Frank Rietta's Work, Research, and Play

Two Atlanta Music Hosting Domain Names for Sale

2009-06-29T19:47:00.007-04:00

I have a great set of domain names for a budding entrepreneur who wants to start a music related business in Atlanta.

AtlantaMusicHost.com and AtlantaMusicHosting.com have been registered to me since 2004. I launched these websites as part of a planned shoutcast-based service that was to be a product line extension to the web hosting business I used to own.

I sold the web hosting business in 2005, but kept these domains.

Both domain names are registered with Dotster.

UPDATED TO ADD: Asking price is $100 for both domains.

PayPal may be used to complete the transaction.

Startup Professionals Musings: Startups: Top 10 Funding Sources

2009-03-10T14:13:00.002-04:00

Martin Zwilling posted a summary of the Top 10 Funding Sources for startup companies.

I personally funded my current company with the proceeds of the sale of a previous business and lots and lots of sweat equity.

While Mr. Zwilling mentions bartering services for equity, it is also quite possible to barter services for a profit sharing arrangement with the people who help with a particular project. This way the company equity remains with the founders and yet those who take the risk to invest in one or more projects can be rewarded for their time investment once that project takes off in the marketplace. It is also vital to never underestimate the importance of choosing the right co-founders and early-stage advisers! A good financial advisor, for instance, may just agree to provide free advice on business structure and tax consequences with the understanding that you will first come to his firm once a payroll is established.

Overall, this is good stuff folks. Check it out!

No More Captchas! Randomized Field Names for the win.

2009-01-20T11:06:00.005-05:00

Just a heads up that Contacts to Mobile is now available for download!

Galen and I have been working feverishly for the last three weeks to finalize Contacts to Mobile, its API documentation, and several example forms, for its launch today. Do not forget that a deep discount is available tomorrow only (Wednesday, 21 Jan 2009) through Bits du Jour (like woot for software).

So give the software a try today. If you like it, buy it at a discount tomorrow. Please let my team know if you have any questions. We are ready to help you make your web forms more secure without the need for those crazy CAPTCHA images!

Randomized Field Names in a Product!? Say no to CAPTCHA images!

2009-01-16T16:25:00.007-05:00

It's now been almost two years since I gave a presentation on the benefits of using randomized field names over CAPTCHA images to reduce the web form spam problem while not burdening prospective customers. Starting next week, the successor to the Security-Enhanced Contact Form will be released as Contacts to Mobile.

Contacts to Mobile is a spam-resistant contact form for your business website that makes it easy to rapidly respond to customer communications, even while you are on the road. It collects their message, generates a vCard, and can e-mail that information directly to your Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry, or other mobile device.

Next week, Contacts to Mobile will be featured on Bits du Jour, a 'deal-of-the-day' website that offers fantastic, one-time discounts on a variety of great products. Bits du Jour will be offering Contacts to Mobile on Wednesday 21 January, 2009 at the dramatically reduced price of $39.95. The normal purchase price for Contacts to Mobile is $89.95!

I am excited to see this product finally launched. My team is working hard over the weekend to put the finishing touches on the example code and website. I firmly believe that we can help make web contact forms and database entry forms more secure on many websites.

New Domain for the Atlanta Security Conference

2008-08-29T18:52:00.004-04:00

To help better get the word out about the upcoming Atlanta Security Conference, to be hosted by the Metro Atlanta ISSA chapter, I have obtained http://www.atlantasecurityconference.com. I will be putting up some more information over the next few days.

Atlanta Security Conference Website

2008-08-18T19:22:00.002-04:00

The website for the 2008 Atlanta Security Conference has now been posted by the Metro-Atlanta ISSA chapter. I attended the conference last year while still a Georgia Tech graduate student and really enjoyed the presentations and human networking.

I will dig up and post some more information soon.

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.