An Experiment in Bloggery

There is a company called Freshly Squeezed Software. They have a few products available, and an upcoming one called PulpFiction. PulpFiction is a news aggregator that supports RSS and Atom. And I’ve been beta testing it. It’s a decent newsreader, but I’m not going to buy it, nor am I ever going to purchase anything from Freshly Squeezed Software. If you want to know why, continue reading.

Background

I’ve been beta testing it for about a week and a half. I’ve been reporting a decent number of bugs—the bug report system (Mantis) listed me as 4th highest number of bugs reported. So I’d obviously been spending enough time tracking down and reporting bugs. In addition, in response to this blog post I did a small PHP+MySQL project for the main developer (Erik Barzeski) which was to be the admin interface for a feature he was going to put into v1.1 of PulpFiction.

Problem

Last night I discovered PulpFiction was running really slowly. I ran leaks on it. What did I find? over 91000 (that’s 91 THOUSAND) leaks, for over 111MB of leaked memory! This was a serious problem. I went to report it, and that’s when I discovered the problem: my bug report account had been deleted. That’s right, Erik decided to delete my account without any warning. He wasn’t online at the time, so I contacted one of the other developers (Brad). He didn’t know what was going on. I gave him my leaks output with a description of the problem and went to bed.

Today I contacted Erik and asked what was going on. I’m not going to copy everything that was said, but the gist is that he deleted the accounts of anybody he feels is “unfit to beta test”. That’s right, he deleted my account on a whim. When I pressed for reasons, the only coherent one he gave was that I wasted Brad’s time by talking to him and that pissed him off. There’s a few things wrong with that, but the biggest was that I had only contacted him twice. The first time I contacted him at Erik’s suggestion (to talk to him about a particular bug I could reliably reproduce). The second time was after my account had already been deleted, and I gave him information about a serious bug that time. So basically, Erik was making up bullshit reasons on the spot. He also told me that he didn’t want my PHP code and that I must immediately delete it as I was using copyrighted materials. The only materials I was using that could possibly fall under this was images taken from his site that I was using to lay out the interface properly so it would fit in with the rest of his site (seeing as it was meant to be hosted on his site). He knew full well I was doing this (and even pointed me to an updated copy of one of the images) and never had any problem with it before. Obviously he was making up reasons again. He also claimed I was using copyrighted code, which was a downright lie. The closest thing I was doing was including a few .inc files from his site (which were simply the header and footer of the page, once again to make it fit in with his site’s layout).

As a last resort, I emailed him with a (very polite) message asking for a clear explanation as to why my bug reporting account was deleted. His response?

OK. Here are the reasons:

1) I said so
2) See #1

And after that he said that any further contact (IM or email) would simply be ignored. To add insult to injury, he posted a snippet from our earlier IM conversation on his blog, made fun of it, when I responded in comments he then ridiculed me and banned my IP from making comments again.

Summary

So basically, on a whim he deleted my account, when I asked for reasons he made some bullshit ones up on the spot, wasted hours of my time having me write PHP code and then telling me he no longer wanted it. He continued to be an asshole when I emailed him, informed me that he would completely ignore any further contact I tried to make, posted a blog entry with a snippet of our conversation taken out of context and mis-interpreted and banned me from commenting so I couldn’t respond.

Conclusion

Don’t purchase any of his products. You’re just giving money to a stuck-up, egotistical asshole who doesn’t care a whit about anybody else. Seriously. Also, his products leak memory like a colander full of water if PulpFiction is any indication of his usual quality.

PHP code

Despite his insistence that I delete it, I still have the code I wrote for him. I’m going to describe it, then put it up for download. I’ve changed all the links to refer elements from his site so I won’t be posting any “copyrighted materials”. However, I’m only putting it up for download, not actually making it usable here, because I don’t want to give him any grounds for complaint (as I’m sure he’d complain that I’m still using his materials if I simply link to them. But the PHP files themselves are owned by me, so I can distribute those just fine). They require PHP 4.3.0 or higher and MySQL. Simply create a database called “opml” in the MySQL database and grant all on opml.* to opml@localhost identified by ‘opml’. Then connect to the database and copy&paste the output from the schema.sql file there. Then put the PHP files onto your server and they should work fine.

Basically, the feature is he wants to be able to have “celebrity OPML” files (an OPML file being the exported subscription list). PulpFiction v1.1 was going to be able to download the list and browse them. The code I wrote was the admin backend—he could add new people, delete people, edit people, and upload new OPML files for people. My code was complete, and I even went the extra step of writing code to parse OPML files and display them nicely (something he didn’t want, since he didn’t need a publicly-accessible web interface, but I did that bit for myself). And now that he’s decided he doesn’t want anything to do with me, he’s going to have to get somebody else to re-write everything I did. Luckily I never gave him access to the PHP files themselves.

Anyway, go ahead and download the files here. If you want to see a screenshot of the index page, click here.

If you want the OPML files for the 4 people (besides me) in that screenshot, just go here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2004 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.