taking back the tubes

A short while ago, I posted about my frustration with imrworldwide.com, a site that seemed to be slowing my browsing experience.

After a little investigation, I realised that this was no more than a market research company’s “spyware”, javascripts that serve no purpose other than to track and report on my movements. They certainly don’t add to my browsing experience. So, I asked the question at work: “how do I block these things?”, I’d tried to find a neat firefox plugin, but they were all a bit feature rich for my needs. I just wanted a block. Then I was reminded by the folk at work of the hosts file – a wonderful little file that I could edit to effectively short-circuit the usual DNS lookup process. Not only that, but I was pointed to this site, which provided a huge ready made list of undesirable urls that you could just paste in and enjoy never seeing again! You need to know what you’re doing – otherwise you risk breaking your connection to the internet, but it’s not terribly difficult.

OK, so it might be a little bit ‘tinfoil hat’, but it seems to be working nicely and now when I visit large commercial sites, they load faster and they don’t snoop on my movements. Instead of nauseating banner ads about losing weight and dental work, I get nice empty space. Combined with the FlashBlocker plugin the effect is really quite excellent!

great service #5

I’ve saved the best ’til last. Remember the days before mp3s?… how about CDs? yes, who had a great collection of vinyl? Who’s still got one? Well, I don’t. I got rid of most of my collection long ago, but there are a few faves hanging around in the cupboard and one day I plan to ‘format shift’.

In fact I tried to do this years ago and bought a Griffin iMic, a little USB dongle that didn’t cost the earth, but sadly failed to deliver – well that was back in 2002. At the time I did a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with Griffin’s tech support, but no matter how I tried with software and settings, I just couldn’t get it to work properly.

Fast forward to last month, when I once again considered tossing out my last records and the trusty old player. I thought I’d give the iMic one more go – sadly, the same problems, however this time I was pretty sure that it wasn’t software, so once again I struck up correspondence with Griffin to see if I could finally diagnose the problem. Prompt responses quickly agreed that it sounded like hardware. Amazingly, I dredged out an old email from 2002 in which Griffin said that it most likely sounded like software. I also tried my luck by asking for a discount on a replacement unit.

The reply I received completely astonished me. Griffin took responsibility for the original misdiagnosis (which was within warranty) and gave me instructions for making a replacement claim. A mere 7 years out of warranty! Now, finally, I’m converting my favourite disks to digital format and I can’t thank the folk at Griffin enough.

So, that’s what I call service. I’ll definitely support Griffin in the future and I hope they get some business out of this endorsement, because they certainly deserve it.

a blockage in the tubes

I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets frustrated by slow loading web pages. I don’t mean the consistently slow ones from low budget sites, but pages that load quickly for a bit, then practically stop for a while – sometimes a looong while!, then maybe resume and finish. Pages from prominent, high budget sites that should do better.

This morning I noticed the BBC site was at a crawl, and I saw in the status bar that it seemed to be waiting on assets from ‘secure-au.imrworldwide.com’, I waited some time (a minute!) – don’t know if it got what it wanted but my page never loaded and I gave up. Then I got to thinking i’d seen that URL before, so I started looking around. Sure enough The Age, News, NineMSN, Channel Ten – all huge budget media sites are stalling as well – and all are stalling on the same URL.

Today was just one I happened to follow up, but I’ve seen this before. Makes me wonder what this site serves and, given it’s pervasive nature, just who is behind it, and what do they know about us. Loading the URL didn’t do me any good…

imrwordwide not found!

So, who are these people blocking the tubes? Check out all the negative press you can find with a google search.

great service #4

I’m an impulse online shopper and there are a few sites that fill my needs just nicely. A couple of these sites offer special deals every day, and one of them is Zazz. Cool as many of the items are, I only made my first purchase on Zazz a couple of weeks back. Including postage, it was only $20, what could I lose?

Well, as it happens, the goods were disappointing. Maybe I was unlucky, maybe they were just plain dodgy, but I emailed Zazz to ask for their advice. Straight away I get an email back – a return authorisation number, even an address label to print out. It was quick – the communication was excellent, no doubts, no difficulties. Within days, the refund was back in my paypal account.

For online purchases, it is absolutely vital that you can trust the vendor. Experiences like this show that you can definitely trust Zazz. Great work guys! I’m still watching your site for my next purchase!

great service #1, 2 and 3

I’ve had a pretty good run lately with customer service – so good I’ve decided to just put a few of them on the record…

1. The federal government solar rebate: OK, I’m being a bit controversial here, but I was one of the thousands who got a 1kw solar cell system on the big rebate scheme. I’ve just got my first electricity bill since the install and it’s showing our average daily consumption has dropped around 60% I am happy! Sure, it’s summer, so I won’t see that all year, but the scheme is a success as far as I am concerned. From the organisers of the Moonee Ponds solar Neighbourhood to the installers, Rezeko and even the pen pushers at the DEWS, the whole process has gone smoothly, if a little slowly, and I want to thank them all.

2. The Hong Kong connection: Dealextreme is a gadget lover’s delight. You can order the most improbable things at the most fantastic prices, but like all businesses, sometimes they run out of stock. I’d been waiting a long time for an $8 item, so long I’d forgotten about it. DealExtreme contacted me, suggested I take a store credit and gave me the details on how I should claim it. Now, this is no more than you’d rightly expect, but we’re talking about a bargain basement company operating out of Hong Kong – you don’t always get that level of service from such companies.

3. Great coffee, great service: We’re lucky enough to have Seven Seeds right next to our office, so around 10 each morning we tend to make a little pilgrimage. This morning, I’d just stepped out into the lane when I realised my cup was leaking – no big deal, I turned around back into the cafe and pointed out the problem. No simple transfer to another cup – that would have destroyed the aesthetics of the coffee. Even though it was a particularly busy morning, a fresh cup was quickly organised, all smiles, and I was on my way.

So, these are examples of good service – nothing more than you should expect, but you don’t always get it and the companies involved all deserve a bit of credit for making the transactions as painless as possible. I’m going to follow this post up with a couple more examples of companies that have gone that little bit further.

your very own babelfish?

Who has read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and not thought a Babelfish would be a pretty cool thing to have?

Ever since I first came across speech-to-text technology about 15 years ago, I’ve imagined an electronic Babelfish – a pair of glasses with a ‘head up’ display and a directional microphone coupled with some nifty speech-to-text plus translation software, so that you could ‘tune in’ to conversations that you otherwise couldn’t understand at all.

Well, I reckon it’s only a matter of time now before someone gets the speech-to-text capability of Google’s Nexus One to couple with Google’s ever improving translation software to produce the first electronic Babelfish. Perhaps not the form factor I envisaged, but now I think of it – probably even better to be able to show the text to someone on a screen or play the translated text-to-speech through the phone’s speaker.

Exciting times!

A racist Australia?

The debate is raging again about attacks on Indian Students in Australia. Are Australians racist? Obviously, the answer is yes and no. I don’t profess any expertise in this area, but there is nothing clear cut about it.

I am appalled by the level of street violence that occurs in my city – desperate, savage and seemingly random attacks are a huge concern, but what are the patterns? what are the causes? and how can we counteract them?

For a start, it’s nothing new. A level of urban violence has always occurred. As our population grows, the density of our cities increase, unemployment and poverty claim more people, more bad stuff happens – it’s sad arithmetic. But is it racism?

It is a clear fact that there are plenty of really nasty people in Australia. People who, for whatever reason, think they need to prove their superiority over others. They go out to pick a fight with someone who won’t fight back. The people they choose must be easily identifiable and vulnerable – at the moment, the people who best fit this description seem to be Indian students: they look different and they’re a long way from home and their support networks. They make easy targets. It’s my guess that the thugs who perpetrate these acts are not choosing their targets because of their particular race – they probably have no idea where India even is – they are choosing because they stand out and are vulnerable. Race is part of it, but it’s a selection criteria, not the motivator.

There are loads of East Asian students in Australia too – so why are they not [currently] being targeted? after all, they’re pretty easy to spot. I believe the answer is simple – a few years ago, the press was full of stories about ‘Asian gangs’. These thugs don’t know if an ‘Asian’ guy is part of a machete wielding gang who might come around later that night and remove bits of their anatomy – or at the very least might know enough ‘mystical eastern martial arts’ to put up serious resistance. Because of this history, East Asians are not seen as quite such soft targets as the South Asians, so for now the heat is off them. It’s the same principle as avoiding car theft. Steering locks on cars have been shown to be nothing more than an inconvenience to a determined thief, but If there are two identical cars, and one has a steering lock, it’s obvious which one will get nicked – the path of least resistance.

There are plenty of racists in Australia too. Always amazes me when I come across it because I live in a culturally diverse inner city area where races and cultures mix and merge constantly, but step outside the metro areas into regions where they only see headscarves on blurry TV footage of bombings in the Middle East and you’ll find staggering depths of ignorance and racism. But it’s racism borne of the fear of the unknown – not racism against a specific people. Give people a chance to mix and learn and that fear melts away.

This is the same for all countries, it takes time and patience to break down. I don’t think Australia is a particularly racist country – we could do a lot better, that’s the way of the world.

boring…

That’s what she said! boring!!

It had been a long time since I’d updated my blog design, it wasn’t bad, but it was old and I was kinda sick of it. I wanted something really clean and uncluttered, with plenty of space and better typography.

Also, in the years since I’d built my old theme along came the sandbox theme, surely one of the plainest and most unassuming looking themes you’ll ever see, but as they say, beauty is only skin deep. Where sandbox really shines is under the hood, the html output by sandbox is rich in smart stuff and although my new design doesn’t really take much advantage of the smart stuff, it makes me feel a little better just to know it’s there. Not only that, but at any time, if I’m getting a bit sick of how it looks, I can just swap my css and it magically transforms.

So, with all the magic that sandbox offers, what did I get up to? Not much yet, apart from the basic design you’re looking at now, there is a rotating bank of 31 header images based on the day of the month. So, to see them all you’re either going to have to check back each day for a month or do some digging around in the code. I still have some other ideas, and there are aspects I’m not happy with, so I’ll be making some minor changes now and then.

… but what about this boring comment? Well, that was Rachel, I was so pleased with my final result that I called her over to show her. She thinks it looks like a news site! 🙁

a change of climate in the party

What are they thinking? The libs have effectively just effectively voted against the ETS by electing the rabid Tony Abbott as their leader. If the government goes to an election on this, all indications are that there will be about half a dozen libs left in parliament – and probably no nats!

You’d think I’d be celebrating – I’m not a Liberal supporter – but I think the saddest thing about this whole saga, ETS included, is that regardless of whether you believe in climate change, or man’s contribution to it, or any other of the sundry side-issues involved here, the bottom line is that it is not a good idea to dig stuff up and use it like there is no tomorrow. Let me put it like this:

You are standing at the edge of a desert of unknown size. You need to walk to the other side of this desert. You have enough water for some days, but there is none in the desert. Do you drink all the water on the first day? No, that would be stupid and an almost certain path to death.

So here we are, a day into the desert, at the leading edge of the future. We have no idea how far we can go, but we’re using our resources at a rate that will see us in difficulty before too long. Is that smart? No, even climate change sceptics can’t believe that is smart. Things have to change – rapidly!

And the politicians are leading us! Is that smart?

If the Liberal’s leadership stupidity leads to a federal election, lets make sure we remind the pollies of both parties know who’s really running this country.

I didn’t know you could do that!

ScreengrabJust discovered a feature of flickr I didn’t know about – short URLs. Every Flickr photo page has it’s own embedded short URL. Much smarter to use the built in tool than using bit.ly or tinyurl etc. Well, it would be if you knew it was there!

There is some documentation about the short URL service in the ‘App Garden’: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html but it doesn’t provide you with any simple tool for working out your photo’s URL. There are ways though!

It’s in the source, for a start. Look for it in the head of your page:
<link rev=”canonical” type=”text/html” href=”http://flic.kr/p/7hKFww” >

The Operator Firefox extension exposes the URL as a Resource, which is how I found it. Frustratingly, you can only look at it – it doesn’t do anything.

There is a greasemonkey script; a tool called flick.to.twit which integrates it with a tweet; and a Firefox extension, which I haven’t tried yet, in this thread, which might be worth watching.

Nice anyway – surprised they (flickr) haven’t done more with this.

about 100 metres…

For me, one of the high points of Australian television entertainment was The Games, and one of the high points of that series was episode 4, series 1, Robbo and the 100 metres. Even reading the script cracks me up (the particular scene starts around page 5), but at the risk of providing a spoiler to those who haven’t come across it before, the premise of the episode centers around a 100 metre track that is about 100 metres… well, 94 metres to be exact. It’s just too ludicrous to be real, which is why it’s so side-splittingly funny.

JOHN: But what you’re telling me is the 100-metre track is about 100 metres long.

Too ludicrous? well, you would have thought so, that is, until last weekend when they held the Melbourne marathon. Seems like the Marathon and Half Marathon were the prescribed distance, but someone played fast and loose with accuracy when it came to the 5km. and 10km. events, but to quote Dallas O’Brien, the event director: the 5km and 10km courses were not measured to the same exacting standards“, and “perhaps we should have highlighted the fact that they weren’t 100 per cent accurate”.

Not 100% ? How about 84% ?? because that would have been about right, yes the 5km. route was only 4.2km! Now, most runners are pretty aware of how fast and far they’ve run – these things tend to be important. Many carry personal GPS devices and can tell you within a few metres just how far they’ve run. Pity the organisers didn’t apply the same rigour: “The five and 10 were both measured by a bike computer. We got them as close as we could.”. This is, of course, complete rubbish and a totally lame excuse. It took me no more than 5 minutes with Google maps to trace the route and get exactly the same answer as the runners got. The 10km route was not quite so far off – but at 9.4km (exactly the same percentage error as the fictional 100m track), you can bet it got some people excited about personal best times before the true horror dawned on them.

A little message for Mr. O’Brien, either get a new battery for that bike computer, or pump up the tyres, but don’t, in future, take people for idiots… did you think they wouldn’t notice?

and the winner is…

For a few years now, Web Directions conference has incorporated The McFarlane Prize, which recognises excellence in web development.

Although a relatively small prize, it is hotly contested, peer reviewed and any sites that are shortlisted (let alone those that win), have achieved very high levels of excellence in coding, usability, design and accessibility (that’s all together, not categories!). It is truly an achievement and I encourage people to visit the McFarlane site and view some of the entries.

Usually, the contenders are relatively small sites from well controlled environments. Not to take anything away from their achievements, but it’s tempting to think such accolades are beyond the reach of large and diverse organisations. Well, this year’s prize winner put paid to that assumption.

Swinburne University of Technology took out the main prize. For those of us in the know about how difficult it is to pull together a university website this is an achievement that ranks alongside climbing Everest, cycling the Nullarbor and completing the Hawaii Ironman.

They deserve: 1) a huge pat on the back and 2) five minutes of your time to visit their site and check what makes it tick.