BiTKOO is a small private company doing great things in the identity and authorization management space.

After working at Microsoft on Visual Studio extensions for the past 2+ years  (Windows Live Mesh app tools, then Visual Studio Tools for Windows Azure) it’s time to do something different.  I’ve learned a lot about Visual Studio innards and WPF construction techniques and worked with a lot of great people at Microsoft.

One thing I’ve learned over the years at Borland, Google, Cooliris, and Microsoft is this: The software industry is far too small to ever really say “Goodbye”.  Whether as future co-workers, clients, speakers or conference attendees, chances are good that we’ll meet again.

One of the fun things I like about BiTKOO is that it’s large enough to have a strong product line and revenue stream, but small enough that I can crash on the CEO’s couch when I’m in town.

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The new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) set to go into effect February 10, 2009 will require all products for children to be tested for lead and other toxins.  Protecting children from toxins is a noble cause, but this law is poorly written.  It requires that manufacturers submit every model of their products for toxicity testing, at an average cost of $500 per test.  Testing must be repeated whenever a model is changed or when a new material is incorporated into the model.

For big business, this is not a huge concern. You make a million units a month, and send a dozen or so samples out for testing.  The cost of the testing is insignificant in the cash flow of millions of units.

 For small manufacturers, particularly makers of traditional hand-crafted clothes, furniture, and toys, the cost of mandatory testing low-volume products is prohibitive.  If your grandmother knits baby blankets to sell at the local craft market, she will be required to pay for a $500 toxicity test for each style of blanket she makes, and for each batch of yarn that she uses.  If she makes and sells doll dresses at $10 apiece, she’d have to make 50 more dresses after the CPSIA goes into effect to cover the cost of one toxicity test.  If she can make 30 dresses from one bolt of fabric, she’ll never recover the cost of the testing that must be repeated for each new supply of material.

The CPSIA law is backwards.  It may have been written with the best intentions, but it is a knee-jerk reaction to recent tragedies caused by toxins contained (willfully added, in some cases) in high volume imported goods.

Since a product is no more toxic than the materials that went into making it, toxicity monitoring should be done at the materials supply level, not the finished product level. CPSIA should be changed to follow the model of the FDA’s organic food certification standards – if a manufacturer uses materials and processes that are certified as meeting toxicity standards, then the products made with those materials and processes should be inherently certifiable as in compliance.  Manufacturers who cannot certify their supply chain to US standards should be subject to mandatory finished product testing.  This removes the burden from small manufacturers to test every product if they use only certified materials and processes, but still protects the consumer in the end.

Many materials used by home crafters are already certifiable as non-toxic, such as natural and synthetic yarns, thread, most fabrics, and several species of wood. There are a variety of paints and stains for wood toys already certified non-toxic by the FDA.  None of these common-sense materials that have been in use for generations are considered acceptable by the new CPSIA law.

I’ve been a home crafter of a wide variety of stuff since I was old enough to rub two sticks together.  I don’t currently sell home crafted children’s products, but I certainly do not want my future crafting options (or my neighbors) to be put out of business by an outrageously shortsighted “protection” law that does nothing but protect big business from competition by home crafters and microbusinesses and destroys a cottage industry at home and abroad.

From  Adriana Stuijt’s article on DigitalJournal:

Objections and criticisms of the new CPSIA law can be voiced to the Consumer Product Safety Commission until January 20.  You can reach the CPSC by email at Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Office of the Secretary, Sec102ComponentPartsTesting@cpsc.gov . Comments can be faxed to CPSC at +1 301 504-0127 or sent by postal mail to:

The Office of the Secretary,
Consumer Product Safety Commission,
Room 502, 4330 East-West Highway,
Bethesda, Maryland 20814 US.

Comments should always be captioned: ‘Section 102 Mandatory Third-Party Testing of Component Parts’ 

You should also write to your own congressional representatives and senators to request urgent changes in the CPSIA to save handmade crafts industry. Use the sample letter

Find your Congressionl representative here and Senator here

For more information, see also the Handmade Toy Alliance web site and sign the Change.org petition against CPSIA.

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Whew!

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About 700 acres have burned so far, but CDF projects it may consume as much as 2000 acres before it can be contained, due to the steep terrain and dense forest. Their best option to contain canyon wildfires is to cut firebreaks at the ridges and try to keep it from spreading beyond its current canyon.  About 1500 people in the Bonny Doon area have been instructed to evacuate. A few of them (a friend’s family and their cats and dogs) are staying at our place for the next few days.

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This simple cost-savings choice has now cost me nearly 3 nights of repeated installation wrestling, trying to get the system set up the way *I* want it.  Actually, the tally is more than 3 nights, since I’ll be starting over again this weekend with a new Vista Ultimate install.

Now, if I were the kind of person who leaves everything at its default settings, I probably wouldn’t be writing this rant now.  But I do change defaults, and that often brings out any and every wart in any installation package. 

I prefer to partition my hard disk into two partitions:  one for the OS and most applications, and the other for “data” – stuff that I actually work on, utility apps, command line stuff, and so forth.  I find this helps keep the high volume of file activity (compiling code, creating and deleting hundreds of files at a time) and associated disk fragmentation from polluting the partition that contains the OS and primary apps.  The system partition is “mostly read only” and shouldn’t fragment badly on its own, other than by continual system updates and registry rot.  (Always defrag after any significant software install, especially large service packs from Microsoft)

Vendors never configure hard disks with multiple partitions any more.  It’s always a monolithic slab of sectors, and always a pain to repartition. 

So I pop the Vista Ultimate upgrade DVD into the machine while running Vista Home, and step through the prompts (including entering the product activation key code) to the point where it asks if I want to upgrade the existing installation or do “advanced” stuff like repartition.  Hey!  Let’s repartition!  Bzzt.  Can’t do that from the setup launched within Vista.  You can only do that by booting from the DVD.

Ok, so let’s shut down and boot from the DVD.  System->Shutdown-> Please wait half an hour while 42 updates are installed for your new Vista Home installation.  Arg!

Come back after dinner to boot from DVD.  Step through the DVD setup steps (including entering the product activation key code) to the point where it asks about upgrade or repartition.  Hey! Let’s repartition! Bzzt. Can’t do that with the product key you entered.  Arg!

Vista Upgrade DVDs can’t repartition the drive on installation.  Period.  The laptop’s OEM installed Vista Home edition can’t repartition the drive on installation either, since rebuilding the system from the recovery DVD sets it up exactly as it was delivered: one partition.  Arg!

Time to go get the real Vista Ultimate product DVD and start over.  Slick the disk and build from the bottom up.

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