Category: Geek

Amongst the perennial flotilla of product launches and buzzwords (anyone still using Orkut?), every now and then you stumble across a product that really gives you that tingly “Ah-Ha!” feeling. Organizing forces for the J-School site redesign, experimenting with various online collaboration tools, came across three {Ruby-on-Rails plus Ajax} products from 37 Signals: Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-Da Lists. Basecamp for project management, Backpack for organizing your personal life, Ta-Da List for dirt-simple online to-do lists. All are optionally private or shareable.

It’s not like 37 Signals is the first to do project/life management online. What sets this stuff apart is the incredibly elegant simplicity of their interfaces. Something about them just reaches out and screams “Use me!” And so I am. Choosing between Basecamp and Backpack was tricky, because both include features I wish were present in the other — e.g. frustrated that Backpack only allows for a single to-do list (crimony!), and that Basecamp doesn’t include the Wiki (Whiteboard) module. Ultimately settled on Basecamp, and am up and running with a team. Add in the fact that you can subscribe to project changes via RSS, and publish project milestones to iCal format, and it all just clicks. A thing of beauty.

For the first time, starting to see Ajax in action in ways that are genuinely useful, rather than just buzz. Being able to drag and drop list items around on a web page (without resorting to Flash), you start to see the first real glimmers of why Microsoft has always been worried that web services could make Windows irrelevant. Google buying and integrating a product like this would push them into that futuristic space where the operating system matters less and less.

Will probably port some of my home and work tasks and schedules to 37 Signals stuff soon — the free versions are more than adequate for most purposes.

What are all these duplicate entries doing in the Admissions Request database? Hmm… there’s a pattern here – when there are duplicates or triplicates for the same person, the first one is always short, the second a bit more detailed, and the third or fourth is a complete entry. Aha! Some people get confused navigating web forms and hit Enter/Return rather than Tab to move to the next field. This should be solvable… Yep, there’s a simple JavaScript fix. Works nicely. In fact, this could be useful all over the place.

Rarely find “aftermarket” stuff I think should be built into the HTML specification, but this is a good example of such a case. It should be possible to put some kind of enter_submit="no" attribute into the form tag to save users from themselves. And developers shouldn’t have to code hacks around (and add byte-weight to pages on account of) common user errors such as this.

Update: Once again bitten by users running that infernal Norton Internet Security, which throws absurd and confusing warnings when it encounters javascript it doesn’t know about. Had to disable the work above — it’s more important that all people have access than that we avoid duplicate/partial entries.

Just came across this .sig in someone’s email:

A: Yes.
| Q: Are you sure?
| | A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
| | | Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

Geeky, but reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago – he was the first programmer-type I had encountered who actually advocated top-posting comments in email threads. Why? Because most email conversations are very short, and the information you want should be the most visible. With top-posting, you can usually see the info you need in your mail client’s preview pane, without having to open and scroll through the message. Sort of for the same reason that virtually all weblogs post most recent info at the top, rather than in true chronological order. He was right — top-posting does make most email conversation more fluid. The system backfires when:

A) The two parties don’t agree on a protocol, and the thread wanders up and down the page willy nilly.

B) A brief top-posting thread evolves into a longer thread, with the need to respond to individual bits rather than to the message as a whole. In this case, there is sometimes an awkward transition as the posting order turns itself inside out.

I’m a switch-hitter on this one, and go both ways depending on message content and mood. Anyone out there adamantly top or bottom? (Cue the sub-dom jokes :)

Warning: geek post.

Just solved one of the more puzzling web mysteries over which I’ve had the pleasure to tear my hair out over the years. This one was a doozy, but also kind of fascinating, if you swing that way.

Over the past 36 hours, have been corresponding with a reader of John Battelle’s SearchBlog who was unable to post comments to that site. Every time he clicked Submit, his browser was referred to a PHP Freaks page describing the REMOTE_ADDR environment variable. WTF? I was not able to duplicate the behavior in any browser, and SearchBlog gets dozens of successful comments per day. The reader’s IP address was not in any block or filter in use, and we simply didn’t have any plugin or configuration in place that would redirect commenters to an external site. What in the world could cause this user to be redirected anywhere, let alone to a site completely unrelated to anything on SearchBlog? And why couldn’t I reproduce the behavior?
Continue reading “Referrer Madness”

Talk about kicking ’em while they’re down… The administration’s mind-numbing obliviousness in responding to Katrina extends all the way down to its web developers and their managers. Turns out you can’t even apply for FEMA aid online unless running Internet Explorer 6 under Windows.

…people using Macintosh or Linux computers are unable to file a claim online — although they can do so by calling the emergency agency by phone. A statement online says, “If you would like to apply for Federal Disaster Assistance by telephone, you can contact us at 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) or for the hearing/speech impaired at TTY: 1-800-462-7585. The current hours and days of operation are 24 hours per day 7 days per week. Currently the lines are quite congested and the best time to call is 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. EDT.

I suppose it’s not so bad to ask people to call in the middle of the night, since their lives are in chaos anyway. This is right in step with the copyright office’s recent move to limit applicants’ choice of browsers.

The bonus fallout from this approach is that a lot of people will get the false impression that IE must be a better browser, or that it can do important things that other browsers can’t. The reality is that the developers are simply working with blinders on. It’s not hard to build cross-platform web applications — there are millions of them out there, and nothing technologically makes FEMA or copyright applications easier to program for IE. It’s an arrogant, discriminatory — and in this case potentially dangerous — “one ring to rule them all” mentality.

Imagine the outrage if government offices decided only to help Christians, or caucasians, or cell phone users, or SUV drivers.

We’ve all done it — that fatal keystroke that wipes out the wrong partition on the disk, vanishes the critical directory, destroys the mission-critical database. Thank god, this time it wasn’t me :)

Got a call late last night from a contact of a contact (not a Birdhouse customer) who had been running a search/replace operation at a very high-powered Movable Type installation. Apparently watching TV while working (lesson #1), the staffer had left the Find field blank and put the string “sponsor” in the replace field. MT 3.1 puts a weighty warning on the search/replace page, but no further confirmation dialog stops you from sawing off your toes (3.2 throws a confirmation dialog). Result: the string “sponsor” between every letter of every Title field, affecting 11,000 entries. Basically, they were screwed and pulled me in.
Continue reading “Resurrection”