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 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.

1. User emails problem with specific error code.
2. Code monkey use TEH GOOGLES to find answer. Answer is specific Knowledge Base article by big company in Redmond, Washington, with specific steps to fix problem.
3. User tell code monkey “that not problem at all, big company in Redmond, Washington who write software and maintain knowledge base wrong about software they write and knowledge base they maintain, you fix problem now”.

I’m sure at some point you’ve run into these “download manager” thingees before. The general jist is, “Our lawyers require that we have 30 different ‘click here to approve the license‘ dialogs, and our management requires we have as many steps as possible to harvest demographic info to sell, so we can’t have you deep-linking to a download, even for a free product. So we ship you a little binary artifact to shell out to wget. Everyone’s happy!”

Except the user, because you’ll note the entire thing is user-hostile to begin with.

Anyway, at some point Mammon came a-calling and they realized, wow we have potentially unused pixels, that we can use to sell! And sell they did:

So not only are we user-hostile, we can’t be bothered to sell anything but one product, even if our data we harvested shows everyone uses our stupid download manager to download the product we then turn around and try to promote/sell to them.

A bit of a plug here: Applescript is still a completely wretched piece of vomit covered in AIDS and fail, but you can wipe a little of the fail off with Script Debugger.

Now to convince my boss to drop the dosh on it TO MAKE THE FUCKING PAIN STOP.

Dear US Gov’t, House of Representatives, Senate, and related parties:

You know what? Fuck you, that’s what.

Your plan to stimulate the economy doesn’t amount of a fucking hill of beans. It’s a goddamned limpdick hand-job from a burned-out whore.

I mean, what more does this amount to than beer-and-cigarettes money? You know what’s going to go up? Lottery ticket spending, you stupid dickheads.

$1200 is half my fucking mortgage payment. Christ, I think it might not have even been my rent on my 1-bedroom apartment (that I shared with my wife; had I been single, I know the $600 wouldn’t amount to shit).

So if I’m about to get foreclosed, or about to have my car repoed, or $35,000 in credit card debt, what the fuck is that $1200 supposed to be for? New big-screen TV?

Problem the first is, you assholes have never been SMB - Seriously Muthafuckin Broke. Cause if you had been, you’d know: when one is SMB, one no longer gives a fuck about “economic stimulus”. $600 means, “I get a couple extra cartons of Basics and eat the non-generic Hot Pockets”.

In other words there is a kind of “failure point” where things become utterly binary: either you have the money or you don’t. There is no “payment plan” and there is no “economic stimulus”. SMB means “who gives a fuck”, maybe I will blow it all on lottery tickets, Marlboros, and beer.

Problem the second is, you assholes can’t afford politically to do anything meaningful and we know it. If I’m approaching SMB or generally just looking to make my financial situation strong, I very simply

1. Write down my total income
2. Write down all the things I spend money on (expenses)

Then if #2 is greater than #1, I start crossing shit off #2 (ie, reducing spending) until #1 is greater than #2. If I can’t make the totals work out I get another job.

But you assholes can’t do any of that, and you won’t do any of that. You won’t be fiscally responsible, ever. You’re children with their first credit card, uncaring what a minimum payment really means. You won’t just get the fuck out of the war (and use all that WOW FREE MONEY to, oh, pay down debt), you won’t stop ruthlessly piling pork and waste into spending bills, you won’t stop ensuring everyone everywhere gets some cut of the tax revenue no matter what.

The only answer you have to the fiscal clusterfuck you created is further fiscal irresponsibility. You’re like a person who’s $20,000 but frantically applying for credit cards, hoping they can get enough to keep shuffling that debt around. Throw enough money around the club until everyone forgets what an unbearable asshole you are.

Honestly I don’t even want the money (ok that’s a lie I LOVE FILTHY LUCRE, but bear with me). I feel like I’m rewarding bad behavior. Somehow this is supposed to stimulate the economy: I guess a new TV helps? Given that it’s built with Chinese labor by a Japanese company? But Wal-Mart will get their slice so I guess that’s OK.

“What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be,” he said at the forum, sponsored by The New York Post. “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”

(source)

He later added that Oceania has has always been at war with Eastasia.

Visibone makes neat charts for people who do HTML and related things.

I thought it would be neat to ask TEH BOZZ for one. Then I saw this.

IE, Netscape, and Opera. Not to disparage the fine folks at Opera, but come on. Webkit, have you friggin heard of it? Netscape, for fuck’s sake? That they just killed?

Way to lead, Visibone. Way to lead.

We recently changed HR/benefits companies, from a nationally-known brand to a local/regional one. This is mostly uninteresting, except if they dick us over (something that happened roughly every 8 seconds with the old one) the people responsible are just down the street, instead of elsewhere in the great wide world.

Anyway, one of the supposedly awesome things about this new company is that everything - EVERYTHING! - is stored in the cloud. Need to make any changes to anything WRT your HR “file”? Don’t pick up that phone - log in! Use the Web, it’s fantastic! We won’t even get a paystub - it’ll be downloadable online!

So today I tried just that. Here are the first 2 impressions the service made:

1. MSIE is the only supported browser. Gecko (all flavors) and WebKit (all flavors) are not supported.
2. The “Your browser is not supported” page it redirects you to is 404.

I can’t go any farther, even with a copy of Parallels handy, because my account isn’t set up yet (but I am technically required to be filing my time in the online timesheet app).

I really can’t understand building an app that won’t work at all in anything but IE, marketshare be damned: Firefox is no longer a bit player on the Web. Favoring IE, fine; but IE only? Is that even remotely sensible?

If their “web site” is a means to deliver binary artifacts over port 443, then we will be having words. I fear the binary artifact future; quite the silly season it will be, and we should be working hard to smash it to pieces.

Today CNN brings us this real brain-teaser, “How do you talk to kids about Britney’s sister?“

Oh come on.

“Do the opposite of whatever they do. The end.”

Why do we even need to have this conversation? It wasn’t like you had to talk to your kids about showing your vagina publicly.