Echofon
I’ve had to stop using Echofon for Firefox. It has an annoying bug reporting feature where if the OAuth screws up it will alert(); the error. Great. So I left my browser running while at work and came home to find… multiple alert boxes open. I mean a lot. It was insane, and I had to forcibly exit Firefox to escape them.
Tip for all extension writers, don’t use alert() for error reporting if your extension runs in a loop. Nobody likes a billion error messages appearing after time, it’s annoying.
This annoyed user disabled the extension and started looking for others. Shame too, as I enjoyed Echofon; while it was working at least.
Glee
I love Glee, I love the music, the episodes and buying the albums. But when I buy an album of a show or movie I expect all of the songs to be included. So far Glee has a stupid regional thing going on. Some soundtracks at a certain store have different songs, all have songs missing and it’s a pain finding that one song you really want to get.
It’s easy to explain why this is. The people behind the show are milking soundtracks as much as they can, as if they release partial ones they can release multiple soundtracks which means multiple sales. Certain tracks being in certain stores are also a way to entice the store to sell the CDs.
Please stop being a total pain in the ass Glee, I’d like to listen to your music but you make it so damn difficult.
Backups
Ok, after a particularly stupid moment a week or so ago (where my fancy backup script was deleted by my fancy backup cleaning script [who then went and deleted himself {he's a male apparently}]) I have gotten things back to normal. Now the site backups are running again.
Every few hours a database snapshot is being taken and saved, and then I’m emailed. Every so often I will download some copies to my local hard drive for safe keeping.
Once a day a full backup of all uploads as well as the database is created, and once again I’m emailed.
These are done automatically, and at set times. No more fear about things vanishing.
At the same time I copied all the files over to a new user account that has a nice folder structure (thank you symbolic links!).
Moving Pictures
I’ve been reading the Discworld book "Moving Pictures" again, and I cannot believe I didn’t notice this before. For all of you who are unaware, Moving Pictures is a story where an idea is leaked into the world, the idea of "Holy Wood". Slowly it captures people and we see the film industry start up in the mythical area known as Holy Wood.
What they soon start to realize is the idea of Holy Wood is older than most, and the intentions behind it aren’t exactly good. Blah blah blah. Buried under the land is a cinema type complex, where a golden statue lies who looks like your Uncle Oswald. The statue being the guardian keeping the idea of Holy Wood from realities where it doesn’t belong, lest other "things" follow it through.
It took actually looking at the book cover and realizing "Holy crap, it’s an Oscar statue". Then I felt like an idiot, as I suddenly clicked where Oswald came from.
TP is a genius, and I’ve read this book many times but only just clicked.
Error Messages
I had a complete geek moment over the weekend. Ended up working on my side project I’m doing in my spare time, and I ended up writing my error management classes.
Inspired by the weird, wonderful and wacky errors found online, I decided my exception handler would also do the same. So what it now does is log the error + details to a file, then display one out of many random messages. The way the site is set up means output is captured before being sent, so if I run into an exception I can discard the built output and display the customized error page instead.
So far I came up with the following (inspired by online sources).
- A message telling the user to sit very still. Once they move their mouse a new message appears, complaining that they moved and interrupted the process, and that the server was going into a huff.
- A request to read the following End User Agreement, followed by a long string of random gibberish.
- A video from Youtube (showing Glee’s "Over the Rainbow" cover).
Having a lot of fun coming up with these. Hopefully they make the error experience a little better.
Vodafone
I’ve always been happy with my Vodafone plan and mobile, I’ve been a customer for several years. Right now my mobile is dying (my own fault) and I’m slowly looking around for a replacement. I’ve decided I’d like to get some sort of Smartphone, as I am a tech geek and do like the features.
In comes searching the Vodafone website. Not only are their data plans insane (mobile data charges in New Zealand is ridiculous. Scratch that – mobile charges in New Zealand are ridiculous), the way their website is presented is a bit confusing. I’m fine with that though, I managed to find my way around.
What has cooled my opinion of Vodafone was how the iPhone launch has been handled. It was poor at best, and I’m not the only one who believes this. The whole handling of the iPhone 4 debacle by Apple turned me off the iPhone (a hard thing to do fyi, the iPhone 4 looks like a geek dream) and the way Vodafone handled the launch turned me off of them.
I guess it’s time to start looking at 2 Degrees or (and I do shudder at this notion) Telecom.
You have entered an incorrect username/email or password
This always bugged me when using a website, when you get your login credentials wrong you are told it’s "either" the password or the username that was incorrect. That’s really great, helpful for me to know where I messed up.
But it has a purpose. It’s a small but simple security measure to annoy bruteforcers. Now when they try to brute force account, they’re not told when they hit a successful username.
But if you have any sort of public member interface then this ultimately becomes useless. They can verify the username beforehand and know it’s correct. So I really don’t think this adds much of a purpose. If you have a public username list, this becomes pointless. Any security gained by it is lost.
I’m not sure where I stand on it. On something like my blog where my actual login username isn’t known, it would be useful. On a forum where you can easily verify a username, it’s less so.
Why I hate hash
I lied, I don’t hate hash. I am of course talking about the hash symbol (also known as pound or number) – #.
In websites the # symbol splits a URL into anchors. Everything before the # is the URL, everything after is an anchor tag. We use # to allow people to jump to specific areas on the page.
For example:
<a name="topanchor">Hi</a>
<a href="#topanchor">Click to jump to the top</a>
When you click the second link, your screen will jump to the first link (if this page is long enough for scrollbars).
But there’s one annoying place people use it. In Javascript calls on links. It’s much prettier to use # than the other method of Javascript.Void(0);
Except, it introduces a new problem. It’s great to have people clicking a link that activates a javascript function without actually reloading/changing the page, but if you use a # and the user is at the bottom of the page, they’ll be bounced to another section on it. Seriously. It’s a huge pain when you’re clicking a button (that’s actually a image/link) and then you’re bumped to the top of the page.
Sad TV and OF is back!
Outrageous Fortune was on tonight. Two words: Totally Awesome.
Then Private Practice came on, and it was sad. Damn them.
