All posts in Web

Review of nightmare with Elance provider (WebHouse)

By | August 5, 2011 | Development, Web | 1 Comment

I’ve used eLance for various outsourcing projects for a number of years.
(Great for small tasks, and an extra pair of hands until the 25th hour in a day is discovered!)

Sure, I’ve had my fair share of problems, however, all have been amicably resolved, talking with eLance and the contractor.

WebHouse
(Md. Zakir Hossain Dakua)

Recently, I had a small requirement for a WordPress theme to be slightly customised.
Unfortunately, I was heading off on holiday, so needed to outsource it, to meet my clients timescale.

I posted the job up on eLance, and had the usual 30 or so bids.

One of those, was from WebHouse (Zak D.), from Shabujbag, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Real name – Md. Zakir Hossain Dakua.
Just in case you’ve had contact from him directly, his email address is:
zakirdaq@gmail.com

I’m usually pretty good at spotting the “bulls*t” in the initial communication (typically, they’ll just say “yes” to everything")

The fixed price work was completed, and he immediately began pressuring me to release the escrow.
He also changed the job to “complete” which meant escrow would auto-release.

Due to my holiday, I didn’t have chance to review the code, was just able to check the basic functionality.

Later, when more data had been added, it was apparent there was a problem with his code.
I asked to get him to fix his own bugs, and here is where the problems started.

A contractor can create a job on your behalf!

On eLance a contractor can create a paid hourly job on your behalf, without you authorising it!
This is what happened. I asked him repeatedly to tell me how long in hours, it would take (and therefore how much) Obviously I got no reply.

WebHouse offered no reply, until he submitted a time-sheet for over 7 hours (at $20/hour) to fix these bugs.

I rejected this, however, but, was on vacation when the “review period” deadline was.

I had emailed eLance to state that I do not authorise them to charge my card.
Heck, I even cancelled my credit card before I went!

However, eLance ignored all of this, and charged my card anyway (damn pre-authorisation must of kicked in!)

Since then, I’ve had nothing but bad news from eLance support who refuse to help.

But why should they? They get their 10% commission from the $150 odd I have been scammed by.
They claim that their “WorkView” process is bullet proof, and that I could review the screenshots… etc…
This is all true, but the work he was doing, was to fix bugs he had created, on work that had already been paid for!

WebHouse has been very unhelpful, right from the start of my dispute.
Stating that the work was done, it was quality work etc…
He even started getting rude, calling me “mad” for doubting the quality of his work (all in hard to decipher, broken English)

I’m using this blog post to drive home how poor his work really was!

I just hope a prospective client stumbles across this post, and choses to decline his bid, before being let down in a similar way to me!

Resolution

Elance finally agreed (after many emails) that there was a problem with the way WebHouse worked.
Although, unfortunately, they wouldn’t take the money back off him, they did credit me with $75.

So, moral of the story, I guess:
Don’t use eLance WorkView, or eLance at all for that matter!
I’ve since moved to oDesk. Far more reliable.

Create a Google Chrome Extension

By | March 25, 2011 | Browsers, Development | 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to look into creating a Google Chrome extension for a while.

Earlier this week, I successfully RickRoll’d Rob Ashton on twitter, which in turn, after a RT, RickRoll’d several others. Many of whom replied with tweets like

@alexjamesbrown @RobAshton You bastards! ;-)

@alexjamesbrown @RobAshton Damn it! grrr.

So, that got me thinking.

What if there was a way to stop you being RickRoll’d. Then I remembered I wanted to learn how to create a Google Chrome Extension… The two ideas fused, and RickMeNot was born.

Step 1 – Create a Manifest File

I created a RickMeNot directory (and init a git repo, of course…)

Then, create a new file using <insert your favourite text editor here>

All  extensions, installable web apps and themes have a manifest file.
This is a JSON file, needs to be called, quite descriptively, manifest.json.

Read more on Manifest Files

The manifest.json for RickMeNot looks like this

{
  "name": "RickMeNot",
  "version": "0.1",
  "description": "Prevents you from being rickroll'd.",
  "background_page": "background.html",

  "permissions" : [
    "tabs"
  ],

  "icons" : {
    "48" : "icon-48.png",
    "128" : "icon-128.png"
  }
}

Most of this is fairly self explanatory.

What we’re basically doing, is setting the name, version and description of the extension.

We then specify the background_page.

A background page, is basically a long running script that manages a task in the background, while the extension is active.

This particular extension won’t need a fancy button (Browser Action) or anything like that, so we only need to specify our background page.

Permissions

One thing to take not of is the permissions array.

This particular extension needs to be able to access the urls of tabs etc… so, we’ll need permission to use “tabs”.

Background Page

Ok. So we have our manifest file that tells the extension what to do, so now we need to create a file that tells it how. This will be where the main functionality of this extension is.

Although this is a .html it doesn’t have to contain the usual doctype and other tags.

It simply needs a <script> and </script> tag, with all the script for the code in between.

Let’s start real simple:


<script>
    chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(tab_updated);
</script>

What this does, is add an event handler for the tabs.onUpdated event.

As expected, this fires when a tab (any tab) is updated.

Note: I’ve called our callback tab_updated – this can of course be called anything.

Our tab_updated function looks like this:

function tab_updated(tabId, changeInfo, tab) {
    for (a in rickUrls) {
        if (tab.url == rickUrls[a]) {
            chrome.tabs.update(tab.id, { url: 'savedFromARickRoll.html' });
        }
    }
};

Ok- so what this does, is loop through all the values in our (as yet undefined) rickUrls and checks if the tab.url (the value from the passed in tab object) is equal to one of the values in our array.

If it does, it updates the tabs url (think of this as a redirect) to “savedFromARickRoll.html” (more on this later)

Populating our array using body onload

So, now we need to populate our rickUrls array.

While our background page doesn’t have to have HTML tags, it can. It can also contain some client side executed javascript.

In this instance, we’re most interested in executing the body onload event

In our background.html we simply add:

<body onload="init()">
</body>

Our “init” function is in between the <script> </script> tags and looks like:

function init() {

    rickUrls = new Array(
      "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0",
      "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2tWVj6lXw",
      "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ5TajZYW6Y"
      )
}

In version 0.1, we’re just hardcoding a few of the known youTube URL’s

In later versions, I’ll rewrite this to check an external file / service or something to get an up-to-date list of them.

Putting It All Together

This is what our background.html looks like:

<script>

    // Simple array containing the URLs of Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up videos.
    // In this version, we're hard coding it, however later on, we'll make this dynamic
    var rickUrls = new Array();

    // Function that is called on the body onload event
    function init() {

        //fill our array with the URLs
        rickUrls = new Array(
		"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0",
		"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2tWVj6lXw",
		"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ5TajZYW6Y"
		)
    }

    // This function is called by the listener we added, when the url of a tab changes.
    function tab_updated(tabId, changeInfo, tab) {
        for (a in rickUrls) {
            if (tab.url == rickUrls[a]) {
                chrome.tabs.update(tab.id, { url: 'savedFromARickRoll.html' });
            }
        }
    };

    // Listen for any changes to the URL of any tab.
    chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(tab_updated);

</script>

<body onload="init()">
</body>

Files within an Extension

An extension can contain files, like our savedFromARickRoll.html, and you can reference them locally.

This also applies to images (see the image in our savedFromARickRoll.html – noRickRoll.jpg)

You can’t however, refer to anything else on disk (c:\ or anything like that)

This is obviously for security reasons.

Source

I’ve put all the source for this post on GitHub

You can download it here: https://github.com/alexjamesbrown/RickMeNot

What’s next…

I’ve got a couple of follow up posts planned on this.

Firslty, a short one on how to list your extension in the Google Apps Marketplace (will add link as soon as it’s ready)

Also, when I get time, I’ll write a post along the lines of calling external services to get a list of updated Rick URLs

View XML in Google Chrome

By | January 19, 2011 | Browsers | No comments

Sometimes, I need to be able to view an XML document in a browser.

While IE supports this natively, you’ll need an extension for that in Chrome.

The one I use is XML Tree by Alan Stroop.

After installing it, it simply “just works”
Viewing any server side XML page displays nice and hierarchically, similar to IE / Firefox

However, to enable opening of a local XML file, you will need to explicitly allow this in the extension settings.

chromeExtensionSettingsMenuOptionTo do this, open the extensions settings page, either by typing chrome://extensions/ into the browser, or by clicking the spanner in the top right corner > Tools > Extensions

(see image to the right for clarification)

 

In the extension settings, locate XML Tree, and click the “Allow access to file URLs” check box:

chromeXMLTreeAllowAccessToFileUrls

Now the extension will also work with local XML files

Amazon DDOS attack – hardware failure cover-up

By | December 14, 2010 | Web | No comments
Amazon AWS Logo

I’m a great fan of Amazon.
I admire what they have done for technology, especially with their AWS Platform.

However, when the company decided to blame a “hardware failure” for their outages yesterday evening, I felt they were trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

An Amazon spokesman said: ‘The brief interruption to our European retail sites last night was due to hardware failure in our European data centre network and not the result of a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attempt.’

Hacktivist group “Anonymous” had already said that Amazon would be targeted with a DDOS attack, that saw Mastercard, Paypal and Visa sites taken down for a period of a few hours, in the last 7 days

If such “hardware failures” can mean downtime in the busiest period for their ecommerce site, then what about AWS? How seriously do they take uptime? What is in place to prevent this happening on the AWS platform?

I use AWS for personal projects, as well as business critical applications at work, and chose the platform to mitigate risks of our own hardware related issues.

I believe they should come clean, and admit that Anonymous, and their DDOS attack, got the better of them, rather than forgetting about their AWS customers, and worrying them of perceived hardware outages.

It has certainly prompted me to look again at alternatives!

H&M Online Store – Usability Issues

By | November 9, 2010 | Web | No comments

I don’t normally do this. But I’m so appalled by the apparent lack of usability testing on H&M’s sparkly new online store, I thought I’d share some of the issues, in a hope someone in their web team picks it up, and does something about it.

Product Information – modal window?

Firstly, this is a website.
It is not a windows application.
If I click into a product, I still expect to use my back button, (or backspace key for that matter) to get back to where I was previously…
Instead, H&M opens up the product info into a little “modal” window

Example:

image

Opens up into inline modal window:

image

I’d much rather see a page all to itself about that product, with the “goes well with” type stuff below, or incorporated some other way.

If I failed to see the X button in the top right corner, and pressed the back button in the browser, I’m now back at the home page!

Persist my session! Or at least my shopping cart!

I was doing a spot of shopping, added about 5 or 6 things to my shopping cart, then I was called into a meeting (inconsiderate in my lunch hour, I know, but hey…)

When I returned, my shopping cart was empty!

Broken link in email confirmation

Having finally placed my order, and got an email confirmation, I was kind of interested to know when it would be turning up.

The only part where it looks like you might be able to get hold of this info is:

You can add to or change your order online or by telephone at any time until we have despatched your package.

The choice is yours!

Internet: Log onto My page where you can easily view, amend and keep track of every aspect of your order.

 

So when I click that:

image

I love H&M clothes, but I expected more from this company!

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