21st Century Digital Boy

Do web sites need to look exactly the same in every browser? I’m sure you’re asking yourself that right now.

Now you can find out! (Also, you can find out if Mike Arrington is a dick. Sadly the need to post if Caps are in the playoffs is gone; someone prod Gary to do this next season.)

Anyway, well allow me to retort.

I so want to live in the magic world where this simple web site will convince the braying masses that are our customers to suddenly decide it’s OK, yes, you’re right mister smart web guy, it’s totally cool that you hacked up our new internet thing at a Starbucks on your MBP with the WebKit nightly.

“We certainly don’t mind that it looks funny”, they’ll say. “We’re so glad you’re hip and you are helping us break free of the shackles that are the Microsoft-IE hegemony.”

Yeah. That’s totally how it’ll go. Or, in the real world:

“Listen, make it work in IE6 or I’ll find another vendor who can. Say another word to me about web standards and CSS, and I’ll go somewhere else.”

Maybe it’s that our customers are insane - no argument there, I post about it all the time - but it seems to be that for we poor run-of-the-mill web developers, life is pretty cut-and-dried: do what you’re fucking told, and that is “make it work on my aunt’s eMachines shitfest”.

Or maybe it’s these guys doing the talking again.

This might totally screw up my thesis about BBEdit release dates.

This article goes on at length listing 18 features Windows “should have but doesn’t”.

Let me save you some time.

It lists everything currently en vogue in Mac OS X (Spaces, Expose, Spotlight, etc) and a couple of random Linux features.

In short, “blah blah blah, I want a Mac that runs all the games I have”. Well, buy one and dual-boot it, jagoff, and quit your bitching.

There is nothing more frustrating than years of “Macs are toys no one wants” then endless articles on how to replicate their features.

You have to be shitting me. $1.25 Billion-with-a-B dollars for Habbo?

Does this valuation take into account the occasional pool closings?

Seriously? A billion?

Look, I don’t care what any of you scientists have to say, with your lab coats and your science, but the drummer is never, ever the smartest person in the room.

Ha! Top that, mister empirical evidence science guy!

So I have been kinda-sorta messing around with the new Plaxo beta web thingee, despite a general dislike to social networking. (Every now and then I feel compelled to try out the current done thing, but just blobbing into Facebook seems pointless as everyone else is already there.)

Anyway, Plaxo ships some sort of Address Book.app plugin, which as near as I can tell syncs local addresses into the Plaxo cloud, and spams everyone to come and sign up. (Sidebar: Also, fail.)

I don’t know precisely because I didn’t install it. Why? Because it’s full of fail.

1. It is shipped as a zip that unzips to a disk image. Fail: please just either ship a disk image or a zip file, but not both. Seriously, guys, man hdiutil .

When you do this, it means you have a minimum of 2 double-clicks to even get to the install, and the user now has not one but 2 files to trash.

2. It ships as an Installer.app package. Fail: Why do you need to run as root to copy a file to /Applications? Hmm? An Installer.app package means, almost certainly, that it’s going to monkey with my startup items, Dock, or whatever. I didn’t ask for that, so fuck you, I’m not installing you.

Installer.app packages have a purpose. An app that reads a per-user, documented data store to talk via some REST-y cloud endpoint does not need anything more than drag-and-drop. If you must install long-lived things, 1)tell the user and 2)make it optional.

This is how religion happens:

Customer relentlessly files tickets claiming subsystem is malfunctioning. Offers vague anecdotal evidence for failure state.

So, I go in and add copious logging; I am now able to see the entire state of the application. And of course, I test my debugging by poking random buttons; failure should occur (per customer) and in either case, I should see logged thingees.

You can guess what happens next: it works fine no matter how hard I give it the million-monkeys treatment.

I then sit and wait to see if any other random passers-by decide to use app. After a reasonable wait, I see no one has, so I declare it fixulated and close the ticket, noting the above (”cannot create failure state, marking fixed and closed.”)

OH NO NO NO, screams customer. We know it does not work. OK, I ask: what’s your proof?

Well, we have not gotten any notifications anyone has used it! We normally have lots! Ergo it doesn’t work.

I attempt to retort that all evidence shows 1)it does work and 2)you haven’t gotten any notifications from the application because no one’s using it presently. As soon as someone uses it (eg, me) it works. Quod erat demonstrandum.

That no one is using it is proof that it doesn’t work, I am told, at which point I feel like I am allowed to have a drinking problem and a bad attitude towards our users.

I needed to rebuild PHP to add SOAP support. (Side note: when will it be reasonable to add functionality w/o rebuilding the core binary, like, oh, every other language in the world?)

Obviously I want to preserve build options, and just tack on a new one. So:


# php -i | grep “Configure Command” | sed -e ’s/Configure Command => //’ -e “s/’//g”


Just just a flick of the mouse, add my new option, and endlessly whine that PHP makes me rebuild the binary eleventy million times a month.

Yay: after barely managing to fix my ailing Mac mini, I awoke to eleventy-billion spam bounces. Someone used my email address as the from. Hooray.

So if you think I spammed you, I didn’t. Some asshole just put my name in the ‘from’ field.

(Update. It seems that the spammer was running from a Comcast cable modem connection somewhere in Florida (hsdl?). This is just so awesome: Comcast, who routinely accuses us of spam and blocks our shit and totally refuses to talk to us about the issue, is now spamming me from within its own domain. I simply cannot wish enough ill will on Comcast. )

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24229068

No one likes the M16 except Colt.