Newegg RMA Horror! Buying from Newegg is a risk! They may ship you a used item as a brand new one.
I purchased what I thought was a brand new SONY Vaio F series for $1150 on July 1st from www.newegg.com. Got it in a few days. The first thing that I noticed was that the original factory seal on the box was broken and another seal was placed over it. The Vaio box also looked like it had been opened and closed at least 50 times and was ripped in a couple of places. When I took the laptop out, I noticed some very slight scratches on the lid and tiny scratches near the microphone port but this didn’t bother me much. I charged the laptop and tried to create recovery disks using the pre-installed Vaio software but the program would get stuck at 44% on the first disk and would not go any further even when left on for 12 hours. I started to suspect that there is something significantly wrong with the laptop so I tried to run some other processor-intensive tasks and also placed the CPU gadget on the desktop to keep track of the performance. Well, the Core i7 Quad Vaio could not even handle the CPU gadget, it would take a minute to appear and if I tried to move it around the desktop it would freeze the whole OS. I came across Sony’s press release saying that his particular model among others has faulty BIOS and that a newer version is available on Sony’s site as of June 29. I checked my BIOS version and it turned out to be the late June version. How in the world could it have a BIOS released in June when the sticker on the bottom says that it was made in February? The only way would be if someone had installed the update already before I got the laptop. This finally convinced me that I received an open box/refurbished/re-certified laptop. As my last resort, I tried to recover the system using the pre-installed Vaio recovery software, this totally messed things up and the machine kept constantly rebooting to the Windows welcome screen without going into the OS. Returned the machine to Newegg, got an e-mail a a week after they got it saying that they restored the machine to factory settings and will ship it back to me. I paid for a brand new laptop and now they want me to end up with a repaired used one, what a scam! I will try to work with their customer support to get a similar model but a brand new one but I have a feeling that this won’t work judging by others’ experiences. I’ve been a Newegg customer for many years and this is the worst experience that I’ve ever had with them. I may have to take this to a small claims court.
So I decided to open my own on-line store because it’s a great way to make extra income as well as a lot of fun (at least for geeks like me). I decided on a more or less classic setup; a shared Linux server with Apache running on it, MySQL database and a PHP shopping cart script.
I’ve had some experience with various shopping carts out there but finally settled on PrestaShop because it seems like a modern, easily customizable and nicely laid out shopping cart script. According to most of the reviews I’ve read, everyone who tried using PrestaShop loved it.
The first little problem I ran into was that PrestaShop is optimized for PHP5 so I created a .htaccess file in the root directory of my shop (not the root directory of the server!) and put the line
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
in it. This allowed me to set up PrestaShop successfully. I’m no graphic designer so I simply made basic changes to the default template and created a simple logo for my shop. I listed some products but suddenly realized that I have no way of accepting credit cards… Luckily, someone has already come up with a credit card module for PrestaShop and this module can be downloaded here: PrestaShop Forum . After I installed the moduel, I realized that I need an SSL certificate in order to process secure transactions. I bought a dedicated SSL certificate form my hosting company, installed it, turned it on and thought that I was ready to go ahead and advertise my web shop with Google, etc., but…
It turned out that an SSL certificate is only good for one domain name. More over, if it’s good for https://www.example.com, then it is not good for simply https://example.com and you have two decide whether you want the “www” at the time of setup! I settled on the “www” version, but what if one of my potential customers simply types in my domain name without the “www” prefix and the proceeds to purchasing an item in my store? Well, it turns out that if that happens, the customer’s browser will produce a nasty SSL error and I will most likely lose that customer. I went back to my .htaccess file and redirected all traffic that does not have the “www” version in front to the correct domain name like this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This fixed the issue with the browser’s nasty SSL warning but produced another issue in turn – every time a customer tried to leave his/her shopping cart and go back to browsing the inventory, they’d be taken to the secure version of the site. Internet Explorer loads images from its cache and even as it does so, if the domain name prefix is “https://” it will treat all the images on the page as “not secure elements” and will produce a nasty error. Basically, IE will give the user two options: 1) ignore the warning and risk your life or 2) do not display the “insecure elements”. The latter option will display the page without any images – useless. I went back to the .htaccess file one more time and added:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
RewriteRule ^category|product(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NC,R=301,L]
Now, if a customer tries to view a product or a category of products while at his/her shopping cart or check out page, the server will automatically open the product or category page with http:// instead of https:// and no warnings! When the customer decided to go back to his shopping cart, the server would automatically do it through the secure “https://” version of the URL.
Finally, my .htaccess file looks like this: (text after “#” is comments)
#set default PHP version to version 5
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
#make sure Apache follows symbolic links
Options +FollowSymLinks
#turn on URL rewriting
RewriteEngine on
#if there is no “www” then
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
#redirect to www.example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#if SSL enabled
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
#redirect categories and products to plain “http” URL
RewriteRule ^category|product(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NC,R=301,L]
Don’t forget to replace “example” with your actual domain name if you try this.
Depending on the shopping cart you use and the design of your shop, you may want to add other pages to the above rewrite code so that all problematic links in your shop are covered.
May 31st, 2010 in
E-Commerce |
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This is not a post about the usual “OS X vs Windows 7″ but rather an attempt to describe the “Mac Experience” from the point of view of an IT professional. I’ve read tens (if not hundreds) of posts and stories that argue just how much better it is to use a Mac than to use a PC but none of them described using a Mac from the perspective of a software developer or even a highly skilled computer user.
Hardware:
So I got my first, brand new and shiny Mac Mini with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo, 120 GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. At around $600, the Mac Mini as the cheapest option to try out a brand new Mac. To make my Mac experience a genuine one or at least to resemble it, I also purchased the Apple Aluminum Keyboard and white and shiny Apple mouse from Rocketfish. Even the cheapest monitor from Apple is in my opinion crazily overpriced so I to complete my Apple set up I obtained an HP 2009m whose design resembles closely that of Apple products. The set up looks and feels great, the monitor is glossy and produces bright and crisp images, the keyboard seems completely unbreakable and the keys make a nice clicking sound when hit, the Apple Mac Mini takes up only a tiny bit of space on my huge desk and the Rocketfish Apple mouse besides feeling like a genuine Apple product has a wheel that allows moving through a page horizontally as well as vertically.
Software:
The Apple Mac Mini came with the new at the time OS X Snow Leopard onto which I’ve installed Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, Quicken, Microsoft Office, Open Office and a bunch of other programs that I cannot recall at the time. I’ve also installed a genuine copy of Windows 7 Professional that I purchased for just $35 on Microsoft’s Student Sale.
The “Mac Experience”:
The combination of the Apple Aluminum Keyboard, the Rocketfish Apple mouse and OS X working together felt indeed different from a combination of PC hardware and software. Clicks and keystrokes felt different from those on PC, somehow it felt that OS X takes longer to respond to clicks and keystrokes than Windows does but this might have been an illusion. The look of OS X is of course great, the dock is a lot of fun, especially with all the new effects added in Snow Leopard. In short, on the surface, using a Mac felt as a more refine experience compared to using a PC. Most of the simple tasks in OS X are very well thought out, it takes less clicks to launch most applications. Simple things like browsing the web, writing e-mails or Word documents were indeed a very pleasant experience. Watching movies in the new Quicktime X and listening to music in iTunes was the best multimedia experience ever. Yes, iTunes and Quicktime are available for Windows as well but they do not look, feel or sound the same as on a Mac. Unless you are a gamer, most everyday computing tasks will feel, look and sound great on a Mac.
The “Real Stuff”:
In the computing world, some of us are required to do a little bit more complicated things than reading and writing e-mails or Word documents. I run several shopping websites that I’ve built myself and therefore I must see how they look in Internet Explorer. I was shocked to learn that there was no Internet Explorer for Mac since IE verison 5.0 so every time I wanted to see a site in IE, I had to boot into Windows. Also, I realized that in order to do something as simple as printing a shipping label from the USPS web site requires saving the label first as a PDF document, it will just not print directly to the printer (obviously USPS people did not think of Mac users). Besides building web sites, I do some freelance programming work. My main languages are Java, C++ and recently C#. Programming in Java, C++ or Mac’s native Cocoa is almost as enjoyable in Mac’s development environment called X-Code as doing your regular daily computing tasks on a Mac. The ease with which native Mac apps can be created out of Java class or jar files is out of this world! Being a UNIX system, OS X allows to install G++ which is my favorite C++ compiler. Overall, I found X-Code as intuitive and easy to use as other parts of OS X designed for simple computing tasks.
On the negative side, you cannot use Microsoft Visual Studio which is pretty much the standard in every day programming so I had to boot into Windows for that, using an Ubuntu Linux live CD (for checking a cross-platform application) almost killed my system and I was not able to boot until I completely reinstalled OS X and even that was possible after about fifteen attempts to boot from the OS X CD. Finding various system files is impossible with Finder and one has to use the terminal for that. Overall, I found that I had to boot into Windows for everything other than reading or writing e-mails, browsing the web or programming in Java or C++ for UNIX. As time passed, my system became slower and slower and I felt like it took ages to launch Photoshop so I just booted into Windows right away for that. Quickly I realized that I needed a more powerful machine than the Mac Mini and after checking prices on the Apple web site I realized that I can buy or built a machine with at least twice the hardware than the most powerful Mac Mini for under $500 or something twice the power of the best Mac Pro for around a $1000.
Sure Macs are great for the average computer user who hardly interests himself with system files or MS Visual Studio. Most apps are easily started with just one click and you cannot mess up the system unless you go into terminal because no system files are available in Finder. Launching your video to You Tube only takes a click of the mouse! However, my major impression of Macs is that they are designed for folks who don’t know much about computers and want simple things done quick. Having to constantly reboot into Windows, unavailability of some programs for Mac, the absence of BIOS (how the hell do I recover my files using a Linux live CD if the system fails?), a tray-less DVD drive which cannot be used for anything than standard size CD’s and DVD’s, the absence of HDMI ports (which are now almost standard) and the complete inability to upgrade the hardware absolutely poisoned that nice “Mac Experience”. My current machine has a 500GB hard drive, 4 Gigs of RAM, a 2.5 GHz dual core processor, HDMI, DVI and VGA ports and a DVD drive that can read anything but 16th century books, all for about $500! I don’t miss the Mac and its OS X because I was forced to spend most of my time using Windows anyway. I need a powerful machine and I’m just not paying $2000 for it just because it has an Apple logo and launches videos to You Tube with one click!
May 14th, 2010 in
Computers |
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