By Bob Plankers on Oct 28, 2006 in General Rambling | 0 Comments
If you are a software developer you should make it easier to download the demo of your software than it is to pirate the whole thing. Seriously. I wanted to check out Sid Meier’s Railroads! but the demo is only available via FilePlanet. FilePlanet prioritizes paid members, so my wait to grab the demo was 45 minutes. Out of curiosity I checked the availability of said game from a well-known torrent site. Fifteen minutes and I could have had the whole thing. What’s wrong with this scenario?
Oh, yeah, I know what’s wrong: it’s easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing.
One of my coworkers prevented me from becoming a temporary software pirate by suggesting FileFront. It seems that FileFront is just like FilePlanet, only way less annoying. I’m sold.
I say “temporary software pirate” because if the game sucks I’ll delete it, and if it’s good I’ll buy it. I won’t buy a software package unless I can try it out first, and I won’t continue using a good software package without buying it. Sometimes I can’t tell from demo software if the package is decent, or in the case of a game, worth the money. All too often a demo has the functionality I need cut out of it, disabled, or messed up in some way to encourage me to spend my money, but I won’t shell out cash when I don’t know for sure that I can do what I need.
In this case, the Railroads! demo appears to be limited via functionality and time, so I can’t tell if it’s worth the price. I guess that means I’ll wait for it in a bargain bin, and go back to playing Civilization 4: Warlords. :-)
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 27, 2006 in General Rambling, Product Review | 2 Comments
Yahoo! released what looks like a follow-on to del.icio.us in the form of Yahoo! Bookmarks.
Update: Tom Chi from Yahoo! commented below on my remarks. Digg.com has his comments, and they make sense. Part of my problem is that I didn’t realize there was an old Yahoo! Bookmarks offering. I still think some of my criticism is relevant, but they know their own audience, or more specifically, both of their audiences. Thanks for adding to the discussion, Tom.
My first impressions of Yahoo! Bookmarks:
- I agree with LifeHacker that the del.icio.us interface leaves something to be desired.
- You can’t automatically post your bookmarks to a blog. That sucks. The del.icio.us interface for that was turbo-clunky but it works reliably.
- The “Bookmark It!” tool bar thing pops up a new window underneath everything. What good is that? I want the thing on top so I can interact with it right then and there to save my bookmark. This might be a Firefox problem, though. However, the default behaviour should be the right thing, and should account for the browser’s behaviour. Imagine explaining how to fix this problem to your mom.
- The “Bookmark It!” bookmarklet interface is clunky. I liked the del.icio.us free form text field where I could type a few things and then hit enter.
- I really like the idea that I can use folders or tags. Lots of people just don’t think in terms of tagging, and folders are more natural to them. Tags seem like a real afterthought in this product, though.
- The “Send” feature is pointless. I don’t want to send something via IM from Yahoo!. You know how I do that now? I open my IM client and paste the URL in there. Likewise, I send URLs in email by pasting the URL into an email and sending it. All the skills I need to email or IM a URL I learned in kindergarten. :-)
- “The all new Yahoo! Bookmarks…” sidebar ad needs a “close” button on it. I got the bookmarklet. Leave me alone.
- Where do the recommended bookmarks come from? I didn’t have anything bookmarked and it recommended stuff to me. If it did some form of recommendations a la last.fm or Amazon that’d be cool.
- I like the screenshots with the bookmarks. A lot of people put a lot of time into the way their site looks, and that gives some credit to it.
- The import from del.icio.us doesn’t work at all. I save the XML output I get from api.del.icio.us as instructed, but all I get is an empty folder called “Del.icio.us Import” inside whatever folder I told it to put the bookmarks in. Which also means that I would have to go and move my bookmarks out of that folder and put them where I said they should go. Annoying. Why can’t the tool just talk to del.icio.us for me?
- I don’t like the fact that I have to select a bookmark and then explicitly edit it. I’d rather click an icon next to each bookmark than go through a few extra steps to select and perform an action.
- You can’t see who else is bookmarking the same thing you are. In fact, the idea of social bookmarking is completely absent from this product, as others cannot see my bookmarks, either. It’s just a fancy personal bookmark manager. Update: this is somewhat intentional, as per the comments.
Final conclusion: Yahoo! Bookmarks initial good looks belie the fact that the product team completely missed the point. Everything that makes del.icio.us useful and cool is missing (namely all social bookmarking). The features that were added, like IMing of URLs, are perfunctory and solve no problems that copy and paste didn’t already have under control. The interface is clunky, tags are an afterthought, and neither are well thought out. The whole exercise makes me wonder why Yahoo! didn’t just opt to sand the rough edges of del.icio.us rather than starting anew.
New Final Conclusion: Yahoo! Bookmarks looks good, but isn’t very useful to me. Del.icio.us is way more useful and while the interface is clunky there the social bookmarking aspects are what I use it for. I stick to my assertion that some parts of the Bookmarks interface are clunky and that tagging can be integrated better. Hopefully some work can be done on del.icio.us, too, to clean up some of its rough edges.
Popularity: 10% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 24, 2006 in General Rambling | 0 Comments
I am now officially sick of this whole Kenny Rogers thing.
Dirt, pine tar, I don’t care. Why don’t I care? Because after he washed it off he continued smoking the Cardinals. They sucked last night, and that’s that. If they had paid more attention to what they were doing, rather than what Rogers might have been doing, maybe they would have hit a few more balls.
La Russa can be magnanimous about the whole thing, but you don’t start a war with a guy who worked for you for six years and knows all your secrets. With all of the crap the St. Louis press and populace is now slinging at Rogers and Detroit I wouldn’t mind seeing the Cardinals get spanked in Game 3 (and 4, and 5).
It was probably dirt stuck to the pine tar. Everybody is right, kinda. Now STFU.
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 23, 2006 in System Administration | 0 Comments
There were three things I instantly changed in Firefox 2.0. In the navigation bar enter “about:config” and:
- set “browser.tabs.closeButtons” to 3 to emulate Firefox 1.5.
- set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to something higher to enable more downloads from a single web site.
- right-click and add a new Boolean preference named “browser.sessionstore.resume_session” with the value “True” to enable session restore. This way closing the browser will not result in losing all your sessions.
w00t. I’m glad this thing is out.
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 23, 2006 in System Administration | 3 Comments
It looks like Firefox 2.0 is getting copied to mirrors right now. Booya!
A huge thank you to everybody who worked on it. I’ve been using it since it was in alpha and I’m really happy with everything that got added (especially now that all the additions are stable!) :-)
Two mirrors I know of are at TDS and the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 20, 2006 in del.icio.us | 0 Comments
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As Guy Kawasaki puts it, a vertical search engine for consumer electronics. Actually pretty darn cool.
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“What’s the difference between a maverick and a jerk?”
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Oct 19, 2006 in General Rambling | 0 Comments
Bruce Schneier posted a piece yesterday about the death of ephemeral conversation. I think it meshes well with what I was saying a few days ago, albeit in reference to this blog and myself:
With the Internet caching everything that becomes part of it, what if I write something that labels me? What if I say something that makes me unemployable, or causes mail bombs to be sent to my mother? The scope of a blunder is no longer local, it is global. The lifetime of a blunder is no longer measured in hours or days, but in lifetimes, as humanity records everything as a permanent record. People routinely judge others as they would never want to be judged. Corporations have zero tolerance policies for opinions. Why would I want to put anything of my own out there, with my name on it, so that someone might decide I am not worthy even before they meet me? What happens when my boss doesn’t like something I’ve written? Labor laws don’t protect anybody from their employers. And now I can’t get another job because I mentioned Nazis in a blog post.
I was writing about how my blog might come back to haunt me later. I’m doing this willingly, intentionally. What about people who are using these technologies to communicate without knowing that it’s all being monitored? And who is doing the monitoring? And who is watching them? The crux of Schneier’s article:
We can’t turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard our privacy. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and to delete it as soon as it is no longer needed.
We don’t need laws that make illegal activity more illegal, such as laws increasing the punishment for operating a meth lab near a school. We need laws that work on the unregulated parts of our society, like our data. Unfortunately I think this Mark Foley debacle will drive the debate the other way. These proposed laws would help protect the rights of the Foleys of the world, and protecting the rights of the accused is just something that U.S. citizens aren’t interested in anymore. Which makes it politically unpopular to do anything about this, especially since the exposure of Foley is generally regarded as a good thing. Why would we make laws to make it tougher to catch these guys?
Why should the accused have rights, anyhow? The police never make mistakes. And like the whole China thing, the corporations like Google and Yahoo! will only protect people’s rights if it’s coincident with their best interests. That isn’t something we can rely on.
Oh, and as for Foley, I think his direct constituency should not be allowed to have representation for a term. You elect someone who sucks to mess with the rest of the U.S. and drag us down, the rest of the U.S. should be able to censure you.
Popularity: 4% [?]
