The other day I could not access the Internet from a coffee shop, so I took a screen-capture of what went wrong. I’m trying to acquire some video production skills for teaching, so today I looked for some CC-licensed images on flickr and turned the experience into a complete video (just over 1 minute).
Transcript: Ubiquitous internet access is still in that awkward adolescent phase. Many mobile professionals and geeks now rely on it heavily, but access is never as straightforward as it should be.
At Starbucks I’m entitled to two free hours of access from AT&T after using my card. This shop has two providers, but neither one works. AT&T rejects my login with an error message branded by T-Mobile — how’s that for collaboration. But I know have the correct credentials because I can log in to AT&T to access my account — I even updated my mailing address.
The lesson of ubiquitous internet is that it costs more to meter than it’s actually worth. Try to restrict individual users and suddenly you need a whole infrastructure for tech support and credit card processing and refunds. Bryant Park in Manhattan offers free wireless, and it costs them less per month than they spend on trash bags. When a cafe offers unimpeded wireless to its customers, it nearly always works.
The ability to run code in your web browser has given us many great things, such as Google Maps. But once in a while a tiny annoyance will make me long for the days when a browser was just a browser, and not a platform. Today’s annoyance is the trick to place the keyboard focus in a text box when the page loads. Here is a screen-cast of my unscripted rant and demonstration of the effect (1:43).
The main problem with these script tricks is that there’s not a good way to customize them across the board, apart from disabling Javascript entirely. Each web site has its own user interface, even if it’s ostensibly just a document. The example is Atlassian because I happened to be browsing their stuff today, but I’m not picking on them in particular. Actually I’m finding Confluence to be fairly impressive, and (dare I admit it) less clunky for non-technical users than the open source options (the best of which might be Twiki).
One would think that keyboard entry is a pretty basic feature of a spreadsheet program. Maybe I’m a newb — I just started using spreadsheets in, let’s see… 1984… with Lotus 1-2-3. Here is Excel 2004 for Mac, completely unusable for data entry. (One minute Flash movie, may not appear in feed.)
And people pay money for this? Denigrate free/open-source software all you wish, but I never had a problem just entering data with Gnumeric or OpenOffice.
Someone appears to have found a workaround, posted just a few days ago. Note that a workaround is not a fix. Normally, “edit directly in cell” is something you might want to do.
A short video (1:22) of me venting my frustrations about email formats:
Transcript: In the old days, email was always plain text. And hard-core techies like me liked it that way.
Grudgingly, we came to accept HTML email. With hypertext markup, you can have bold-face, fonts, images.
But this is still okay because you can resize the text if you need to, the text is searchable, and Apple Mail on Leopard even recognizes dates and integrates well with the calendar program.
Where I have to draw the line is emails where the entire message is an image. It’s extremely common in our institution to create a full-page flier and then distribute it via email as an image. It doesn’t resize. It’s not searchable. The dates are not recognized. The MIME standard for multimedia email allows for plain-text alternatives in this case, but they are rarely available.
Here’s an even more egregious example, about the availability of our schedule of classes online. The link is blue. It’s underlined. But it’s not clickable. I can’t even copy and paste. I have to type it in from sight.
Just say no to image-based email. (And nevermind the inconsistency of distributing a 4 MB flash applet to demonstrate this simple point! At least I provided a plain text alternative.)
Hm, why is my laptop running so hot this morning? Hm, what is that new icon in my menu bar? Why, it’s the Cisco Clean Access agent, eating up 100% CPU time! While I’m on a wired connection. Even if they don’t know how to tie into the MacOS network configuration properly, you’d think they might have heard of the sleep() system call…
Really, I wanted to love you. You seem cleanly designed. I adore your model of a persistent file system, where even branches and tags are just sub-directories. Your commands mostly make sense. I appreciate that many of them work without repository access, so I don’t have to wait long to get a status or a diff.
But now you’re screwing me over. All I wanted to do was take the WordPress 2.0.4 upgrade for a spin in your vendor branch. I know it has been a few weeks since I last spoke to you. But now all you can tell me on my Powerbook is “Bad database version: compiled with 4.4.16, running against 4.3.29.” And on Debian, you say only “svn: bdb: Program version 4.2 doesn’t match environment version.” What did I do to deserve this?
You’re jealous of darcs, aren’t you? How petty. Anyway, it’s your affair with Berkeley DB that got us into this mess. I know, you’re seeing ‘FSFS’ now, whatever that is. You say things are better this way, but where does that leave me?
I suppose I should accept some blame too. Some of my repositories are private — read and written only by me — and I wanted them available for commits when I’m offline. So I put them in my home directory and synchronized with unison to other architectures and operating systems. I know, I know. To say this is ‘not recommended’ is understatement. But somehow it seemed to work okay for a while.
Working from home certainly has its advantages. The first few times I stayed home during weekdays, however, I was shocked at how frequently the phone rings! Since then, we’ve registered on various do-not-call lists. New York state had one fairly early on, and it seemed to be effective. Unfortunately, the registry does not apply to businesses with which you already have a relationship.
So the main offender these days is Chase bank. They call here literally twice a day, every single day. Art and I both have cards with Chase, although unlike many of our cards, they are separate accounts. So practically every day that I am home, I get to talk to some bored Desi with an unlikely name like ‘Veronica’ or ‘James.’ “No, I’m not interested in the credit protector.” “No, I’m not an authorized card-holder on that account.”
Today, the proverbial straw was placed, and I blew up at some poor woman — this was the second Chase call within an hour — who supposedly was not trying to sell the credit protector, but rather needed to contact Art about his account.
I called back immediately to close my account in protest. (Nothing gets the attention of a faceless bureaucracy like terminating your relationship with them. Back when Cablevision was persuading me to switch from Dish Network to their DVR system, the only way I could find to speak to people powerful enough to comprehend the defects with their technology was to ask the first-tier knuckle-draggers to close the account.) Anyway, the friendly Desi I spoke to at Chase this time recommended keeping the account but getting on their internal do-not-call list. Hint to other Chase annoyees: 800 945 9470. Allow 30 days to take effect. So my relationship with Chase was spared for another day.
But immediately afterwards, feeling a lack of satisfaction, I took a pair of scissors to my card. We have too many of these damn things anyway.
I understand that writing distributed applications over the web is hard. And that Javascript is a mess sometimes. But I would think that for the 25% surcharge on every order, Ticketmaster could afford to hire a programmer or two that could get it right.
I just failed to purchase tickets in both Safari and Firefox. Their server returned a curt error message saying “There are problems with your submission: Please select a state.”
How silly of me to forget to select a state. Let me try again.
Huh? There’s no frakkin’ input for the state!
Maybe they want me to type the state along with the city, as in “Bronx, NY.” That might actually be kind of progressive; I loathe those drop-downs with more than 8 or 10 choices. Scrolling drop-downs should be banned outright.
Nope, “city, state” doesn’t work, and this time the error was that I “exceeded my time limit” and my tickets were released.
View source. Looks like they’re doing some fancy magic Javashit to fill in the state drop-down based on the country selection. But the country box is filled in for me already, and disabled.
I made sure Javascript itself is enabled. I tried again in Firefox. I dutifully typed in all my details again. Same error: no state.
I guess I’ll have to phone, but I’m already pissed over all these fees and frustration. I’d much rather buy directly from the box office, but they’re only open 12–4 on odd Tuesdays. Or some such. Screw you and your ‘convenience’ fee, Ticketmaster.
Whee, my first ’brant™ (web rant). I feel somewhat better. I’ll feel even better if this post ever makes it to page one when someone googles Ticketmaster.
15 June update: after cooler-headed investigation, it looks like turning off Javascript may do the trick. None of their buggy code gets a chance to run, and the state drop-down is present in the plain HTML. Still, I’d rather work-around Ticketmaster if possible…
16 June update: I sent customer service the URL of this post as soon as it was published, and today it seems like the state drop-down has reappeared. I wish I had saved the page source last time, so I could diff it. Also, Art said that last night TM wasn’t allowing online purchase at all when he tried, so he phoned instead.
Here is one reason of many that PowerPoint makes you look like a total amateur: it cannot kern fonts. Just look at the distance between the initial capital letters and the rest of the words below. ‘Yale’ is the most egregious example, and utterly embarrassing if you’re representing Yale and this horrid bit of text appears on your title slide. No, there is not a space character between the ‘Y’ and the ‘a’… PPT just renders it that way.
The default way to lay out letters digitally is to use the bounding box of each letter. Just imagine the smallest rectangle that encloses the whole letter. And then stack those rectangles together like books on a shelf. This works for most pairs of letters, but sometimes they look terrible that way.
To fix this, all digital fonts contain information about pairs of letters that should be moved slightly closer together than they would otherwise appear. This is called kerning. Digital fonts have been designed with kerning pairs, and computers have set type with them, since at least the 1970s. And here it is 30 years later… I guess Microsoft didn’t get the memo.
The strange thing is, Microsoft Word can kern the fonts, but inexplicably it is turned off by default. You have to go into the menus and ask for it. If I ask PowerPoint about kerning, it draws a total blank:
Now, you may argue that people who have not studied typography or design won’t notice this. So, using PowerPoint would only make you look like an amateur designer to other designers, not an amateur computer scientist or chemist or management consultant.
But I believe this is dead wrong. People who haven’t studied design can’t identify problems like this, but I’m pretty sure they notice them at some level. An audience member will come away thinking my visual aids are very professional looking and yours are crappy. He doesn’t necessarily know whether it was the layout, the color scheme, the choice of font, or the software itself. But the impression left by your visual aids will certainly impact your message. Here is the same text, set in the same size, in Apple’s Keynote software. Notice that the ‘e’ is tucked slightly under the ‘T’ in ‘Team’.
I rant about this problem to myself whenever I see it on someone else’s slides, which is basically whenever I attend a talk. I was prompted to post this today because we had an awards ceremony for students last night, and I had to stare at the word “V aledictorian” in PowerPoint for a while.
Say no to PowerPoint, or at least start bugging Microsoft to fix this!
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