The Schoolr Blog

Textbooks?

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:35:00 -0700

I can’t believe we’re already at the end of the semester. Finals start next week. I’m not going to give you any study tips because I’m the last person who should be dishing out that advice but I will tell you how you can get rid of your textbooks and make some money in the process.

To start, I want you to check out:

Textbook 123. It’s a site run by a couple of guys at UVic and it looks pretty great. It uses Facebook Connect, so you don’t have to register for the website per se, just log in with your Facebook info and skip the hassle.

Some cool things about it:

You’re selling within your school’s market
They have pre-filler. This allows you to just enter your book’s ISBN and it automatically displays author, version, publisher info - all you have to do is enter the price you want to sell for.
When you enter a book, Textbook 123 automatically adds a picture of it to your listing.
There’s a wishlist feature, too. Enter a book you’re looking for and the site will search the database and alert you when that book becomes available.

I haven’t used the site to sell books yet but I will be listing a few in a couple of weeks. You might as well give it a try, it’s free.

Textbook 123 has more of a Canadian focus right now. Yeah, we’re the world’s guinea pigs.

craigslist. As if you’re not already aware.

Here are some tips to sell your books faster on craigslist or any other online-garage-sale-site.

Take a picture! Yes, even if it’s just with your phone. This is preferred over the actual picture of the book on the publisher’s website. Why? People want to see that a) you’re legit and b) what quality the book is in.
State the class the book is for and the exact edition it is.
Is the professor using a newer edition than what you’re selling? No problem. Just include a note saying that and explaining that the content is essentially the same and that professors don’t really care what book you’re using.
Price well. Usually, I check what the bookstore is selling the books at used and I bring the price down by 10-20%.
Are you selling a bunch of books? Make different listings for each book.

If anything, hopefully this post just reminds you to list your books somewhere!

Enjoy the 4-day week.

A month?

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:34:04 -0700

I can’t believe it has been a month since I’ve posted! I’m sorry, it has been a very busy month but don’t worry, I’m still thinking of you.

In fact, I’ve been working on a new interface for Schoolr. The goal is to simplify things even more and I’ll also be adding some new features. And by features, I don’t just mean more search options.

I’m going leave this post a little bare so that I force myself to share more with you.

Until then, farewell and have a fantastic week.

Oh, hello.

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:12:06 -0800

I know. I’ve neglected this blog for the past few weeks. Midterms came and I told myself I’d write something after they were over, then reading break, and then the last weekend of the Olympics. But I’m here now. And by here I mean on the ferry coming back to Victoria from Vancouver (Did someone say gold?). Technically, I’ll have to post this once I get home because, for some reason, BC Ferries hates WiFi.

Updates? There’s been a little aesthetic change to the main page. You probably won’t notice but I spent way more time on it than I should have. No? You want an update that’s more substantial? Something worth reading? Well, I can do that for you – just give me a few weeks.

In the meanwhile, let me introduce you to Fresh Password. The site generates a really secure password for you in one click. You obviously won’t use the passwords it generates for everything but it works well for things like online banking and the likes.

Oh, I kind of hesitate to post this but it really made my day. I got this email as a suggestion through the Schoolr contact page a couple weeks ago. It was totally unprompted and I’m not sure what the context is but it’s absolutely amazing:

“why does everyone have a hard time with homework and everything they should just put down random answers like i do but mine are educated guesses and that way they don’t fail the eighth grade

bye”

Enjoy the start of the week.

RSS? What is that?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:58:37 -0800

“What is RSS?” - I’ve run into this question a lot in the past couple of days so I thought I’d dedicate this post to explain.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” That in itself is of no help to you but, hey, now you know.

Let’s say you visit a bunch of blogs and news websites on a daily basis. You have to type in each address and scroll down the website to read new posts or articles. RSS feeds let you read the content on those sites without actually having to visit them.

How? Well you’ll have to use an RSS Reader (I suggest Google Reader). Once you have a reader you can click the “RSS” or “Subscribe to RSS feed” buttons on each website. This will connect the RSS feeds from the respective websites/blogs to your reader. So instead of visiting each website individually, you can now open up your reader and see all the new articles and posts from all the websites you subscribe to in one place.

Why would I want to do that? It’s a time saver and you can quickly scroll down and view new content from all the websites you subscribe to without having to actually visit them. Some RSS feeds give you the full article/post in the reader, some others only give you a headline with a link to read the full article on their website.

Should I use RSS feeds? It’s really a personal choice. Some people love them, others aren’t a huge fan. I enjoy using them occasionally but for the most part, I like visiting each website/blog individually. It’s like eating at a restaurant, things tend to taste better when you’re in their environment.

I just heard about this -- and now I'm hearing about it again.

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:14:26 -0800

You know when you hear or learn about something kind of obscure and then out of nowhere that fact or name starts popping up everywhere? Yeah. It’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Kissed?

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:30:16 -0800

I am giving you a source of procrastination. Kissed by a Bus. It’s as strange as it sounds.

Etraffic Solutions plagiarism update

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:18:38 -0800

So I received an email from Wayne Poncia, the CEO of Etraffic Solutions, on December 8, 2009. I’ve waited to post his email and my reply back, expecting to get a response from him or Etraffic but that hasn’t happened, so here we go:

His email to me (Dated: December 8, 2009):

Sasan,

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention. As soon as I received your notice, I investigated to find that, as you indicated, the www.schoolr.com URL was copied into the public source code of the SchoolWAX site. Reading your concern about its inclusion I instructed Etraffic staff to find the reference and remove it. I apologize on Etraffic’s behalf for the error that was made. It should not have occurred.

Regarding the press release about SchoolWAXTV claiming to be Canada’s “first” all in one homework site, I agree that that this statement is open to interpretatoin. In response to your concern about the claim of “first” I checked into why our marketing person wrote the sentence the way that she did. The response I received was that the combination of video and homework help was, in her mind, a “first.” However, I see no harm in removing the word “first” from the release and have instructed staff to remove it.

I reviewed the schoolr site and I think you are providing a great service. It appears to be targeted to post-secondary students and is a great one-stop jumping off spot to credible research resources. I enjoyed the humour on the site as well.

From what I understand, schoolr is a non-revenue generating site in the same way that SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV are free services. SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV actually came from a personal frustration that I had with my own children relying exclusively on Google and YouTube for research online. I wanted them to use some of the many homework help sites available worldwide and, as a result, had SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV created as a free directory of quality homework help sites. SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV promise no advertising and no revenue generation from either site. Sponsorship is free.

SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV do not target post-secondary students (as you can see the SchoolWAX target audience is elementary, middle and secondary). I like schoolr’s more mature offering for post-secondary. If you like, we would be willing to link to schoolr from SchoolWAX and recommend it as a post-secondary resource? As well, I would be happy to include schoolr as a sponsor on the SchoolWAX and SchoolWAXTV sites. The only thing we ask for in return for sponsorship is that your organization (in this case schoolr) link to SchoolWAX and/or SchoolWAXTV.

I am sorry that this situation has occurred and have taken steps to address your concerns. I wish you well with schoolr, it is a great service.

Wayne Poncia
Chief Executive Officer

My response to him (Dated: December 16, 2009)

Wayne,

I appreciate the fact that you are taking steps to ameliorate this situation. I certainty understand how personal frustration can fuel innovation and I hope that we can both continue to provide useful services to the community at large. While your vision for SchoolWax may have been pure, its implementation, by your own admittance, was sullied by a developer at your company.

While SchoolWax may not be generating direct revenue, as it is a free service, it does act as a method of promoting Etraffic’s products. An example of this can be seen through the ‘Featured Product’ section of the “Educators” page. This can also be confirmed by an educator’s testimonial on SchoolWax’s “About Us” page, “I was blown away by the Pilot Math online trial on SchoolWAX and knew I had to have it because my district is going online. -Gr. 7 Teacher, NVSD 44.”

I welcome competition and I urge SchoolWax to be constantly innovating. And while I agree that there are many similar web services and websites out there, I disagree that they can directly take from one another, unless express consent is provided; be it design, function, or in this matter, code. The fact of the matter is, a developer from your company based SchoolWax off of Schoolr and this was demonstrated by Schoolr’s code being featured in SchoolWax’s code. As a result of this, I am seeking compensation.

I hope that we can negotiate some sort of settlement, and I invite you to provide me with an offer.

I appreciate the removal of the claim that SchoolWax was “first” and you are more than free to publicly link to Schoolr.

Regards,
Sasan

It’s been almost a month since I sent my email and Etraffic has not attempted to contact me since. Maybe they figure that I’ll give up or forget about it.

I was doing some research on Etraffic Solutions and I found this article from the Financial Post Business Magazine (dated: December 2006). It talks about how Etraffic Solutions was fined $12,500 from The Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft for using pirated copies of Microsoft and Symantec products in their office. Interesting.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“Wayne Poncia, a partner with eTraffic Solutions, a Victoria-based online-learning content provider, also takes issue with CAAST’s strategy. Poncia’s company got in trouble with CAAST in 2004 for using pirated copies of Microsoft and Symantec programs, and paid a $12,500 penalty. The investigation was a result of a tip — Poncia suspects an unhappy ex-employee. Nevertheless, he feels CAAST would be more effective if it softened its approach. “Negative ads and scare tactics don’t work,” he says. “CAAST would have a far broader impact if it collaborated with companies and assisted them in monitoring their software, instead of trying to get employees to rat on their companies.” Read the full thing on Sarah Efron’s website.

That’s it for now, I have some readings to get to. I just wanted to let everyone know where everything stands now. Expect some more updates in the next few days.

P.S. Thanks for all the emails/Facebook messages! You guys rock.

My eyes

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:49:25 -0800

What if I told you that I had something that would let you look at your computer screen at night without bothering your eyes? What if I told you it was free? Well, I think I have something to tell you.

Download F.lux right now. I’ve been using it for a week now and I love it. What does it do? It changes the warmth of your screen’s display depending on how far you are from sunrise/sunset.

Give yourself some time to adjust to it (everything looks totally weird when you first launch it). This thing has saved my eyes.

Two thousand and ten

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:34:25 -0800

I’d prefer not to call it twenty-ten but that’s just me. In any case, welcome to the new year. Classes started up for me this past Monday and it looks like it’s going to be a busy semester.

I hope everyone had a chill break no matter how short or long it was. If you’re still on break, good for you.

I’ve been getting some emails/Facebook messages asking what the scoop is with Etraffic Solutions, so I’ll write an update in the next little while. Let’s just say that Hubert is just getting warmed up.

No more install woes

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:49:13 -0800

Hassle sucks. And no, I’m not talking about the ‘Hoff. You know when you get a new computer, or format your drive, and need to re-install everything again? It’s not a difficult task but it definitely is time consuming. Ninite solved this problem and did a great job doing it.

They give you a list of apps to pick from, you select them, then it gives you ONE installation file which installs all the software you picked at once. Beautiful.

Happy holidays! Hubert has decided to enter children’s...

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Happy holidays! Hubert has decided to enter children’s fiction.

Jeremy Baker at The Zone (FM 91.3) did a quick interview with me...

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:03:28 -0800

Jeremy Baker at The Zone (FM 91.3) did a quick interview with me about Schoolr. Check it out.

Flashcards?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:38:38 -0800

I’ve been in the library a lot these past couple of weeks and I’ve seen a lot of people making flashcards so I thought I would share Flashcard Exchange with you. Basically, you can create your own flashcards online or study off the ones that have already been posted. For the most part, all subjects are covered. It’s worth a look.

Hope everyone is doing well this exam season. I have one more to go. On a Saturday. At night.

Hubert made the cover of Monday Magazine

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:35:00 -0800

Photo by Jason Youmans, Monday Magazine.

So Hubert made it on the cover of Monday Magazine (thanks, Monday!). The cover shot is accompanied by an article written on the Schoolr situation with quotes from the CEO of Etraffic Solutions, as well as a law prof from UVic. Check it out here.

Hubert definitely has some explaining to do.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:51:46 -0800

Hubert definitely has some explaining to do.

Speed reader

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:59:04 -0800

This is something that I think I’ll be using more regularly. It’s called Spreeder and it trains you to read faster. Just paste in a bunch of text and choose your specifics and it will flash the words right in front of your face. Pretty seamless. I like it.

Schoolr had a great day at UVic today. Hubert danced and...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:51:00 -0800

People showing some Schoolr love.

One bad mother-clucker.

Awkwardly walking through the library.

Schoolr had a great day at UVic today. Hubert danced and awkwardly roamed various buildings on campus, entered lecture halls (big ups to all the profs), and posed for pictures.

If anyone has any pictures or video from what happened in the Cadboro Commons (think: music & Hubert shaking his stuff on a table), please send it over.

Schoolr was first at UVic

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:21:54 -0800

Live in Victoria? Want to show your Schoolr support? Come down to UVic (in front of the McPherson Library) anytime between 1:00PM-3:00PM on Tuesday, December 1st.

Hubert will be there…breakdancing.

Schoolr was first. A story of copyright infringement, plagiarism, and a leading e-learning corporation

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:51:00 -0800

How it started

Rewind back a few weeks. There I was, at home, waiting for my clothes to come out of the dryer. With twenty minutes to spare, I sat at my desk wearing my best laundry day attire: blue basketball shorts from the ninth grade, a significantly undersized t-shirt, and black socks. Had I showered yet? Perhaps.

To fill the time, I started to look through Schoolr’s referral logs. What are referral logs? Basically, they tell you where your site was visited from. For example, if you’re on Facebook and you visit Schoolr, the log would tell me that you were referred by Facebook. Pretty standard. As I’m going through the logs, one site catches my eye and I click onto it. It’s called SchoolWax and it was strikingly similar to Schoolr in both look and function (especially the previous version of Schoolr). The first thought I had was, “This sucks, they liked my site and copied it for themselves.” Thing is, design elements can’t be copyrighted and without having solid proof, I wasn’t able to prove anything. See the similarities here.

That is, until I viewed their source code. I saw that they had directly copied a part of my source code and put it on their site. This made it very clear that the existence of their site was based on Schoolr and took their site from “made something similar” to “copied code and function.” See copied code here.

I dug deeper and found out that SchoolWax is run by Etraffic Solutions, a large e-learning corporation based out of Victoria, British Columbia.

Feeling a bit cheated as SchoolWax had used my content to promote and sell Etraffic’s products, form partnerships with organizations, and as a means of publicity, I decided to consult a couple of lawyers. They were very helpful but also very expensive. Being a student, I don’t have a litigation budget, so I decided to deal with this on my own.

November 16, 2009:

I sent Etraffic Solutions a letter establishing that they were infringing on my copyright. It contained 3 requests:

Immediately stop infringing on my copyright by removing Schoolr’s content from SchoolWax or provide adequate credit and enter into a licensing agreement with Schoolr.
Provide me with a retribution (for the 15 months their site has been in operation).
Immediately stop the claim that SchoolWax was “Canada’s first all-in-one homework portal.”

Read my letter to them here.

I also had their source code notarized, so that they couldn’t remove my code, or references to it, and claim it was never there.

Look at the notarized document here.

November 23, 2009

I received a response from Etraffic’s lawyers. The letter did not address my main complaint (that my source code on their website showed they copied Schoolr), rather, it focused on minute, general information, that I did not bring up. Here are some snippets from the letter and my responses to them.

From the letter: “While the reference to a public website, www.schoolr.com can only be seen when viewing the code behind Etraffic’s website, the reference to your website has now been removed by Etraffic.”

My response: So they’re saying that they did copy my code but that it’s not a big deal because it could ONLY be seen in the source code (and it’s not like the source code makes up the website…).

From the letter: “The reference to www.schoolr.com served no purpose within the Etraffic code and conveyed no advantage to Etraffic.”

My response: Of course the reference to Schoolr served them no purpose. It was foolish of them to replicate my site and even more foolish to copy and paste my code into theirs. I am not questioning the existence of this one line of code (that I originally had linked to Schoolr as a quick fix to a bug). I am questioning the fact that a) they based SchoolWax after Schoolr and b) they copied my code onto their site.

From the letter: “Both www.schoolr.com and www.schoolwax.com legaly access the citation functionality of the North Carolina State University website as do a number of other websites.”

My response: Of course they do. I never questioned this and this is not my complaint. North Carolina State University offers a fantastic citation resource and I encourage more research websites to utilize their brilliant tool.

From the letter: “Etraffic has not violated any copyright, nor made any revenue as a result of your website being referenced five times. Etraffic has removed any reference to your website and now considers the matter to be closed.”

My response: Once again, their wording is impeccable. According to this, they haven’t made any specific revenue from my code being “referenced” five times. How about the revenue that was generated as a result of SchoolWax copying Schoolr? That is where this code comes into play, as proof that they did more than “reference” my code but rather copied Schoolr and sloppily left a trail. And, as far as I’m concerned, this matter is not “closed.”

Read their letter here.

Some quick facts:

SchoolWax was launched in September 2008. Schoolr was launched in December 2006.
SchoolWax is a free website, like Schoolr, however it is used to promote and sell Etraffic’s products.
SchoolWax partnered with LearnNowBC, which is funded by the Ministry of Education, to bring the site to BC students and educators.
Schoolr thinks you’re cute.
Read more about parterships that SchoolWax has formed on their website here.

Schoolr was first.

You all rock.

Click click click

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:08:00 -0800

It was pretty annoying, I know. Every time you changed a tab (went from Google to Images or from Wikipedia to Thesaurus, etc.) you would have to click the text box to write something. Not anymore. Now, your cursor is always in the text box, no matter what tab you click.

Update: So I made it super clickable but as a result it messed up everything under ‘more stuff’. So I’ve temporarily disabled the function until I figure it all out but it will be back.