MySpace tour horked
Why is MySpace so popular? It can’t be because of their tour. The first slide, uhm, ok, I should create a profile (not bloody likely), ok, well clicking ‘next’ just gives: 
Sweet!
Archive for the tag 'bitching'
Bad IM etiquette
The signal/noise ratio of IM conversations is usually pretty poor to start with, but I’m continually amazed by the initiations that I’m subjected to for these interchanges, anyhow. In the excerpts below, CTSRN stands for “Coworker That Shall Remain Nameless”.
CTSRN: hey ben - got a second?
Me: y
CTSRN: mind if i stop by?
Me: k
CTSRN: cool - thx - i’l;l be there in a sec
Now, understand that this person sits about 50 feet from me. Aargh. Just come on by dammit rather than interrupt me twice, to say you WILL come by. If I’m busy, you can probably tell just from looking in my cube. Sigh.
Then there’s another person who almost always starts IM conversations like this:
CTSRN: hey
Me: hi
CTSRN: can i ask u a question?
Me: shoot
The second part of my last response there was “me”, because at this point, the person has already basically asked me TWO questions. Just ask the question!!
One more, yet another person, with timestamps:
CTSRN (2:26:19 PM): hey ben
Me (2:26:21 PM): y
CTSRN (2:26:36 PM): i sent a note for the [project meeting] tomorrow, but can you still do today at 4pm?
Me (2:26:43 PM): y
CTSRN (2:26:50 PM): cool
CTSRN (2:26:59 PM): lemme sort it all out
So here there was an actual, valuable, business reason for the ping–could I still make a meeting (although, I rarely don’t attend meetings I agree to, anyhow). But it was ping-then 2s for me to reply. Then 15 (!) more seconds for the question, during which time, what, I am supposed to stare at the window awaiting the question? Then 7 more seconds for my reply, which seems reasonable to consider if I had a new conflict at that time slot or not. But then, 7 more seconds for the “cool” acknowledgement (when none was needed at all), and then dammit, 9 seconds later than that, a followup that was useless to me. A transaction that could have taken a total of 7 seconds of my attention took 40 seconds, 75%+ of which was me theoretically staring at my screen. In reality, I was doing other things simultaneously during that time, but it then involved at least 2 additional context switches for me than necessary. Sure, it’s not a lot in one instance, but it all adds up.
Alright, I feel better now. Oh and by the way, this is only a couple weeks after I sent out an “IM etiquette” email rant to several internal maillists about the way to properly use IM, and why. Maybe I should have sent it via IM instead.
Stay around lil doggies
I had to be at work pretty early yesterday to be on a phone call with folks in India, so I took the earlier train (7:30am). On my way to the station I typically walk through the post office parking lot, and this particular time I noticed a dog in the lot, eating scraps from a discarded pizza box. It looked like he had tags, and was of a breed (I suck at identifying dog breeds, but it seemed to be a fairly fancy one.) Also, I recognized the dog, but I wasn’t sure from where. I thought it might even be my next-door-neighbor’s, and I know theirs had gone missing at least once before. I decided I should see if there was a phone number on his tags, because if it were my dog, I’d definitely want someone to let me know where my dog had run off to…
Now, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to bother dogs while they’re eating, but this guy was pretty halfheartedly picking through pizza remains, and I approached slowly, speaking in a calm voice. I managed to get to his collar, and rotate it around to the tags, and noticed this dog was positively filthy. Smelled bad, greasy coat, just gross. But, there was a tag with a name (”Moxie” I think it was) and a phone number. I called the number and someone answered and said something I didn’t quite catch, and I asked “Do you have a dog named Moxie?”, they replied “Yeah…”. I asked “Is he lost?” and they said “No, no, he’s just running off the leash–where is he?”. I told the man, and he said “oh, that’s right across the street from here. It’s fine.” I said, “uhm, ok…” and hung up. Then I realized what he had said when he answered the phone was the name of a bar a half block away, and that I had seen this dog lying on the sidewalk in front of that bar before.
So this got me pretty irritated–one, that this dog looked pretty pathetic, and was so dirty, and apparently at least somewhat hungry, and had a good chance of getting hit by a car; and two, that my hand was now pretty gross from touching the dog, and I wanted to buy a bagel, but didn’t want to touch anything I was going to eat, for sure. The bagel joint I like doesn’t have a public restroom, so I ended up going to Starbuxx just so I could use their bathroom. And since I felt a little guilty about just using their restroom, I bought a hot chocolate (for $2.70!!) which wasn’t even very good. I kept thinking about poor Moxie though.
iSight rant
Oh, back-to-back hardware rants! Whee!
So my wife’s buddies “all” seem to have these mac webcams, and so she needs one too, right? Well, ok, it sounded cool so I didn’t need a lot of persuading. So I drop by Fry’s and pick one up (they’re essentially $150 no matter where you buy them), and plug it in. Nothing. No iChat love. No, well, much of anything! Which is kind of weird.
I do a little reading and realize that actually, you need iChat AV to make use of it. Which comes “free” with the Panther upgrade (OS X 10.3), which costs $129. Or, you can get iChat AV alone for $29. Well, I know I want some of the goodies in 10.3 anyhow, but was hesitant to upgrade before because I didn’t want to risk anything going wrong to her beloved Mac. But, I decided should just go for it…
So I’m off to the Apple store (happened to be going by on the way to the bagel shop in Burlingame, actually) and decide to play stupid to the sales staff, and see if I can get any useful help. Oh, it humbles me to do so… but here we go (my side of the conversation in bold). “Need any help?” “Yeah, I’m thinking about getting 10.3 upgrade from 10.2, but wait… when will 10.4 Tiger be out?” “Not until next year” “OK. I’ll take it. Now how do I back up my data before upgrading, just in case?” “Oh, well, do you have an external firewire drive or some blank CDs?” “Sure, I have an external FW HD”. “OK, copy some stuff from your home dir onto it first”. “Uhhh… like what stuff? Everything? What if it wipes my drive and I need to do a full restore after the upgrade” “Uh, that won’t happen.” “But I thought 10.3 had a habit of doing that with there was an external FW HD attached?” “Oh, yeah, well, you want to detach that drive before upgrading.” “Oh.” “Yeah, but actually, the version in this box is probably a slightly newer version than just 10.3, so it’ll not have that problem.” Riiiight. So, out I went, for the second time in as many days having tithed Apple $130+..
After uninstalling and deleting some junk, in an attempt to free up some diskspace on her Mac (it was down to about a gig free), and apparently convincing Finder to no longer be clueful about blank CDRs inserted in the slot (”No volumes that can be recognized” instead of the usual “Do you want to initialize this new disk”), which made it difficult to copy stuff off onto CDR… I finally bit the bullet and started the upgrade. This actually took a couple of tries, because the first time it couldn’t find the internal drive on the notebook to install from, even though it had been thrashing on the CD and disk for a while up to that point. Anyhow, about 90 minutes and 2 CDs later, it was done. And the CDR-recognition thing was fixed, and lots of niftiness ensued… Panther is cool. Although of course, it was stock 10.3.0 on the CDs; it needed about 150M of additional software updates to be downloaded and installed (and a magic file trashed to convince it to install Java 1.4.2, because it didn’t believe me that 1.4.1 was installed, even though it clearly was during the upgrade; this was 20 minutes of hunting on the net to figure out how to make this work, and 3 times downloading 28M of updates… more money for Speedera I suppose.)
So, on to iSight / iChatAV. It works well enough, but got a little tiresome. Let’s see, let’s use the iSight camera to make an iMovie. Nope, not possible. Only your DV camcorder via firewire can be used for that… what? OK, well, maybe I can take snapshots with it for iPhoto… well, if so, I can’t figure out how. So basically, there is a $150 webcam, and I do mean webcam, usable only for iChat, sucking down a bunch of current (and getting a bit hot, I might add) on the notebook’s solitary firewire port. Hmm. It’s now sitting the drawer, actually. I guess she’ll hook it up when she really wants to chat with someone, but… that’s kinda lame. It won’t even work with iMovie?! Come on, Apple, really!
Wanting to bust a cap in Urban Outfitters’ azz
OK, you want to be mad at someone? How about David T Chang and Urban Outfitters. He created a “game” called Ghettopoly. It’s being sold at the Urban Outfitters chain stores. I don’t honestly think I’ve ever bought anything there, but I certainly won’t in the future.
I don’t even want to potentially bump this motherfucker’s pagerank by linking to him, but… you have to see this, before someone burns his site down: http://www.ghettopoly.com/. It’s hosted by Yahoo!, so I’m off to write a complaint e-mail.
Here’s some of what MSNBC passes off as ‘coverage’ on it: ‘Ghettopoly’ game called ‘racist’ (why is racist quoted? Single quoted at that? WTF?!?)
It’s one thing to joke about our differences, encourage discussion, and have fun with friends. It’s another to mass market stereotypes, especially trivializing serious issues and painting with such a wide, offensive, brush. And yes this goes for Hollywood, too! Insensitivity is one thing, but this is truly tasteless and offensive. Is gangsta rap? Yeah, some of it is too, and some of that needs to be kicked to the curb, as well. But let’s start with this first. I can appreciate offensive humor, in a big way, but this isn’t really humorous–it’s simply exploitative. Once you get all the “jokes”, this game wouldn’t be funny, or fun. And it offers no commentary on the ghetto, no insight to make it humorous, only presents the ghetto and stereotypes of the ghetto as something to point and laugh at, not find a commonality with the subject that is the basis for true humor. It is the kind of “funny” 7 year olds laugh at when the bully breaks someone’s toy out of hate, not the kind when a comedian exposes and show the humor in stereotypes (think Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin.)
And now that I’ve visited the urban outfitter’s site, I see how this could happen. What a load of trash–beer-branded t-shirts, “jesus is my homeboy” logo’d stuff, and camo pants. I suggest they change their name to ‘Suburban Loutfitters’; apparently their target demographic is farm-dwelling militia members. I clicked around a lot, and was surprised to eventually find a nonwhite model. One. But then again, I don’t blame minority models for refusing to wear any of that shit 
That’s like 50 years old!
I have a team of developers who work for me. Some are Linux/PHP/Perl/mysql guys, some are IIS/ASP/MSSQL guys (and apparently from their behavior, never the ‘twain should meet). My background is definitely biased towards the former camp, but I try to be impartial. Sometimes, though, I really see stuff that just blows my mind.
We have a payment partner who shall remain nameless (but it rhymes with “iBill”). We used to use a value from their admin interface to calculate some stats. This page changed. The 500+ line vbscript that, among other things, scraped for this value, is broken. The developer gave up on making it work. Customer service complained enough that I just sat and wrote a 1-page LWP-based script to fetch down not only that number, but the entire list of active customers, which is useful in many ways. I told the developer of the vbscript about this, and he was interested in getting at the data (it’s cron’d to pull every morning.) So, I told him the directory and server (it’s on a linux box), how he’d need a ssh client (and where to get one), and said give a holler if there’s any problems. I was curious to see what’d happen.
Cut to later that day. He tells me he can’t get on the machine because there’s too many people already connected (huh?) He shows me, sure enough, Remote Desktop says it can’t connect. I inform him that true, the linux box doesn’t support microsoft’s remote desktop. I explain again about ssh, and he must have at least read the mail, because he had installed PuTTY. He fires that up, and can’t get in. Nope, really, SSH–telnet ain’t gonna do it. OK, now password doesn’t work. Right, the linux box doesn’t understand your microsoft domain password–but it’s the same as your cvs login, which is on the same machine. OK, now he’s in. Command line. Boom. Now what? I say “well, it’s command line, but you know, like DOS”. “DOS? That’s like 50 years old!”. Sigh.
I say, “I sent you what directory it’s in in the email”, and watch. He figures out “cd” is the way to get there… good start: “cd home/pmt_logs”. No go, I tell him “you need a slash before that”. “/cd home/pmt_logs”. I correct him, he gets there. Types “dir”, and thanks to years of bash shell alias hacks being now standard on RH9, it works. After a few more moments I realize he hasn’t the faintest clue how to examine the contents of a file. He indignantly asks how is he supposed to access these files?!
I give in and just make a readonly Samba share on the box.
Why is it that the commandline is so scary to these folks? I know CMD.EXE sucks ass, but if you are a coder on windows, shouldn’t you know at least something about it, or commandlines in general? I’m not going to offer any insight that wasn’t already much more eloquently delivered in Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning, was the commandline” book, but seriously… all Windows coders should install cygwin and read a book. I don’t hire people who can’t explain at least the concepts, if not the final meaning of a commandline shown to me by Marc Slayton years ago. (It’s goes something like this… what does this do? “cat /var/logs/httpd/access_log.tgz | tar xzf - | fgrep -v ‘.jpg’ | cut -d’ ‘ -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -50″). Needless to say, I didn’t hire any of the MS guys, they were all inherited. But I did get this same programmer from above, interested in learning some Perl [on win32], much to my surprise, so maybe there’s hope for skill expansion yet.