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.

Web browsers are a varied beast, and great ideas can become bogged down in frustrating hand holding and gentle coercion.

With an ongoing project - devReview(), a number of requirements for the site layout were put together:

1. CSS based (and clean as possible)
2. Cross browser compatible. [IE6+, Firefox 1+ and other Gecko browsers, Opera 8.5+, Safari 1.3+, Konqueror 3,4+]. IE 5/5.5 went in the nice to have bin. Given the site is for techos, the spread was wide but more modern.
3. 3 column with a fluid centre for content
4. Content to appear first in html.
5. Viewable down to a min of 600px.

In the early development, a number of layouts were looked at, and trialled. Eventually it was settled to use the ‘In Search of the Holy Grail‘ layout from Matthew Levines ‘A List Apart’ article. It seemed to best satisfy all the requirements above.

So where are we today. Well if you look at the site now, you will notice the 3 column layout is gone, replaced by a 2 column version. Some may call this failure, I call it compromise. With relatively simple content the layout stayed together, but once it needed to be pushed and extended, some of the browsers (IE6 mainly) became such a pain. Eventually it was much more productive to dump the ‘the holy grail’, lose a bit in layout, but gain extra in maintainability, and extendability.

So of the 5 layout requirements, 4 have been kept. We could have selected a different 4 (ie dropping the content first or fluid centre), but the 2 column solution seemed the most workable.

Sometime in the future this can be looked at again. Old IE versions will not disappear straight away, but I am confident that the new browser wars are a good thing, and all web users (and developers) will benefit.

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.

Don’t forget software freedom day this Saturday the 16th. Plenty going on in Sydney, and the rest of Australia. Unfortunately all this weekend I locked up in small business course so will miss the talks and events. But if you some spare time on Staurday, find out what is going on in your local area, and drop in.

Attended my first meeting of the Sydney PHP Group the other night. A reasonably small affair, but with a very good talk from the founders of the site Remember the Milk. It was good to see two passionate and talented people talk about all the work they have done, the boundaries that needed to be pushed, and some of the pitfalls they have encountered. A lot of Free and Open Source Software is used (some of which they created) based around PHP, Python, web servers and postgress as the db. And it makes good use of AJAX technologies. I can see the purpose rather than a gimmick. Inspiring for a couple of ideas I am working on.
There is a pdf of the presentation, which includes relevant links.

Over the years I have tried a number of Linux distributions: Redhat, Mandrake/driva, suse. All had their pluses and minuses, with my preference generally for Mandrake.

Last year when I changed to a Dell laptop as my primary work computer, I again set up a dual boot system. This I didn’t enjoy so much. Many frustrating hours when there are other things to be done. Redhat Fedora 3 & 4 annoyed me no end, getting info about Mandriva was a pain, so I settled with opensuse. Some config on my part but relatively smooth and it did the job with minor quirks.

During this time I had never tried a Debian based system, but I was hearing so many good things about Ubuntu I had to give it a try. I have always had a personal preference for KDE over GNOME, so I went for the sibling Kubuntu. Download the iso file, burn it to disc, and start the install. 6 steps and I was up and running. This I found scary. No extra config or hunting the internet for drivers. System updating was simple, and it just works. I am sure there are issues I haven’t hit yet, but they should be small. If K/ubuntu keeps this up I may just use it on the server.