"In late April, the UserVoice security team learned that an unauthorized party illegally accessed one of UserVoice’s backend reporting systems and was able to view user data on a small subset of users. The user data includes name, email, and a hashed password and salt. Unfortunately, the passwords were hashed with the SHA1 hashing algorithm, which by today’s standards is considered weak. As such, we’re resetting the passwords for all users in our database."
Every tree maintained by the City of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) has "an email address" (in the mainstream press it's been "one email per tree"; in reality it's a single mailbox the CoM staffers respond to).
I like the Fitbit hardware (I use a Surge and love running with it) and their software is decent, but their customer service is atrocious.
I found a bug triggered by hitting the "Pause" button during a run. Effectively the device paused on the display, but the underlying data they use to build maps, calculate pace, etc keeps calculating. So if you run for 10 minutes, pause for 10 when you unexpectedly meet a friend, then run for 10 minutes all of your stats are based on a 30-minute run which isn't what most runners are interested in.
I documented this in excruciating detail (including showing errors in their .TCX file exports) and sent it off to their helpdesk.
First response: "That is a carrier issue, but don't worry we are still counting your steps.". There was no acknowledgement of the content I'd sent or the attachments I'd included.
Second response: Insisted it was a carrier or GPS issue, and not a software bug.
Third response: They asked me to call their 800-number. After I declined due to being in Australia, they replied and insisted that the call would be free, because it's to an 800-number.
Fourth response: THey are "Blessed" I contacted them. No acknowledgement of understanding of my issue.
It seems clear that their customer service team are not familiar with day to day use cases of their products, particularly the high-end running watch. The free phone call stuff is amusing but hints at a team that aren't aware of who their customers are.
Again, I like my Surge watch and their software is pretty good. Integration to Strava is great. But there's a pretty good chance they'll be overtaken by a future Apple watch with GPS in it.
What's the source of your Australian data? The AusPost data is rather expensive, and most providers have somewhat awkward APIs and/or enterprise sales models that get tricky to navigate. Having somebody to abstract that out to would be fantastic.
Surely a coffee-infused stout can provide the best of both worlds?
That said, unless it's a side project that isn't in real use I don't tend to work after drinking alcohol, but it's a rare day that I don't work "under the influence" of espresso.
Excel does this with it's built-in data sources. Typically it can connect to any ODBC data source, which includes pretty much any SQL database and most proprietary databases (although in some cases you'll need to buy ODBC drivers. Yuck)
Then, bingo! You've got real, structured, data available in Excel so you can run Pivot Tables, build charts, and filter data to your hearts content. I use it frequently to build read-only data views for people who want to analyse their data in ways they don't know how to do using more native tools.
I used to work for a hospital that used this strategy for almost all of its internal reporting (I was contracted to ease the transition to Business Objects); it can get out of hand quickly.
Every morning between 8:45 and 9AM, doctors and administrators would come in, fire up Excel and refresh their data, the slowdown on the network was noticeable (pretty much a 'select *' on a massive de-normalised reporting tables hundreds of times throughout the site).
The flexibility that Excel offered some (not-too-technical) power users in those circumstances was fantastic, though, as much as I hate to admit it.
Yep, it's got it's limits - I would only use this in production with carefully crafted queries to try too counter this problem.
My usual use is against MS CRM data, which puts a 10k line limit on by default. First instinct for many people is to disable the limit, but in reality it's a good fail safe!
It is not easy to set up, but way easier than using csv for getting raw data from Excel into SQL Server, or for running a clean-up query on data in Excel.
Depends on the data source, I believe. I think some can be RW however I never use it - allowing users to update data from Excel isn't something I'm keen on, other than possibly as a sysadmin task.
Further information: https://status.uservoice.com/incidents/fb7ml8b3nphf