Frank Rietta's Work, Research, and Play

Tired of Contact Form Spam?

2008-01-25T17:45:00.000-05:00

Many of my customers have been receiving an increasing amount of spam through their website contact forms. The spammers fill in fake names, email addresses, phone numbers, and a junk message with lots of links. To counter these spammers, one must make the web-form difficult for a spambot to fill out and yet keep it usable for valued human guests. CAPTCHAS are used in a lot of places online, but randomized field names are preferable because no strain is put on a human guest.

I presented a paper, called Spam and the Ongoing Battle for Safe Communications, on randomized field names at last year's Software Industry Conference.

Those interested in my help setting up a hardened web form on a business website can contact me. My standard rate is $95/hour.

Software Marketing Metrics

2007-01-29T07:50:00.000-05:00

In software marketing, it is important to change one thing at a time and measure the results. Continual iterative improvement is the best way to achieve long term, measurable, results. So what are conversion ratios? Conversion ratios are simply tools to measure how effectively your product is being sold. They can often be easily computed directly from your web logs.

The Overall Conversion Ratio, the Download Conversion Ratio, and the Trial Conversion Ratio are particularly useful, and easy to calculate, for those selling software on the internet.

Overall Conversion Ratio (OCR)

The overall conversion ratio (OCR), Purchases/Total Visits, is the easiest ratio to calculate, but it is generally hard to make much use of since the visit count typically includes a lot of noise from search engine spiders and other non-prospective-customer activity.

Download Conversion Ratio (DLCR)

The download conversion ratio (DLCR). Total Downloads/Total Visits. Assuming you are in the business of offering a try-before-you-buy product to prospective customers, it is fair to say that a unique visitor who downloads a copy of the trial software is a prospective customer. This ratio is more useful than the OCR as there is typically less noise from automated spiders.

Trial Conversion Ratio (TCR)

The trial conversion ratio (TCR), Purchases/Total Downloads, is a great measure for how well a product sells itself to prospective customers. A low TCR indicates that there may be critical problems in the program that need to be addressed:

It does not install properly or is otherwise dead-on-arrival.
It crashes or behaves incorrectly.
It has been cracked.
It is falsely identified as malware by one or more anti-virus or anti-spyware programs.
It is low quality work for which the prospective customer just does not want to open his wallet.

Looking for More?

If you want to have more fun with ratios, you can check out my 2006 SIC paper on Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV.

If you want to get really serious about business intelligence, read the Business Intelligence Roadmap by Larissa T. Moss and Shaku Atre, and Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank. These sources will help you get started building a deeper understanding of the business intelligence process and data mining.

The SIC-2007 Call for Papers is Hot off the Press

2007-01-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

The SIAF Board released their call for papers and presentations for SIC 2007, in Denver Colorado. The annual Shareware Industry Conference is a lot of fun for software developers and marketers. I had a blast last year when I presented Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV.

FREE SQL Converter for Excel offer

2007-01-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

Do you want to get SQL Converter for Excel for free? A few months ago, I introduced TrialPay as a method for a prospective customer to get SQL Converter for Excel for free and still pay Peachtree Communication Systems for it! How does that work? Alex Campbell's TrialPay presents a number of offers from qualifying partner companies.

Here's how it works:

You visit the TrialPay page for SQL Converter for Excel.
You sign-up for a product or service from one of our TrialPay affiliates.
In return, the affiliate pays Peachtree Communication Systems the license fee.
You will receive a fully licensed copy of SQL Converter!

The list of affiliate partners include big names like Blockbuster, Cingular Wireless, eBay, Stamps, T-Mobile, Vonage, and others.

Of course, you can still buy it directly, for instant electronic delivery.

Happy Copyright Notice Update Day!

2007-01-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

Today, New Year's Day, is the first day on the Gregorian calendar. It is also the perfect opportunity to update those various copyright notices. Therefore, I like to call today Copyright Notice Update Day.

Six days left until Copyright Notice Update Day

2006-12-26T12:25:00.000-05:00

Christmas has come and gone with much visiting of family and feasting on a wonderful dinner. I like to call January 1, Copyright Notice Update day. That is the perfect time to go through every web site and make sure that the range on copyright notice is accurate.

This time of year is also a fantastic time to continue charitable giving. $5 from each sale of SQL Converter for Excel will be given to the Make a Wish Foundation. The foundation's mission is to enrich "the lives of children with life-threatening medical conditions through its wish-granting work." I personally donated to them this year and look forward to being able to give even more through this fundraiser through January 31, 2007.

It's fun to make a difference in people's lives. Also, remember to update your copyright notices!

Georgia Tech to Compete in Network Security Contest

2006-12-07T16:49:00.000-05:00

Students from the Georgia Institute of Technology will be competing tomorrow in the 2006 UCSB International Capture The Flag contest. The Tech team is called int80 and consists of about forty graduate students and some undergraduates. I will post pictures by next week.

The new City of John's Creek

2006-11-03T07:45:00.000-05:00

I look forward to voting for the council members for the new City of Johns Creek, Georgia, next week. Our new city was chartered by the Georgia General Assembly in HB 1321 earlier this year. One thing that bothers me about the name of the city is that they have completely dropped the possessive. The city is named after John's Creek, a stream that runs through what used to be John Roger's property. So the name of the city should be John's Creek.

I have never understood why possessive apostrophes are hard for people. If the name does not end in S, simply add an 'S to the end. If a name does end in S, add a single trailing apostrophe (') to the end. Oh well, the rest is an argument for the grammarians. I will just have to be content with the copy of Patricia O'Conner's Woe Is I that my mother gave me for one of my birthdays.

SQL Converter 2 for Excel is Available

2006-11-03T07:20:00.000-05:00

SQL Converter for Excel (version 2.1) was released on October 23. It has been exciting exchanging e-mails with various people about it with a number of sales already coming in.

SQL Converter for Excel - version 2.0.4 BETA released

2006-09-05T00:35:00.000-04:00

The second public beta release, of SQL Converter 2 for Excel, has been posted. Much of the helpful feedback from the last month's beta release has been incorporated into the latest build. We are within a few weeks of the first release candidate. This is an excellent time to get involved with the beta testing process. As before, the download link can be found in the SQL Converter for Excel Yahoo Group.

Visually Integrated for Enhanced Functionality

2006-09-02T14:47:00.000-04:00

I have started the process of visually integrating this blog with the Rietta Solutions web site.

Following an idea from Michael Meadhra's "Creating a pure CSS horizontal navigation bar," the navigation bar now consists of an unordered list and CSS formatting. This change significantly reduces the size of navigation bar at the top of each page, both visually and in code.

More importantly for this blog is getting the template right. While there are some work-of-art blog templates available, none of them quite fit what I needed here. Fortunately, Google's Blogger allows the publisher (that's the blogger) to fully customize the template with normal HTML, JavaScript, and the Blogger markup. Getting a basic template is not so hard, but getting it right takes a bit more effort.

This project is a work in progress. I plan to have everything converted to proper XHTML and CSS, but that will take some time as there is still a lot of legacy code floating around this domain.

Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.

2006-08-10T12:18:00.000-04:00

Patrick McKenzie posted a fabulous article on how customer service scales. It is an excellent article to help small business owners think about how small things are important in customer service communications.

On a slightly unrelated note, it is a big mistake for most companies to outsource customer service. Customer facing processes, particularly customer service, are sources of business intelligence on customers' needs and frustrations. Great pause must be taken when considering outsourcing or ignoring vital customer processes.

A.R.M. Yourself Against SQL Injection

2006-08-08T18:19:00.000-04:00

To effectively protect your web application from SQL injection attack, you must ARM yourself. That is, when writing applications, be sure to validate all input strings. There are three, and only three, options when given a piece of data:

Accept it
Reject it
Modify it

It might seem obvious that all input must be validated. Too often, webmasters and programmers are focused on getting a working application under time pressure and may not implement the best security practices.

So what does it mean to ARM yourself? Well, one good step is to use the string cleansing functions of your programming language. Also, if a field is supposed to be a number then explictly convert it from a string to number.

I originally talked about this at the ACMSE-2006 conference in May. I will have to write up some more on the topic at a later date.

SQL Converter for Excel - version 2.0.3 BETA released

2006-08-02T13:01:00.001-04:00

It's been two days since the beta release of SQL Converter 2 for Excel. The new version was first announced on the SQL Converter Yahoo group, then the SQL Converter download page, and now here.

"SQL Converter for Excel is a tool to convert worksheets to real SQL database tables. First, you load and model your data as a familiar spreadsheet. Once you have the fields and data the way you need them, SQL Converter will help you build a SQL database table that can then be easily loaded into your MySQL database server " (SQL Converter 2.0.3 BETA readme).

As the primary developer for the project, I am glad that the program is finally in the beta phase. It has been many years in the making as my attention has previously been divided among the web hosting business, my undergraduate coursework, and other work.

This first beta phase will last for at least a month. The feedback will be incorporated into a subsequent beta and then the final copy will be released. Early beta testers will be able to earn a free copy of the final release by materially participating in the beta. If you are interested in joining the beta testing program for SQL Converter, please let me know.

"One Laptop Per Child" Demo Out

2006-06-03T21:32:00.000-04:00

Christopher Blizzard, of Red Hat, gave a very nice demo of the One Laptop Per Child unit.

Apparently Microsoft and Intel have publicly criticized the project, claiming that it is wrongly focusing on the cost of the hardware, but then that is to be expected since it will run Linux instead of Windows.

It's really nice that this group will be able to produce a $100 portable computer for kids.

A very brief update on my happenings

2006-04-13T15:12:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I ask myself why I even bother to nominally keep a blog. Being rather busy between work and school, I seldom find the time to write anything of interest for these pages. Since I last wrote, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and sold the web hosting business to Jay Johnson, a man who definitely has a passion for customer service and providing outsourced IT services (aka web and e-mail hosting).

I am now a masters student in Department of Computer Information Systems in the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. Switching to graduate school while continuing to work has been a challenge, but the flexibility that Robinson provides for working students is amazing. My undergraduate institution was definitely not friendly for someone who was both working and taking classes. I am currently working John Hupp, a PhD student at GSU, on a requirements gathering wiki. We hope that the site will help people become better project managers and serve a good place to get some ideas as to what practices work best.

I am working with Eric McCorkle and a few others to launch a new Atlanta-based corporation. I will leak more details later.

Extend Firefox: Your Guide to Writing Firefox Extensions

2005-11-09T09:18:00.000-05:00

After three weeks of work, the first draft of Extend Firefox is complete and available at http://www.rietta.com/~frank/firefox/.

This document explores the process for creating an extension for Firefox 1.5. The topics covered include adding a button to the status bar, adding a menu item, adding a preference pane. The tutorial goes in depth, with copious code samples, how to actually do something with the buttons once they are added. The sample code is all from program called Home Page Scheduler that was developed for this tutorial.

I was a member of the team of Georgia Tech students who developed this document as part of a technical communications class. Check it out and feel free to post any comments here.

A product website without pricing information is really annoying!

2005-08-14T18:20:00.000-04:00

Looking at the website, of a product in which I am interested, that does not show the price is frustrating! It is frankly amazing to me how many product websites from reputable companies do not make it easy to find out how much their widgets cost. When I cannot determine the price on the same page as the product information, I generally assume it is too expensive and move on. I wonder how many potential customers are turned away by hard to find pricing information.

Saying no to PayPal Phishing Attacks

2005-08-09T11:33:00.000-04:00

Users on my mail server, well at least the ones with domains subscribed to the filtering service, no longer receive PayPal spoofs unaltered! The trick to catching this vermin is both simple and accurate.

An e-mail is certainly a phishing attack when all three of the following conditions are met:

The From address claims to be paypal.com
The Received header, which indicates the address of the computer from which the e-mail was actually received, is not paypal.com
A paypal.com URL is mentioned in the body of the e-mail

Similar rules can be applied to ebay.com, suntrust.com, and any of the other brands that are spoofed. The code has already been written and these rules are easily implemented with SpamAssassin and available at http://www.rulesemporium.com.

Instead of the offending message being delivered unmarked to users who may be tricked by the scams, the users receive an e-mail stating that the message is suspected spam, giving enumerated reasons. Users can of course still see the original e-mail that is attached to the explanation message.

I wonder why the "Anti-Phishing Working Group" does not provide useful information like this. I suspect the next useful feature would be automatic reporting to spoof@paypal.com or similar addresses that may be maintained by organizations who are victims of phishing scams.

Upcoming Beta Release: SQL Converter 2 for Excel

2005-07-25T19:04:00.000-04:00

There is nothing quite like the exhilaration from lack of sleep and high levels of caffeine present during a marathon coding week. Fortunately, I am able to take my time this week preparing SQL Converter 2.0 for Excel for beta release. The core program is functioning well and I have spent the last day wrestling with Windows Installer issues.

From a developer perspective, building object oriented software in VBA for Excel is a pain. From a users perspective, the new version has:

A much improved interface for managing tables
Access to all columns (A - IV) in Excel
New wizard to help design SQL tables from the header row
Support for long field names, including spaces

I hope to have a public download available within the week.

Less is more! Google offers less "talk".

2005-07-21T13:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was visiting my grandmother, who had recently purchased a new computer and wanted to use the Internet. The person who had helped her install her computer had set her up with Juno because it was free. However, my grandmother found it impossible to use because it was too visually distracting. She wanted access to a few things including e-mail, IM, and maps. She and I changed her dial-up service to that provided by her local phone company and then registered a gmail.com account and changed her default homepage to google.com.

Gmail is one of the nicest e-mail interfaces I have ever seen from a usability standpoint. It beats all of the web mail interfaces hands down and even most of the desktop clients. The biggest problem with e-mail programs today is that there are too many small buttons. It is nearly impossible for someone like my grandmother to use them. Gmail is clean cut and uses discrete advertising that does not distract from the task at hand.

I hope more companies learn from Google and forgo the horrible flash animations, animated gifs that blink, and other antiquated advertisement techniques. Plain, well-placed, discrete information can be seen as helpful and not distracting. Simple layouts with less clutter will greatly improve the user experience.

I really like the Royal Bank of Scotland’s advertisements of "Less talk." It is the same principle that Google appears to be using with great success. I can only hope that the software and Internet industries mature and apply the same principles.

WinZIP sold and needs technical improvements.

2005-07-18T08:39:00.000-04:00

Henk on sharewareblogs.com is reporting that WinZIP has been sold to Vector Capital, which is the company that owns Corel, JASC, and Real Networks. I hope Nico Mak and company received the appropriate compensation for their years of work.

Only time will tell if the new owners do more than just change some icons and increase the price for the WinZIP software. I hope they improve the performance on B2ZIP and GZIP compressed TAR files so that decompression can go on-the-fly. Currently WinZIP writes the new ZIP file to a temp file and then copies it to the final destination. However, this is very inefficient when archiving a very large home directory to a USB storage device. There should be an option to have WinZIP write directly to the destination file without creating a intermediate temporary file.

Vector Graphics and Icon Licenses

2005-07-17T18:04:00.000-04:00

I have been working on a few applications in the last year but noticed that they look out of date compared to most new applications. The problem is that I have been using the Visual Studio icon set or leaving buttons and menu items without a graphic. Microsoft has been shipping the same sample icons since at least Visual Basic 3.0. Needless to say the state of art for icons and other computer images has advanced since 1993. As I personally have very little artistic skill I had to start looking for more modern looking graphics.

Considering I use FreeBSD quite a bit I, of course, started playing around the KDE and Gnome icons but ran into a license roadblock as those graphic elements are licensed under the GPL. The applications I am developing will be distributed under another license so I am precluded from using these particular icons. It does not appear particularly clear how one should go about licensing these images from the original authors under an alternate agreement. I wonder how this might make developing non-GPL software for Gnome and KDE which blends in nicely with the other applications within the environment. Some icons are licensed under LGPL but a lot are GPL.

After looking around for companies that sell icon sets for what I consider reasonable prices (somewhere less than $50), I found quite a bit of variation. In the end I bought a copy of Susan Pichotta’s Roma set (www.aceicons.com). The primary reason I chose to go with this particular set is that I looks reasonable and I know the artist through the ASP and AISIP. As I get further along I might have to see if Sue will be willing to create a few specific icons in the same style as the set but the new artwork has already helped spruce up the look of my applications.

Back home in Georgia

2005-07-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

I am back home and more or less adjusted back to Eastern Standard Time. I really enjoyed the study abroad experience in Barcelona, Spain. I managed to take a camping trip to Montserrat, a camping trip to the Pyrenees in Southern France, and even a weekend trip to London. I particularly enjoyed walking around the city and enjoying the sights, sounds, and food. While I by no means became particularly fluent in Spanish, I did manage to get pretty good at shopping, dealing with numbers and prices, and even picked up some social niceties in both Castilian and Catalan.

As my wallet was stolen in the first month of the trip, I had to get a new drivers’ license and student ID printed. I find it somewhat humorous that the student ID reprint costs 3 times more than the drivers’ license. I also got the necessary professor permission and permits to take a 1 hour graduate seminar class in order to be a full time student in the fall without taking so many classes that I do not do well in my final semester.

Now it is time to get back to work.

Hello Pictures

2005-07-10T09:13:00.000-04:00

I wanted to test the image upload capability in Blogger. This kitten belongs to Neus, who helped Jay, Imran, and I out with our software internationalization metaphor project. Neus lives in small town called Palautordera, which is about an hour train ride outside of Barcelona.

I am currently working on my final paper. It is time to get back to work.