Too Far Afield

• Bluescreens and similar things – in the public!
• Because it’s fun! New York traffic lights push buttons never work: For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button
• Blogged Broken: A Complaint Box Turns Frustration Into Fun

• Douglas Bowman helps Macromedia to sell it’s WaSP-approved Dreamwever MX 2004 application: The Macromedia Interview
• Eamonn Fitzgerald comments on an agency that spent EUR 77 million on an unusable website: Obscene website (costs) revisited
• They sit it out together again: Bush and Schröder make peace over Iraq
• Software this time – another sad story on unusability: The Luxury of Ignorance

Have you ever wondered, where your software is made? Well, if you do not belong to the very few smart people using the open-source Linux Operating System or other software under similar licenses, there is a chance you will find out by following the link below. Enjoy.

Microsoft campus tour – What they look like

My favorite citation:

Even Microsoft employees sometimes forget which building is where. They weren’t built in order, and some numbers are missing. The way the numbering works is that each time Microsoft plans a building, it gets a number. When projects are canceled or delayed, the buildings end up being built out of order or numbers go missing.
A favorite prank is to send an intern to a meeting at a building that doesn’t exist.

Or maybe this one is even better:

This was one of the several buildings used by Office. Back in when I was working on IE5, Office couldn’t ship until IE was ready. Both of us were accused of what’s called Schedule Chicken: One team says they’re going to be shipping on time knowing that they won’t but with the expectation that other team will have to push back their release date for unrelated reasons and then both teams will get more time to work on their software. To prove that we were on time, we made a bet: whichever team was behind had to carry a keg of beer from their building to the other building every Friday. Needless to say, my team (IE) had a free keg every Friday I was there.

Needless to ask why an application that is good for word processing can’t ship without an application that is good (bad?) for internet surfing and the other way around. Let alone this strange Schedule Chicken.

However, it is interesting to take a look at anyway and the function I like the most is, that if you know something about one of the pictures, you just click on it and comment. Your comment will then appear right below the picture. Thats an innovation I’ve never seen so far. Good idea, also from a usability point of view.

About two days after blasting my old Firefox profile I’m now getting back to usual business slowly. I just added PapaScott, yesterdays missing blog, to my list. However I asked myself: Why didn’t I read something from Jason Kottke today? The answer is: I failed to remember adding him! Die Zeit Blog is also missing. I’ll add them sometime tomorrow.

Another thing I noted while using Firefox extensively:

• Tabbrowser Extensions has a possibility to open searches in a new tab and that’s why the extension that doesn’t work with this version of Firefox (see my earlier post) is no longer needed. Thumbs Up!
• Firefox not only blocks javascript popups opend by a normal webpage, but also javascript popups opend by my wordpress blogging favelet in the Lesezeichen-Symbolleiste (German name). This means I can either allow all sites I visit and want to blog about to open popups with Firebird (way too complicated and also a bit insecure) or I can’t use my favelet any longer. I’m sure this is a bug. Unfortunately I have no bugzilla account to file one. Thumbs Down!

• David features a nice ‘German’ story from across the Atlantic: An American who has found memories of Germans
• Asa is awaiting your questions on Mars and Mozilla: Ask Asa
• Someone posts things which should have been easy to find with Google but aren’t. Today: How to make a patch file [via PapaScott]

Yesterday the German edition of Mozilla Firefox was finally released to the public. Since I had heard many good things about Firefox so far, I was eager to upgrade in a hurry.

Unfortunately I experienced a shock when I launched the browser: All my bookmarks were suddenly gone. In it my ‘Regular Readings’ category I used to store the links to blogs I tend to read on a regular basis. To be more precisely my whole profile simply missed. I was quite impressed of an even faster browser and the new download feature I used to reinstall some extensions, but the next shock came in a minute. My standard theme seemed to be no longer among the living. At least it was not in the themes list on Firefox Help. After some googling I was however able to find the themes’ homepage and found a fresh 0.8 version of the theme there. An other problem was, that a favourite extension of mine failed to work, but I hope the author will fix that issue soon.

So my upgrade went not quite that well, but one has to note that Firefox is still in beta and except for the installer, that seems to have some problems, it is state-of-the-art, very powerful and very good. The missing blog list was a good reason for me to put together a new page called ‘Regular Readings’ for this blog. A few hours later I got it up and running – hoping I did not forget a blog. Hey, stop! Now that I write this entry I realize I missed one. I’ll include it soon.

And now forget all these ramblings, read one of the articles linked at the bottom of this page and: Take back the web now!

• Ben Goodger: Why you should switch to Firefox
• Asa Dotzler: Firefox gets blogged
• MozillaZine: Firefox 0.8 news and reviews

• Web Graphics features a quite technical explanation of why one should use points instead of pixels for defining absolute font sizes: What’s the point of using pixels? [via Digital Web]
• Heise.de reports that parts of Windows’ source code circulate on the internet: Windows-Quelltexte im Internet gesichtet
• Eamonn Fitzgerald provides some thoughts Andy Warhol had when he visited Germany (Düsseldorf, more precisely) about 25 years ago: The artist, the butcher and the female bullies
• The Guardian asked its readers for their most horrific Valentine’s experiences: And they say romance is dead… [via Fray Storyblog]
• Jeremy Botter quits his Letters From Iraq blog: Farewell, desert.
• Google is more evil: Anti AdWords Strike Again
• A new Firefox extension changes the browsers name randomly: Firesomething [via Asa Dotzler]
• In spite of not liking the sites overall look, I’ll link to this one: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE [via MozillaZine]
• Digital Web Magazine finally published it: 2003 Reader Survey Results

Just like other people we do it the Zeldman way: A redesign is in progress. The sidebar and the sites stylesheet have been changed slightly. When in doubt: Reload!

• In New York you are now able to use a handy web form to report pot holes. Why isn’t this possible in Hamburg, too? Pothole Blitz [via Jason Kottke]
• The City of Graz, Austria wants to rename its Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium if California does not abandon Todesstrafe: Graz beißt sich am Terminator die Zähne aus
• The Guardian has a special report about a ‘well known’ German author I’ve never heard of: Porn und Drang

Post Reserved. Stay tuned.

Since my old ‘new phone’ featuring a mobile device, an answering machine and handsfree talking broke down just two or three months after I bought it in April 2003, I got the money for the phone back and used an old non-mobile Telekom device I inherited from my grandmother – until now. My grandma’s phone was good enough for me except for the handsfree function, which was too low, and it also had no answering machine. Another problem was, that the phone had no CLIP function. I could live well without an answering machine, but the other two were enough for a big thumbs down. That’s why I finally gave up and bought that new phone, that broke down way too early.

However I’m feeling lucky now as it was at least gentle enough to brake down during guarantee period. When I finally made it into a computer store last Friday I wanted to get a phone featuring

• a price equal to the money I got back
• an answering machine
• handsfree talking
• an acceptable look
• use of as little space on my table as possible since I have a small desk

Well, you guess it: It was a nightmare! All phones in stock looked either terribly bad or did not have the features I wanted. Even the more expensive ones. After about two hours of searching in about three different shops I finally settled on a Panasonic KX-TCD515G device, which I bought mostly for its stylish look and its big display.

• Microsoft Frontpage people clean up – leaving only one html error in their ad: We’ve cleaned up our act. [via Dave Shea]
• Virtually every company uses open source software in one way or another. Read this article about its value for your business: Swimming with the Tide [via MozillaZine]
• Although not officially launched, yet, Knoppix 3.4 will be included in the next edition of c’t comping up this Monday, February 9th: Knoppix 3.4 auf Heft-CD

Surfing the web for a quick reference on correct user administration with MySQL, I just found the following example from chapter 5.3.5 of the German MySQL manual: Neue MySQL-Benutzer hinzufügen.

mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP
           ON spesen.*
           TO custom@whitehouse.gov
           IDENTIFIED BY 'dumm';

Note the last line which states dumm (German for dumb) in connection with whitehouse.gov. In the original English manual, the password of the user custom@whitehouse.gov is obscure.

Some people might ask: What did the translators of the MySQL manual wanted to say? But maybe it’s a bit presumptuous to think of ulterior motives here…

I just found this little unique piece, which appears to be a practice test featuring QUOTES FROM EITHER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES GEORGE W. BUSH OR SENATOR / CHANCELLOR / EMPEROR PALPATINE FROM THE STAR WARS MOVIES. Just attend the test and see how much quotes you get right. A solution is provided at the end of the article [via Jason Kottke].

Jeffrey Zeldman was frist and other people complain further. Actually it seems that there is a bug in the CSS Validator of the W3C. But why did they make so much fuss about it instead of reporting it to the fellow maintainers that provide us with this service for free and waiting a few days or weeks until this simple bug is fixed? Bugs happen. Humans ain’t perfect. But well, here you go! If you’re keen, just spread the word (these are only a few posts):

• Jeffrey Zeldman: CSS Validator Changes The Rules
• Douglas Bowman: Let’s Be Bad
• Dave Shea: CSS Validation
• Webstandards Project: Validator, heal thyself?
• Nick Finck: Building CSS Without Hacks

The German chancellor Mr. Gerhard Schöder of the center-leftist social democrats party SPD has just resigned from his position as the party leader. While some people already take this as an indicator for a soon-to-come collapse of the red-green government, we can still be anxious to see what happens during the next few months.

• English Speaking Press
  • BBC: Schroeder quits as party leader
  • Guardian: German political crisis deepens as Schröder quits party post
  • The New York Times: Schroeder Quits Germany Party Leadership
  • CNN: Schroeder to quit as party leader
  • Washington Post: Schroeder to Step Down as Head of Social Democratic Party
• German Speaking Press
  • Der Spiegel: SPD-Krise – Schröder schrumpft
  • Die Zeit: Schröders Notrücktritt – Münte hilf
  • FAZ: Schröder gibt Parteivorsitz ab
  • FR: SPD lobt Schröders Rücktritt als Parteichef
  • SZ: Notoperation am eigenen Leib
  • taz: Schröder macht halblang
• German Parties
  • SPD: Schröder übergibt Parteivorsitz an Müntefering
  • GAL: Reformpolitik geht weiter
  • CSU: Schröder ist Kanzler auf Abruf
  • FDP: Bundeskanzler gescheitert – FDP fordert Neuwahlen

Just a quick update: I was unable to post to this blog recently because I was affected of some illness. Unfortunately it was quite a big deal. If you are lucky, I’ll post some CT pictures …

We’ll be back to normal schedule in a few hours.