Why see it static on the screen when a woman can, erm, enunciate it for you?
(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)
Forget WhatIsMyIP.com
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Category: Technology
Geek Cred- –
Oh, man, I only got 7 of 10 in CNet’s Classic Games Quiz.
It’s a wonder you’re still reading this pathetic blog.
On the other hand, one and a quarter years later, I’ve finally gotten my lab hooked up and I am posting this from my old Windows 2000 box, the last machine I built by hand. Does that redeem me any? Bueller? Bueller?
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Commodore 128 as Nature Intended It
Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, and he did, and on my most recent trip to Wisconsin I retrieved said machine.
When I first tried to boot it, it failed. So I planned to make it a teach-yourself-electronics project to resuscitate it, but all it took was a new fuse in the power supply. So I didn’t really learn much at all, but it works beautifully.
And darn the luck, the only television with an RF switch attached to it was in the living room. So behold:
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Oh, my. I was so excited, I hooked the Commodore 1571 disk drive up and I’ll be durned if it didn’t work right out of the box. So I dug through my archives of my old disks and found some of the programs I had written in the first Bush presidency. As you might know, the Commodore 128 was my first computer, so Basic 7.0 was my first language. And I wrote a number of programs.
Including Adventurers’ Guild, a program designed to keep track of my D&D group’s equipment and character list. It wasn’t truly data-driven, but it did use the Commodore 128’s graphics to their ability. I mean, high res graphics, brother:
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The main program was just a routing piece that called a subprogram allowing the user to look at the various and sundry keeps, characters, or stockpiled equipment:
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For example, if you wanted to see the roster, it would go into a subprogram for the roster and you could see all characters past and present that played in the campaign:
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For example, here’s my brother’s favorite character as seen when the user has chosen to view all:
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And even when I was a junior in high school, I was building help into my applications. Here’s one of my first help files:
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When the user logged out, the Commodore went into hi-res graphics for a moment, painting an exit door:
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Then it ended turning the screen to default colors and with a final message from the dungeonmaster:
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Hmm, lightning is misspelled. I’ll log a defect on that right away.
I wrote a couple of other things, too, including a DMV quiz program after watching the movie License to Drive over and over as only a kid in the boondocks with only Showtime could.
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The instructions included my address back in the day and welcomed correspondence. Back in those days, that’s how you did it without the Internet and e-mail addresses that worked wherever you connected:
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And the Weird Al Wannabe Quiz:
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Of course, after I released them to the wild of the Commodore CG BBSes, I’d expect they were never downloaded. I know no one ever came across with a shareware donation. I did, however, make some money programming, as the high school baseball team’s manager wanted a program to keep track of stats. At Stellar Soft, we were happy to gather his requirements, deliver a quality program, and support it with new features as requested for the princely sum of like $50:
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I see that in the instructions, I listed it as a division of Triple N Enterprises:
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Considering that Noggle, Noggle, and Neiderriter was our lawnmowing business, I guess I did that for taxing purposes.
Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. What’s my point? I don’t know; I have 20 years of software development experience? Or perhaps to boast once again that I have more Commodores than Michele?
Aw, who cares, I got to post some pictures of an old computer.
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I’m Steve Jobs, Bitch!
Apple issues battery program for iPhone: Replacements cost $79, $6.95 shipping, three business days:
The iPhone’s battery is apparently soldered on inside the device and cannot be swapped out by the owner like most other cell phones.
Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Hakes said Thursday the company posted the battery replacement details on its Web site last Friday after the product went on sale.
Users would have to submit their iPhone to Apple for battery service. The service will cost users $79, plus $6.95 for shipping, and will take three business days.
That’s rich. Kinda like their overlord, come to think of it.
Don’t people gather with pitchforks and torches and DoJ attorneys outside the walls of Castle Redmond for this sort of thing?
(More on Kim du Toit and Tamara K.)
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Nancy Pelosi Fails QA
Well, not Nancy Pelosi herself, but her Web site has gotten the wrong sort of attention on the blogs recently (here and here and so on). It’s a simple Macromedia Flash presentation embedded within a Web site, but it has a number of problems that a trained eye would have caught.
First and foremost, whomever created the presentation used stock imagery in the most sloppy manner; they chose, to represent a story on American military medical care, a stock image of someone with a uniform featuring an epaulet talking to a doctor. Unfortunately, that epaulet said “CANADA”:
Her political opponents (of which I am one, don’t get me left) were quick to seize upon this as something more than a failure (or lack) of quality assurance, but they’re just looking for something to make noise about anyway. Still, someone who reviewed this with any degree of exactitude would read all text and identify any extraneous logos within stock photography. And someone would have read “Canada” and said, “Uh, no…..”
This particular failure has been remedied, as the slide that offended the bloggers no longer appears. However, the site still fails QA in the following manners.
At the change of each slide, the text from the first slide (“Green the Capitol”) displays during the transition. Now, unless you’re actually trying subliminal advertising, perhaps you don’t want this to occur. Perhaps you want a smooth fade of the words and the fade in of the new slide. Still, unrelated text shouldn’t appear:
Next, the embedding of the Flash object is faulty. It gives the user too much control over the behavior of the object, including the ability to zoom so that the images appear pixellated or the text displays outsized. Since the Flash object has a certain set size, only a portion is visible, like this:
Finally, as you should know if you build Web sites for a living (or pretend to), Macromedia Flash Player is a plugin whose presence should not be taken for granted on the user’s Web browser. Any time you provide animation or other documents through plugins, you should provide a handy mechanism so that those users without the plugin can get them if needed. Does Nancy Pelosi? No:
Instead of a static graphic or a link to Macromedia Flash Player, we get empty space. That Other America that I’m always hearing about, the one without Flash, gets left behind.
I am tempted to go into metaphors about legislators whose Web sites aren’t checked before they’re put up and the implications for legislation, but I’ll save that for another blog post and will point out that a couple of hours’ worth of time of a trained Quality Assurance professional would have ferreted these issues out before releasing it to the public, sparing embarrassment and also sparing someone the “emergency” of fixing it.
But, hey, if you don’t want to spend that money or budget on quality assurance, you roll the dice. Sometimes they don’t come up snake eyes, but when they do, you’ll pay for it.
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Users, Consumers Find Web Technologies To Be Mere Tools
In a stunning turn of events, the components of the Web 2.0 phenomenon are seen by users as mere tools, and those users have very little loyalty to particular tools:
Study results show that social networkers have little loyalty for any specific social networking site. Almost half of all social networkers use more than one site and one in six uses three or more.
Interactive marketing agencies better keep this in mind that spending client budget on building/hooking up all sorts of “community” (read: users build the content for the client for free) will have wasted that budget when another company comes up with a slightly cooler set of technologies to do the same thing. You must differentiate the brand using existing Web 1.0 techniques and build that community with good promotions and content instead of hoping “users” will do your job for you.
James Joyner (past client of my company Jeracor, just so’s you know) sums it up thusly:
Not only is this unsurprising but the premise behind the question reflects a deep misunderstanding of the Web 2.0 concept. Social media aren’t about loyalty to sites but rather a means of self-expression and growing and communicating with one’s network.
That will remain true with fickle consumers, so if you’re building a consumer-facing Web site, don’t forget the fresh content when adding expensive technologies to the bill of sale.
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One Thing, Unfigured Out
I read an article from Bizjournals.com about varied job backgrounds because, brothers and sisters, I was not just born the pestilence onto software that I am. So this article tries to tell me how to use that: A diverse background isn’t necessarily a problem, but two things struck me.
One, this quote:
Remember from the movie “City Slickers,” old Curley holding up his gloved hand and saying, “One thing — and you’ve got to figure out what that thing is.”
Um, no, both IMDB and I remember it like this:
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the “one thing?”
Curly: [smiles] That’s what *you* have to find out.
Secondly, dude, your mailto link is messed up and is carrying through the headline and the first paragraph:
Well, I guess I have found my one true thing, the story to tell my future interviews and clients.
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Free E-mail Marketing Campaign QA
Dude, your variable name is showing up in the subject line.
If your replica watches are of the same quality as your QA, I’ll pass. Besides, I have a real watch, I don’t need a bracelet with numbers and hands painted on, thanks.
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Slandered by ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo, some sort of professionalesque personal search engine, crawls the Web and turns me up as working for almost any blog “company” where I appear on the blogroll. This leads to this particular bit of slander:
DotNet Nuke developer? I dare say NOT.
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iPacemaker
Apple’s iPods interfere with heart pacemakers, study shows:
A teenager’s curiosity has uncovered an unsettling side effect of wearing an iPod: It might cause heart pacemakers to malfunction.
The discovery appeared in a study announced Thursday during a research presentation in Denver. The finding, initially reported by Reuters, shows that iPods generate enough electromagnetic interference to hamper effective function of implantable pacemakers, and in some instances cause them to stop working entirely.
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Why Should IE 8 Differ?
Microsoft’s solution would be to make developers shoulder the responsibility if their sites break when rendered by IE 8.
Sounds a lot like their “solution” to a lot of broken things.
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Trust the Administrators
Whenever some developer or project manager tells me that a software application does not have to provide bulletproof validation for administrators because they’re not as dumb as normal users, I pause a moment to reflect upon administrator genius:
trumwill: Over the weekend the company changed everything on the network. They sent out an email with our new network passwords.
morequen: Wait, they sent out *an* email?
morequen: with everyone’s password?
trumwill: Everyone’s password being the same, yes. They advised us to create a new one.
morequen: wow
trumwill: Which would be possible if we could, you know, log in to see the email. Which of course we couldn’t because our passwords didn’t work.
Administrators are just users put in charge of other users. Smarter? Maybe sometimes. But software shouldn’t be written as though its users are Steven Hawking, because sometimes those presumed genius-level administrators are nothing but users tasked with administrative responsibilities.
(Link seen on Dustbury.)
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Charlie Brooker Sends Coded Message
In this column, he subtly hints at how he feels about competing computer technologies:
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
No word on how many Linux adherents lost lunch money on the playground to Brooker immediately after publication of said article.
(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)
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Why QA A Simple Mail Merge?
Mail merges have been automatic for 20 years, right?
Front
Back
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That’s No Phish; That’s An Amphibian
Today, I received this message:
Oh, no, I thought like good little phishbait. I didn’t even bid on that.
But instead of clicking through on the e-mail, I go to ebay.com and search for the item.
Well, low and behold, the item number in question was an actual item and it was offered by the seller mentioned in the phish e-mail:
Of course, it’s still obviously a phish because:
- That’s not the e-mail address tied to my eBay account.
- The e-mail lacks most eBay header/footer details.
- The message headers indicate it came from somewhere besides eBay.
- The auction that I was “delinquent” for hadn’t ended by the time I received an e-mail.
But still, the sophistication of this particular phish is remarkable. It scrapes an actual auction off of the eBay site before or at the time of mailing to make it seem more authentic.
I’m almost afraid enough to vow to never click a link in an e-mail again, but I’d probably get fired.
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Earthlink Parties Like Its 1997
Wow, sending free CDs for a dial-up Internet service:
Dude, when someone comes to you with a marketing plan exhumed from a time capsule, it’s for historical perspective, not implementation.
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MfBJN Offers Its Only Comment on the iPhone
Steve Jobs has certainly recognized, so far, that the products and interfaces that most closely resemble the things we’ve been conditioned to expect from 40 years of Star Trek win, but I’ve got two words for him:
Voice Recognition
Touchscreen is nice on this little tricorder thing (what, you scan it in with the camera and run it through OS X applications and you’d call it something else?), but whomever gives me voice-activated wireless communication with my home network and through the firewalls to the Internet will win.
Whether it’s an affected A like the television show or a little Windows icon on the RFID on my chest that I tap remains to be determined.
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Microsoft Offers Assistance
Clicking through a link on my MSN Messager, I got the following helpful error message:
Note Microsoft’s tips:
- In your browser, click refresh. But the URL is for a unique landing page, toobusy.html. So refreshing will only reload the error page.
- In your browser, click Back, and try again. But since I reached this page without navigation in the browser, the Back button is not enabled.
- Wait a few minutes and try again. Bingo.
The screen offers me three options, only one of which I can actually try. In that case, the screen should only offer me a single option.
Such things lead a user to believe that maybe the application, or at least the copywriters behind the interface, are out of touch or incorrect sometimes. That blows a user’s trust in an application, or it should.
But me, I am in QA; I don’t trust my watch without checking it against my cell phone, the clock on the computer, and the clock on the phone.
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The Persistence of MGM
A number of years back, I signed up for the MGM newsletter as part of a contest entry or something. Every so often, one of the newsletters hit my e-mail box, and I deleted it without reading it. Finally, I decided to save myself the step of manually erasing the unread by unsubscribing to the marketing missive.
I clicked through the unsubscribe link and entered my e-mail address. A thank you page displayed and assured me I would be removed.
Meanwhile, a pop-under displayed:
An invitation to subscribe to the newsletter from which I just unsubscribed.
Those kids at MGM are ever the optimists, ainna?
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That’s No Subservient Chicken
It’s not Microsoft Bob, either; it’s Ms. Dewey, a Flash presentation wrapped around Microsoft’s new search engine.
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