A carnival of technology

Augh! Damn you, AbiWord! It looked so nice… It can read MS Word documents, it’s small, it’s fast, and it’s Gtk+ based. “Word processing for everyone,” claims the splash screen. Word processing for everyone that’s using AbiWord. It can’t save to anything useful. It can’t write MS Word documents at all, though it fails to mention this when you use “Save” rather than “Save As”, and you end up with it’s XML based format that no other program can understand. “But there’s still hope!” you may say, it can save as Rich Text, LaTeX, and you could always print it to a postscript file. The attempt at Rich Text left the first page all in bold, and enough other errors throughout to make the document unusable. Postscript halfway worked; ghostview handled it without too many errors, but no postscript printer can handle it. The final attempt, LaTeX, the everyman’s typesetting language, failed in terrible ways that are likely to give me nightmares later. The only format that AbiWord can write with any amount of accuracy is it’s own, and I hope that you won’t need to print it afterwards.

20% of the adult population in the United States has severe literacy problems (National Institute for Literacy). Every one of them works at WalMart.

The music section at my WalMart is not simply a little bit out of order; it is completely unnavigable. I saw Backstreet Boys, Rod Stewart, the Who, and an MTV Greatest something or other all in one row that claimed to be a part of the T’s. This is far too complete for occaisonal misplacements by finicky customers. Even malicious pranksters would have needed a plan, two or three days, and possibly a good random number generator. There is no plan to the WalMart music section, only chaos.

Editor’s note: This rant stands apart from the rest in that I still agree with its sentiment. My keyboards even today are always remapped with control where the caps lock used to be.

Why was the control key moved? The control key may not be nearly as useful as it once was back in the days of teletypes, but it’s still a lot more useful than the caps lock key. Also, as a vi user, I don’t particularly want to have to move my hands every time that I need to hit the escape key. It seems that the only purpose for having the control key on the bottom row of the keyboard and the escape key by itself in the upper-left corner is to give both emacs users and vi users severe cases of carpal tunnel syndrome.

In the computer lab in the Rich building there are 10 Ultra 10 workstations and 4 Ultra 80’s. The Type 5 keyboards on the 10’s show much evidence of wear with the many layers of crud on the keys and overall dinginess. The Ultra 80’s, on the other hand, have shiny new Type 6 keyboards and mice attached to them. However, it would seem that the benevolent people in charge of the labs thought that the students would appreciate an AT101 keyboard layout much more than the Unix layout traditionally seen on Sun keyboards. It doesn’t even look like a Sun keyboard anymore! It’s just another common PC keyboard with a bunch of extra keys that no one will ever use. Rather than use the faster, cleaner, nicer workstations, I will use the dirty ones with layers of fingerprints on the monitors so that I might use keyboards conceived in a more sane world.

Editor’s note: This was written before popup blockers became common and when javascript was mostly used for Geocities sorts of effects. Disabling the ability for some random web designer to run code on your computer really seemed quite reasonable at the time.

Today’s rant is inspired by some recent complaints that I have seen on a few webcomic related forums about popup ads. The complaint is that popup ads are more annoying than standard banner ads since they “popup” and force you to notice them, and that ad companies have been finding various ways to circumvent tools designed to filter out unwanted popup ads. It seems to me that there’s a rather simple way to solve the problem of popups. Turn off JavaScript, you twits! You obviously don’t want to give control over various aspects of your browser and the ability to create and modify windows to an unknown third party, so don’t. Do you want to allow webdesigners the ability to modify images and text based on mouse and keyboard events, or allow them to thrust the work of running a program on your computer rather than theirs, or allow them to create an arbriatary number of windows and shake them to bits as if there was an earthquake inside of your computer? A well-designed page can have a tasteful inclusion of JavaScript elements, but in this humble rodent’s opinion, popup ads and earthquakes are reason enough to live without it.

The following rant was sent as feedback to Aussie Catalog for their crappy website. Why was I shopping at Aussie Catalog, you may ask? An Australian friend on IRC has been trying to get me to experience the joy that is Tim Tams (and there better be some serious joy in those things, himi), so I finally took the time to track down where to find them in .us. Why did I order them online rather than buying them at the store, which is about 30 miles north of me? Well, that’s because I’m too lazy to get a ride out to Marietta.

I recently ordered some Tim Tams from your website, and I have a few comments on security and the site’s design.

First, although encrypting the credit card number and order information is most certainly a good idea, sending the full, unencrypted credit card number right back to me in the confirmation email most certainly is not. Rather than rendering the encryption completely pointless, you may want to only send a few digits of the number back in the confirmation email, or none at all.

Also on the topic of the email, I suggest that you send it as plain text rather than the badly formed text and HTML combination that you are using now. (To send both in the same email it should be MIME encoded as “multipart/alternative” so that MIME capable, text-based mail readers (such as mutt or pine) can display the text by default. You currently have the plain text version of the message, immediately followed by the HTML version, which causes the whole thing to be seen as HTML.) Since the only feature added in the HTML version is the link at the bottom, and this can be accomplished just as well with a plain-text link, it may be a good idea to simply send only the text version.

As for the website itself, it looks awful. You have a rather large introduction page using 9 frames in which the only useful information is a mission statement of sorts, a summary of the products offered (which should be clear from the catalog), and a suggestion to view the page using a screen size of 800×600. These things could be implemented just as well as a part of the main catalog page, especially since there is a second introduction and some instructions already on this page.

Frames should be used only minimally or not at all. Navigation through your site would be a bit less confusing without some some of the 12 frames that you use. For example, one of the far right frames, main, would be better implemented as a separate page. The animations are especially distracting, and there is no point in taking up that much of the screen with information that will for the most part go unused. The bottom far right frame, main1, should be eliminated completely, since users should be capable of opening a full screen window on their own.

This brings me to the next point: the heavy use of Javascript. The heavy use of frames already make your site difficult to navigate, but the use of javascript makes it impossible for some. The mouseover information on the products could implemented just as well as a few lines underneath the product pictures, and this would also make it easier to find a specific product. The product information from clicking the thumbnails does no more than the task of an actual link, so it should be implemented as a link. By not making your site dependent upon javascript and by lessening the use of frames you can make the site more navigable and friendly to your customers.

Lastly, you may want to offer an email address for sending feedback as well as the text form, since it is quite annoying to type something of any length in a tiny text box.

…and here is the response (received the following Monday) from AussieCatalog:

David,
Thank you for your comments. We have already designed a new site. We should be posting it soon
Thank you

First, as a warning, I am not Australian and I have only a minimal knowledge of Australian law, so don’t flame me too badly for any blazing inaccuracies in what follows (I would like to know about blazing inaccuracies; just don’t yell too loudly.). You may be asking yourself, “Why does this American loser care about Australian laws,” to which I say, “Look! A three headed monkey!”

Australia seems to be a country that is concerned for the health of the public and legislates as such. However, let’s ignore gun control, illegal and prescription drugs, environmental regulations, and warning labels on packs of toothpicks and look at the restrictions on caffeine. Australia has restrictions on caffeine similar to the ones found in Canada (or at least that were formerly found in Canada. I believe that they have relaxed them somewhat. They still haven’t put caffeine back in Mountain Dew, though. Crazy Canucks), meaning that it is not legal to add caffeine to a product. Products which naturally contain caffeine, such as coffee and tea, are legal, but those to which it is added artificially are not. Somehow restricting caffeine in this way is going to improve the health of the public. This means that, were I in Australia, I could drink enough coffee to keep myself awake for a week, but I couldn’t go to the nearest store and buy a Coca-Cola. Is there any point to this? Is the 30mg of caffeine in a can of cola somehow more dangerous than the 80mg or so in a cup of coffee?

Update: 13th January. I have been informed by an Australian friend of mine that not only does Coca-Cola have caffeine in .au, but Jolt does, as well. However, Mountain Dew does not. And, from what he’s told me from secondhand knowledge, people attempting to bring Penguin Mints into the country normally have them taken from them at the airport. So not only are Australian caffeine laws insane, but they’re confusing as well.

Today’s rant is about the poor use of politics in comics. More specificly, the use of politics to the point that the strip not only loses all humor to those who happen to disagree with the cartoonist as well as becoming essentially meaningless to everyone. The most recent example I saw of this was in yesterday’s strip at Ozy & Millie (one of the better webcomics out there, but it falls into this trap more frequently than some). The punchline of this strip involves one of the characters uttering the name of the Evil One (it doesn’t really matter who, he could have said “Hitler” and it still wouldn’t be funny) at which point the other character fell to the ground as if struck to the head by a large rock. To me, this sort of strip says, “I ran out of ideas, so why don’t I launch a baseless and content free flame at someone I don’t really like.” I would rather there be no strip at all than something like this.

Editor’s note: It’s worth noting that I never would have cared about that whole Parallel Tasking thing if 3Com hadn’t brought it up. It was a different time, 2000, and I was much angrier back then.

Here’s that rant section I promised. After I write more than one, I’ll put the old ones in some sort of archive page, and just have the newest one of everything on the front page, a la Billo the Clown.

The victim of my first rant is 3Com. I’ve been slightly miffed at 3Com ever since the ALS, where I learned about their policy on opening the specs for the Parallel Tasking chip. For those of you who don’t know, my main workstation has a 3Com905b, upon which is a large chip with the words “Parallel Tasking” written on it in large, friendly letters. The point of such a chip is to take some of the load off of my poor, overtaxed CPU. However, 3Com, in order to maintain a technological advantage over their competitors, have chosen to leave the specs for this closed. This means that any Linux or BSD box running a card with this feature will be crippled compared to an NT box using 3Com’s drivers. Therefore, 3Com is actually putting itself at a disadvantage as far as *nix users are concerned, since Intel cards suddenly become superior. Way to go, 3Com.

I don’t have a raspberry noise to finish off my rants like Billo does, so let’s just pretend that I gave 3Com a swift kick in the rear. Maybe I’ll make an animation of such sometime. (Note: It is now Dec. 21, and I just noticed that I mispelled “gave.” You’re not getting an animation.)