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Almost 20 years ago, some heathen compatriots and I worked hard to create absurdly baroque DOS prompts with ANSI.SYS and, inevitably, larger-than-normal environment memory on pre-Windows systems. I wish I had a copy of the PROMPT command used to create my own version of that monstrosity -- it danced the cursor around to put the current path at the top of the screen, the date in the corner, yadda yadda yadda.
It turns out, people still do this sort of thing on unixy systems.
Someone has built a Windows 3.1 emulator in Ajax and Javascript. The attention to detail is disturbing and astounding. You can play Minesweeper or, if you like, spawn a browser and visit the site recursively. Notepad works, and will save files to your desktop.
[Via MeFi.]
Or, maybe you do.
Gizmodo points out the bestest robot flower girl EVER.
Today's strip, My Hobby: Abusing Dimensional Analysis, is my favorite in weeks. Shame about England, though.
Microsoft never met any problem they couldn't make more complicated. You can see this in nearly everything they do, from relatively simple things like the Zune -- way, way, way more fiddly than the iPod -- to their mess of a mobile platform (really? a "Start" menu on my phone? Are you high?) to how they manage server settings for tools like IIS and SQL Server to, well, even Word and Excel these days. Trapped my increasing commoditization, they keep shoveling more and more features into tools into which almost no one dives deep -- my bet is that 95% of all Word users have no idea what 95% of the features do. And yet they add and add and add, and Word gets slower and slower and slower.
Complication is sin in computing. Simple tools are better. This is a bit of a religious position, but my 20+ years in computing has left me with the strong opinion that a whole bunch of flexible, small, generalized tools is a way better solution that an proliferating patchwork of giant, inflexible programs dedicated to single tasks.
My current proof of this is Team Foundation Server, MSFT's current offering in the source-control-and-work/bug-tracking world. It is, of course, the path of least resistance for the MSFT developing hordes (while the rest of the dev world uses tools like Subversion). I'm not writing code on this project, so I can't speak to that side of the tool, but as a product manager I do know something about the bug-and-issue-tracking side of the thing. And it's a friggin' joke. Everything takes ninety more steps than it ought to. The only way to interact with it, really, is to install and use VISUAL STUDIO -- there is a web client, but it sucks balls even from IE8. If you've used more lightweight, flexible tools like Bugzilla, working with backlog of items in TFS feels like assembling a ship in a bottle with a broken pair of tweezers.
Of course, TFS does come with a rich set of templating features, and is skinnable and has workflow features and is all kinds of customizable. It'll talk to Excel for bulk entry, even!
And yet, here's the rub: none of that shit really matters for 99% of the people who need an issue tracker. It's a pretty simple use case, which is why so many of the popular tools are simple web apps with little in the way of system requirements: Management uses the list to figure out what needs doing; they set priorities, and assign items to developers. Developers use the list of things assigned to them to know what to work on, and in what order. Dialog ensues on each work item as required. Everything should be simple and straightforward. Nothing gets lost in the shuffle, because the universe of items is fairly simple and easy to see.
Not in the land of TFS, though. You've got a boatload of work item types to sort out (bug? enhancement? product backlog item? sprint backlog item? task? there's MORE!), and there's no way to change the type post-creation, which is an EXCELLENT way to ensure some double-entry and/or the loss of an item because it's in the wrong type. It's thick-client dependent, but even that interface looks like something from the Land that UX Forget (constant scrolling, e.g.). It just took me 10 minutes to find the "jump to item #" feature, for crying out loud.
Who comes UP with this shit? Are they fired yet? Christ.
For various reasons, today I have my calendar up on:
- My Mac's iCal
- Outlook inside VMWare
- OWA on my client laptop
- Outlook on my corporate laptop
- My iPhone
Just now, all 5 of them began noisily alerting me to my first meeting today.
"I have a business installing styrofoam nuns. Fuck a fruit basket."
NSFW (profanity). But do not miss this.
...of Scalzi's masterwork The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.
Enjoy.
I for one welcome our new dancing Japanese robot masters.
This is apparently from last year, but how often do you see a Halloween costume this amazingly cool? Dude built a Luke-and-Tauntaun setup that beggars belief. Check it out.
The 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia. You're welcome.
Over at CHUD: Jack Kirby's Inglorious Basterds -- the imagined 1970s comic adaptation of Tarantino's latest, as drawn by Jack "King" Kirby.
PERFECT.
The Windows version of Remote Desktop doesn't cache my credentials, so I always have to provide at least a password to get into our remote machines.
The Mac side version? No problem.
Randall Mundoe graphs the movies.
We give you: Eternal justification for Autotune: Carl Sagan Remixed.
While I understand why you say that "many technical issue can be resolved by using the support functions of our web site," at no point in my technical career has this ever, ever, ever been a good use of my time.
The much-publicized collossal cockup over at Microsoft regarding T-Mobile Sidekick user data reads like an IT horror story, and that's because it completely is (some are even saying sabotage). And it didn't take long for some folks to immediately start using the story as proof that cloud-based computing is a bad idea.
However, that's not the lesson here, and cloud-based services are not the real problem in this picture. Let me explain.
The Sidekick, for those who don't know, is a clever piece of hardware made by a company called Danger, and sold exclusively through T-Mobile. Unlike most PDA phones, this one came with no sync cable -- you put your addresses into it, and it sync'd up to T-Mobile's servers over the air.
That's where "cloud storage" comes in. In the IT world, that phrase means "storing your data out on some servers in some data center someplace that you don't own." Use Gmail? Your mail's in the cloud. Rely on hosted Exchange? Same goes for you, except now your calendar and contact data are in the cloud, too. Google Docs? Cloud. Various web-based collaboration tools? Cloud. You get the idea. It's got power, but it's also not always a perfect fit. Right tool, right job.
In the phone context, this has strengths, especially for casual users -- no software to install on your PC, no cable to lose, and you can get to the data from any browser (like, say, at work and at home) even without your device handy. Changes made on either side get sync'd to the other, and everything's groovy.
There are some costs, too, obviously. The biggest one is potentially security, as Paris Hilton learned back when the Sidekick was the "It Phone" and some private snapshots from her Sidekick account ended up on every gossip blog in the universe. It wasn't the work of some nefarious hacker cracking T-mobile's site; it was almost certainly just some dude who managed to guess Hilton's password in the privacy of his own home with no access at all to Hilton's phone. Game, set, match. The lesson here, though, isn't "cloud storage bad;" it's "use a real password." Who wants to bet it was her dog's name?
The real gotcha of the Sidekick architecture, though, is the one that's happening now. Not only did the Sidekick not require a cable to sync to your desktop (Outlook or whatever), it couldn't. There is no easy way (of which I'm aware) for a Sidekick user to get their own backup of their Sidekick data. It was and remains a "trust us; we know what we're doing" situation -- which, as I've said before, is never a good idea.
Now that the Sidekick servers are toast, and everyone knows that Microsoft did essentially no backups, that lesson should be clear.
But let's be specific: The lesson isn't that using any cloud service is bad. The lesson actually doesn't have anything at all to do with cloud services. The takeaway for the savvy after the Sidekick affair is bone fucking simple:
Make backups. Lots of them.
If the system someone is selling you doesn't allow YOU to make your own backups, buy something else. I use cloud services, if you want to call them that, for two different sets of data on my iPhone. Using MobileMe, my desktop calendar and contacts sync with my phone via Apple, with changes automatically pushed from one side to the other whenever required with no cable involved. It works like a charm, and my data is in three places -- my phone, my desktop, and MobileMe. And my desktop is very backed up. I do the same thing with my corporate Exchange data, which exists in even more places (since I use multiple computers with multiple installations of Outlook in addition to my normal computer).
I also use other kinds of cloud services. My Nogators.com mail is hosted at Gmail, and Imap'd down to my clients. That's pretty darn cloudy, and I wouldn't go back to running my own servers if you paid me. But, again, I also have backups.
So, again: the problem, dear reader, lies not with the cloud, but with our selves -- and our ability to measure our backup security in time zones and spindles.
Or, at least, it is if you didn't hire incompetent web devs in the first place. Derek Powazek nails it down for us:
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
It may not be quite that bad -- someone probably does have to explain to the masses why semantic markup matters, or why having meaningful links and real site structure matter and, in general, why HTML generated by something other than Word or your brother-in-law is important -- but to a first approximation, he's right.
What's good SEO? Here's the key:
The One True Way
Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.
Please ditch the ribbon and give me this instead, mkay?
Last week, I gave up and ordered Uverse with Internet only from AT&T. I really didn't want to, and I may still tell them to go to hell, but at this point it appears to be the only way I can get high-speed ( > 5MB) connectivity into my house for less than a couple hundred bucks a month.
The first hurdle was getting them to sell me Internet-only. I have Vonage, and I'm very happy with it; I see no reason to go with AT&T's phone service. I have DirecTV with a real Tivo; there is absolutely no reason to go with AT&T's retarded DVR technology, HD be damned. But you can't sign up for net-only Uverse online; you have to go to the phone, where you talk to an idiot.
Well, that's not fair. The dude I got might not have been an idiot -- but if he wasn't, he was a liar. You pick.
The point of contention here is that I asked, over and over, will ordering Uverse disconnect my DSL? I have a 3MB down/768 up circuit here already, and I wanted to keep it so I'd have a fallback if the Uverse sucked. Over and over the idiot/liar assured me that yes, I could keep the DSL, it wouldn't go away, it's completely separate, etc. Fine; I ordered it, and scheduled Tuesday installation.
This morning, of course, we had no Internet. After lots of local troubleshooting and a phone call to my ISP, it turns out that yes, AT&T deprovisioned my line. Getting it back would be basically re-ordering the service from scratch. I called AT&T Uverse support and explained to them what had happened, and they were of course all about "well, he shouldn't have told you that, because it's not true, we regret the error, etc."
I have one word for that: Bullshit. AT&T doesn't care. They never care. They're AT&T, and they will keep screwing customers as long as they possibly can. The call center I ordered Uverse from probably has a fucking sign on the wall encouraging the drones to say anything and everything to get a customer to sign up; if they don't, it's implicit in the comp plan. And now, of course, I'm on the hook - it'll take weeks to get my DSL back, but some dude in a truck is theoretically showing up here tomorrow to set up Uverse. Gotcha!
The not-quite-so-dingy side is that I got them to ditch the install fee ($150) over this, but that's cold comfort since the Glenbrook Valley types got a no-fee install without even asking.
Here's the really annoying part: I have two copper lines into the house, only one of which has been active. If ATT had been honest about how DSL and Uverse interacted, I could have ordered the Uverse onto the other line and kept the DSL after all. Instead, because of their incompetent/sociopathic salesjerks, I've basically lost a day of work over it.
So, AT&T? Fuck you. Fuck you twice. I tried to avoid you, and when I finally gave in you were right there with a "gotcha" you clearly care nothing about. Die in a fire. Seriously. In the meantime, I'm shopping for non-Uverse broadband. Even at $65 a month, it's leaving a pretty shitty taste in my mouth.
At first, so-called "white hat" bulk mailers like Constant Contact looked like a good idea, but it appears their clients are not universally scrupulous, so signing up for Mailing List A frequently results in me getting on lists B, C, and D as well. Politicians are the most obnoxious about this, but they're not alone.
Consequently, I went over to Google to tell it to sideline anything with a ConstantContact (or BlueStateDigital) mail header -- except Gmail doesn't know how to do headers. Grrrr.
After a second attempt at "put this on my calendar" appeared to fail, I did a little research. The data detectors are pretty good, just not quite foolproof. Sure, the month and day are right...
These aren't labeled as such, but these "Uncomfortable Plot Summaries" remind me of nothing so much as the asinine blurbs for shows in the old TV Guide. So often did they miss the point of a given show that I used to say they'd summarize the New Testament as "Jewish carpenter runs afoul of Roman law."
Anyway, not all of these are funny, but any list that reduces Highlander to "Elderly immigrant destroys property" has to have a few other gems on offer.
Not I. However, IO9's post here giving them a gentle smackaround includes a pitch- (and art-) perfect spoof of those insufferable Wonder Twins from the 70s cartoon. Do NOT miss this.
By now you've probably at least heard of the Deep Field experiments with the Hubble; basically, scientists pointed the telescope at an apparently vacant spot in the sky, but turned up the sensitivity and looked for a long time -- and discovered that the "black" piece of sky was actually home to thousands of galaxies, some as much as 40 billion light years away.
Go here. Read more. Watch the video. Space is huger than you we can imagine, but this video gives us a little glimpse of the larger universe.
GM's been talking about the groundbreaking plug-in hybrid Volt for a while, but now they've let the ad men and marketers (read: LIARS) start babbling, and as a consequence we're now seeing press that suggests that the Volt gets a whopping 230 miles per gallon.
Mark Chu-Carroll over at Good Math, Bad Math explains why this is pure, unadulterated bullshit. The Volt's cool and all, and in some circumstances could get even better mileage than that, but the mechanisms involved make traditional MPG figures pretty much useless.
The Volt leaves your house in the morning charged from the grid, and can go up to 40 miles without using any gas at all; after 40, though, the electric engine is charged by a small gas generator that will apparently produce about 50 MPG on its own. Consequently, people with short commutes might use zero gallons of gas a week, but people driving in from the burbs would use way more. Touting the 230 figure, though, is just a bunch of suits lying.
BoingBoing points us to Dara O'Briain:
Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves with the old 'Well, science doesn't know everything.' Well, Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. [...]
Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
If you're of the right tribe, go read and enjoy Signs you're a bad programmer.
Really, Microsoft? Really?
So, with most webmail tools, if you hit the "logoff" button, no amount of URL tomfoolery will allow a nefarious person to re-connect to your mailbox from the browser or session without your password.
This is As It Should Be.
I've just noticed, however, that Outlook Web Access apparently sees it differently. When you hit the logoff link in OWA, you get this warning:
At this point, the URL has shifted from our base OWA URL to something that ends with "/auth/logoff.aspx?Cmd=logoff", which gives the user the distinct idea that their session has been zapped safely. Sure, it's probably safer to quit the browser at this point, but in this age of weeks-long uptimes for even Windows boxes, who does that?
I sure don't. However I just had a need to log into our support mailbox, and haven't used OWA in at least 24 hours. The minute I pointed Safari at OWA, I was looking at my inbox. No login. No challenge. No nothing.
What the fuck?
If, in the course of my web reading, I encounter a video from YouTube that's long, or if I'm doing so from a place with questionable or slow connectivity, my standard procedure is to open the video and immediately hit pause. the YouTube player is smart enough to accumulate the video and hold it for me, and when I come back to that page in 10 or 20 minutes, the video will play uninterrupted.
What, then, is the problem with the Comedy Central videos? No matter how long I let them buffer, they always stutter and pause and require additional buffering.
Does someone geekier than I know why their approach is so broken?
This never before seen pictures of Armstrong on the moon shows his face through the visor.
In 1977, the TRS-80 Model 1 was the shit. Gizmodo has more.
The LRO has taken pictures of the Apollo landing site; you can see the lander and even the astronauts' footprints.
I end up using both -- for a rich, formatted, in-house mail, Outlook is the winner -- but what's interesting is how much search SUCKS on Outlook compared to Mail.app. I can find mails in no time on the Mac side, but the Outlook search tools appear to be made of fail.
...you'll be very sad if you don't see the joy that is Star Trek II as an opera with action figures. Really. Click. Seriously.
Citicorp Center in New York is a striking building for lots of reasons, but the most obvious is that it sits on four huge "stilts" that allow one corner to hover over a church. Less obvious is its massive motion dampening system, developed to reduce wind-induced motion sickness in tenents.
Its most interesting aspect, though, is what happened when its structural engineer realized, several years after its completion, that his structure might not be as safe as it should be under significant wind loads, and what he did about it. Let's be clear: when I say "not as safe as it should be," I mean he realized the 59-story skyscraper might fall down.
Seventeen years later, Joe Morgenstern wrote a long piece in the New Yorker about what happened next; it's online here and is well worth your time.
Installing recommended updates and patches on our Exchange server resulted in (a) Windows Firewall being automatically enabled, preventing any access to Exchange and (b) the webmail client being completely hosed.
CompuServe is finally dead.
It is apparently impossible to log out of Outlook Web Access in a browser and then log back in as a different user without first quitting the browser. WTF?
Hellenic Shipping has created an interactive GoogleMaps mashup that shows the locations of their ships in real time. Globally.
(Via MeFi.)
JWZ has this rundown of the timelines for popular SF films. We're already past Clockwork Orange, Escape from New York, Freejack, and (obviously) 2001.
Absent -- since it's not the actual timeline of the film, just of events referenced therein -- is the original date of Judgement Day from 1984's original Terminator film, which will be 12 years ago this August: 8/29/1997. Ouch.
Or something, since it's now refusing to reimburse its workers for data plans on non-Windows Mobile devices regardless of how much they're used for work.
There's drinking the kool-aid, and then there's really drinking the kool-aid. This is just silly and wrongheaded. That they're couching it as a "cost cutting measure" instead of blatant logrolling is even cheesier; nobody thinks Windows Mobile is a viable platform.
In addition to the fancy new iPhone 3GS and related announcements (and don't dismiss the $99 3G move; Apple's now positioned for an even larger piece of the smartphone market), we also got a peek at Snow Leopard. The new rev of the Mac OS is a refinement release, not a major feature-laden milestone, but it does include one very significant new capability:
The other major demo was of the Microsoft Exchange support baked right in to Mail, Address Book, and iCal. "The Mac has Office, integrates with Windows IT services, but what's missing is Exchange," said Serlet. Apple licensed Exchange compatibility directly from Microsoft, so now it's a snap to set up integration with Exchange Server 2007 or newer. It includes server auto-discovery support in Mail, integrated view of Exchange and personal calendars in iCal, support for scheduling meetings, accepting invitations, drag-and-drop contact integration, and more. This support should make it far easier to use Macs in most corporate environments.
Windows doesn't come with Exchange support. You've gotta buy Outlook for that. Something tells me that Snow Leopard's implementation here will be smarter than Outlook's, too.
Oh, and the price? $29. That is not a typo.
Via DaringFireball, here's Enderle's predictions for WWDC this year:
"The question is whether they will use it for product launches," said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Analyst Group. "It appears the answer is no since they are signaling that not only will Jobs not be there, neither will the new phones." From the standpoint of consumers and even investors, he said, the developers conference isn't nearly as important as Macworld.
Jesus, is this guy EVER right? He's like tech's own Bill Kristol. What a useless gasbag.
This video demo of a 1964 acoustic modem -- at 300 baud -- is pretty fantastic. It was all over the net last week; I'm just getting to it.
Some fun bits:
- It's acoustic, obviously; there was no way to plug a phone line in otherwise.
- It has no digital circuitry at all -- there's no microcontroller, and no real command set.
- It does, however, still work -- though loading Wikipedia over 300 baud is an exercise best left to museums.
300 baud predates me, but I did start at 1200. The jump to 2400 was enormous, and the jump to 9600 was even better -- though it was a plateau, too, since the terminal controllers for the University mainframe ran at that speed, so here was no reason to go any higher until dial-up ISPs started happening.
