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2004.01.05
Downloadable archives and naming conventions
Does it do what it says on the tin?
I'd imagine that I'm not the only person on the .net to hate this, and thus say this, but due to the fact that I'm coming down with a cold/flu type thing and am feeling grumpy I thought I'd have a rant.
Why do people not use sensible names and conventions for files within archives?
For instance I download an archive for the docs for Smarty and Safair automatically expands the archive. Nice, saves me trouble. Except the folder it's extracted to bears no resemblance ot the name of the archive. The archive is "Smarty-2.6.0-docs.tar" and the resulting expanded directory? ... "manual". OK, so it's pretty easy to find it eventually, but it would be even easier to name the file logically and help thge end users [plus the likely hood of me having a directory called "Smarty-2.6.0-docs" that gets overwritten is a lot less likely that one called manual.
Worse yet are downloads which don't have any resemblance at all. I downloaded windows drivers for my epson printer the other day, and the archive expanded into a filename I simply couldn't understand or relate to the archive. We're mostly past 8.3 naming conventions, so can't we just get over it?
Oh, and whilst you are fixing this, please can you learn about mime-types on web servers? We've been doing this interweb thign for over 10 years now, and it ain't that difficult to do properly.
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2004.01.05
A new year, and published stupidity already.
1 cent per mail message, you gotta be joking...
I\'ve just read this article about charging 1 cent per email and, well, I\'m shocked.
Great, let\'s charge 1 cent per email. That wouldn\'t be much for general use. For one the article is American centric, there are a couple of users outide of the USA in case you hadn\'t noticed. And if SPAM stops originating in the US it will originate elsewhere.
It would also kill all of the email lists that are run not for profit. Take one list I\'m on, the IDM list at hyperreal.org... This list probably has well over 1000 subscribers. And it has a throughput of between 20 and 100 messages a day. On a quiet day that would mean it send 20,000 emails. That\'s 200 dollars.
Another idiot thinking solely about the commerical implications of the internet and not looking at ho wit improves society. Cheaper to buy a decent piece of spam filtering software [like SpamSieve which works wonders for me] than to pay for those messages.
I\'m so glad that there is space for me to respond to this type of stupidity. I hope somebody slashdots that article and the author gets the flaming he deserves.
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2003.12.10
Measuring The Data Mountain
From the economist
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%298%24%28Q13%2B%21%40%20%3C%0A Sorry, behind a pay barrier.
You can see the original research here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/A short and curious article, this immediately changes Data from the title into a measurement of Information in the first line. This made me uncomfortable. As a programmer I know that information is structured data; a string of numbers use is meaningless unless you are told it is a telephone number, by presentation or implication.
That structuring might be the change from 0800235354 to 0800 235 5354 for some people, or to +44 (0)800 235 5453 for others. A contextualization.
On the internet the generation of context is much more complex. An HTML page containing a text article may have a considerable amount of strcuture to make it's presentation understandable [or to position adverts neatly around it's outside]. I've seen pages which are more than 50% structure in my time.
And this extends out into all media formats delviered digitally. Does a low quality image file contain more information than a high quality image, or a low quality sound file more than a high quality. It might hold a greater detail of information, but not relatively to it's increase in data size.
Further the data transfer/stored isn't quantified in the article, so I want to find out their sources. What intrigues me is how much of the wonderfully large amount of data is used in the duplication of items. Poisoned is me showing 4.898,191.48 GB of data currently available across OpenFT, FrastTrack and Gnutella... how much of that is duplicates and copies [if the music industry are to beleived, the majority of it].
If that's the case then that much information isn't created it's stored. It's duplicated.
It also makes me wonder how much of it is people saying the same thing overt and over again in slightly different words, rehashing the same arguments and saying "me too"? Or just for the sake of making a noise.
A cursory look at the source materials even imply that the figures are based upon sales of recording media, and that these include wide assumptions of what was stored on the media.
I'd stick this in the same category as one of my pet hates : Research that is announced as newsworthy after long testing when the same conclusion was painfully obvious to anyone with there eyes open, or that states statistics without qualifying their source or relative position within a field.
This article, which goes on to say that all of the figures are pretty much guesstimates, isn't really information. It's statistics for the sake of saying something. To me it's dis-information.
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2003.11.24
How not to make money on-line
E-commerce and it's failings.
Why is it that companies such as Dabs and MicroWarehouse can't produce websites which work. They mostly work, but if you step away from the main platform [Internet Explorer in windows] and try to use a browser remotely alternative [in this case Safari on Mac OS X.3] they fall appart. It's not the browsers fault. It's badly coded webpages.
I don't understand this. There is no reason for pages to be badly coded. It's perfectly simple to make a secure shoping system without relying on special browser features. And it's pretty damn easy to add all the javascript bells and whistles without it falling over. These companies should take a look at amazon to see how to do it. In the mean time I've got £1000 to spend on a monitor and two websites that can't take my order properly because of badly coded HTML. I bet I'm not the only one that's got frustrated with these overly complex systems.
I'm tempted to give the money to Micro Anvika, even though it will cost £100 more, as I reckon their site will work. They are retailers who understand customer service. I'm not happy supporting companies like the two above who really don't take the on-line customer experience seriously. Vote with your credit card this christmas. If there are problems with an on-line transaction, take it elsewhere. To a retailer who knows what they are doing.
You should also avoid companies who have the kind of security issues that Argos and B&Q have suffered from of late. Don't deal with these companies whose names make them think they don't have to worry about their customers, or customers rights. They are the fools.
E-Commerce, Security and website construction that work can be done well and cheaply. Companies have been fooled by vendors snake oil and they need to smarten up.
update In the end I opted for Computer Warehouse. Their sales system was simple and worked for me, there product was the same price as MacWarehouse and Dabs, and they also included free shipping. Way to go CW. Let's hope your after sales service is as good :-)
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2003.11.12
So that's what an earthquake feels like...
... on the 10th floor in Tokyo.
Well, that's another experience notched up. I guess it was a little one by the way that people just kept on getting on with their business down in the street below.
[Apparently it was 6.5 on the richter scale]
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2003.10.15
What's in a title?
"Digital Media Technologist"
I was trying to come up with a description, a job title I suppose, to put on my business cards. I came up with Digital Media Technologist as it best described what I did. I work with computers and electronic equipment to develop solutions to media problems. Anyway, I did a search on it and came up with this:
http://acweb.colum.edu/curriculum.html
So be it.
Dorian Moore
Digital Media Technologist
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2003.09.17
PDF Misuse
not the first and surely not the last word on this...
So I've been looking round a large number of corporate websites today to try and get information out of them, and I've been horrified about the amount of PDF files that are used in place of inline information. And how little information the PDFs contain. Now, I can see a certain use in providing PDFs, as you can download and print them and give them to the powers that be and they don't get distracted by the navigation on the page, or confused by all that complex 'internet' technology. Then again, the same could be achieved by adhearing to webstandards and using CSS for print of a page to. Obviously the PDF can also be used to read off-line. Handy if the PDF actually contains more than some horrible marketing blurb which tells you nothing about what you are enquiring. And it ruins the experienc of research, you have to move to a different application, switch context and tax your brain, to read this minimal piece of text. And that's provided the link to the .pdf even works.
Don't get me wrong. PDF's are great for print. I issue all of my invoices in PDF format, I use them for forms and for printable matter from websites. But I don't use them for small pieces of content that are a vital part of what I'm trying to find out on a website.
When will people learn? Soon I hope.
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2003.07.25
Changing a privacy policy and sending you SPAM
A trend that seems to be building
I've noticed something new happening of late. Companies that I've used in the past, who have my email address, seem to be sending me unsolicited email. I _always_ make sure I opt out of lists, and if not I'm pretty sure to check as soon as I've regietered that there is an unsubscribe function. If I can't opt-out, or the site looks at all dodgy, I don't give them my email address, or give them one that I can block instantly without loss of other services should it start being used.
But of late I've been receiving emails from companies where my detaisl seem to have been 'reactivated'. Offenders in the last 5 days are:
192.com
GX Networks
cdzone.co.ukAll of whom I have explicitly unsubscribed from their mailing lists, and all of whom continue to send me information.
192.com seem to decide that they can send you new unsolicited email every year or so, despite asking for the complete removal of my presonal information from their system.
The GX networks one is a legacy from XO communications who I used to be a customer of. I've asked several times to be removed from XO and GX's databases. To no avail apparently
CDzone.co.uk are a horribly inefficient on-line record sales company who I _never_ permitted to send me email except regarding my order [which took 5 months to appear].
I know that what these people are doing is illegal, and indeed I intend to report them to the data protection registrar, but this seems over-reactive when these companies should just remove my information from their records [except for legacy purposes] upon request.
The trouble with a lot of these systems that I see is that it's my word against their's. I know for a fact how I've handled all of these, but it's easy for the offending companies to say I did not follow their procedure or make any number of excuses about why the behaved inefficiently. I wish there was a way of officially registering these issues with a "3 try's and your out" type system to the individuals benefit. At the moment the weight is towards the corporations and that sucks.
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I'm afraid I've not dealt with them for a while - since 2004 - and only have the following contact details for themsales-at-cdzone.co.uk status-at-cdzone.co.uk
If you ordered through Amazon, like I did, I suggest taking it up with Amazon, who are are really good on these matters.
you might be able to get a phone number by going to www.companieshouse.gov.uk and searching on their company name/number (their company number appears to be 3224003 ) ... though I think you have to pay £1 for the report, there is one which will contain the names and addresses of the directors of the company... so you can at least write to them at home with a piece of your mind!
Good luck
DorianI am having a lot of trouble with cdzone myself and I can't even contact them since neither their email nor phone number appear on the site and they've never even sent me any correspondence. The fax number given doesn't go through either.
Do you have their email address for me, please?
I really want my money back and to give them a piece of my mind.
Thanks for the helpful info in general.
I just found this phone number for them, don't know if it works or not:+44 (0)1484 400 553
I whole heatedly agree with the above person cd zone are appalling and i shall not be using them again. They ignore emails, they have no number that they answer to. On the whole a completely shit company. Don't order from them.
I second that. they've ignored my emails and no one answers the phone when I call.Is it a job for Ofcom?
If you ordered through amazon let them do the leg work. If your paid by debit or credit card your also covered. I have noted that, probably, CD Zone have spammed Amazon's feedback facilility in the last week. Take a look. Apparently they have i trillion customers a day, all of whom rate them 5 out of 5. More like a little turd in his bedroom taking the piss out of us honest people. amazon should remove said turd as it is not fair to the vast majority of adults who do run a decent business via Amazon Marketplace.
