WebInno 22

I was at the Web Innovators Group last night. Overall an interesting batch of presentations. The two that caught my eye were BuySellAds which allows advertisers to control which sites their ads are displayed on (presumably these sites need to be part of the BuySellAds network,) and Fluent Mobile which allows users to get news content on their iPhone.

Customer Service You Say

Had an interesting interaction with the customer service department of an online store. I won’t divulge the name to protect the innocent.

On Safari you can’t add anything to the cart thus making it impossible to buy anything. I only tested Safari on the Mac. The site does work with Firefox on the Mac, I was able to purchase the item I wanted.

I flagged the issue to the customer service department and they told me that they knew about the issue but were waiting for Apple to provide a patch. They suggested calling the toll free number to place the order.

Two things are wrong with this picture, the first is that I am sure Apple is not losing any sleep over this one so a patch is highly unlikely, second the idea of having an online store is to shift the cost to the customer, calling to place the order causes the company to incur a much higher cost of sale.

Every other store I have access using Safari allows me to buy stuff, so what makes the user interaction on this one so special that they can’t support Safari?

The correct thing to do of course is to make sure the site works with all browsers, there are some very good javascript libraries out there which mask developers from browser vagaries (JQuery and YUI to name but two.)

Failing that, the site should detect which browser I am using (easy to do) and offer a slightly degraded experience which still allows me to buy stuff, or informs me that the site currently does not work with Safari and that I should try Firefox.

Personally I would patch the CTO with the “could do a better job” patch.

Would You Buy A Car Without An Engine?

There is are many days when I am really glad I left the old country and settled here in the USA, and this is one of them.

I just finished reading this post by Paul Thurrott entitled “Microsoft documents how Windows 7 E customers can get a browser” where he excepts the steps users need to take to install a browser because the main release of Windows 7 in Europe won’t include a browser.

We have known this for a while but I still think this is in-sane!

Selling an consumer operating system without a browser is like selling a car without an engine.

Imagine for a moment a trip to the car showroom where you can pick whatever car you want only it doesn’t have an engine. You need to make arrangements to procure your own engine and install it in the car yourself.

CloudCamp Boston – July 29th, 2009

CloudCamp Boston will be held on July 29th, 2009.

From the conference web site:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

I will be attending.

Unix Toolbox

A friend pointed me to this very useful list of Unix/Linux/BSD commands, worth taking a look at and bookmarking.

SMART

Given that two of my drives failed in quick succession, I have been getting to know SMART, specifically the smartmontools package which has been very useful, as well as this article “Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART“.

And the failed drives will be destroyed first by being overwritten with zeros and then by using a hammer.

Snow Leopard

I have been running Snow Leopard on my laptop for three weeks now and I have to say that I am very happy with it. It is fully stable by any stretch, the mouse cursor disappears from time to time, but the guts of it are stable enough.

I like the UI changes a lot, basically the same as Leopard but with the rough spots ironed out.

Interestingly I find myself missing Snow Leopard’s features when I work on my MacPro.

Update on CentOS 5.3

I tried my best with CentOS 5.3 but it had a serious problem on my core i7 motherboard, for some reason everything was running about half as fast as it should have been, cpu bound application were spending a lot more time than they should have been in system land. I was getting better performance running under VMware on my MacPro!

I posted a questions to the CentOS forums and, getting no answer after 24 hours, decided to install Fedora 11, which seems to work well so far. The 150+ updates which are installed on top of a fresh install are hardly inspiring given that Fedora 11 came out barely 3 weeks ago, but everything seems to be ok so far.

Except for two drives failures in quick succession, same model and same amount of run time, both ran out of spare sectors within days if each other.

CentOS 5.3

I was very happy to see that CentOS 5.3 had been released because it now supports the ethernet adaptor on my intel core i7 board. I was forced to use Fedora 10 because CentOS 5.2 did not support the ethernet adaptor. I used to be a fan of Fedora, but no more, they are just too many issues with it, for example the network refuses to come up when the machine boots, and Xorg regularly pegs the CPU rendering the machine unresponsive.

Tomorrow I am ditching Fedora 10 and moving to CentOS 5.3, good riddance.

Snow Leopard 10A380

I spent some time this morning installing Snow Leopard 10A380 on my laptop, it handled doing an update over an existing installation of Leopard 10.5.7 but failed when running the software updater (Apple released a 700MB+ update to Snow Leopard 10A380.) I tried the install again migrating a TimeMachine backup of Leopard, same failure as before. The trick was to do a clean install of Snow Leopard, install the update and then use the migration assistant to migrate the TimeMachine backup.

All in all Snow Leopard is looking pretty slick, I plan to test it out some more in the next few days.