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Copyright 2005 Randy Charles Morin
Part of the KBCafe Blog Network.
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Copyright 2005 Randy Charles Morin
Part of the KBCafe Blog Network.
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Minimal Javascript code to preform a simple word count.
Ninety percents of stats are simply used to justify untruths. Especially when you don't have a verifiable source for them. For example, my own first sentence. Where does that come from? I made it up. But even stats that do have a source are likely to be misused or miscommunicated.
On one project, we were using the Clearspring widget platform. Not only was our widget horrible, but the Clearspring wrapper was mostly broken as well. I knew this widget wasn't gonna fly, but the powers that be insisted otherwise. We had a deadline and we went live with the bad widget. We agreed to revisit the widget post launch. A few months after the launch, we reviewed the adoption of the widget. The manager in charge of the Clearspring integration said we had millions of placements and we should keep the widget as-is. Millions? Where? I could only find one or two. I told him I didn't believe him. He gave me the password to the Clearspring dashboard so that I could double check the data. I reviewed the data and noticed that almost every single placement had occured on our own website or internal development servers. Clearspring was counting our previews of the widget as placements. In actual fact, we only had a few placements. I explained this to the manager and he didn't believe me. He said he would review the stats himself and get back to me. I never heard from again. The project was basically dead because the manager had stats indicating we were getting adoption, when we weren't.
The lesson. Doubt everything involving stats. It's probably untrue. At least 50% of the time.
Honestly, I'm fed up with behavioral algorithms. It's stupid. It's in every game you video or online game play. Lately, I'm playing NASCAR Cart for Wii. If I lose twice in a row, the third race is a cake and they actually slow down at the end of the race to let you feel good about yourself. What is the point of putting the game on the most difficult setting, if they are gonna flub the 3rd race and let you win.
It's the same in my NASCAR 2009 for PS/2. If you are losing, the lead cars slow down to let you catch up. Even on the hardest settings. It's also true of online (free) Texas Holdem Poker. When I try a new poker room, I get 4 of a kind, straights and flushes every few hands. But after playing for awhile, I can't get any of them. I worked for a gaming company and I couldn't believe it when they told me to implement this feature.
Honestly, I hate this shit. I know why they do it. They want you do feel good about yourself. If you lost every game, then you'd likely think the game sucked. I personally cannot stand winning every 2nd or 3rd NASCAR race on these stupid games. Give me something challenging. This is stupid.
Download the Gmail notifier to enable mailto link with Gmail on both Macs and Windows.
We haven't tested which Web browsers these work for, but we assume they work for the three major browsers; Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.
This works on Firefox 3 and later.
We recomend installing Firefox and following the instructions for Yahoo! Mail on Firefox above.
Download and run the Register Hotmail with Default Programs utility.
Download the mailto to Gmail handler Greasemonkey script.
You will also need to installed Greasemonkey for Firefox.
Please send us any further solutions that you discover (randy@kbcafe.com).
Latest stats for my most popular website talk-sports.net.
Most often when someone blames the previous guy, you can assume that the current guy is simply irresponsible. I can't remember how many times a programmer tried this on me. It's not my fault, the previous guy's code is horrible! That's a phrase said as often as the national anthem.
Blaming the previous guy is a sign of irresponsibility. It's sometimes justified, but rarely. Even if justified, then you should have fixed it. Period.
Possibly one of the worst mobile website implementations is that of NHL.com. I've always avoided NHL.com on my mobile device because it didn't work at all. It looked like they were serving me a full HTML website with lots of graphics, CSS and Javascript that don't work on my mobile Internet Explorer.
All of a sudden today I'm being served a mobile version of NHL.com on my desktop computer (not a mobile device) and I don't know how to get back to the full website. 101 in mobile design, give the user the ability to escape back to the non-mobile version of the site. Morons!
I've been struggling with just how to write a mobile website. What I've noticed is a bunch of really crappy mobile websites and I sure didn't want to do one of them. My approach was to simply tweak my existing HTML websites for mobile devices. Here's what I wrote. When mobile is true, I simply remove the clutter normally in my HTML websites. Sorry for the lack of formatting. My code was partially based on code written by Richard Jones.
bool mobile = false;
try
{
System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities cur = (System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities)Request.Browser;
if (cur.IsMobileDevice
|| (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("Windows CE") != -1)
|| (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("iPhone;") != -1)
|| (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("iPod;") != -1))
{
mobile = true;
Context.Items.Add("mobile", true);
}
}
catch
{
}
Nice idea!
Eating your own dog food means using your own product. It's very common in software development. The advantage of doing this is that you quickly recognize bugs, deficiencies and potential new features.
Recently Google announced that they are moving their AdSense Help Forum away from Google Groups to a new platform. They describe a few new features that weren't available in Google Groups. I quickly asked myself why they didn't simply add those new features to Google Groups? That's part of eating your own dog food. Recognizing potential features and implementing them. I wonder if their was a conversation at Google where the AdSense team asked for the features and were refused by the Groups team? Or is the Groups product in maintenance mode (no new features)?
Today, while working on a paid review for a website, I discovered the following sentence on their homepage.
"Sites that ... have a reputation for treating players fairly will not be listed on ..."
QA. QA. QA. Pay your best tester more than your best developer.
More and more, I'm amazed just how broken most websites are. Today, I was looking for an Olive Garden in Indiana and stumbled upon an Olive Garden Canada website. I started looking for location in Canada. It asked for city or province in the search textbox for locating an Olive Garden restaurant. I typed each province in Canada and it returned "We're Sorry. No results were found near your location. Please search again." for all. I knew their was an Olive Garden in Edmonton, Alberta, so I typed the name of the city "Edmonton" and got a match. Searching on the province "Alberta" and you get no results. It's no wonder their are few Olive Gardens left in Canada. You can't find them. The same functionality worked fine from the US website.
Don't develop unique presentations for mobile devices. Rather, just tweak your desktop presentation.
Too funny! Hat tip to Robin. Been there, done that.
One problem I encounter a lot on the Web is crazy developers who try to over validate everything. In this case, I was updating my address information for a service I use. The website is quite nice on one hand, in that, it was able to determine most of my address when I entered my postal code. On the other hand, it got the street address slightly wrong. I decided the address was 295 Queen St E, when it's actually 6-295 Queen St E. The developer was so sure of his amazing algorithm that he wouldn't let me edit the address.
I often experience the same problem with phone numbers. My Motorola Q doesn't understand phone number extensions, so when I enter the extension in the address book, the phone dials the wrong number.
I keep getting the same "Well I have a mac and can't send a report this comment message 2 u..." When I ask Mac enthousiast, they deny there's a problem with mailto links in Safari. What's up? Can anybody give me the story here? It's my most common user problem these days.
More specifically, it has to do with mailto links that have the subject URI request parameter. For some reason the subject request parameter doesn't work in Safari or so most all my users claim. I don't have a Mac to test this with.
When you are IBM, it's not hard to sell software. But when you are Joe, then you should read this. This blogger explains how he's selling software at $20,000 a pop to big companies. I might read it 10 times myself.
http://nukemanbill.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-sell-your-software-for-20000.html
Today, my project was to redirect the entire http://reblinks.therssweblog.com site to http://www.reblinks.com. A quick Google and the solution is built into IIS. Read the source for a detailed explanation.
