossed) keeping it seamless for our users and customers.

2. SSL support for hosted products we're in the process of adding SSL support for our hosted web-based applications - our Hosted CRM Software and Hosted Helpdesk Software - to protect our customers' sensitive data from unauthorized parties. We already have SSL-certificates installed, so it's the matter of moving to the new server.

Top tools for Startups & mISV's

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:57:00 +0000

Here's a short list of handy development tools used in Jitbit and useful for any startup:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition - this edition is free. Just like our next item....

MS SQL Server Express 2005 or 2008 which is a full-blown database server despite of the name. The only thing I miss in the Express edition is jobs, but they can be easily emulated.

Ankhsvn - a free Subversion plugin for Visual Studio. And consider buying some storage from an SVN-hosting provider. There are plenty of affordable solutions, even the free ones.

IcoFX - a great free icon editor. The one built into Visual Studio lacks the alpha-channel compatibility.

TrueCrypt - a free open source disk encryption tool. All our source codes and sensitive customer data for Hosted Helpdesk and Hosted CRM is stored on encrypted drives maintained by this tool. The drives are easy to backup by the way - just make a daily copy of the container file. This great security tool can even crypt your C: drive on the fly.

Microsoft SEO Toolkit which I already blogged about.

Google Street View Goes Stereo

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:28:00 +0000

Google street view now features a new icon:

That makes you regret you have no 3D-glasses at home.

(link to this place in Paris)

Tough week

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:50:00 +0000

We're having a tough week at Jitbit

First, our email server was down for some time.

Then, one of our developers had accidentally removed a file from the helpdesk software source codes. Its all right, we have backups. But! An automated backup procedure was initiated shortly after, overwriting the backup copy with the wrong data.

Then, the new version of Helpdesk was automatically published without this critical file, causing a lot of errors from our customers. Our Hosted Helpdesk was partially down for 20 minutes (was not accepting new tickets via web interface).

Somehow I managed to restore the file, even though it was stored on a TrueCrypt-volume (and kudos to TrueCrypt - its volumes even support undelete tools).

Now, how we plan to prevent this in the future.

Our backup plans and deployment procedures are reworked to prevent conflicts and overwrites. But most importantly, we're moving all our source-codes to Subversion. (btw Jeff Atwood has a great article about it). We also decided to host the Subversion database at a third-party server, and picked ProjectLocker as our provider. There's also a free Subversion plug-in for Visual Studio called Ankhasvn which we strongly recommend to all bootstrapping startups.

PS. We're currently working hard to add iPhone-support to our forum software, very excited about it. Please send us any thoughts and suggestions on this.

Fixing The Blogger.com JS-error "Access Denied"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:32:00 +0000

If you host your blog at blogspot, you are experiencing a javascript error "access denied" for the last 48 hours. Lots of people are reporting this bug, but it's still not fixed. A temporary fix is:

<script type='text/javascript'> window.onerror = function() { return true; } </script>

Edit your template HTML and paste this code somewhere inside the <head> tag.

UPD: Please note this fix does not "solve" the actual problem, it just hides the annoying error message. We still have to wait for Google to fix this.

Twitter best practices for small business owners

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:48:00 +0000

I saw a lot of posts on the BoS forum where people don't "get" Twitter and the way they can they benefit from having a Twitter account for their mISV/startup. Here's some best practices based on how we use Twitter at Jitbit:

1) Post your feeds to Twitter. Jitbit has its news feed, blog feed and "latest releases" feed published to Twitter. We use Twitterfeed for this, but in the process of moving to Feedburner since they also started offering this feature.

2) Install a Twitter-client. We use Twirl for our PCs and Tweetie on the iPhones. Twitter clients are great because they act like IM-software: as soon as someone mentions your product, or you, or some search-term you are interested in, or retweets you, or sends you a direct message or a reply - you get an alert in your system tray. Instantly. This is just great.

3) Don't forget to add one or more twitter-searches to your twitter-client. And configure these searches to appear in the updates list along with the posts from people you follow.

One of our customers was really amazed how fast this works. He twitted about our Helpdesk software and we got back to him within 7 minutes to help him with his issues (of course we were lucky to be in the same time zone, it wouldn't work that fast if you and your customer are on different sides of the Atlantic, but anyway - imagine how great this is for the customer even if you answer in a couple of hours).

4) Use Google Reader. I already blogged about tracking your product mentions using Google Reader and sharing interesting posts on Twitter.

We had Downtime Today

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:30:00 +0000

The short version: Jitbit's email-sending server was down for more than 5 hours. This was due to a technical error. We screwed up. I apologize to all the affected users, sorry for all the inconvenience caused. All unsent order confirmations and license information were resent manually. Most of the support cases you sent us - have reached us, but some may have been lost.

The long version: .NET framework has a bug that they have been promising to fix for 3 years now. The bug is - the .NET Framework's SmtpClient class never closes its connection to the SMTP-server. After hours of email-intensive work your server has thousands of open TCP-connections to the email server. That leads to another problem called "too many open connections" causing your server to response slowly. The workaround is to lower the idle timeout for the connection so it closes automatically. But the workaround sometimes does not work if the timeout is configured BEFORE you set up a host for the SmtpObject...

Anyway. Our server has stopped sending out email notifications. We have not tested the "workaround" before deploying it to our server.

Now Patrick McKenzie has a great list of standard industry responses to outages:

"Outage? What outage?"

"Please see our status page, which we’ve conveniently located in electronic Siberia."

"ATTENTION ALL USERS! 0.7% of you were affected by some very serious sounding things yesterday! Please be worried unnecessarily even if you weren’t affected, and swamp our support line, who we will provide no effective tools to tell you whether you’ve been affected or not!"

We admit the error and apologize to you. Sorry. We screwed up. But we're still here to help in case you need us.

Paid Review Sites Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:53:00 +0000

ReviewMe.com

Pros: Has a lot of blogs registered. Works nice when you pick a blog yourself.

Cons: Totally sucks when you create a "campaign" (a proposal for bloggers) and let bloggers pick it. After you create a "proposal", there's no chance to approve a blogger before reviewing your product. Any blogger who meets the criteria will do. My criteria was - Google-PR 3 and "3 stars" rating at least. All I got was a couple of robotic posts in some China-hosted splogs for almost a $100.

PayPerPost.com

Pros: Nice and easy UI

Cons: Errors on the website. And really bad support. I got a bunch JS-errors in IE8 when trying to add funds to my account. I got a number of "unsecure content" warnings from both IE8 and FF (you know, the ones that popup when you mix "http" and "https"). After reviewing their support forum, I found that I'm by far not the only one having this issue. And when I submitted my issue to this forum all I got was moderation and deletion of my messages. Duh.

Looking forward to try SponsoredReviews.com, updates to come.

PS. We still offer a free copy of Macro Recorder for a blog review, learn more.

Google Maps Made My Day: How To Get to Honolulu by Car

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:54:00 +0000

Ever wondered how to get to Hawaii without spending a penny on airlines? Ask Google Maps!

Now look at the directions. This is awesome.