John (Charlie‘s brother) just sent me this link. You enter words and have them sung back to you… very very funny.
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Category: Humour
Every now and again I’ve followed links from Will Wheaton’s hillarious blog (more commonly known for the role he played as “Wesley Crusher” in STNG) to Fark. Generally they’re links like this, where Fark users use photoshop to play around with images. In the previous link they’re ripping off the various Google holiday logos.
Today I subscribed to their rss feed and have found it full of rather humorous links to news articles… like “Costumed Disney World employee ran over by float, killed during parade. Disney spokesperson attributes incident to goofy mistake”.
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Code access security…
Jim Blizzard makes some interesting comments about code access security in .Net relating it to the “superbowl half time event ‘scandal'” where Justin Timberlake & Janet Jackson did a duet, but part way through the event Janet’s top “malfunctioned” (i.e. thats aparently how she described it… but in every day terms her top “fell” off)
Anyway, Jim was making a comment on how in life when people want to do something wrong, they’re not going to ask permission before they do it. In the same way, in computers a malicious program isn’t going to ask you if it can please erase your entire hard drive before it does it. But with the .Net framework’s code access security, the programs are only allowed to do what they’re explicitly given permissions to do. So you don’t have to worry (unless you give all code full trust on your machine)
Check out his blog entry “Breasts and code access security…” for more info.
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Buying Nothing
A while ago I had a complaint with an SMS service offered by IDWS… I sent myself a sample sms, and for some reason, som proxy server between me and them kept hitting the “form submission page” with my cookies, but with no querystring, or form data.
The net effect of this was that their system charged me for 83 odd blank sms’s were sent to nobody (it stopped “sending” them when my account ran out of money). When I say “nobody”, I don’t mean “some random person”. I mean, literallly they were sent to nobody… The same as if I had just not typed anything into the “To” field.
Anyway, they charged me for them (because aparently they get charged for it), and claimed that it was my fault for not enabling javascript on my browser – their only means of validation before sending any message is a Javascript function, which naturally the Proxy server was not really bothered with executing. This is just really bad coding.
What made it worse was that they didn’t seem to care too much about fixing this “bug”, and they insisted on charging me for all 83 sms’s… And they had the gall to think that I’d keep using their service. After a good number of e-mails explaining to them the stupidity of their coding practices, and why I would not be using their service again unless they fixed it (because who knows when next this will happen, and what if I had 2000 sms’s available in my account that time?) they gave me back 1/2 my sms’s and promised to see if they could fix it in the next realease of their software, and that they would e-mail me when it was released. (That was 2 months ago and I’ve still had no e-mail)
Anyway… on the thought of “buying nothing”, I saw a blog entitled “Apple selling DRM’ed silence at $0.99 a pop”, on BoingBoing. Its a bit different and far more excusable… but basically the gist of it is that when an artist happens to have a silent track on their album, you still pay $0.99 for it… and they still ensure that you can only listen to your silence subject to the DRM requirements. So not only are you paying for silence, but you can’t even share it with anyone else… 🙂
Its a small side effect of artists doing odd things on their albums, an unfortunate one, but fairly un-avoidable, and quite understandable. I’d love to see what their response to it is…
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Bad usability…
Yesterday, part of a problem I was solving required me to add a “count” property onto a structure I was building. Its basically a tree structure, so each level can have multiple items under it. Kinda like a family tree… yeah, that’s a good example, so I’ll stick with it. 🙂
My problem was this… If I said GreatGrandpa.Count, what would you expect as a result? Should it just count his children, or should it count all of his descendants? It might be small, but its important when you’re designing things that other real people have to use…
I saw a great example of this going wrong (in a non programming context) this morning on Ryan Farley‘s blog about trying to find a map that showed where a local restaurant was. Here’s what he got:
How’s that for a useful result? “You know what, I can’t find exactly where it is, but its somewhere in america.” Gee, thanks! 🙂
Ok, so its not really anything valid, but its a nice comment anyway… NASA are using a Java based system to plot out Spirit’s course on Mars and communicate the course of action to Spirit. So Stuart comments about it(found via Rory), saying “No wonder it took the thing twelve days to move eight feet forward!” 🙂
Today is the first meeting for my homecell. I started off the day reminding everyone about the meeting, but with my super-intelligent mind I craftily neglected to mention where it was taking place… which was all merely a ploy so that I could send another sms to the whole group to show them how much I care. (right… something like that)
Anyway, at least I’m starting on the right foot – if anyone thought that a cell leader was meant to be perfect, my first communication with the cell proved otherwise. 🙂
Oddly enough, I was feeling fine about my first meeting until about 5 minutes ago… which was around about when I stopped and thought – “Gee, that’s amazing, I’m not nervous about tonight.” Well, so much for that thought. At least I still have feeling in my hands (they’re usually the first to go when I’m nervous), so that’s a good thing. Anyway we’re just having a dinner and I’m gonna chat for a short while about where we’re going as a cell. I keep thinking that I’ve forgotten something…
Another new thing (for us in SA) is that Survivor: Pearl Islands starts tonight… aparently its much more of a “survival of the fittest” type thing this time round (they aparently get given very little, and are given no time to prepare before they are tossed overboard)… hopefully Sean remembered to put the VCR timer on. 🙂
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MS Codenames
If you’re into the MS technologies, you’ll probably have started to notice that Microsoft are starting to push their “next versions” already. Their codenames are being thrown around in newsgroups, blogs, and development sites: Longhorn (with Inigo, Avalon (including XAML), and the “third pillar of Longhorn” which I can’t remember), Whidbey, Yukon. I even saw someone mention a team at MS working on features for the OS to come after Longhorn (they mentioned its codename, but I can’t remember it)
Recently a couple of the MS employee blogs have been talking about how some customers are complaining at all this “future talk” and that its not very relevant to problems we’re experiencing now.
Unfortunately for my company, we were starting to build tools that would let us do what many of the “new” MS technologies will do when they’re released. I say “unfortunately” because now we need to decide if we spend the development effort now, or wait for MS to release the technology in 1-2 years time. Then we’d still have to wait for the technology to be adopted by our clients, so on the surface it looks like we should just go ahead and build what MS is building.
Coming out of a discussion about how odd it is for there to be code samples coming out for technologies that we don’t yet have access to, and how nice it will be when these technologies come out, we have made up some new names for them:
- Longhorn = Long yawn (it will be quite a wait till it is released)
- Yukon = You Can’t (well, not yet, but in 2 years You can)
- Whidbey = Would be (as in “It would be nice to have whidbey now, but we don’t”)
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Customer support
Today I read a blog by Cameron Reilly entitled “my awesome customer support experience with Taskline”, and I realised that I have experienced some truly aweful and truly awesome service relating to my hosting providers.
About 2 years ago I started hosting with Brinkster… unfortunately I realised that they weren’t offering that great a value for money. So I moved to SleekHost (I might have moved somewhere else before then, but they’re the next one I remember) only to find hopeless support, that they did not do 1/2 of what they claimed on their advertising, and that their admin/control panel really sucked. So I moved to Instaspace, which was all fine and well, except that they didn’t offer .Net v1.1, their support people were hardly online, and even if they were online they were of no use because they could hardly understand english. They also had a very poor grasp of their own hosting environment, and I often found myself telling their support people what to do. So in a search for .Net v.1.1, I decided to move again.
By this time SleekHost had changed their offering, improved their control panels, and I’d grilled them about exactly what it was that they offered. They seemed to be ok, so I signed up. That was a BIG mistake! In the 28 odd days that I was with them, my site was operational for about 5. They were totally hopeless at responding to any problems I logged. The main one was that ASP.Net was giving me an error that basically said “I don’t have permission to read your web.config file, please fix it.” So I asked them to set the permissions on my site correctly, explaining the error in detail and how to fix it, and telling them how to confirm that it was working. The response I got was “We made one of your folders into an application, and it should now be working but we’re getting an error that says that you don’t have permission to read web.config.” Now, I’ve never ever seen a more useless support response than that. Nowhere did I ask them to make a folder into an application, and they simply repeated my problem to me. That reply only took them a few days to make (with some prodding for a response from my side). I replied to tell them that they were being idiots because my problem was still there, and that they’d done nothing to solve it. Its like me going to a doctor with a broken arm (and nothing else wrong with me), telling him what’s wrong and he says “Thanks for that. … Well here’s some medicine for your stomach ulcer, and by the way your arm is broken, I think you should look into it.”
Anyway, my site was down for a long time… I think the longest time it took them to reply to a problem was about 12 days. Eventually I’d had enough… And I stumbled upon SecureMate. Their signup process was flawless, their admin systems were excellent, and their support was brilliant. I was in awe!
Unfortunately a patch went wrong on the server’s admin systems and my site was out of order… but they responded quickly and moved my site to a new (soon to be in production) server of theirs to help me out. That was not such a great idea because when they moved the rest of the sites over to the new machine, they also moved a copy of my site from their old server, and suddenly my site stopped working. Their support people were quite good, despite some hassles with e-mail addresses of mine. I eventually got a phone call from them. They work in Singapore and I live in South Africa so that was quite impressive… I’m just a tiny little client of theirs, but they bothered to take the expense of calling me (an international call for them), and the problem was solved quickly. They’re one of the few companies I’ve found who will take responsibility when they’ve done something wrong, and will do their best to get it fixed. Recently I’ve set up this blog, so I wanted to add a SQL database to my hosting and have some folder permissions setup. Ordering and setting up the DB took a total of 20-30 minutes from my first e-mail to them to completion, and the folder permission changes were done within 15 minutes of my mails. Their support people are incredibly friendly in their approach to their customers. I love it!
Anyway, I thought I should rave a bit about them because they have totally blown me away, and all this for only about $8pm for my hosting!
To end off, here are some funnies I found on Nihit Kaul’s blog, he found them on “The Scobeleizer”. They are 2 movies… Behind the scenes at Microsoft and Every OS Sucks. Enjoy!
I just had a conversation with a friend about XML, and its uses. It started off by explaining a bit about RSS for syndication of news, and why getting an XML feed is generally better than getting a Javascript feed… It ended as follows, which I thought was kinda worth a post:
Paul says:
If I’m writing any apps that need quick ways to store data, I use XML – its really easy, really quick, and doesn’t need anything other than Notepad to view it… Access, needs MS Access, SQL needs some SQL query tool, but XML just needs Notepad.
ChãrlIe says:
🙂 joy
Paul says:
Like my ultra-cool “Figure out which cellphone contract would cost you the least” application which stores all the contract types in XML, and converts your phone bill to XML before it analyses it all and tells you which is hte best contract for you
ChãrlIe says:
I havn’t seen that? that sounds cool
Paul says:
when I give it my phone bills, its normally pretty spot on with calculating what I should be charged by vodacom
And it proves that the Weekender Everyday per second is the best contract for me (even though I spend R700-900 a month on my phone and everyone says that I should be on the Talk 500)
ChãrlIe says:
LOL… you too smart for them Paul…
Paul says:
Well… when I was on MTN, I listened to their support ppl and upped to one of their bigger contracts, but ended up spending way more money…. nobody else believed me that it had happened, and nobody that I’ve spoken to about it has believed me that the weekender is better for me than any other contract… finally I can show the world my wisdom and vindicate my long held beliefs that the world rejected 🙂
Paul says:
Then they will know that I truly am a genius and the whole world will submit in reverent awe to my mastery of the cellphone tariffs.
And shortly thereafter my brain shall explode, due to a build up of pressure caused by a grossly oversised ego, and the world shall be at peace once again.
ChãrlIe says:
LOL … hehe
ChãrlIe says:
well… I hope that doesn’t go into a blogg
Fortunately, nobody reads my blog anyway… but why would someone not want to have comments posted onto the web? That can only leave me thinking… What is Charlie hiding? Is there some sinister past that he is protecting? Perhaps he’s running from the mob and the mere mention of his name could cause them to come and hunt him down? Could that be why he uses such odd characters to make up his name? I wonder… 😛