Pablo Averbuj

Google Checkout First Impressions

When I was ordering a lens from RitzCamera yesterday one of the checkout options was Google Checkout. There was a $10 discount for doing so and if you know me you know which one I picked. The actual checkout process was fine, no surprises and easy enough. But there seems to be some inefficiencies between getting the data to RitzCamera and back. I still don’t know what my order number is and it’s been 24 hours.

RitzCamera, for its part, is completely useless. I talked to one customer service rep who said he’d call me with my order number “at a later time”. When I asked what that meant, he clarified “15-30 minutes”. No call. I called two hours later and got a different representative who told me it could take 24 hours for the order information to be processes.

How are these guys communicating? Homing pigeons? If only someone could develop a technology that could instantly transfer information across long distances…. if only…

One nice thing about Google Checkout is it can provide to each vendor a vendor-specific email address, so the vendor never gets your real email address, if they’re the spam-happy type (this means YOU Dell) but this feature is working against me when I call RitzCamera and they ask me for my email address and I have to give them a 100 character long unpronounceable email address. So I try to use the Google Checkout “email the vendor” feature to ask them what my order number is. Here’s what I get back in an autoreply:

We have received your email message with the subject:
Questions about order #XXXXXX
If you do not get a response within 48 hours, please send your message again.
Thank you.
RitzCamera

Really, that’s your solution? If I don’t get a response within 48 hours, send it again? Isn’t that the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results)?

Thank you RitzCamera!

Opera mini

When I find myself stuck in a boring place (like the DMV) I turn to my last hope for mindless entertainment: my cell phone. Up until recently I had very limited options. Backgammon was enough to entertain me for at least 10 minutes, but it was starting to get old. Surfing the web via GPRS with the built in WAP browser was mildly entertaining; I used to have a few trivia games bookmarked but they’re now defunct. A couple of weeks ago I read about Opera Mini and just this week I got to try it out. It is amazingly good for a 64kb program. As a point of reference, on my XP system notepad.exe is 68kb. And thanks go the mobile edition of Google Reader, I can keep up with my reading. It doesn’t support javascript or DHTML but one can hardly hold that against it. The UI took some getting used to but that’s likely because I was used to the built in WAP browser. If you have a phone that lacks a decent browser and supports MIDP 1.0 or higher take advantage.

More PSA to Lightroom details

I posted a link to my results to the Adobe Lightroom Beta forums and someone asked for additional details, and I realize I skimped on the technical stuff a little too much. Here are the details on the steps as described in the previous post. I got a lot of information out of people doing a similar thing: transferring PSA data into iMatch.
Continue reading More PSA to Lightroom details…

Lightroom Import Success

Update: I posted excruciating detail in the following post.

I was able to successfully migrate my PSA tag associations to Lightroom. In terms of working time I probably spent about 3 or 4 hours working on it (highly interrupted). The process more or less broke down like thie:

1. Import the images into Lightroom
2. Use PSATool to dump PSA catalog to text file
3. Build keyword list from psa dumpfile
4. Import keyword list into Lightroom
5. Update the SQLite database to add the mappings

I could be a lot more turn key. It could be as simple as steps 2 and 5, but I wanted to manipulate the database directly as little as possible for my first attempt. There’s columns whose purpose is not entirely obvious to me and I’d just as well let Lightroom create most of the entries than do it myself. This way the only table we are manipulating directly is AgLibraryTagImage (the image < -> tag mappings), and this table is fairly simple. Likewise the AgLibraryTag table is easy to manipulate, but importing the keywords is the easiest step of the process (and there’s magic with the keyword lists it builds). Importing the files into Lightroom took a very long time (I’d guess 2-3 hours). And I only have about 5000+ images, some of the requesters on the Adobe boards had upwards of 15000. There is a lot of magic going on populating the Adobe_images and Adobe_imageFiles tables (mostly metadata caching).

I actually had written this post on Sunday night, thinking I had completed my task, but after I wrote this the import finished and it actually didn’t work. I thought I had missed some nuance of the schema but as it turns out, it was just a subtle bug in the import process. However, this led me to discover an reference that I hadn’t previously considered. To the side is a screenshot of my successful import.