technology

Paying The Price For Being #1

One of the funny things about having a blog is that you never know what is going to strike a chord with the people that read your blog, or for that matter Google. By some quirk of an algorithm you find that you’re at the top of the charts on one topic or another and you find yourself being put in the role of “guru” on that subject (wether you are, or not).

This happened to my good buddy Mike Rohde with an article that he did on Yoplait yogurt. He wrote a quick article about an idea he had regarding their packaging and next thing you know, he’s in the top 4 on Google if you do a search for yogurt packaging.

As for me, my hotspots have been Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap (currently slipped to page 2) and National Brand 43-571 (page 1) because of an entry I wrote concerning my love affair with paper. However, in looking at my Google Analytics this week, I found that the bulk of the traffic to my blog comes from an entry entitled “Having A Hard Head Can Sometimes Pay Off“. Doing a search for “Axiom and Garageband” turned up the reason why — I’m the #1 result.

The article dealt with my trials and tribulations in getting my Axiom 25 to work with GarageBand. It was a project I did almost 2 years ago and one month after the post, I never went back to it. Another case of something I “had to have” only to move onto something else 20-days later.

Regardless of my lack of interest in the subject, clearly there were plenty of people still looking for a solution, finding me and as luck would have it, being met with frustration. Over the past year, I’ve hacked this site every which way and never really completed the process. It goes a little something like this.

1. A client of mine wants to change something with their install of MoveableType.

2. I apply it to this site first to see if it’ll work.

3. It does/doesn’t and then I usually, but not always, revert the site back to the way it was and you can see where this is going.

All these changes affected my Axiom / GarageBand article when they broke the download to the PDF that provided the solution. Doh! So this afternoon, I updated the PDF, checked all the links, fixed the download tool I use to keep track of such things and generally cleaned this up a bit in the process.

So for those of you that found that article only to be met with frustration, I apologize. Hopefully the revised article will be more helpful. As for me, I’m going to be a bit more cognoscent of the long tail of my articles so that they don’t spank me in the butt.

1433 days ago • site news, weblogs • Tags: axiom, blogging, garageband, movabletype, pdf

The Reality Of Internet Explorer

I absolutely despise Internet Explorer. It is a complete turd of a program in every conceivable manner. It’s insecure, it doesn’t follow web standards when displaying web pages, it’s integrated into the OS so if it crashes it brings down your entire computer, and the list goes on and on and on, but I won’t belabor the point any further. Most of my gripes are with IE 6 and earlier but the latest version of Internet Explorer — version 7 — isn’t that much better, so it goes out with the bath water too.

From a system administrator perspective, I convert every system I can over to Firefox and go so far as to ban IE on systems that I control. As a web developer, I spend a serious amount of time in the development process dedicated to changing my code to make IE work properly. Every other browser on the planet will display content correctly, but IE always has some oddity that requires a tweak or hack.

As much as I and the millions of other geeks like me hate IE, it simply won’t go away. So it was with great interest that I read an older article by Kevin Hale on Particle Tree entitle On the Tenacity of Internet Explorer 6. When I read that adoption rates were flatlining and his question of “Have we basically converted everyone that had a problem with Internet Explorer 6?” I thought perhaps we were finally done with IE6. Unfortunately, after reading the entire article, it’s clear that IE6 is here to stay and it’s something we’re going to have to live with for a long time.

And why is that? Well, it boils down to the fact that the main reasons people were switching was due to the fact of popups, spyware and the like. Now that toolbars have fixed many of those glaring issues, people aren’t motivated to switch.

Now, you may think IE6 obviously makes browsing the Internet suck because it doesn’t have tabs and tends to implement CSS and JavaScript poorly. But that’s because if you’re reading this site, you’re probably a designer or developer. Remember: ugly, buggy and slow aren’t enough to make users think it sucks enough to switch (think MySpace and Windows). In hindsight, the best thing to happen to Firefox was probably the rise of file sharing networks, spyware and pop-ups. Basically, everything that made the web suck. Everything that made the web a safer place to browse, made Firefox less relevant and quelled the urgency that made an alternative to IE6 a necessity.

It disappointments me to now end to have to agree with his conclusion. I’ll still push Firefox, Opera and other alternative browsers every chance I get, but it sucks that the reason that there are so many Zombie Computers is due to ignorance and lethargy. I know that I’m a geek and that this falls into my domain expertise, so you might chalk this up to the ramblings of a nerd, but we’re not talking small numbers here – botnets number in the hundreds of thousands. Their impact can be felt everyday in the billions of SPAM messages that are sent from them every day.

All gloom and doom aside, Hale’s article did leave me laughing in the end. It may not end positive, but it does end on a funny note.

Just goes to show that it has to be in your face popups of wangs and cooters to make you download something different.

1493 days ago • technology • Tags: internet explorer, web

Don’t Call Us… We’ll Call You

Since switching to Mac OS over a year and a half ago, I have been in hog heaven. Truly. Almost every day I’m reminded of just how elegant and, dare I say, FUN it is to actually work. I’m not kidding, it’s a true joy and I’m reminded of this nearly daily because I also work in Windows every day and I’m reminded of just how painful computing can be on the other side.

A good portion of my day involves network management and I use a wonderful little tool called Remote Desktop to manage the many Windows servers I’m responsible for. RDP is primarily a Windows program, but, thankfully, Microsoft has Mac Version as well. I’ve been using the beta version of RDP 2.0 for quite awhile now and it’s performed quite well. I use it on a daily basis and can report no real problems with it. Well, that was until recently.

About a week ago, I was prompted with the following dialog box when I launched RDP:

Updating software on the Mac is a fairly common experience and it’s rather quick and easy so there was no reason for alarm. I selected the button “Download Latest Version” and was directed to the Mactopia site, which is Microsoft’s Apple Software section, and it was with this one click that the “Microsoft Experience” kicked in.

Instead of taking me to a page dedicated to Remote Desktop, or even directly to the download file itself, I was taken to the Mactopia home page. “Hmm… oooook.”
Left to my own devices, I had to search for what I was looking for until I found the link in the navigation for the Remote Desktop page.
Once on that page, I then had to find the link to download the latest version and select it.
That link sent me to the bottom of a new page which showed me another link to actually download the file. Of course that was after I figured out what the heck I was looking at.
After waiting for the download to start for about 30 seconds with nothing happening, I click the link again… and again…
I refresh the page and it’s then that I see that there’s a “Details” window that’s changing. So I click the link again, see that this small window in the bottom right corner of the page is providing me with details on the download.
I scroll several pages of details until I find the actual download link at the bottom of the iframe window and click that bastard.
The file finally downloads

But Wait… There’s More
After all that hullaballo, the file is finally on my hard drive and I go through the install routine to update the program. I relaunch RDP and I’m surprised to find that the same dialog pops up. “What the?!” Starting the process AGAIN I read the RDP page more closely and see in the sidebar the following:

I had to read that sidebar a couple of times to make sure that I understood it, but what I read was correct. After a convoluted 8-step process just to download the program and then go through the install routine, I learn that there was no need to do all that. Microsoft HASN’T actually released an update and not only that, they have no real indication when it will be ready. Just sometime in the next two months. And just to add insult to injury, instead of releasing an interim program with a revised expiration date, you’d prefer that I see this damn nuisance screen 800 times a day until you get around to releasing a new version.

W o w .

This is yet another example of where the user experience leaves me wondering “I’m I the first person to do this?” So much of what I do with Microsoft products leaves me feeling like I’m the first person to even try a product, much less run into a problem. This one thing may seem small from your side of the fence, but since switching to Mac OS, I have less and less of this kind of problem. When the “Microsoft Experience” rears its ugly head, it’s now it’s pulling from a deep, deep well of past pain and suffering.

I guess I’ll just have to wait until Microsoft releases an update in a month or two and just do what Microsoft suggests and dismiss the update button. Question is, how will know that there’s been an update if I’m ignoring Microsoft’s own update notifier?

Bunch of ass-hats.

1500 days ago • technology • Tags: interface, microsoft, user

Google Docs — Now With Gears!

I read on the Google Docs Blog today that Google Gears has been enabled for Google Docs. Given that I’ve become quite enamored with Google’s software products, like Docs Calendar and of course Gmail, I was eager to try being able to edit documents offline with Google Gears.

What’s Google Gears?
Google Gears is a browser plugin that allows you to take certain Google Products “offline” and edit/read the data when you’re not connected to the Internet. It’s currently in Beta and as of this entry, is only available for the Firefox browser on Mac OS. Windows users can use Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Once installed, “Gears Enabled” applications have new offline features that users can take advantage of. Currently this is only limited to Google Reader — although some 3rd party applications support Gears, such as Remember The Milk — so Docs support was the tipping point for me to give it a try.

Sorry Charlie
I installed the plugin for Firefox and validated that it was indeed enabled and fuctioning properly. I went to Google Reader and Remember The Milk and both immediately provided me with the popup image. Unfortunately, Google Docs does not. I tried repeatedly to reload the page and even went as far as logging out and then logging back in, but alas no love.

Then I went back and read the article more clearly.

…and I’m happy to tell you we’ll be rolling it out over the next few weeks, starting today with a small percentage of users.

Guess I’m not in that small percentage. Poo.

1508 days ago • technology

Is It Just Me, Or Does MovableType Seem Dead?

I’ve been working on a large project for a client and we’re implementing the latest version of MovableType. When I first got into MT there was a thriving community around the software and it was a lot of fun, but all of that seems to have changed. MT4 was just released, so you’d think there would be a lot of activity around it, but it just seems, I don’t know — d e a d.

Many of my friends have switched their blogs to WordPress, including my good friend Rachel over at Fiat Lux and for larger installs, it would appear that Drupal is the current flavor of the month. Yet it seemed that MT still had a strong presence and large community around it.

Yet, as I drill down bugs, glitches and fixes for MT4, I have to say that things seem awfully quiet. Maybe I’m too close to it right now, but the forums seem awfully quiet to me. Anyone else find this to be true, or is it just me?

1688 days ago • weblogs

Help Me, I Don’t Get Facebook

I’ve heard Leo Laporte talk about Facebook at lot on the TWIT Podcasts and I have an account, but I have to confess that I just don’t get it.

To me it looks as if Facebook is nothing more than LinkedIn, but for personal stuff. Am I wrong?

At first I thought it was more of a personal hub that pulled all your online content into one place. For example, I thought that it would pull my Flickr photos, Twitter and all my blogs into one “digital hub”, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I figure I must just be missing something so I thought I’d make a quick post for some feedback while I go digging for a review, or something to that effect.

1747 days ago • internet

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