Category: Geek

ORA blog: Technical details on my many frustrations in dealing with Apple’s iTunes Music Store affiliate program.

For years, one of the most common complaints about The Archive was that the layout was frames based. I’ve always been aware of the problems that frames present, but felt that the nature of the data being presented lent itself so well to a frames layout that I was willing to accept the consequences, even though advertisers pay less for impressions on a framed site. Still, getting rid of them was one of the big design goals of the new site, and I felt I had accomplished that pretty well.

Now that I’ve finally gotten that particular monkey off my back, guess what the most common complaint about the new site is? “Where did the frames go?” “I hate the new layout!” “This is much harder to navigate than the old site!” Sigh.

Now, to be fair, these commenters have raised a valid point: It’s no longer possible to quickly access all of the mishearances of a particular song, or all by a particular artist. Without the frames, you have to click your back button to return to the listing. And the javascript list collapser I’m using doesn’t remember which sublist you had open when you left the previous page. So these recent comments, in a way, are validation of the very reasons I used a frames layout to begin with.

During development of the new site, I was so focused on the voting system that I did almost all of my test browsing via the Vote button. Had not even considered trying to consume the site in such an orderly fashion. But one commenter had a great suggestion: Why not include a mini-list on every lyrics page containing all related songs and artists? </me smacks forehead>. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that eight years ago? Hey, that’s why it’s called a public beta. Will work on that next week.

Explorer Destroyer offers a set of scripts webmasters can install to encourage their readers to switch from MSIE to Firefox… and make some extra coin in the process.

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox. For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

The goal: To get your site’s traffic down to less than 50% IE users — which is a pretty lofty goal.

FWIW, browser stats for all of birdhouse.org for November (includes this blog and birdhouse classic; not sites hosted by Birdhouse Hosting). Currently at 59% MSIE, which is surprisingly close to the goal. Not sure about installing the actual script though… thinking about it. If I do, it will definitely be in “Gentle Encouragement” mode.

The outstanding question for me is, where are all these dollar bills coming from? Is Google really offering $1 to switchers? And what evidence do they have that anyone has actually switched? Had trouble digging up real information on this, save a small mention on Google’s support site: “AdSense publishers can generate earnings by referring users to Firefox – just follow these instructions, being sure to select Firefox as the product.” Slashdot story here.

Thanks mneptok

Once upon a time I wrote a note to customer service at Albertson’s (grocery store) complaining that they didn’t offer a single brand of eggs in a non-styrofoam carton, and provided them with some information about the environmental effects of polystyrene in landfills. Two weeks later I received from Albertson’s a computer-generated form response thanking me for my “recent correspondence.” Included in the envelope was a coupon… for a free carton of eggs in a styrofoam carton. Their little way of connecting with customers and assuring me that my voice had been heard.

Two days ago I wrote to customer service at gap.com complaining about the fact that if you visit their site with Safari, you get kicked out with a message: “We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.” I provided some information on Safari’s excellent standards compliance ratings, and asked “If you can’t make your site work with Safari, how can you make it work with anything?” I also noted that, yes, I could fire up Firefox and use that instead, but that I refused on principle — I’d rather shop elsewhere than play that game. Today I got a message back from gap.com reading, in part:

Currently we support AOL, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Firefox for PC users. Unfortunately, we temporarily do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh. …. Safari users having problems accessing our site can download the free Firefox browser.

I guess failing to understand or even apparently to read my message was their little way of connecting with customers and assuring me that my voice had been heard.

Why even bother? Speak a smidge of sense into the void and you end up feeling like Quixote, raging against the machine. Corporate retards.

SF Chronicle:

In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United States, 71 percent.

But that favorable perception is starting to fade as Indian employees working in outsourced call centers spend day after day being berated, slurred, and degraded by American callers frustrated both with their computers and the effect of outsourcing on the U.S. job market.

Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, “You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving.” She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in. “I was speechless,” he says. “She didn’t even give me a chance.”

Yeah, uh, really makes you proud to be American. Urgh.

Wired recounts History’s Worst Software Bugs, including the “entymology” of the term:

… in 1947 … engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer’s logbook with the words: “first actual case of a bug being found.

Also includes nice Flash visuals demonstrating the principles of buffer overflows and race conditions, plus a Blue Screen of Death summary of history’s worst bugs.

I’ve sometimes wondered what the software industry would look like if admins and consultants were able to charge vendors for time spent fixing or working around the fallout from operating system flaws. The industry would certainly evolve with a more sure foot, albeit much more slowly, and it would be a lot harder for big software houses to get rich off code. Still, I’ve felt guilty more than once taking a client’s money after spending two hours fixing a problem resulting from an OS or software flaw, and wished I could forward the invoice on to Redmond.