Understanding Nothing

I’m a big suporter of websites doing proper validation. I even released a perl module to help people do it more easily (on the, perhaps naive, assumption that the easier it is the more likely it is people will do it).

But I’m an even bigger detractor of websites doing stupid validation. Yesterday I finally caved in and ordered a subscription to the New Yorker. I’m currently paying cover price every week for this (£182 a year), and there’s a little card in each issue offering me a subscription for 149 euro (£99 at today’s exchange rate). Of course I did a quick search online to see if anyone else is doing a better offer, but none of the UK magazine subscription sites even seem to offer it. (Of course the magazine subscription market in the UK is very different from the US, and even the magazines which you can subscribe to you barely get a discount at all. In the US from what I can see you tend to only pay about 25% of the newsstand price, or less). The New Yorker’s publisher’s Condé Naste, however, do offer an international subscription at $112 (at the current ludicrous exchange rate that’s under £60). It’s surface mail, so I’ll probably have to wait a few weeks longer for each issue, but that’s OK – the “timely” information in the New Yorker isn’t that useful to me anyway.

So I tried to use their online ordering form. Of course they fall into all the old traps. The credit card field doesn’t allow entries with spaces (there is NO excuse for this whatsoever), they expect a State (although at least “International” is an option), they want my postcode with no space – even though the space is an integral part of UK postcodes, and I couldn’t find my country (they have neither United Kingdom, nor Great Britain[1] listed – after thinking maybe they’d moved these out to the top of the list they way some sites do and failing there also, I eventually discovered they have Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man etc as separate entries!)

But even after handling all this the form kept giving me an annoying JavaScript pop-up telling me “Please enter a valid address”. Of course it didn’t bother telling me what exactly about my address it believed to be invalid. I really couldn’t find anything wrong my address, so I resorted to the geek last resort: I viewed the source of the page, located the link to the JavaScript validation code, loaded it up and attempted to discover what its validation rules were.

Bizarrely, the JavaScript was rejecting my address as the first line didn’t contain a space! I live in an old house with a name, and so the first line of my address is merely “Lismachan”. But that’s not good enough for Condé Naste! They need my first line to be “Lismachan “. What people who don’t read JavaScript are supposed to do I just don’t know.

Why do people persist in putting stupid barriers in the way of people who want to give them money?

[1] I have another rant for people who force me to have Great Britain, even though Northern Ireland is obviously the part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” that isn’t in Great Britain…

Back in the early 90s I got a bundled copy of Microsoft Money with a PC. At the time I had next to no money, and was pretty much living off credit cards. Keeping track of who I had to pay when was critically important, and so I tried Money, found it invaluable, and have pretty much stuck with it ever since. I’m fairly anal about entering everything (a source of great amusement to some), but I’m a sucker for data and reports and graphs and the like,

I’ve looked at a few of the upgrades to Money over the years, but I’ve never actually installed them. The demo versions never seemed to play nicely with a pre-existing installation, and it seemed that if I decided not to upgrade after the 30 days were up I wouldn’t be able to use my existing version either easily (I’d need to have backed up my data in advance as newer versions would undoubtedly ‘upgrade’ the file format, and I’d need to re-install the earlier version from CD, probably after cleaning out some registry entries).

So recently when I got a new PC for home I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try the latest demo. I could leave my ‘real’ version on my work PC, copy across the latest backup of my data, and play with both in parallel on two machines. At first I hated it. The interface has changed significantly in 10 years and there didn’t really seem to be that many new features that would persuade me to upgrade. I never really liked their “online banking” side of things which supposedly interfaces with my banks and credit card companies, and most of the new features seemed related to that, as well as online bill paying, house inventory tracking, house buying etc. The core functionality of just keeping track of basic transactions seemed mostly the same as ever, only with a clumsier interface.

But after a week or so playing I began to notice tiny little changes that made things much easier. Previously, when adding transactions in January, if you entered something from the previous month as 24/12 it would automatically fill in the current year, which of course was ludicrous. Now it correctly auto-fills the previous year. There’s a nice function to “flag” transactions to be brought to your attention again at a specified later date. There are a variety of new ways in which you can order the transactions when reconciling an account. Even the online import of a statement from my bank is much smoother, correctly merging transactions that I’d already entered even if they were on a slightly different date and entered to a slightly different payee.

So, when my 30-day trial was over I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I went back to Microsoft Money home page where I downloaded it from, and searched for the part that would let me enter my credit card number to get a product key to “unlock” my trial version.

Of course I searched in vain. Microsoft apparently don’t work like that. Instead I had to go to Amazon, order a physical CD in a box to be shipped to me, wait a week for it arrive, uninstall my trial version, and re-install what appears to be an identical piece of software from a CD. It’s not as if you even get a manual or anything – it’s just a CD in a box.

I really don’t get this. This is a solved problem. You download a trial version. It expires. You go to a website, give your credit card number, get a key that unlocks the software. You plug that key in, and bingo, your software works again. There’s no need to send me a CD through the post. There’s no need to force me to uninstall and reinstall the software. There’s no need for me to wait a week between deciding to purchase and actually being able to use your software.

So maybe Microsoft don’t want to upset their dealer network. (Like Microsoft have ever cared how they upset…) Then allow the on-line retailers to sell your license keys for you. Amazon could just have easily sent me an email with a registration number when I bought the product as send me a box (actually they could do this much more easily, and much more profitably). Sell boxes to people who really want them. But those of us who just want working software, please don’t get in our way.

Every few months for the last 2 years I’ve gone on the hunt for an RSS aggregator. Every time I’ve been disappointed. Everything I’ve tried has been clumsy and kludgy and made my blog reading harder, rather than easier. And so I’ve stuck with the routine of actively visiting all the blogs I read (of course my fancy “last updated” blogroll scanner that I wrote myself in Perl helps a lot with not wasting time checking pages I know haven’t changed!)

Until now. Last week I came across SharpReader, loved it instantly, and one week on I’m still a fan.

The interface is the standard 3-pane Oulook-esque approach that most aggregators seem to take now, but it seems to do it better than most. Subscribing to feeds is also much easier than the clumsy approach many others take – you just drag a webpage from your web browser and it does the auto-discovery dance for you. (It also imports OPML so it was easy to get my initial sites set up).

You can categorise all the blogs into, erm, categories, and perform tasks on a universal, category-wide, or single blog basis (so, for example, I poll our internal work blogs at 15 minute intervals, blogs of poeple I know well every 30 minutes, keep most at the default hourly polling, and have some daily.

It also has feedster searching built in, and because feedster provides RSS search results, it’s trivial to subscribe to searches for topics that interest you. (This is also a great way to find new blogs to read regularly).

I have two major wishes for it, which I sent in email to the author (and received a response within an hour, saying that he liked both ideas and would try to get them in either the release that’s about to come out, or the next one!):

Firstly, I’d like the polling to be a bit more staggered. I have a lot of feeds, and every hour I get pop-up notifications telling me of all the changes – which can drag my computer significantly if there’s a lot of changes have happened in the last hour. I suggested that instead of waiting 60 minutes for the next poll it should wait for 60 minutes + rand(3). Over time the feeds will all start to drift apart, and be distributed all over the hour. I’ll get a constant stream of new articles all the time rather than a surge every hour.

Secondly, I’d really like to be able to mark articles to come back to later. At the minute I have to keep marking things as “unread” if it’s something I want to read in more depth.

But these are minor nits in a fantastic product, and now I can subscribe to lots of feeds that were just too much hassle to go check manually on a regular basis (such as the CPAN reviews of my various Perl modules!).

I’ve disabled comments and trackbacks to my weblog except to those who provide a signed FOAF URL, or a home page that links to one.

— Ken MacLeod

This should be interesting. If this takes off it should (a) increase the number of people with FOAF files, (b) increase the number of fradulent FOAF files, (c) increase the number of people with signed FOAF files.

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my central heating. The timer would call for heat, but the boiler wouldn’t realise this, and so wouldn’t actually give me any.

I’ve had Pipeline Services out to look at it four times in the last month. Each time they “fixed” the problem, only for it to return in a few days. Once they reset everything and jiggled some things around until it started working; then they came out and properly serviced my boiler; then they rewired my thermostat; then they replaced the thermostat completely.

On Friday night it stopped working again. It’s fairly cold here at the minute; and seems even more so since I’m just back from San Diego! I spent the guts of an hour doing the reset and jiggle routine to no avail. On Saturday morning the heat didn’t come on, and the house got so cold I couldn’t type. Pipeline weren’t answering their phone, so I left several messages for my landlord to get back to me as soon as possible, and relocated for the day.

By 6pm I still hadn’t heard from my landlord so I left him a few more messages. At 10pm I eventually got hold of his brother, who said there was nothing they could do until Monday, and that if I could get someone to fix it myself I could take the costs out of my rent.

And so began my quest.

I started looking through the Plumbers section of the Yellow Pages. The first ad for a 24 hour plumber was the delightfully named “A Plumber” (“Any Emergency, Any Time, Any Job”). He lists two phone numbers, neither of which were answered, on several attempts.

So I moved on to “1A Belmont”, who despite their name don’t seem to be anywhere near me on Belmont, but rather somewhere in BT8. He helpfully informed me that they didn’t do gas boilers, that I’d need a Corgi Engineer, and that I should switch my attention to the “Gas”, “Boilers” and “Central Heating” sections of the Yellow Page.

There I discovered Spectrum Premiere Services who presented me with a quandary. On the one hand their web site was Flash based, and contained lots of spelling mistakes. On the other hand they were one of the only companies to even have a web site (other than placeholder Yell pages). They listed Belfast and Glasgow numbers so they seemed to be more than just a “one man band”, which was a promising sign. Until I tried to ring the Belfast number and discovered it didn’t work. I tried ringing their Glasgow number, hoping someone there might tell me the new Belfast number, and was connected to someone whose accent was so strong I couldn’t work out what he was saying at all. My brain eventually stopped trying to decipher it as a Scottish accent, and I realised it was a broad Norn Iron accent – somehow phone Glasgow had connected me to the mobile of their local contact! He then proceeded to tell me that they couldn’t do anything over the weekend!

Next I tried “Boiler Rapid Repair” and got an answering machine. I tried again and actually managed to speak to someone. He said he had two guys out doing jobs and he’d see if either of them could come round! Five minutes later he phoned back to apologise that both had gone home for the night, and that it would be the next morning before he could get someone out. He was quite apologetic and friendly, and suggested I try Central SVS.

So I rang their number, only to be informed by BT that it had changed (I can understand a Yellow Pages ad being out of date, but surely their own website could be fixed?) I tried the new number and got an answering phone telling me that the office was unattended and giving a number for emergency contact – if you’re a contract customer!

At this point I gave up. Every one of the numbers I rang advertised themselves as providing a 24 hour emergency service, but that obviously means something different to what I expected.

I called Boiler Rapid Repair back, arranged for them to come first thing this morning instead. They discovered that my motorised valve was faulty and was shutting off the boiler. Pipeline, in the 4 times they had come out, had never once even looked at this.

Today I have heat. Tomorrow I’ll discover what Pipeline have to say …

At work we keep trying to make the effort to look back after each project and learn from how it went. But we’ve never found a good way to structure this, and as a result we often don’t do it at all.

Johanna Rothman gives a
retrospective of a year of blogging, using a great set of questions from Norm Kerth:

1. What did I do well that I don’t want to forget?
2. What did I learn?
3. What should I do differently the next time?
4. What still puzzles me?
5. What do I need to discuss in greater detail?

So, earlier this evening I got email from someone I haven’t heard from in about 10 years, telling me that I was featured in last weekend’s Sunday Tribune alongside an article about BlackStar, in a “What I did after I made millions”(!) piece.

So, I dutifully trotted off to the Tribune website to see if I could find the article, only discover that they don’t place their articles online like any other sensible newspaper. Instead they’ve teamed up with NewsStand who promise to delivery print versions of newspapers to your desktop. It seemed that I could get Sunday’s edition for $2, so I decided to indulge my narcissism and give it a go.

The first hurdle to a potential customer was the notice that the minimum charge was $3.50. Making people spend money they don’t actually want to is a really, really bad thing, but the dollar is ludicrously weak, so I decided to persevere.

Then the next page tells me that actually the previous page was a lie. The minimum charge is $10 – but as a special offer to new customers they’ll let me only pay them $5. This actually defies comment.

However, the small print told me that I could claim back any unspent portion of my account at any time, so I figured I’d give them that $5. But first I had to download the software. Oh yes – they have proprietary software for viewing the newspapers! A whopping great download that took 6 minutes even on my spiffy ADSL (after I managed to get to actually start downloading – their JavaScript doesn’t work on Mozilla, of course).

Finally I could download Sunday’s paper. An even bigger download that took over 15 minutes. Thankfully I could start viewing it before it had finished.

This is where it gets really bad.

Their special software is really just an image viewer – every page is just a huge image that, even with the software at full-size, can only fit half a page onto my screen. I eventually worked out how to scale the pages down so I could see two pages at a time, but then I needed to zoom in eleven(!) times to make an article readable (which of course involves clicking on the magnifying glass in the toolbar, and then clicking again on the area of the paper you want to zoom in on).

They do have a search button, but my vanity search didn’t reveal any results. I figured this was because it hadn’t downloaded the whole issue yet, but even when that finished I still couldn’t find anything.

So I spent about 20 minutes painstakingly going through every page. Nada. After all that pain, I couldn’t find the article.

There was an ad though for Interface – a new 8 page IT supplement as part of today’s paper.

But of course that’s not included with the online edition – even though every other section seems to be.

*sigh*

Now for the fun of attempting to get a refund through their woefully confusing on-line support system.

Anyone have a copy of the real paper?

I’m back from Etech, and waiting for the jetlag to kick in. I managed to stay awake until about 10pm last night, and awoke around 7am this morning, so hopefully I’ll get tired earlyish this evening, and work my way back into a normal sleep pattern, rather than the usual flying east jetlag where I can’t get to sleep until 4am. As I didn’t get to stop off on the east coast for a couple of days on the way back (as I’ve done for all my west coast visits in the last 6 or 7 years) I’m 8 hours out of sync rather than 5, so I’m not sure what difference that’ll make.

Etech itself was interesting, and fun. I found the Social Software tracks the most interesting, but was very disappointed in all the camera-phone sessions – I don’t know if it’s just a UK/EU difference, but I really didn’t come across anything interesting or new there.

Marc Smith and Donald Norman gave excellent keynotes, but Pertti Korhonen and William H. Janeway were really dull.

My main complaint about the conference as a whole is that most of the talks were too long, with not enough depth. 20 minutes would have worked much better than 40 for the vast majority of them – especially if there really was an abundance of great proposals.

I’ve been ranting all week about the latest radio advert from Invest Northern Ireland. They’ve been spending a lot of money over the last few months encouraging people to start their own businesses. Most of these are terrible, but the latest one irritates me more than the rest. The basic premise is that you shouldn’t keep putting things off – especially starting a business. If you leave it another year someone else may come up with your idea and then it’ll be too late.

When I used to be invited to give talks to people thinking of starting up their own business I used to encounter people who wouldn’t even tell the course organiser what their idea was for fear of it being stolen. I always told these people that if they expected to succeed purely on the strength of an idea they should just go home, because making a successful business was much more about the strength of the execution than the strength of the idea. For some reason this never seemed to go down well. And now I find that INI are promoting this nonsense in a major radio campaign!

Thus I was pleased today to see a link over on the xPlane blog to an article on this very topic:

In 1967, an angel investor, Fred Adler, received over 50 business plans for entrepreneurs who proposed to start microcomputer firms. Only one of the teams presenting this idea ever made it. Its name was Data General. But why did so many entrepreneurs pitching a plan to sell microcomputers either never receive funding or if they were funded, never succeed? They didn’t make it not because the idea was per se bad or didn’t have the potential to be a good opportunity. It was a great idea and enormous opportunity. Rather, it was because the other entrepreneurial teams were unable to execute.

PHX News have a bizarre story about how Christians are moving their business away from Amazon to Christian-only online stores. This, of course, is hardly surprising.

The explanation, however, is:

Amazon.com on the other hand sells grace and smut mixed together. This of course is objectionable to a great many Christians. To illustrate her point, Zahn referred to a book offered through amazon.com that depict humans having sex with demons, using a well known Bible quote as it’s [sic] title He Came To set The Captives Free by Rebecca Brown.

In my earlier days on the net I was one of the creators of The Jack Chick WWW Archive!, devoted to the works of one of the 20th Century’s greatest conspiracy theorists, and publisher of all those little religious comics, Jack T Chick (his basic thesis: Everything is a Jesuit plot).

The bizarre twist in all of this, of course, is that “He Came To Set The Captives Free” was actually originally published by Chick, and is usually found for sale in Christian Bookstores – it’s from the same series of books as Catholic Terror in Ireland, What’s Wrong With Christian Rock, and my personal favourite: Lucifer Dethroned (“Bill Schnoebelen was a Vampire until Jesus set him free!”)

Sometimes this stuff just defies parody.