Serguei Alleko Blog

Normally I hate installing software on my computer, if it’s not really needed. Any software you install is one more spot on your computer (your work tool). like, for example, I know Windows Explorer is not the best File Manager, but I would hate to install Total Commander or Far.

At least Misrosoft is under preassure from millions of angry and very critical users for the errors in it’s software. But you never know, what kind of bugs could sit for years in small tools from small vendors.

The same goes, of course, about messengers. I use always original MSN messenger and yes, i know it’s heavy and has ads, but it works. And it’s a part of the system. Miranda is not (I was using it for a couple of years and hated it).

The only exception is the browser. Even it’s a very much part of the system.  Even worse, most of the web-publishers in the Internet are testing their sites with IE (and then may be, if they have time, with Firefox). Which makes IE the only browser, which has some intensive to guarantee you the compatibility with content.  BUT! I’m still using another browser.

First it was Firefox and then, after it’s first release – Google Chrome.

The reason is that those browsers are made for displaying content. And nothing more. They’re trying to eliminate every single thing, every pixel between you and content. All those nice rich IE-features like web-slices, additional bar for favorites, additional window for LIVE Search, special, very slow procedures for displaying “about:blank” – all those are belong to the software, not to content!

According to my Wakoopa-profile I spend most of the time browsing (or working via browser, most of my work-related programs are web-based). So I really would like to stand nothing between me and content. It’s like breathing, I really hate even small obstacle between my lungs and the oxygen. How exactly Google Chrome helps with than?

• super-fast opening a new tab with Ctrl-T (I’m going to write it twice, but I really-really hate to wait when IE is opening “about:blank”)
• search in the address-bar (and also automatic possibility to start typing your search-string after Ctrl-T)
• absence of program title bar (another several pixels for content!)
• absence of ANY additional bars, buttons and menu’s
• it’s just simply fast-fast-fast!

I’m not saying Google is the king and there will never be a better browser. Chrome is number one for the moment. May be even Microsoft will issue an IE-light with all those super-fast features. Then I’ll switch to IE. But for now the browser for content is Google Chrome!

A couple of days ago Microsoft came with a new free Anti-Virus product – Microsoft Security Essentials

I will not comment on Microsoft ability to create security products, my opinion could be based of course. I’d like to write a bit about the whole idea of those Free Anti-Virus.

Currently it’s not just a GNU-like projects, made by open source enthusiasts to make world better. Big serious companies are making those product and distributing millions of copies. Here are the leaders:

• AVG
• Avast!
• Avira
• PCTools Anti-Virus

Their marketshare is huge (although it’s very hard to measure. Most market share measuring technologies measure products, something which is bought and sold). They’re very high in Organic google resutls for the best keywords, like “antivirus”. They’re also spending hundreds of thousands on paid google campaigns and download seeding via affiliate networks. Why all of those? Just to deliver you a nice present?

Of course not. Their business model is  - first get a huge portion of market, get very strong recognition from home users around the globe. And then sell them something.

You can visit their sites and see their business models. It’s mostly Online Sales, so everything is open, no hidden distribution agreement or union contracts. You’re told that “Just Anti-Virus is not enough” to protect your computer and then they ask you to buy “full Internet Security version” where normally you can find firewall, anti-spam and a lot of different components.

What is the difference between an activation code and a serial number. The biggest one is:

One of them costs money and could be a product for your e-shop and another doesn’t cost anything.

Activation codes are secret numbers, which are used to activate some software. Normally it happens online. The generation of activation codes could be pretty secure. For example as far as I know, pirates could not make a tool which generates activation codes for Kaspersky Anti-Virus software. All “generators” which you can download from pirate sites have 20-30 fixed stolen  licenses in it and give them to you in random.

Even if you manage to get the right code, the activation procedure means you have to connect to a server of the software vendor and try to get permission from them to use the software. At this point vendor could try to perform a “face control”. If the code was stolen in China and already used 500 times, I bet they just simply block it.

Normally crackers prefer to disable the control of the activation status in the software itself, not trying to beat the activation protocol.

After software is activated, it normally gets a serial number. It’s just a number identifying your copy, it could even be sequential. It can not be used in another copy of the software and can not be sold.

Some time ago I’ve written that webmaster is an obsolete profession. For any website bigger that 5 pages there is no persons who can manage everything – from content to software installation. Even if we’re taking about information website without e-commerce or huge database, there are still several steps, which one needs to follow in order to set information online.

Those are the typical steps in current a simple website management:

Step 1. Content copywriting.

Copywriting means you’re writing marketing BS and know about it Normally managed by marketing people without serious technical knowledge. This is where your ideas are.

Step 2. Content delivery.

This is mostly technological part.

• Hosting with fat connection to the Internet
• Hardware and software, required for the website, for example LAMP.
• Content Management System, software required to implement your texts in a menu-based hyperlink structure with your design
• Configuration of this CMS, like web analytics, forms, email connections, user logins, etc
• This could be done by engineers with knowledge of Internet technologies. Normally managed by IT departments.

I’ve seen in a lot of organizations that stop at with these 2 steps and they have a lot of problem. Marketing people and technical people speak different languages. They have different work agendas. In marketing they’re mostly managers and technical people are mostly makers. Click for a great article about  managers and makers it by Paul Graham

There are a numerous cases when it’s not completely clear who should do semi-marketing, semi-technical tasks, like for example check texts for HTML-compliance or upload images on the web. Linux system administrator could say it’s not his problem, he has installed the CMS and it works perfect. Marketing lady doesn’t quite sure, what “upload” means.

Actually the picture should look like this

Step 2.5 Content Publication

This a very important step, which is not completely technical or marketing. The goal of this step is make sure the text written by marketing becomes web content and ready to join the Internet sea.

• Design – your CMS must have appropriate design
• Menu structure – this is how websites structure the texts – they put them in the menu tree. It should not be very deep, more than 3 layers and people get lost
• HTML-coding. There are 1001 rules on how to set the HTML-tags up. The pages must be viewed normally in major browsers
• SEO-optimization. This part is much more important that people think. If a page is good optimized for SEO, it’s good optimised for the Internet.
• URL – very important that your page has short fixed URL, not the one, which CMS generates and changes from time to time
• links, outgoing and incoming – needed to be checked. Its one of the biggest pains of content publishing. Internet is a sea, and it’s always changing. Keeping your links updated is a complex problem.

What kind of knowledge is required for this step. Obviously a lot of technical background but with a hint of marketing. The person must understand why we’re putting this on the site, not only how. Also he must be punctual, resourceful and stress-resistant. Publishing of 300-pages site can drive you mad.

Following my post about cyberpunk-style satellite communications I’ve found, that we just bought a 4th satellite-technology device in our family – GPS Garmin nuvi 860T.  The other 3 were – GPS-receiver for my old Nokia e61i, GPS in my car and satellite dish for Russian TV for my mother in law.

many years I mostly use TomTom mobile software for Nokia and I was happy about it. Nice clear map and voice from a woman called “Jane”. Except a couple of cases, when Jane for example lead us to impossible Chowchilla Montain Road, it worked just fine.

So I’ve assumed all modern GPS devices should be fine. That was a mistake.

My wife bought this GPS Garmin nuvi 860T (sorry I don’t know where to put a link, there is no easy-to-find description on Garmin site) for €240 (discounted from €400). This device, which I immediately called Susanin, has the following features:

• He speaks a LOT. Even tries to pronounce the names of the streets according to English grammatical rules ( OK, this part could be fun at first, when he tries to pronounce “Diependaalselaan” for example)
• Actually information about name of the street doesn’t help with navigation, it’s seldom clearly written in Belguim or Netherlands. It only divers your attention from driving.
• Susanin can not even pronounce correctly. somehow he doesn’t have enough processor power to generate a simple voice (in 2009!)
• The map is unclear and looks really strange. It may be nice in USA, where the most cities are build in squares, but try to use it in a place like Hilversum, for example. You’ll lose yourself in a sticky web of small gray lines.
• He has very annoying notification about speed control cameras. According to him, all the highways in Belgium are full with cameras (in reality there is may be 1 per 100 km and even those seldom work). But Susanin beeps every 5 minutes with huge stupid warnings.
• Apparently the map from Navteq he’s using is very old. It has made a decision to use old and slow A12 from Brussels to Antwerp instead of fast E19. Really strange, I’ve just updated the map via Internet.

Worst:

• Susanin constantly loses the car in the city. it a crowded area every 3 minutes it founds the car on the next small street, recalculates and gives advices which have nothing to do with the real position of the car. Apparently it doesn’t use SirfStarIII, which almost never has such problems with my TomTom
• And he can not be returned (some strange rules about GPS devices activation). So, we’re stuck with the annoying bastard.

Fro me Garmin is not an option anymore. Why didn’t I stick with TomTom!

One of the most distinguished features of cyberpunk is availability of new advanced technology to the poorest groups of people. In Bladerunner a medical lab could be found in the dirty slums, in Snowcrash an uneducated biker caries nuclear weapon and so on.

Part of this could also be found in our lives. In Europe satellite communications are a distinguished characteristics of poor Turkish, Russian or Moroccan districts. People use satellite dishes to watch free TV in their native languages.

The future is now!

Frist time sinds I sold my old private PC to my friends in the student campus in 1999 I’ve bought one! The last 10 years I got only PCs from work.

10 years ago I was able to find the best configuration, based on 486MMX processor for me, but now I was not sure. So, I’ve asked some friends to make one for me.

The result was:

2 30 gig’s drives in RAID0 become a system disk and 1 terabyte drive is for the data

For about 900 euro (without VAT) I’ve got a nice, fast and black box!

One of the best thing I love about email – it’s predictability of delivery.

You always (well, almost almost always) know if your email was delivered or not. Either your email shows up in the mailbox of the recipient or warning shows up in your mailbox. Nothing disappears in the middle. It could well be one of the most important  reasons of popularity of email communications at the dawn of Internet.

That was before Anti-Spam was invented. Anti-Spam programs or gateways can and often  do delete emails without any trace. In the last years I think 90% of the time my emails were not received was due to a spam filter.

Anti-Spam takes form the emails it’s predictability.

Well, fortunately now there are other, even more predictable electronic means of communication, like instant messaging.

Some time ago, as a technical person, I couldn’t understand the complexity of the whole subject of web  statistics and analytics. 

• Web-statistics – measuring how many pages were visited and when
• Web-analytics -  trying to understand what it means

 When you know little, it’s always easy to build a logical solid theory about something.  That’s why people, who analyzed their first month of logs sound so sure about themselves. When you’re learning more, you find that your logical solid theory must be expanded. Then expanded some more and more. At some point you find out that your initial theory was completely inadequate. That’s a point on your learning curve called “I know that I don’t know anything”

I’ve reached that point about web-analytics on a training from Omniture. They have 2 days basic training on how to use their software. And 2 more days advanced training on that. And this is only for users, not for administrators!

OF course biggest part of the training was not statistics, but analytics, the way how to analyze your results. The subject is very complex. But actually, I figured out that simply the measurement of such objects, as “hit”, “visit”, “visitor”, “page view” is more a craft than a science. Read more here about key definitions in web-statistics.

So, why the web-statistics is complex:

• The philosophy of underlying protocol  HTTP is not really helping the measurement. The protocol is session-less and asynchronous. You don’t exactly know what user has done on your website and weather it was successful, you have to guess
• The philosophy of web browsing is not really designed for interactions. It assumes that user just reads text, clicks and reads further ahead. If user is trying to do anything else, like go back or reload or double the page, browsers react differently and sites react differently. Very hard to measure.
• The philosophy of HTML is not really designed for modern interactive WWW. It has nothing to do directly with statistics, but it lead to creation of number of new technologies, like flash, java, AJAX etc. And those are often difficult to measure
• What is a difference between pages anyway? Google Analytics defines it as change in the URL of your browser. This leads to a number of problems, like difference between / (just slash) and http://alleko.com/ (site name with slash). Also some technologies allow to change pages without changing URL
• When user opens a heavy homepage of a site, his computer makes 50-100 or even more TCP connections to the web server. Sometimes is hard to define that it’s one hit.
• It’s not obvious when to detect an end of a visit. User most often closes the browser when he doesn’t want to be on the site anymore. An industry standard says 30 minutes after the last hit

Different vendors have different approaches to the measuring, so often data from Google Analytics don’t match with Omniture or something else. Don’t worry, they’re not manufacturers, they’re crafters. Ironically there is no really standards in web-analytics either. Is 4% conversion high? Is 20% bounce rate low? Nobody could say for sure, every site is unique.

The only thing we can do is to compare comparable. Just choose one solution and measure your success against your success last month. Of year. You can not measure objectively.

Recently I’ve got a 2-days training from Omniture (hope to write more about it tomorrow). My question as a person, trying to sell online the software was: “How to deliver the message to the customers”.

In more details, I wanted to know, how to tell people more about product, how to find out, what do they think about the product.

It appeared to be more difficult that I thought. The teacher, based on his experience (Omniture analyzes 22% of The Internet) confirmed the picture, that I’ve seen myself.

When the site is about the software, almost no one is interested in reading the message! People just want, basically, 2 things:

• download a trial
• (may be) pay for it

That’s it. Looking at the real interface of the product costs thousand words. So, If you want to find out the best strategies for selling your software, spend your time in fine-tuning download page and simple e-store page. It’s there, where 95% of your customers will spend their time.