Thanks for giving me the opportunity to serve, and provide support to you all.

Its been a great time, and I’ll see you around the neighbourhood. ;o)

Cheers,
Chee Wee, Chua…

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See who Tim Paterson is.

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That is because, the network license is sent to the customer by email, and the instructions are contained within. I would guess that, often, the person receiving the license certificate email is not the same as the person installing the product.

And thus, it came to my attention, when customers file support cases, claiming they need assistance on how to install the product with network license, as there are no instructions on how to install the product.

As I see the problem from the customer’s point of view, and in order to improve the customer’s experience, I incorporated this feedback to product management, and asked for instructions to be included. Shortly thereafter, network license installation instructions were included in the install.htm file.

So today, when you purchase the product, which comes in a DVD, together with a printed Quick Start Guide, the Quick Start Guide contains instructions that says to refer to the DVD’s install.htm file for specific installation instructions, and the installation instructions has a specific section dealing with network license.

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I watched a funny show the other day: Idiocracy. It was about this average soldier, Army librarian Joe Bauers, played by Luke Wilson, who was involved in a hibernation experiment. Unfortunately, the person in charge of the experiment was busted for committing crimes, and the experiment was forgotten.

500 years later, the world had evolved to the stage where Joe is now the most intelligent person alive!

Watching the movie, I think I share the same feelings as Joe.

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Recently, there seem to be some customers who reported losing serial numbers for CodeGear products. Fortunately, we have a Developer Network functionality which allows customers to view the serial numbers for the products they’ve licensed.

For such customers, they need to visit the Developer Network site (http://members.codegear.com/), key in the user account and password, then, click on the "My Registered Products" button.

This will allow them to get back the serial numbers for their products.

For a complete overview of what features are available on the Membership Services site, please view the Developer Network article: New membership services on the developer network.

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It seems that there are quite a few customers out there who do not know that you can obtain official CodeGear Support assistance for free, if you have an installation / registration issue with CodeGear products, subject to certain terms and conditions. You can easily check the status of your free installation / registration support case also.

In addition, there are articles written by everyone in CodeGear Support. These articles are a result of cases filed by customers, or research done by Support personnel, or both.

Some common mistakes made by customers when they file an installation / registration case are a combination of forgetting one of the following:

• To provide the serial number of the product you’re having trouble with.
• To provide the Developer Network (DN) login account name or email address of the DN account if you’re having a registration issue with.
• Using a different email address than the one in the DN account.
• To provide the specific error message encountered.
• Read the readme, install, or deploy notes for the product you’re installing / registering.
• Selecting the correct region where you’re located (to ensure that the Support personnel attending to your case is more culturally attuned to the language / intonation of voice, etc)

Though instructions are provided on the page leading to the filing of a free support case, sometimes, it is easy for customers to forget.

What are the ways that you and other CodeGear customers think that we can improve upon our processes?

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I’ve just noticed a newsgroup posting by the CodeGear VP of Products & Strategy, Michael Swindell.

The VCL for PHP documentation is live!

I hope this is the way our documentation will go in the future.

To quote Michael, ‘This new version is done more in the "Delphi way" and now includes all the published properties, methods, and events for each component class, not just the underlying getters and setters behind them.’

This is all very exciting for me…

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1. Support for Vista - see image below. ‘Nuff said.
2. Tool Palette filtering - It’s now a Pos(Filter, Lowercase(ItemName)). So if you type Box, you get TListBox, TComboBox, TGroupBox, and any component that contains the lowercase word box.
3. IDE startup and shutdown speed - On a Pentium D, 3GHz, 2-core Vista machine, Delphi starts up in < 16 secs the first time, shuts down < 3 secs (disappears from the screen in < 2 secs and from the taskbar manager, another 1-2 secs), and when you start it up again, it takes < 10 secs.
4. Improved WSDL Importer and WSDL Importer sources - are there any webservices that we cannot import?
5. Our dedicated and passionate customers - without them, would we have made so much improvements?
6. > 372 fixes to the product.
7. My name in the Alt TEAM easter egg game.

And now… SHAZAM!

I call upon the following Cogs to name their favourites…

• Calvin Tang
• John Kaster
• Malcolm Groves
• Chris Bensen
• Seppy Bloom
• Allen Bauer
• Stephen Blas

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So, when you first install the CodeGear product that you have purchased, you’re required to register it.

In my opinion, registration serves as a form of software protection for both the customer and the vendor, protecting both parties.

Software protection has a long history since the 80s, involving dongles, disks with damaged sectors, hard disks with marked sectors (I know, I’ve encountered all these personally before. In those days, you had to have the physical device with you before you could start the software), etc… leading, to the eventual current state of product activation.

Various criticisms have been voiced.

If you’re a first time customer, you’re required to fill in some information, such as your name, your email address, your home/office address, the name of your company (optional), etc. Then, in order to prevent anyone from accessing these information besides yourself, you have to supply a password to protect it. Of course, if you forgot your password for your DN (Developer Network) account, there’s a way to recover it.

For the purpose of this blog entry, let’s assume that for various reasons, you decided not to supply valid information. Then, one day, you either

• lost / forgot your registration details, including password
• changed all of your name, address, phone, email address, etc…
• worked for another company
• had to reformat your entire PC

or all of the above so that none of the original registration details match the information you can supply now, and had to reinstall the software. Or someone had performed a license theft and now has your serial number and authorization key.

So the scenarios now are:

1. Someone had your serial number and authorization key.
2. You had to reinstall the software.

Supposing you now have this issue on your hands, and you’re required to resolve it, what do you do?

First, you have to verify the customer’s details. (There’s the two-way authentication issue, verifying that the vendor is who they say they are, but this blog entry is not about security, so I’ll not go into that) Since none of the details matched, and you couldn’t be sure the customer is who he claims he is, you can’t release any information to him, as that causes all sort of privacy, confidentiality and other related issues.

And that’s why it’s essential that your DN account have accurate details.

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