Before heading to Shanghai, and while I was there, numerous people asked if I was going to the Shanghai Expo which is, as far as I can tell, the equivalent of a World’s Fair.  It has drawn thousands of extra visitors to Shanghai and lasts a full six months.  Well, I couldn’t find a compelling reason to go.  Hearing that there were long waiting lines sealed the deal.  Why do I want to do this?  OK, on to the real story:

The real reason for going to Shanghai was to have another CMIC retreat with Chris.  Peter and Chris had been to Shenzhen twice before, and since Peter’s trip to the US freed up a bed, the idea to spend some time working closely with Chris was hatched.  Well, I stayed about five full days and we worked every day from morning until bedtime only breaking for meals and the World Cup match between Argentina and Germany.

Well, I can’t argue at all with the results of the trip:

• Peter and I blasted through a release of the 1.1 software the day I arrived.  Actually, he upgraded the servers with all the changes while we were asleep and I made sure the system was running as expected the next morning.  A few bugs were discovered (as well as some fraudsters), but we took care of it quickly.
• Chris and I, working side-by-side, cranked out the callback feature making it possible to initiate calls as well as send calls.  I knew we could get this done during the trip, but I was surprised that we got it working end-to-end in just two full days.
• I bumped up my bash command line skillz several notches by just sitting with Chris and asking questions.  I really hope to be able to zip around the shell soon.
• Chris took me on a survey of the Ruby on Rails development system, which looks like a real pleasure to program in.  I can’t wait to learn it inside and out.  I also spent some time alone working on some sample code and problems.

Some fun things we did:

• We worked in some great locations, notably:  1) The Park Hyatt Cafe at the millionth floor (ok, 91st) of the International Financial Center (IFC) building.  We enjoyed expensive (and decent) cappuccino and the best view in the city.  2) Mocha Cafe in People’s Square Park.  This place is hidden behind the entrance to an art museum.  It appears to be unknown to the masses because, despite its size, there were only a couple of parties there.  We enjoyed a hot lunch in the humid pre-storm afternoon, then escaped inside to AC while it poured outside.  It felt good to crank out more code while looking out onto the park in a thunderstorm.
• Watching the Germany – Argentina game in a German restaurant.  We got the best seat in the house simply by asking, “Can we put a table HERE?” From experience, I predicted that Germany would win and that if Argentina got behind, they’d fall apart.  Neither of those was incorrect.  The Germans in the restaurant were quite mean to poor ole sad-looking Maradona whenever his face was shown on the TV.
• Enjoyed the Monday special at Malone’s:  a 50 RMB colossal hamburger at Malone’s.  I hadn’t had a hamburger like that in months.  My was it tasty!  I respect Chris for eating another half of one, including the fries and the pint of beer it came with.  He said the week before he ate two.  Respect.

Some innerestin’ things:

• Shanghai felt so different this time around.  I guess the last time I was there with Robert, we frequented visited Suzhou, got scammed by tea show representatives, bought knock-off ties on the street, and witnessed rats skittering through local hole-in-the-wall restaurants.  But this time, I had to make a special effort to speak Chinese, it seemed like.  Every single restaurant was full of foreigners and most every waitress spoke fine English.  It was good to get back to Shenzhen for this reason.
• Shanghai was also quite expensive this time around, restaurants especially.  Granted, we didn’t do any street food, but even the Chinese restaurants was at least 130 per person (a little over $19 USD).  I guess the cheapest was an Indian restaurant with a lunch special.  That cost us 91 RMB.
• There were tons of foreigners.  Plenty were quite obnoxious.  ‘Nuff said.
• The Chinese were generally more behaved and urbane.  I saw no egregious violations like peeing in the street and only one spitting incident.

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My new favorite place to go spend a few hours and crank out some work:  High Tea.  High Tea is located in LuoHu in the building next to the Di Wang tower that is supposed to look like an open book, just across from Shenzhen Book City.  Find it by taking the escalator up between the KFC and McDonald’s (remember, this is China!).  On that floor, turn left and follow the hallway to the end.  You’ll see “Friday’s Cafe” right in front of you and an elevator on the right.  Take the elevator to the 4th floor (the highest floor that this elevator goes to).

The food is priced well since everything on the menu is half-priced.  The best deal however is between 2-5pm where you can order a snack for between 8-15 RMB and, for 1 RMB extra, you can add a drink of your choice.  The drinks to choose from are great:  coffees, teas, milk teas, ice cream and red bean drinks – and all come prepared in with a nice presentation.

Of course, for working, there’s high quality wireless internet that’s just as good as Everybody’s Happy.  The interior looks great, very modern and clean.  The only downside for us foreigners is that the menus, like Everybody’s Happy, are all in Chinese and no one speaks English.  So, take a local along or brush up on some Chinese.

We just finished up our “Call Me in China” January retreat.  My business partner, Peter, who is also a former MS employee was in town for around two weeks.  After leaving Microsoft, Peter moved to Shanghai for the more stimulating social environment and cosmopolitan feel.  Me, I still like Shenzhen.  Peter’s brother, Chris, accompanied him.  Chris, a computer engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, accompanied him and will be spending a semester in Shanghai learning Chinese.  Chris’s capacity with “Call Me in China” was officially intern and his contributions were greatly appreciated.  To learn a little more about the retreat, read more here.

We ate many meals together.  Peter and Chris leaning more towards the Northeastern style cuisine featuring dumplings and me preferring the spicier offerings of the Sichuan and Hunan regions.  Our final meal together was at a fairly small Sichuan restauarant.  Peter heard a suggestion from the waitress of what he though was “sweet chicken”.  The conversation was too fast for me to catch, unfortunately, for I knew what this “sweet chicken” really was.  Actually, it was “field chicken”.  Both “sweet” and “field” have the exact same sounds:  “tian” tone 2.  But, the characters are completely different and thus the meaning is completely different.

“Sweet Chicken”, aka “Qin1 Wa1″,  is another word for “Frog”!  I’ve grown to like frog actually and this was a tasty dish, but it was a bit to realistic for Chris’s liking.  The bodies of the poor frogs were almost intact.  The heads were missing thankfully, but the cute little hands and feet were still intact.  The underside looked otherwordly too; “Alien” was the term that Peter used.  Chris didn’t eat too much of this dish, but at least it made for some good pictures.

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Man, I can’t believe this project is finished.  It’s been in the works a long time.  Again, something that sounded very easy turned out to be involved and lengthy.  This time, despite it being a music project, I was completely ignorant of the effort that was going to be involved.

Basically, I wanted to improve my recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on the electric guitar.  I recorded it a long time ago with synthesizer tracks replacing the orchestra.  Although I was happy with the recording, the synth sounds had always been the weakness.  Just a year or year and a half ago, a friend, colleague, and fellow guitarist suggested that I redo the MIDI tracks with real orchestral recordings.

I finally got around to looking into this.  However, I was convinced that all that was involved in converting a MIDI file into orchestral sounds was running the MIDI file through some high end samples and call it good.  Boy, was I wrong.

I started out by posting a job on Elance requesting someone to convert a MIDI file into a WAV file.  I got numerous responses whose prices ran the gamut from $50 to $500.  This seemed weird, but I didn’t really think much of it.  I ended up picking a really nice and knowledgeable guy in Argentina.  He was way on the low end of the price, but I really picked him because he sounded informed and communicated well.  However, when it came time to share the job with him, I got a nice but firm email stating that he’d misunderstood the requirements and that it was way beyond what he had originally had bidded on.  He was nice enough to spend a lot of time with me to explain exactly what would be involved.  About the same time, I met a guy in China, Xiao Xie, through another friend who, having studied music and was working in the music industry here in Shenzhen as a game and advertisement composer, seemed to be a great fit for the job.  So, I hired him.  A great find!

His English was pretty good, better than my Chinese, but at least he had a command of the technical terms in English, so we could get by.  He basically confirmed what the guy in Argentina had stated:  we needed to render each instrument into a wave file, and usually each track would need to be rendered multiple times.  For example, we’d need to render some violin sections with long bow strokes with pronounced vibrato, other times we’d need to use a swift marcato, and then everything in between.  Strings are always the most difficult, but we had to do the same for winds and brass as well.  On top of that, for the challenging full orchestral moments, we rendered multiple versions of the same track to give it a full ensemble sound.  We neede to separate some tracks, like some of the flute tracks, so we could bring out the melody better.  Then, we went back, mixed it all together, reworking sections multiple times so that the balance would be good.  We added equalization, reverb, and so on.

As you can see, this is way more work than simply turning on orchestral samples, pressing “play” on the MIDI file and “record” on the WAV recorder.  We usually spent one day per weekend, for anywhere from two to six hours working through the piece.  It took about three to four months to do the whole thing.  We worked hard on it, got testy with each other from time to time, but remained friends throughout. A celebration is called for!

And, I’m very happy with it!  The CD artwork is already finished, so now, it’s just a matter of uploading the right files to a duplication company in the US and re-releasing on CDBaby.  I’ll send out another announcement once the recording is for sale.

Have a listen of a brief sample from the first movement:

And some pics from the home studio:

[View with PicLens]

One thing I’m not so good at:  Letting go of the reigns and delegating to other people.  One thing that plays into this is money.  If I can do something myself, then I’m often reluctant to spend money on someone else doing it.  Most things I can do, so I think that it’s best that I do them myself.  And so I do.  And then I end up driving myself crazy with too many obligations and deadlines.  That happened last week and I realized I had to take a break and relax.  I’d basically been working from sun up to past sun down and should have had more to show for it.  At least I realize it.  And I’m trying really hard to get better at it.  I think it’s something that’s just going to take concerted effort and practice.  And repeatedly reminding myself that I’ve got to get better at it.

Stuff I was driving myself crazy with this past week:

• Choosing membership software – There are tons of solutions out there, each with pros and cons.  Though I haven’t settled on one, I’m a lot closer.  Getting to this point though was a pain.
• Investigating merchant accounts – Same thing here with tradeoffs and pros and cons.  I use a website for advice, but that’s nothing like trusted advice, and it’s so easy to get contradicting information.  In the end, it comes down to your own investigation which is time-consuming.
• Video technical problems – Actually, there weren’t too many problems, but hunting down the right cables, testing out the green screen, etc. etc. takes time.  I spent a long time looking for a stupid Firewire 800 cable which is surprisingly impossible to find in Shenzhen now.  I had to order one from Shanghai.
• Buying a plane ticket – Once I decided that I needed to come home for Christmas, I spent a lot of time online looking for a ticket.  At first, I wanted to use my miles, but every time I went to purchase a ticket, the Delta site would tell me that “a leg of your trip is sold out.  Please try again.”  Well, thanks for telling me which one.  I had to make at least three phone calls to customer service.  In the end, I realized that since Delta partnered with Northwest (or was the same airline) and that all my flights would be on Northwest, I’d get more accurate information on their site.  One trip to the NWA site and I found a relatively cheap ticket from Hong Kong to Hotlanta.
• WordPress mail problems – A new version of a plugin that I endorse had a weird problem of stripping HTML from mail when generating mail from the “Edit Post” page, though it worked fine from the “New Mail” page.  Numerous back-and-forth with a support group didn’t yield much.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked a client’s URL – Why?  After networking around, I found out that you have to register a site in China if you don’t want it to be blocked.  I then contracted another trusted contact to help out.  In the mean time, I had to console and explain what was going on to my clients.
• Create a test ad campaign – This is just an idea that I had after creating the first website.  As part of the negotiation (due to a misunderstanding that I was forgiving with), I got some free advertising in a Shenzhen magazine.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked one of my sites – Same thing.  At least I’d seen this before.  But, this affects my ad campaign.  I now need to think about revising the ad.
• Health Certificate – As part of my visa requirement, I had to go get a medical examination at a designated hospital.  The first time, I had someone help me.  This time, it was just me.  Got it, and all is well.
• More visa stuff – Trips to police stations, getting the runaround, visiting five places until finding the right one, dealing with officials who don’t know what the process is.  This caused numerous headaches.  At least I had someone helping during key moments otherwise it would have been much longer.
• International Bank Accounts – Learning the ins-and-outs of moving money around.  What a pain.  I’ve been working on this one for weeks, it seems.  I owe my friend in Hong Kong money for purchasing my laptop.  He’s been very nice.
• Business accounting – Related to the above item, I had to contact my accountant and ask some things that have been on my mind.
• Learning RegNow’s fulfillment and affiliate system – It’s huge, complex, and poorly documented.  I often lose patience with the documents and then just settle for an-email-per-day support while I concentrate on other things.
• Finding an appropriate WordPress theme for a new site – This is time consuming and I haven’t found anything I like.  I think the solution is to hire someone to create one.  Create the job, post it, review the dozens of bids, follow-up, establish payment rules, etc. etc.

It’s about a week after I pulled back a bit so I’m wondering what I’m forgetting.  It doesn’t matter, that’s enough.  Well, one day, my head was hurting so much that I decided I needed a head massage, or more accurately a “wash head” or “xi1 tou2″, as they say in Chinese.  The beautiful thing as that there’s a place right outside of my apartment complex, a hair salon actually, that offers this.  I’ve written other posts that talk about haircuts in China.  In these haircut places, you can get these wonderful head massages before you get your haircut.  I thought my last place was pretty good, but this one takes the cake.  Here’s what you get with a “head wash” at the place next door:

• Three washes, each one lasting ten minutes.  And you’re not sitting in some stupid chair wrenching your neck backwards like you do in the US.  You’re supine on a cushioned table with your head balanced on a small padded column above a sink.  The first two washes are with shampoo.  And, once there are enough suds, the girl washing your hair will just rub your temples, forhead, sprinkle water down your closed eyes so it runs off your cheeks (very refreshing), massage your neck and shoulders.  Fantastic.  The last wash is with some sort of cleanser with a menthol sort of feel to it.  The same techniques are used.
• Five minutes to clean your ears with Q-tips.
• Five minutes of arm massage.  This is very comfortable if done well.  A lot of it is focused on massaging your hands and fingers.
• Ten minutes of back massage – great way to round out the whole experience.

After fifty minutes of that, I always end up staggering home.  A hot shower and I’m ready to hit the sack and feel revived in the morning.

Total cost:  10RMB ,or, $1.46

I forgot to announce on this site last week that my upgrade to my Cascade climbing site is now complete (I did announce on Facebook).  I used the same technique as I did for the Gore Range Site.  There are also newer movies available on various reports.  I decided to use Vimeo.  I prefer their interface to youtube’s.  Of course, youtube gets way more traffic.  You can click on the “Movies” category to see all reports with movies, by the way.  I still have several to add, including some HD ones…whenever I get around to making them.

Well, I’ve got another release ready.  You can download it here.

Of course, there’s always a heaping amount of nonsense when you’re dealing with software.  I foolishly thought I might get by this one with very little effort.  I was so close.  And yet again, at the finish line, something lassoed me an violently jerked me off my feet and put me on another part of the course to make my way through.

Here’s the good, both items have to do with how I changed my software:

• I added code to better support affiliates.  Regnow has an SDK, which is (surprisingly) designed very well, which is used to certify that your application ensures proper payment to affiliates who sell your product.  I was able to implement this in a matter of hours.  All I did was read the two page overview doc, looked at an examples, and implemented it.  Thanks, Regnow!  If only the rest of your system was this well-planned.
• I changed my install program from a crappy old copy of InstallShield (I stay as far away as possible from the new versions which are awful) to Advanced Installer, which is fantastic.  I can’t say enough about how good it is.  Nowadays, finding something good makes me happy because I’ve been burned by so many bad upgrades!  I was up and installing Snatcher and Son 3.1 in about thirty minutes.  The only difficulty was dealing with the registry, but around an hour of learning how it worked fixed all the problems.  I was able to create my installation package using the free version.  I may end up buying a license, just so I can customize the graphics and a few other little things.  At $299, it’s way more affordable than InstallShield.  Oh yes, and my installation program shrunk from 7 megs down to one.

Here’s the bad, these all come from the fulfillment side:

• I went to upload my .msi file on the Regnow.com servers and got an error message that they only support .exe files.  You’ve got to be kidding!  I shot off an email to support right away.  I can’t believe this is true, but I guess it is.  Maybe I’ll have to buy a license to Advanced Installer to get this too.
• On Upload.com, where I have a paying account, I went to modify my product and made all the necessary modifications.  It went smoothly (save for the fact that the icon doesn’t show and I uploaded both .png and .ico files…got a support message out for that).  However, I got asked to upgrade my account from a free account to a basic or premium one.  What?  I already am paying!  I went back to my product page which indeed showed that I had added a new product!  But, I am certain that I clicked on modify.  So, another support message is out.  Bah!  I won’t even go into describing how confusing their help system is.

I’m looking forward to the day when I make an upgrade and it takes a total of thirty minutes to deploy the whole thing.  As of right now, that seems a long way off.

Again, as they say in Chinese:  “Hao Shi Duo Mo”, or, “The road to success is paved with hardship.”  Too bad I don’t know how to say, “and nonsense, and foolishness, and bad designs, etc.”

Want to see some pictures of the apartment I live in?  See below.  Since I’m no longer at MS and am trying to work for myself, I’m a little low on cash flow.  So, I’ve moved into a cheaper place and am rooming with a former colleague of mine.  Actually, it was an easy transition since we’re both very low key.  I do sorta miss the privacy, but it’s not bad at all, and can be fun at times.  Anyway, I had a housing budget at Microsoft.  Actually, it was super high, until I brought it down to the reasonable level and negotiated the difference into a cash bonus instead – haha!  But anyway, my place was about 8000RMB before, which is almost $1200.  That’s pretty high end for Shenzhen (which is already an “expensive” city for China).  My place was really big too – 3 bedrooms.  Much to much for me, but I picked it because it was the cleanest place I found in a neighborhood that I knew.  The landlord turned out to be fantastic too.  She even dropped the price way down (to 5500, I think) when I announced that I had to move out (just before coming to the US for the summer).

Anyway, there were a couple of ‘hoods that we thought about moving to.  In the end, we ended up finding a place in “Hai An Cheng”, or “Coastal City” which is the name of a big mall near here.  It’s a nice area; the mall attracts a lot of high end businesses and restaurants and there is still plenty of local flavor.  There are way more local restaurants and stores that I can quickly get to now than before.  The only downside is that it’s not close to a subway.  But, I’ve found the key busses that can take me where I need to go.  Some are quite fast.  Who needs a car?

The rent is 3500RMB a month, about $500.  Split in two, that’s $250 per month.  Not too shabby.

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I have a Filippino friend down the street whom I’m jealous of.  He’s got the best place for the money I’ve ever seen.  A very cozy apartment that matches roughly the same dimensions as mine.  But, a sweet kitchen and a well-designed bathroom too.  It’s only 3000RMB.  If he moves out, I’m jumping on that place without waiting.

I rehired a girl here in China to help me port over the trip reports from my old Gore Range site to the new one.  I used the same effective technique:  Create a special page that described the job and (here’s the key) created a screencast that showed how to do the job.  A “screencast” is basically a video of your computer screen showing what you’re doing on the computer.  I created the one for this job with Windows Media Encoder 9, which has problems (of course), but is at least free.  I’ll be upgrading to Camtasia as soon as I get my new laptop (going to pick it up in Hong Kong early next week!)  They’re running a $99 promotion now for their new version for the Mac.

The screencast is a powerful tool.  My assistant was convinced that this job, using WordPress, etc. was too complex for her.  I told her to just give it a try for a couple of them.  Now, she’s cranking them out in a matter of minutes.

Total price for the website port:  $15

My adventures in the Cascades are next.  That’s a much bigger site.  Maybe I’ll even create a site for my fourteener trip reports.

My first project after leaving Microsoft was to re-release my WebSnatcher products.  Except, this time, I wanted to give this old lineup a brand new handsome face.  That included:  bundling my two products together as a simple “web downloading suite”, update the new graphics with artwork from someone who knew what they were doing, a new name, and a new website.  Of course, I included some small enhancements and a few key bug fixes, but there wasn’t really that much new in terms of functionality; it’s just a much better looking package that runs much better on vista and Windows 7 and, as a package, it’s much cheaper (by a third).

The development was a pain.  The primary source of that was wanting to move the main product, the product formerly known as “WebSnatcher”, to Unicode.  Well, that didn’t work at all (and I believe I covered exactly why in a previous post), so rolling that back was kind of a pain, especially not having source control.

Then, just before I went to the US, I ran out of time and didn’t have all the software that I needed to prepare the installation.  My copy of InstallShield was in my storage unit and one of my first jobs was to pull that out and put together the installation while I was in the US.  But, upon arriving in the US, I discovered unlucky mistake:  Apparently the software that protects my product had corrupted one of my DLLs.  After trying numerous workarounds, I realized I was stuck and had to wait until I got back to China in order to rebuild the DLL and protect it again (I had some vague memory that the protection software would corrupt files one in a hundred times or so…actually, I now have no idea if that’s true).  So, I gave up on releasing my software and forsaked two months of revenue.  But, when I started the project up again in China, I realized that it wasn’t the software at all, it was just some absurd new security feature in Vista.  How many times has Vista prevented me from “realizing my potential”?  Well, let’s not even bother counting.  I immediately got a copy of Windows 7 and installed it on my laptop and reproduced the error.  I fixed it by manually registering the stupid COM DLLs on install and not automatically through DllRegisterServer().  Easy fix…once I knew what the problem was.

Well, as big a disappointment as that was, it paled in comparison to setting up the fulfillment operations.  I assumed that once the product was actually done, setup created, website running, and everything, that the big problems were behind me.  Oh no.  And what’s worse, these problems were even more stupid than the Vista problems.  In fact, all throughout this release, every problem I ran into was not a problem solved by creativity or innovation, but some dumb barrier placed by some bad design choice or lousy support system.

It started off pretty well.  I was set on fully automating order fulfillment.  Before, when a user purchased a product, I’d get an email notification.  Then, I’d log into my Windows machine, start up the software that protected my product, input their name, generate the key, then save the registration key as a text registry file.  I’d then start up my email program, copy the usual mail text from a text file and paste it into the email, then add the registration key as an attachment and send the email.  I got pretty good at this, where it would take two to three minutes to fulfill.  It wasn’t that big of a deal since I didn’t get that many orders, but the one huge downside was that it was dependent on me.  If I didn’t check email, someone wouldn’t get their key for a day or more (if I were a user, that would irritate me).  If I went on vacation and couldn’t bring my laptop, they wouldn’t get their key for a week, or maybe more.  But, at least I set up an autoresponder to let them know (no matter, that would irritate me too).  So, I was committed to 100% automated fulfillment.

The software that I use to protect my application came with a ‘C’ API to implement your own key generating tool.  That’s exactly what I needed and it fit the requirement of the regsoft.com, my fulfillment company of many years.  They simply needed the registration key to be output to stdout (text in a console application, basically) and to know the arguments that you required to be passed to your application.  Easy enough, and I was able to implement it in just a couple of hours (the one party in this whole affair that did do a good job was the protection software).  I then, according to regsoft’s instructions, emailed regsoft and asked them to evaluate my application, I attached the application in a zip file (renamed to .ziz), I included a readme.txt file with the arguments I required and sample output.  I did everything to the letter.  They said they’d review it in two days and get back to me.

Two days came, nothing.  So I wrote back.  I got an email response saying something like, “Oh sorry, we got your email but the file wasn’t attached.  Please send it again.”  I sent it again this time from two different addresses.  Two days later, I followup and get the same response.  This time I send another email and add an FTP link with username and password (which I tested) where they could download the file.  Two days later, maybe more, I follow up again.  I get the same response, except this time they suggest that I add a link where they can download it.  So, I write back nicely saying, “You guys don’t seem to have your act together.  I’ve already provided all of this.” to which they replied with profuse apologies.

It was a little too late anyway because I had learned of another fulfillment company, a sister company in fact, called regnow.com.  This looked more attractive anyway because they had an extensive affiliate network.  So, I was committed to switching.  I started the process to get my software selling on their site.

Of course, their system was way more complex than regsoft’s.  I actually liked the regsoft system quite a bit; it was well designed, they just lacked the affiliate network and their customer service was lacking at times.  Combine the two and you’d have a strong combination.  Anyway, just getting through the first two pages took a whole afternoon.  They had huge sections to prepare affiliate marketing kits and so on.  I had to create graphics from the artwork that my designer created for me in all sorts of dimensions.  No matter, I plowed thorugh it.

Then I got to the automated key generation section.  I assumed that I’d be able to use my little Windows console app to generate my keys.  No such luck.  They had much stricter requirements:  You had to submit source code, not an executable.  And it had to be compiled by the GCC compiler (uh oh) and be able to run on a Solaris machine (or whatever).  Well, I looked a bit into this, but I hate these open source compilers; just getting them to work is a monumental effort.  I don’t understand why they enjoy making it so hard, well actually, I think I do, I should write a post on the psychology of programmers.  Anyway, I realized this was going to be an effort so I first had to ask a key question:  “My key generating application is dependent on a Windows DLL (the protection software DLL), there is no way around this.  Do you support an app that can run on Windows?”  I never really got an answer to that question, but I did submit my source code just to see what would happen.  A tech representative wrote me back with a long list of errors and told me to fix them.  Most all of them were from Windows identifiers that the GCC system didn’t understand.  OK, that settled it for me; this was the wrong battle to engage in.  Was there another solution?

Turns out, there was something that looked promising.  I had recently purchased an upgrade to my protection software which included many updates in custom key generating options.  One was a CGI library.  I’d never done that before, but how cool would it be to generate keys over the web?  Regnow supported this, that was good.  So, I just needed to upload the library to my cgi-bin folder on my website and create a little web page to test it.  I uploaded the library, wrote the page (even easier than writing the first application), and tested it.  ERROR.  So, I opened a ticket with my hosting company to find out if they supported this.  I was suspicious of one little line in their CGI documentation:  make sure your script ends in .pl or (one of the other popular CGI scripting languages).  Mine was a compiled library.  Maybe this was impossible to work.  Regardless, my ticket was there.  In the mean time, I posted the “do you supported compiled CGI libraries on your server?” question to another hosting company.  They wrote back right away with “Yes”.  Would I end up switching hosting companies too?

In the mean time, the other company took forever to answer.  The first response they gave me was, “Can you set up a test page?” to which I replied, “Look at my original request; I’ve pasted in text you need to test it.  Just save that text to a ‘test.htm’ file and open it.”  I won’t go into the details of all the back and forth, but finally they confirmed that it was indeed true – they only supported scripts, not binary CGI solutions.  Time to switch hosting companies.

I started trying to switch hosting companies.  I figured out the plan I wanted and the duration (I wanted the max length so the monthly rate would be very low).  But, my credit card was denied.  Oh no, not now.  I tried jumping over to some software that bypassed the China filters and disguised my IP address.  Still failed.  I called up the company and told them what was going on.  They suggested that I either go to Hong Kong or call someone in the US to make the purchase for me.  So, I called my mom and we walked through it at least two times, maybe three.  DENIED!  Remember, this is all balancing times between the US and China so much of these conversations took place late at night or early in the morning for me.  I called the bank and told them that I was running into these problems.  They suggested that I call the hosting company back and explain to them that I had contacted the bank and so on.  She also gave me a phone number that they could call in order to verify that I was telling the truth.  Back on the phone with  the hosting company, the customer service agent was great; he seemed to understand the pain that I was going through.  As he was communicating with some of the people looking into the credit card, he would quietly pop back on the phone with me and tell me, “They’re asking me if you sound like a real American” to which I could only reply in my best Apu voice, “Yes, thank you, hot dog, Britney Spears…”  We finally got it all straightened out, but I had to email over a scanned copy of my passport and explain again the situation, the people I talked to, the bank phone number, etc. etc. I was relieved when I woke up the next morning and I saw an email message, “Welcome to Host Gator!”  YES!!!

It took me only five minutes to upload the CGI key generating library and test it.  It worked!  Score another one for the protection software!  Now, it was just a matter of getting it plugged in to the Regnow system.  But, remember what I said about it being complex?  Well, it was basically impossible for me to figure out without plowing through reams of web page help which was badly indexed and had no search (what?!?).  So, I spent the next several days on email with support back and forth.  I asked for a phone number twice; never got one.  While these guys were helpful, they were constrained by this complex system, and their time zone.  It was basically an email per day unless I was lucky enough to catch one of them early in the morning (my time) in which case I’d get two emails in one day.  In between all that, technicians were changing parts of my submission, deleting sections, etc. etc.  This prompted more emails like, “Hey, I just added this, what happened!?”  It was a big mess, and they have a lot of improvement to make here.

I realize this post is already long so I’d better stop.  If I went into all the additional little problems of getting this product out the door, I could go on for another few paragraphs.  Let’s just say that it’s finally done and I’ve very happy with it.  An order came in almost right away and it was so sweet to not have to do a thing.  I’m looking forward to turning more of my attention to another project and spending a few hours a week working on marketing this software, something I never did the first time around (I think I could have done really well if I had any business sense back then).

I never would have thought that this little project would have been such a pain.  As they say in Chinese:  “Hao3 Shi4 Duo1 Mo2″,  “????”, or “The road to success is paved with hardship”.  Neat how you can say all that in just four words, huh?

Well, here t’is, finally!