Entries Tagged 'Rants' ↓

Regular readers will know that I’ve been considering getting a Mac for some time now. After justifying every reason I don’t need or want one, the discovery of some great Mac-only software made me re-consider*.

There’s just one stumbling block. You see, I own Adobe CS3 and Lightroom. Adobe very ‘kindly’ allow users to install copies on two computers, so long as they’re not both used simultaneously (clause 2.4 in the license, for those who are interested). This means I can run Photoshop on my desktop and laptop as required. Great!

However, for some unknown reason Adobe only allow this between computers running the same operating system. That’s right - I can’t install on a Mac and a PC and switch between the two.

Which puts a block on buying a Mac. There’s no way I’m prepared to license even individual Adobe products a second time, and with the number of comps I slice-n-dice being without Photoshop isn’t an option.

There is the option of installing Parallels or VMWare on OSX, an XP guest, and then running CS3. I doubt the feasibility of that - Photoshop runs like a pig on natively, so how much worse would it be under virtualisation!

Any options I’ve missed?

* Not that I want to lock into another proprietory platform. But I dislike Vista and XP is coming to the end of its life-cycle…

When I moved to my current house I inherited a Plusnet ADSL account. Inheriting the existing ADSL meant I had no downtime when moving in (none of the 10 day wait for BT to sort things out) so suited me perfectly.

Quickly it became clear that Plusnet was adequate but not great. Traffic shaping made working on a couple of servers at evenings and weekends impossible (we run ssh on a non-standard port, which led to an 8-10 second delay between typing and seeing the result on-screen - sure I could tunnel via another server, but it’s effort). I live in the middle of a city and the broadband (ADSL Max) was set on a 2MB profile. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Plusnet’s technical support to agree to get the line profile reset in order to see what the line would handle. I knew this profile had been in place since 2004 - and given friends living in the middle of nowhere get faster broadband I figured we should!

Anyhow, a culmination of things led to me arranging a migration to ADSL24, an Entanet reseller. Getting the MAC code from Plusnet was painful but nowhere near as bad as getting one from BT Broadband Everything was going smoothly with migration set for 10 December until…

…at quarter to 1 on Friday morning (7 December) our broadband account was deleted. I didn’t know that at the time, or even that it had stopped working. I was asleep. Waking the next moring I first thought the migration had gone ahead and tried the new connection details. Nothing.

Because of my work having working broadband is critical. Especially as on Friday I was supposed to be doing a rush job (actually the client didn’t get me the necessary information, but still…)

So at 9.30am I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to dreaful music. The support technician looked at our account and said “The tag on your phone line is set to Entanet, the migration must have gone ahead. Talke to them”.

So I phoned Entanet. And sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to slightly better music. I got through to a very efficient lady who explained that the migration wasn’t yet underway, it’s normal for the tag to change early (so Plusnet are at fault), and would I like BT’s number to talk to them?”

So I phoned BT. And got through to an extremely friendly and helpful chap. Say what you will about BT, but they know how to train their customer service operators. He looked up the line and the migration status, confirmed what Entanet had told me, confirmed that a migration should be seamless.

So I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for nearly 15 minutes listening to some dreadful music. Just as the Elton John came on I got through to an operator (doh!) who probably didn’t know what hit him. I stated everything BT had said and this time he agreed that the service needed re-instating. Which he did. Unfortunately Plusnet’s system wouldn’t let them reactivate my account without billing me for another month’s broadband, but I have been promised a refund. I wait with baited breath…

Facebook proudly declares itself to be XHTML 1.0 Strict via the doctype embedded on every page. However, as anyone who has had a peek at the source code will be able to confirm, this is not even wishful thinking but a downright lie. Forget the usual “I’m trying to be valid but a few mistakes are bound to creep in” problem (which is as far as I often get); these guys are defining custom attributes, repeating ID tags and not escaping ampersands in URLs.

I was digging into the “Invite friends to an event” page because I wanted to see how the “Invite Friends on Facebook” search was so responsive (I tried something similar a few months back and gave up). Turns out it’s extremely simple, but makes huge use of custom attributes on tags. Validating the page gave me over 300 errors.

Two points:

1. Why should anyone care?? Facebook have created something amazingly popular with sort-of a web 2.0 interface and it works in all major browsers. Who can complain about that? Well, I’m going to. Leaving aside issues of ‘That’s not fair!!’ because they’ve taken a pragmatic approach that got the job done fast and which I wouldn’t be happy using, the point of standards is to be a standard. If Facebook don’t have any intention of being valid XHTML 1.0 why claim to be so? What happens in the future if browsers tighten up? Is Facebook only looking to the short-term, until someone purchases it and its founders’ profit?
2. Could everything Facebook have done be done without custom attributes, or are they a necessary evil? Looking at it I’d say it can all be done without, but some of the Javascript code would be more complicated and tied to the HTML structure (having to get certain data from child elements).

Incidentally Facebook could have the best of both worlds: extend the XHTML doctype to allow these attributes and have valid code at in the process!

I’ve just been looking round for a prospective client who wants an open blog on their site (I know… bad idea), but is bound under the UK DDA which prevents the use of inaccessible graphical captchas.

In the same week I’ve enabled limited graphical CAPTCHA’s on Phorum over on sendcard.org. The Akismet plugin was catching the spam well, but I was sick of deleting it manually (currently Phorum can’t delete it automatically). The Postgres mailing list has also been discussing using one for comments in their manual.

At some point common sense has to come into accessibility. I dislike CAPTCHAs (I have good eyesight yet often can’t read them), but they deter the spammer and save me a bit of work (unlike say Akismet, where the spammer keeps on spamming not knowing they’ve been caught, and I have to wade through confirming all are spam). Now which is better… a forum or comment system with a CAPTCHA, or no forum/comment system?

Some people propose asking a text-based question or problem, such as “What is the capital of France?” or “What is 7 times 3?”. There’s a few problems with these:

• These set up a barrier for dyslexic or dyspraxic people.
• For people who don’t speak English (or whatever language your website is in, they are difficult if not impossible.
• They require more effort than reading a list of characters! OK, so CAPTCHA’s are hard to read and require effort, but not mental work. I don’t want to drag my brain onto another topic after writing a post (and I have a physics degree, so it’s not like they’re impossible)

You must have seen the blogs that are disabling comments due to spam. Doing so makes the comments inaccessible to 100% of the people. I suggest that while being totally inclusive would be the best outcome, excluding 1% of people is preferable to excluding 100%.

Update: Jeff Croft wrote a rant on accessibility while I was finishing this, which is worth reading!

This is the first in an occasional series of posts about companies who are isolationist, offer terrible customer service or annoy me in a different way.

First up is Newegg.com. As many of you know, prices of pretty much everything are lower in the US than in the UK. I needed another CompactFlash card for my camera, and someone pointed out that newegg.com are selling a Transcend 2GB 120x card for $38.99. I haven’t found anywhere in the UK near that price, so I visited newegg.com.

There’s nothing on the front page or at the top of other pages to say they only ship inside the US. Having been caught out before, I look at the “Frequently Asked Questions” and “Knowledge Base” at the bottom of the page, to try to determine where they ship to.

Nothing. That’s good, I must be in luck! A US company that recognises there is a world beyond its shores and the 52nd state of Iraq.

Happy, I browsed back through the site and added the CompactFlash card to my cart. And realised there was no way to select shipping to outside the USA.

Then I saw it, at the bottom of the cart:
IMPORTANT SHIPPING INFORMATION

Why not make it clearer on the site? Why require me to add it to my cart before finding out whether I can have it shipped to me? I fully understand companies who don’t ship outside their country (it’s so much easier to deal with the postal service - no customs declarations etc) but for goodness sake make it obvious from the start if someone arrives from a non-US IP address! It shows a distinct disregard for their brand outside the US, and for potential customers. Perhaps they never tried any user-interaction studies for the site - or spoke to anyone outside the country when designing the site.

I use the word link farms, but I could have equally well used ‘partner sites’, ‘featured links’, or ‘popular searches’; all of which are used instead.

You may be wondering what on Earth I’m talking about. Link farms are so last century, the search engines don’t respect them any longer and will likely blacklist your site for using them (or gateway pages). However, link farms are all around and growing in usage. They’re back in a very sneaky form. You’ve probably seen these on sites, like these links that were along the bottom of an antique dealer’s site.

With Google’s Pagerank putting weight on the number of incoming links, every possible strategy is being used. A site without incoming links is pretty pointless now, particularly if you’re in a highly competitive market such as renting florida villas. So the owners promoting these sites take the opportunity to purchase links from other sites. Sites with irrelevant content. Whole sites built just to provide links to other sites to increase their search engine ranking.

Today it’s nowhere as obvious as the link-farms of yesteryear. Oh no, these guys have learned their lesson. Neither are most computer-generated junk; instead a few of the sponsored links are added to proper-looking pages.

Let’s suppose the search engines agreed this was not a good way to measure popularity (he who buys the most links is the most popular). They would have a problem. How can you tell the difference between a page of content with random links placed at the bottom of the page to purposefully increase search engine ranking and a blog with a selection of random links in the linkblog?

Here’s an example I found which for a computer would (should?) be hard to distinguish automatically:

I don’t want to play that game. To me it feels like match fixing, fiddling the accounts - it just shouldn’t be done. I believe it’s an ethical problem - it may work, but it isn’t measuring whether the content of the site is good, or whether the site provides a relevant match. There’s also the wrinkle that to do well in search engine results, why should I pay people to clutter up the internet with more useless search engine fodder?

As always, your thoughts are appreciated.

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Using WYSIWYG editing tools is the ONLY thing that makes me use Firefox or IE.

I don’t care if adding WYSIWYNG editor support would break the standards or not. Opera is a commercial product, and if there isn’t a standard way to do something then it had better invent its own way (or copy Mozilla) to satisfy demand.

I am so looking forward to the day I can build a weblog tool using “Bitflux Editor”:http://www.bitfluxeditor.org/ (which allows for inline editing, probably the most revolutionary online editor around), and edit my pages in Opera. Editors like this are the way of the future, and Opera must not be left behind (as it is ahead of the crowd in most areas at present).

Even if something as radical as the Bitflux Editor couldn’t be supported, at least support the tradtional textarea-replacement type like “kupu”:http://kupu.oscom.org/ (being designed for “Plone”:http://www.plone.org), “htmlArea”:http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/, or “FCKEditor”:http://www.fckeditor.net/.

That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

_[First posted in the "Opera forum":http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=59735 where it got no replies]_

Well, I _thought_ it was. Obviously I’m wrong.

Recently I’ve delt with too many US companies who are not interested in extending the same conditions or offers to those residing outside its polluted shores. Let me go through some of them:
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