April 2004 Archives

Because of my usual circle of friends I sometimes forget that the world is still largely populated by people who regard computers as magical artifacts of a most mysterious nature.

This was demonstrated recently when I was at a clients site. Everyone in this company is really Not Technical.

They were having a problem with their web site that they just couldn't solve with all of the pointy-clicky software that they use. I reached for the nearest Mac, opened a terminal window, logged on to the web server and started typing Unix commands to diagnose and fix the problem.

"Hey look", said the person whose computer I was using, "Dave's doing that hacker thing".

It seems that in their view of the world, anyone who can use a command line must be a hacker. And, of course, they mean "hacker" in the corrupted current media meaning, not the real meaning (which would have been a compliment).

I have a Google News Alert set up so that I get an email whenever Google finds a news item about the area where I live.

Yesterday I got an email that rather shocked me. It mentioned two men being shot in the head just round the corner from where I live. I was shocked that it had happened, but also surprised that I didn't know anything about it.

Further investigation (i.e. reading the story that the email linked to) revealed that this had taken place in 1994. It was only in the news now because the family of one of the men had offered a reward for more information about the shooting.

Obviously it's still a shocking crime, but it explains why I hadn't noticed the police crawling all over the area in the last few days.

Sometimes I wonder if people really realise what "WWW" stands for. Surely "world wide" implies that everyone should be able to access your site. Not just people who use one particular browser on one particular operating system.

The one particular browser is, of course, Internet Explorer and the one particular operating system is Windows. In this case, it's my bank, First Direct, who have done it wrong.

I've been using their internet banking service very happily from various browsers on Linux. Today I see that they've introduced an extra service called "internet banking plus". On reading the details, it's a way for First Direct to show you the details of any other (i.e. non-First Direct) accounts that you have. Sounds interesting so I click the sign-up button.

But of course it doesn't work because I don't have the right software. The main problem seems to be that this new system is written as an ActiveX control. And only Microsoft browsers running on Microsoft operating systems can run ActiveX.

Now I can understand that the vast majority of First Direct's customers use IE on Windows. But I wonder what the trends look like. With more and more people browsing from PDAs, mobile phones and TV sets, there must come a point when these people become a sizeable percentage of a site's users. Not to mention all the Mac and Linux (and other "minority" operating systems) users who are currently locked out.

Surely at that point they will need to consider reimplementing the system in something non-proprietary. Which must make you wonder why they didn't do it like that in the first place? Is it so much easier to do this in ActiveX than it would be in Java?

What makes me most angry about this is that when sites don't work in a particular browser then many users don't realise where to place the blame. I try hard to convince Windows users that Mozilla (or Firefox) is a better browser than IE. Sometimes I convince them to give it a try. But when they find sites like this that don't work, they don't blame the people who created a non-standard site. They blame the browser for not being able to display the site properly.

So I've written to First Direct pointing out the problems with what they've done. I'll let you know if I get a response.

A survey published yesterday says that most people have no more than 1000 songs stored on their computers and that therefore portable players that store 5000 songs are unnecessarily large.

See, to me that sounds a bit too close to the famous quote (usually attributed to Bill Gates) that "640 Kb should be enought for anyone", but I'm happy to to accept that I might not be exactly "average" in either the size of my music collection or the rate at which I've been ripping it.

$ find /data/audio/ -name "*.ogg" | wc -l
4785
$ find /data/audio/ -name "*.mp3" | wc -l
727
$ du -h /data/audio
[ snip ]
21G /data/audio

Jean Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French Front National, is apparently in UK where he will address members of the British National Party.

Isn't the idea of two nationalist and racist parties from different countries working together more than a little ironic?

I've just seen that on Live Journal there's a community called 50bookchallenge. The idea is to try to read 50 books in 2004.

Weird to think that there are people who would find reading 50 books in a year to be a challenge.

It seems I have a new job. From Tuesday 5th May I'll be a Senior Perl Programmer working for Outcome Technologies.

If I go a bit quiet it's because I'm a lot busier :)

I watched the first episode of Tru Calling today.

It seems to be a combination of Early Edition and Six Feet Under with a dash of Run Lola Run. That makes it pretty interesting, but I think that the writers will have to work hard prevent it getting repetitive.

I'll be watching for the next few weeks to see how it goes.

While browsing my digital program guide today, I noticed that at at 18;50 this evening Sky Movies 6 is showing The Miracle of the Cards which is a film based on the Craig Shergold story. Looks pretty dreadful so I won't be watching. But if you're really bored this evening...

78% of NME readers say they will defy the BPI and continue to use free file swapping networks.

Is anyone even a bit surprised by this?

I went to see The Passion of the Christ. I enjoyed it immensely. You may be interested in reading my review.

I thought that the cinema would be pretty quiet on a weekday afternoon. But there was some sort of outing from a local church. The cinema foyer was full of little old ladies who looked like they hadn't been to the cinema for thirty years. I expected there to be much tutting and gasping and even walking out when the film got a bit grim, but their faith held strong and they all seemed to stay to the end.

Following on from my recent rant about ntl customer service, I see that they have just announced that they are closing 10 of their 13 call centres and laying off 1,500 people.

That'll be a great help.

At a Canadian music awards festival on Sunday, Alanis Morissette wore a fake nude suit in protest against the censorship on US TV.

The BBC has the story but there's a better photo here

I get my digital tv service from ntl. You hear a lot of people complaining about ntl, but in general it's all worked pretty well for me.

Then on Saturday evening at about 7:30 I discovered that one of the set-top boxes had a problem. I was missing most of the channels that I subscribe to. I had the same problem about a month ago. That time I made a call to ntl customer service, they pumped some signals down the cable to the box and everything was fixed. So I expected the same thing would happen this time.

I didn't expect to find that the customer service department (including the fault reporting line) had all gone home for the weekend. They weren't back until 8am this morning. When I called them this morning the problem was fixed in about five minutes. But my cable service was out of action for thirty-six hours for no good reason.

It turns out that the restricted opening hours were introduced last September as a cost-cutting exercise. But surely, if you're providing a 24x7 service then you need to provide 24x7 support. Or am I expecting too much?

You know you're being interviewed by an interesting company when one of the offices has an Alien suit lying on the floor.

According to a correspondent in the New Scientist, Dr Seuss invented nanotechnology.