Ernies Tech Thoughts

A few ‘news’ stories yesterday about the release of MS Vista, and people lining up at Midnight to get their copy. The usual marketing spiel from a MS rep that sounded exactly like the marketing for XP. I just don’t get it. My main laptop is a dual boot system: XP and Kubuntu Linux, so I am not completely anti MS. But the thought of handing over around $300 for something that doesn’t seem that revolutionary, is a concept I fail to get. Besides the laptop is about 18 months old, and probably would not be able to handle Vista.

I see the retailers are all celebrating the new equipment sales Vista will create, and tonnes of perfectly good PCs on the scrap heap. Great for the planet.

You would love to be doing great new and interesting things with all of your working day, but sometimes the boring and mechanical need to be done as well. Wordpress release version 2.06 last week, so I upgraded the various sites I have resposnsibility for. Its not an exciting job, but better than falling prey to security issues. However it is a frustration to do it all again so soon after for 2.07.
Now what was that great idea I was working on.

For a site we developed, a custom guestbook was added by us, to replace a previous 3rd party guestbook, which had been turned off a while ago due to security problems. A relatively simple affair to create, but with effort put in to make it secure against database injection and other nasties. And in this purpose it has been all good.
All entries are moderated, and this is made quite clear. Do you think this would deter the spammers? Not one bit. First week things are pretty quiet, second week about 30 attempted spam entries, and for week 3 almost 200. Wow there are some bored and desperate people. Not one of them got their viagra spam links on, but it didn’t stop repeated attempts. So possible bot activity as well.

A few extra lines of code to highlight the types of attempted spam we had seen, and auto reject the submission. This has had a positive effect, and the next week is down to under 30. I am not sure what these are trying achieve. Maybe the ‘Thank you for your submission entry’ makes them feel loved.

As an extra step we are adding some IP related filtering, and tweaking the word filtering. This should bring it back to single digits which is liveable.

We did consider captcha entry, email verification, but it was agreed this provides and inconvenience to the real users.

Its not often that Google, Yahoo and MSN agree on something, but it has happened, and it should make a webmasters life a little easier. For a while now Google has had Sitemaps where you give them the location of an XML file that allows them to better spider your site. Well Yahoo and MSN have joined in, and will work off the same file format.
See the sitemaps.org site for more details of file structures and an faq. I assume a number of the smaller search sites will jump onto ths pretty quickly.

Google & Yahoo already accept the files, while MSN will be public sometime in 2007.

A client came to us for a web site, and they also needed a domain name. Even though the business is based out of Australia the preference was for a .com address. Their name was relatively generic so I knew it was unlikely to be available, and asked them to think about alternatives they would be happy with.

Now of the 10 domain possibilities all 10 are taken. But what was most frustrating about this is, that of the 10, only 4 had actual web sites, with 1 more redirecting to an alternative but similar name. Of the other 5, all had ‘affiliate’ type sites filled with advertising, and three being up for sale. None had a connection with the name of the current owner, and seemed to be purchased for speculative purposes.

My ‘free market’ friends would say this is an optimal solution coming from a very lightly regulated market. To me it is market failure. The likes of goDaddy have helped created such a situation with low cost domain names, that groups and companies can sit on large numbers of domain names in the hope of selling them to a legitimate user down the line.

I know this situation is not going to improve, (unless there is some kind of from left field dot-com bust number 2). But I do have 2 suggestions that will be disliked and ignored.

• A flat rate charge (tax) per domain name with all proceeds to a charity/worthwhile cause.
• The use it or lose it principle. Pick a random 13 year old of mySpace, and get him or her to judge if the site is real. If negative you lose the domain name.

Just my 2 cents.

Coming from a technical and business background, I like to believe I am mindful that not everyone is a technical person, and the use of computer systems don’t always come naturally. Often problems get raised which are the result of user error or lack of training/knowledge, but sometimes they are real issues that need to be fixed. But no matter how vague the problem description, or unlikely it seems, the first response must always be the user has an issue to be looked into and fixed. Never you are an idiot, and you are wasting my time.

Unfortunately not all IT support seems to work like this. Recently I have had to deal with the support teams of 2 of the external web hosts I have dealings with. 1 is amazing. Emails answered in minutes and not just with generic form letters. Readable feedback, and not afraid to admit the problem was on their end. A very professional outfit.

As for the other. On multiple occasions, slow responses, and generic check your settings answers. Fair enough then, recheck settings that haven’t changed. Inform support of this, and point out that I see other users as having similar problems in their support forums. Waiting, waiting….. Hours later recheck the support ticket, and see entries that action has been taken (and the ticket closed), but no explanation of what action, or if the problem is really fixed. God forbid any feedback.

So my rules on customer support for techs:

1. Assume the customer really has a problem, until proven otherwise.
2. Keep the user in the loop.
3. ‘Action Taken’ is not feedback.
4. The user closes support requests.
5. Dont assume the end user has a degree in Comp Science. Explain the situation in something resembling normal language.
6. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away. The customer may.
7. Don’t send satisafaction surveys when the issue is not really solved.

I have seen a few list recently of essential applications people install on their PCs, so I thought I would put together my own list:
For web development

• Firefox, with the following extensions:
  • CSS Viewer
  • HTML Validator
  • Web Developer
• Notepad++
• Apache
• PHP

For Windows apps:

• NUnit
• SharpDevelop
• Visual Studio

General Development:

• MySQL
• WinMerge
• Subversion with TortiseSVN

Protection:

• Spybot
• AVG
• Zone Alarm

Miscellaneous:

• FileZilla
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• YAReg for dual booters needing to access Linux partitions
• CDBurnerXP
• 7-Zip
• OpenOffice

I noticed recently that stylegala.com was up for sale. This is one of the sites I would check regularly and I always found it full of good info about web design issues, especially after years away from web programming (I remember the days of Netscape 1 and Lynx…….).

The opening price was $30K but at last look $40K. It started from 1 person but a community grew and grew around the site. So who would buy this site and what could they do with it? I see 2 possibilities:

1. A corporate group buys the site. Naturally their focus will be a return on investment. Can more income be squeezed from the site without alienating its community. I would be suprised. And if the new owner doesn’t share the same passion for the site aims I believe many of the important users will drift away. Possibly 1 or more of these users will make the bold move to start a new community from scratch.
2. A large group of users chipping in small amounts and owning it collectively. Could this ownership structure survive and prosper? I would like to hope so, but a few core users will need to take the lead with out upsetting the other owners.

Even though this site didn’t start out as a business, it has become one. Do businesses survive when the original passionate owner moves on? My guess is this one will be swallowed up, and much of its character will be lost. The upside is that someone else, somewhere else will replace it.

1. Successful Dutch football team
2. Ancient Greek hero
3. Brand of cleaning product
4. Acronym for over hyped repackaged technology

Welcome to the blog. This will contain my random thoughts and hopefully helpful suggestions on the broad development world. Links to useful sites, code and maybe even a book review. Time will tell. Feel free to comment or even disagree, but with the aim of readers and posters gaining something useful.