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By Darian Shimy, May 25, 2010 4:00 pm

If you happen to come across the following deprecation warning:

DEPRECATION WARNING: Giving :session_key to SessionStore is deprecated, please use :key instead. (called from new at /Users/dshimy/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/gems/actionpack-2.3.8/lib/action_controller/middleware_stack.rb:72)

Take a look at your config/environment.rb file for the following:

config.action_controller.session = {
    :secret_key    => '_sample_session',
    :secret        => '00000000000000000000'
}

and change it to:

config.action_controller.session = {
    :key    => '_sample_session',
    :secret => '00000000000000000000'
}

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By Darian Shimy, March 29, 2010 10:24 am

I went to download a file and saw the following estimated download times:

Although, DSL and Cable providers have been adding higher speeds to their offerings, isn’t it time to lump them together into ‘broadband.’

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By Darian Shimy, March 29, 2010 10:19 am

I recently needed to fax a document to Apple regarding the iPhone.  Here is the comment I added to the fax cover page:

You requested information to be sent via an obsolete technology.  Although a fax machine may look nice next to your mom’s 8-track collection, you really should consider using technologies that were developed after the mid-1970’s.  Just a thought.

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By Darian Shimy, October 22, 2009 12:22 am

Being in the Social Media Monitoring space, I often need to test certain functionality with Twitter Search.  For my account, this is very difficult.  For some reason, none of my tweets ever show up in Twitter Search.  Have I been blacklisted?  I know twitter search doesn’t access all tweets, but I figured it would have seen one of mine.

Well, I am not alone.  Twitter has a help desk article on the subject here.  I tried to create a ticket, but it looks like they were hiding the link.  No worries, Rails apps have easy to guess URLS, http://help.twitter.com/requests/new.

Submitted a ticket, we’ll see if anything comes from it.

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By Darian Shimy, October 18, 2009 10:24 am

I came across this product on Amazon.com under their sexy costumes.

Uh, yeah!

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By Darian Shimy, October 10, 2009 9:43 pm

This Thursday I’ll be at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View, CA.  If anyone else is planning on attending, let me know.

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By Darian Shimy, September 4, 2009 11:01 am

Today we received notice from Google that we would be receiving credit for the loss of service earlier in the week.

Between 12:45 PM to 2:15 PM PDT | 19:45 – 21:15 GMT on Tuesday, September 1, 2009, Google Apps Gmail users were unable to access their accounts through the Gmail web interface. … As a result of this incident, we are extending a 3-day SLA credit to your account. This credit will be reflected in an automatic 3-day extension to your Google Apps term date, and no action is needed on the part of your administrators.

Looks like Google like Netflix know how to handle customer service.  If only the second worst cell phone company would do the same.

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By Darian Shimy, April 1, 2009 8:16 pm

I’m not a marketing, PR or CorpComm guy, but I can say with all the BS news for April Fools, no company in their right mind would release good news today.  However, this would be the best time to release bad news as it will either be dismissed as an April Fools joke, or be washed out with the other crap clogging my RSS feeder.

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By Darian Shimy, March 26, 2009 5:02 pm

Quite often I am asked if a company should engage a person who is disparaging their brand or products.  The answer is, “Absolutely, yes!”  My response comes in two flavors:

1. If someone wrote something that was not based on factual information and drew conclusions based on incorrect data, provide the correct information in a positive light.  Saying something along the lines of, “Thanks for the post.  I represent XYZ and wanted to give you some information you may not have seen when you wrote your post,” goes a long way to calm an emotional author while still presenting your side of the issue
2. If someone is stating a personal opinion, “Company XYZ sucks,” reach out to them and try to help them.  They feel that way because they had a bad experience or your product really does suck.  A good response is, “I’m sorry to hear you have been having problems with our service, would you mind providing specifics so I might be able to help you?”  (Notice the out in the previous sentence.)

When responding, remember the following:

1. You don’t need to win every time, but you do need to show up
2. Don’t bash the author, that will guarantee a humiliating defeat
3. People can disagree with you as long as they have the correct information

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By Darian Shimy, March 19, 2009 5:38 pm

Actually, I’ve been on for a while, but have not gotten around to using it.  Feel free to subscribe:

http://friendfeed.com/dshimy

Thanks!