Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Google Checkout – an example to follow

My Gmail free space has been running out way too often recently.  I got bored with cleaning it up all the time and decided to upgrade my account.  While the process of buying something online is often trivial, I was pleasantly surprised by Google Checkout.  It was even easier than ever.  It felt like every little detail has been thought about.  Here are the things that I particularly liked:

  • Simple, straight-forward interface.  No bragging about coupons, special offers, promotions, and a trillion redirects.
  • Sensible defaults.  Google knows my name, address, and telephone number.  They can use this information to make order form submission easier.  And they do.  Including the default for the “name on card” field.
  • Clear information about the amount being charged.  Order submission button itself displays the amount that will be charged.  This way you can’t be confused by all the sub-totals, taxes, etc.  Crystal clear!
  • Excellent email notification.  The email clearly states what I have bought and when I will get it.

While none of the above sounds like rocket science, it actually is.  Go and buy something, enjoy the experience.

Back to Mozilla Firefox

About a month ago I praised Chromium browser (and Google Chrome incarnation of it).  It’s fast, slick, and like Firefox has a gadzillion extensions.  Unfortunately, I switched back to Mozilla Firefox for now.  And as much as I’d like to use Chrome, there is an issue that annoys me enough not to – profile corruption.

As any other young application, Chromium crashes quite often.   That is understandable.  But the problem is that every time it crashes, my browser profile is corrupted, which results in loss of history, saved passwords, and open tabs.  That’s just something I can’t tolerate.  Crash  all you want, but bring me right back to where I was, when I restart your sorry butt!

Hopefully this problem will annoy enough people for someone to step up and fix it.

Blocking ads on your favorite sites

Jason Kottke links to a post in Ars Technica with an argument that people shouldn’t use ad blocking browser plugins when visiting their favorite sites.  The argument is as old as ad blocking browser plugins.  And I most often here exactly that side of the story – the site that you love depends on the advertising and by blocking it, you’re effectively closing its oxygen supply.

I don’t disagree, but I find this point of view too narrow.  I think advertising should work for both the site and the visitor.  If we are asking a visitor to take a responsibility, we should also ask the the site owner to do the same.  Because the truth of the matter is that most sites out there are overloaded with advertising.  Most advertising out there is irrelevant. And on top of that, most advertising out there is annoying.  I think if site owners were spending more time selecting an appropriate and relevant advertising, their visitors wouldn’t spend as much time blocking it.

Consider the practical side of this.  From all the people I know who browse the web, everyone (and I do mean everyone) is browsing through a whole lot of web sites.  It’s not one web site, not two, not ten.  It’s hundreds and thousands.  If you look at all those web sites collectively (no matter who the person is), you’ll agree that the majority of those web sites have too much of advertising, which is too annoying, and too irrelevant.  And from the point of view of the site owner, it’s often much harder to fix than it looks.

First of all, most site owners don’t have advertisers standing in queue. So the choice is quite limited.  You get what you get most of the times.  Secondly, there are tools like Google AdSense which help site owners show ads which more relevant.  But with that being completely automated there is just so much control over the results. Most of the times you don’t get to pick the company or ad content.  Thirdly, the fact that not everyone not everywhere is on the web has something to do with ads relevancy.  For example, I live in a small country of Cyprus in the middle of nowhere.  There are probably a total of 40-50 companies here which advertise on Google.  None of those companies have anything that I am interested in.  But because there isn’t much choice, I’ll be shown these ads anywhere I go (every site that uses Google AdSense).

Even being a site owner myself, running Google AdSense block, I am still a supporter of ad blocking browser plugins.  I think the end-user should have a choice. And not only have it, but exercise that choice too.  If someone is getting annoyed by a huge ad block in the top right corner of this site, please, by all means, feel free to block it.  You don’t see it, you don’t click it, you don’t care about it – you just improve my click-through rate.  That’s the parameter I worry about.  I’d rather have 10 people see the ad and 10 people click on it, than have 10,000 people see the ad and nobody click on it.

Whatever happened to programming

Via this Slashdot post I came across an excellent blog rant – Whatever happened to programming (and the follow-up).  Subject in focus – modern programming, and how boring it have become (mostly).

Today, I mostly paste libraries together.  So do you, most likely, if you work in software.  Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic?  We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages.  We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL.  We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory.  Now how much of that do we use?

Of course, when a subject like that is brought up, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the web will respond with numerous discussions on if and how much of it is true, how did we get here, and how we can get out, and anything else remotely or not at all related.  And that’s just what happened.  You can read Slashdot or Reddit comments or Google for more.  But I think, if you do programming for living, you’d probably agree with the main point of the article.  And even if you won’t, it’s still fun to read.  Like this bit for example:

Especially, I have learned that anything that has “Enterprise” in its name is so incredibly boring that the people who use it had to shove the name of the Star Trek ship into its title just to keep themselves awake.

On the serious note though, working with mainly two programming languages – Perl and PHP, I see that there is indeed a difference to the “being boring” degree.  PHP is way more boring than Perl.   Surprisingly even with Perl being so well known for its CPAN – a huge archive of modules and libraries to use.   I guess it has something to do with There Is More Than One Way To Do It – motto of Perl.

Dupsorry – an apologetic shortcut

I just came up with a word. It’s mostly used as a phrase, but I think it can be worded.  Dupsorry.  And I define it as an apology for a possible duplicate.   For example, when you share a bookmark twice, or tell the joke you already told.  It’s good to use it when you are not sure if you’ve just created a duplicate.  Just in case.  Enjoy!