Author Archives: Josh

Sensis Yellow Pages

Dug this up from a five-year-old draft:

Sensis are nuts. They’ve totally shot themselves in the foot, and they’ve only got a limited amount of time to plug the gap before their Yellow Pages foot falls off completely.

Yellow Pages on the web doesn’t contain entries for all of the businesses listed in the physical Yellow Pages. Sensis charges businesses extra to list on the web. Not many have taken Sensis up on that option, meaning that YPW has remarkably few businesses listed – and because YPW has few businesses, consumers don’t turn to YPW to find businesses. And because of that, fewer and fewer businesses are listing… and so the death spiral goes.

If anyone there had one ounce of sense (sic), they’d be giving web listing away for free, or even negative price. For a while, while the network effect was being established. Then the charges would start hiking up, and the profits rolling in. But no, they had to try to be profitable before the monopoly was established. Bang! bang! Wow, my foot hurts.

I don’t think I was wrong.  When’s the last time you used the yellow pages online to find… anything?

Pressing a button does not demand JavaScript

The state of software produced by web developers is highly variable.  The things the good programmers can do is little short of astonishing, as it always has been with limited environments.  But the bad programmers…

Fifteen years ago I did a Microsoft certification thingy, and now they want me to do a satisfaction survey on it – for no compensation.  I think not.  But I notice an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, so I follow it: http://www.mailingsvcs.com/optout.aspx?type=email&optout=1&service=1&networkid=9001&id=josh@example.com&pid=p53457652, see the Submit button, click on it… and nothing happens.  And then I realise – it needs JavaScript to press.  A button, one of those things right at the heart of HTML 2.0.  What is this, amateur hour?  Turns out, yes it is because if you follow the hacked URL above — which if filled with bogus data — and click on the Submit data, the back end proceeds happily without validating any of the data, and asks you another question before confirming that it’s done:

We’re sorry you no longer want to receive e-mails from us. Please allow one week for us to process this request, during which time you may still receive e-mails from us. We apologize for any inconvenience.
To help us improve our service, please tell us the primary reason why you no longer wish to receive our messages:

There appears to be some kind of problem with their computers.  Last time I checked, the time it takes a computer to remove a record from a database is in the vicinity of “I’m already finished”, not one week.

I’m of the opinion that people who construct software ought to be required to put their name on it in a visible way, so they can go on my list of people to smack in the face when I meet them.  It’s for the best.

Disney: evil, but defeatably evil

Disney DVD’s slogan is Moves, Magic and More.  They got the more part right for sure.

There I am trying to back up my copy of Wall_e_lic2_d1 so that once the kids have scratched the living bejesus out of the playing version, a new one can be generated from the master. And also as to avoid the annoying ads, language selection and other remote-control-based activity at the start – just shove it in the DVD player and walk away. Thankfully Australian copyright law lets me do this.

The studio have been dicking around with the disk’s table of contents, giving it over seventy files it claims are five gig in size – which, giving the DVD specification, is not possible. What you need to do in circumstances like this is play it in some player that will tell you what the magic track that actually contains the movie, not some hacked version of it. Then back that one up.

In the case of this particular disk it’s track 53, 1:33:26 long weighting in at 5425.95MB in size.

Thing is, DVDShrink barfs on it. Like it does Cars, but for different reasons. Thankfully I’ve recently discovered that Linux has an equivalent to DVDShrink, but this one is still being maintained. K9copy is it’s name; Cars was processed with no problems, and it was only the tomfoolery on Wall-E that caused a pause in activity.

So there’s one less application that I need a copy of Windows to run.

Teledildonics

The interwebs are the kind of place that if you don’t watch yourself, you can find yourself wandering into all sorts of odd locations.  This thing is called a RealTouch.  It’s a USB controlled masturbation aid (like guys need some kind of aid) that synchronizes with especially encoded video pornography streamed from the publisher’s website:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but shoving your junk into a caterpillar track doesn’t seem to be a good idea.  Am I the only one who thinks of radio-controlled toy tanks when I look at this?  Remember to only use it with the shell attached kids!  There’s a heater built-in too.   Again, I’m not sure that strapping an electrical heater to your Johnston is one of the cleverer things you could do today.  There’s also some kind of thing to disperse lubricant.  All this for a bargain-basement US$150!

Apparently, computer controlled masturbation is a well documented field more precisely called Teledildonics.  It appears that geeks, given the opportunity to combine computers and self-pleasuring, didn’t attempt to restrain themselves and went in full-tilt.  There’s even a wiki dedicated to Teledildonics, with a page on this very device; it’s all very technical (your salami experiences Parallel Axis Actuation using two motorized belts).

Which is why you shouldn’t click on weird ads.

Birthrate<2.0 in Australia does not mean the end of the species

I’m listening to politicians rambling on about paid maternity leave and one just observed that it’s a crying shame that in Australia the birth rate is less than 2.0 per female.  Said same politician is advocating for more financial support for those undergoing IVF.


This planet does not need more people.  Governments should not be encouraging their production.

I’d like to point out that as it has in the past, Australia can very easily import humans to fill any shortage of warm bodies needed to care for the Baby Boomers in their dottage.  We don’t need to breed workers for the elderly-care industry.

Your Emergency Hardware is designated as such for a reason

All geeks have Emergency Hardware lying around, for when Something Bad happens.  I’ve always got a power supply ready to go, spare keyboards are stacked up, there’s sticks of memory stashed away, hard drives in boxes, serial cables, weird lengths of Ethernet cable; the list goes on and on.  Emergencies happen surprisingly often, but only sometimes to they demand a trip to the local computer store.

When an emergency happens, I’m reminded why my Emergency Hardware is no longer my day-to-day hardware.  Recently, the monitor for the HTPC made a funny popping sound, then a crackling sound, went dark and started smelling like… the magic had escaped.  The old standby, turning it off and on again, didn’t work.  It was time to store that monitor until the next trip to the council transfer station.  Out comes the Emergency Hardware, a 17″ ViewMaster CRT I happily paid $800 for fifteen years ago.  I’d forgotten that the red gun’s gone (it might be just a loose wire, but there’s no way I’m opening up the back of a CRT to go poking around with a soldering iron).  Some of the UI elements on the bits of software we use on that box are in red – or black, nowadays.  Also, it seems that if the monitor is off when the PC boots, it won’t sync to the video signal when you turn it on after the PC has booted – it just goes straight to power-saving mode (I’ve not seen that behaviour before).  Press the power button on the PC, wait for it to cycle down, power it back up – this time with the monitor on.  Sigh.  Perhaps it’s time to retire that monitor.  Soon.

And, as part of the ADSL2 upgrade, I managed to brick our modem, meaning I needed to obtain another (in the meantime, out came the Emergency Hardware: an external 56K modem for dial-up – I never did get that working for the Linux boxes); a generous friend gifted me one he had lying around in his Emergency Hardware collection.  It drops out periodically (my friend’s explanation: “there’s a reason I don’t use that modem”). We got a free new modem as part of the ADSL2 signup; it doesn’t do routing. Sigh.  Looks like the VoIP adapter will need to include a router.

I wonder what would happen if we had communal Emergency Hardware.  Plenty of perfectly functional but not-quite-good-enough stuff gets tossed each year; I wonder how you’d store and manage a collection like that.

Pet Finch Secrets

Pet Finch Secrets float:right” src=”http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/5634/indianajonesdoor.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”” />
A true geek can’t help themselves.  Every time — every time — the garage door is closing, you’ve got to duck out under it as per Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark; for some reason I keep remembering it’s his hat he retrieves, not his whip.

But malfunctioning technology kills my inner child.  Every time the collision detector fires off (which it does fairly often, even when it hasn’t collided with anything) and the garage door opens again – beeping – a little part of me dies.

CPU pegged at 100% while downloading video under Ubuntu?

totem-video-thumbnailer at fault?

Close Nautilus, the file-system browser that you’ve got open on the directory where the files are being downloaded. It file is constantly getting pinged as having been updated, and so it’s getting thumbnailed over and over again, to no end.

Note your download speeds may improve after this fix.

Chrome doesn’t sandbox the CPU; Goggle docs waits really hard

Chrome doesn’t attempt to sandbox CPU consumption. I just closed an inactive Google docs spreadsheet, and saw CPU fall from pegged-at-100% to bubbling along at 10%.

Does it really need each available CPU cycle to wait for the other end to do something? Apparently so, in the way it’s coded.

Google: not as clever as the press release makes out.

Myki website suckiness

Having recently used my Myki card for the first time, I thought it best to see how the system had tried to screw me.  At the time I used it, it seemed simple enough, even if it didn’t allow me out of the first gates I tried at Flinders St station and the exit scan took… longer than I would have thought reasonable.  And now, I went to the website to inspect the transactions.  After some fumbling and following unnecessary links, I got to the query page, into which you enter a date range (why it just can’t pull up the most recent transactions by default is beyond me).

Pick an generous date range, to ensure you get all your transactions, and up pops this error:

Please correct the following and try again:

Date to should be less than or equal to current date. Please try again.

It couldn’t just assume that if the user has entered a date range for the future, it will be fine to report all the transactions that haven’t happened yet?  Nor could the system possibly pre-populate the inputs for you to fix things, nor pre-populate before you enter a crazy date like December this year.  Oh no.  That wouldn’t be hostile enough.

Bending to the will of the brain-addled programmers, I complied and got:

Please correct the following and try again:

Up to six months of transaction data will be available.Statement Data only available after 5/11/2009

The first is an assertion, not a problem.  If Statement Data is only available after 5/11/2009, well, just give me that!  Why the controls even offer dates prior to this (two years prior to this) is confusing to say the least.  And why wasn’t this problem flagged along with the last problem?  Why force me to fix “problems” one at a time?

It’s like those crazy Blogger.com comment submission forms, with embedded CAPTCHAs – get the CAPTCHA right and anything else wrong, and you’ve got to keep solving CAPTCHAs until you get the other fields right too.  I’ve already proven I’m a human, you stupid website!

Honestly, you’d think that the people who designed the site weren’t forced to use it until their eyes bleed.  The cards associated with the account – three, one for myself and one for each of my offspring, are all listed as card numbers – even though each card was posted to a named individual.  So I was a little bewildered when no transactions turned up for my card, until I realised I had to try each of the 20 digit strings in turn until one that had transactions listed said transactions.  This thing has such a simple interface, and yet it is so poorly implemented that I’m stunned; it’s almost as if a bet had been made, along the lines of “I bet they can’t stuff this up” – and yet so much fail has been inserted into this one little web page.

And another thing: session expiry.  Why expire Myki sessions?  If people care about their travel data being exposed to others wandering past the PC, they’ll log out.  That’s the extent of the security risk.  It’s not like Myki has money you can move anywhere. *

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave’s last works are “My God, it’s full of stars”.  Dave, this one’s full of fail.

*Yes, I know about the load that maintaining session data puts on your webservers.  I just don’t care.  Get better webservers.  Expire inactive sessions after a week if you’re that worried.  Or do some kind of hourly keep-alive ping thing with the JavaScript that you love so much.  Just don’t bother me with your whiny little “it’s too hard” complaints.