The company I work for recently upgraded Outlook Web Access from “borderline intolerable” to “still pretty bad”. It’s still a piece of junk, light years behind Gmail, but it’s an improvement. Until I tried to save an attachment in Firefox. A coworker sent me this PowerPoint about the mortgage crisis. OWA gives you the option to “View as Web Page”. Cool, I thought. I don’t have to save this file to disk and open it. So I did that. It was too slow. The PowerPoint is 45 pages or something, and the page transition time was getting annoying. So I decided to download it after all. I mean, it’s not like hard drive space is at a premium these days. There’s a little hyperlink that says, “MortgageCrisis.pps(2MB)”. So I clicked it. Firefox will generally handle things like that well – if you click a link to a file type it can’t open itself, it gives you the option to open it with a program you have installed, or save it to disk. That’s fine. Not with the new OWA. It just gives me an error message that this type of attachment has to be saved to disk. This is annoying, but not unexpected. Microsoft has never played well with others. So I right-clicked the file to “Save Link As”. None of this should be shocking to anyone who spends a lot of time online. This is where Microsoft punched me in the face. “Save Link As” attempts to save “attachment.ashx” instead of the PowerPoint. For those who don’t know, .ashx files are idiotic proprietary Microsoft script files for handling HTTP requests. It doesn’t matter if that’s Greek to you. The point here is that, once again, Microsoft has decided that the way everyone transmits data on the internet is wrong, and the way to really serve the needs of internet users is rewrite the rules so that nothing else is compatible. There are agreed-upon standards for transmitting data on the internet. Microsoft repeatedly defies them in order to make competing technologies incompatible with Microsoft products. It’s absolutely unconscionable, and one of the primary reasons I switched to Ubuntu Linux as my home operating system. BTW, “unconscionable” is a totally awesome word. It may be Microsoft’s only redeeming quality that they create so many opportunities for me to use it. Well, only redeeming quality other than Bill Gates’ newfound philanthropy. That’s pretty cool, too.
Tag: Technology
Battery standardization – probably not going to happen
Green Cell Eco-Concept: One Battery For All
Green Cell is a concept with a single simple idea: use safe, standardized rechargeable batteries in all portable gadgets.
I’ve argued this before – it’s ridiculous that every single portable device uses it’s own battery and charger. Even within the same company they often aren’t compatible. Nokia used to do it with their 5000 series cell phones, but I think they’ve gotten away from it. Anyway, this would be really cool if it happened. I don’t think it will, but it would be cool.
Drupal coming along nicely
I tweaked my strategy to import this blog into Drupal, and it’s working quite well on my local machine. I had wanted to go with the brand new Drupal 6.0, but it’s not quite finished, and many of the modules that I might want to use haven’t been updated yet. So I think I’ll go with 5.7, and then upgrade down the road a little when 6.0 is more mature.
My big problem is the permalinks. I don’t want to have to write individual .htaccess entries for 700-some posts – I can’t imagine that’s a good idea. So I need a redirect rule, and I don’t know much about writing them. I think I can figure it out, though. I think I’m going to have to map http://www.blog.complainthub.com/?p=123 to http://www.complainthub.com/node/123 or something like that. I don’t think that will be hard, but you never know. Luckily my webhost uses nice, sensible Apache servers, instead of some hideous abomination.
Anyway, my next challenge will be scraping together a new theme. I have some ideas, but I need to execute them. And I need to pick a color scheme. You can leave suggestions in the comments, which I’ll probably ignore. But you can leave them.
Wow, that was easy
I did a test import of Complaint Hub into Drupal on my laptop. It worked nearly flawlessly. It’s going to be a little tough to keep up the permalinks so that any links to the current site redirect to the new site. I want to move everything back to complainthub.com (You’ll notice the URL here is blog.complainthub.com), which makes it harder. And then there are still the posts from my old From Harvard Street blog that are all forwarding from harvardstreet.complainthub.com to blog.complainthub.com. I suppose I could probably just fix that to go directly to complainthub.com.
The import module for Drupal also does not import multiple WordPress categories for a single post. It only imports multiple tags. Unfortunately for me, I use categories almost exclusively. There is a way to convert categories to tags, but there’s a big disclaimer about backing up your database first. I guess I could just do that.
Otherwise, it was pretty awesome. I still need a nice new theme, but otherwise you may be seeing the changes sooner rather than later.
The future of Complaint Hub
I’m thinking about migrating the site from WordPress to Drupal. For many of you, that sentence may make absolutely no sense. If you don’t keep reading, I won’t blame you. If you do stop reading, you should make it up to me by going and buying John Scalzi’s special edition book that he’s auctioning off for charity. Get him to inscribe it to me, with some really inscrutable saying. Bid quickly, as it’s already over $2000.
Anyway, if you’re still reading, I got a little infatuated with Drupal while doing some work for a project that never panned out. It doesn’t do blogging as well as WordPress (At least not right out of the box), but it does a lot of other stuff much better. And I think it would be perfect for a project I’ve been thinking about.
Some of you may know that I’m MUCH better at thinking about projects than actually doing them, and I have a bunch of stuff still in the thinking stage. I have a money-making venture with a friend. I have an online economics course to take with another friend. I have the science fiction novel I’ve been plotting out. I have an 8K in March and a 10K in April. I have my real job. I also have a wife, and a family, and some friends, all of whom require and deserve some of my time.
In any event, the project could be really cool, and a nice side effect is that I’d probably bring back the complaint submission page that people have been missing. And I’ll update the theme of the site – at least one friend insists that his eyes bleed when he reads it.
So that’s in the future. I don’t know how long it will take to happen, but be prepared. If you subscribe via RSS, the feed might change, although hopefully FeedBurner will take care of that transparently (To you, at least). But I’ll keep you posted.
Two wrongs dont make a right
Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo – washingtonpost.com
Microsoft Corp. has offered to buy struggling Internet search provider Yahoo for $44.6 billion, a merger that would combine two of the technology world’s most well-known names into a potentially potent competitor for Google in the lucrative Web search and advertising market.
I’m not sure I see the point here. Sure, Microsoft (or anyone else, really) would love Yahoo’s traffic. But unless they’ve got some great idea for the next step, that’s a pretty steep price for a bunch of pageviews that could go away at any moment.
Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have shown they can compete with Google, and since it’s so easy to switch from one to the other, simply combining users isn’t going to do it, either. Do they think that, by joining forces, two companies that don’t know how to compete in the space are going to suddenly find themselves swamped with good ideas? Good luck with that.
Maybe Microsoft should go back to building operating systems. If Vista is the best they could do, they don’t seem to be putting enough resources into that department.
And with them goes the stench of failure
AOL Moving Executives, Headquarters To New York – washingtonpost.com
The company said that while senior executives would depart for Manhattan, most of the 4,000 employees at the Dulles campus would remain. The shift is the latest step in the company’s transformation from a provider of dial-up Internet access to one focused on online advertising.
While I’m disappointed that the Dulles area may lose a bunch of jobs, I can’t say that I’m sorry to see AOL start to pull out of our area. I say, “good riddance, you miserable failures”. This is a company that for a while was synonymous with “the internet”. Your average American didn’t “go online”, they “went on AOL”. Never mind that the day AOL merged with Time Warner is generally considered the day the internet boom died. These guys were so entrenched as number 1 that it’s amazing how clueless they turned out to be.
I would warn Google and the other companies that AOL’s entrance into the online advertising world probably means that the business is going to be changing significantly very soon, but I’m pretty sure they already know. And don’t think I mean that AOL will drive the change. I mean that AOL throwing their hat in the ring probably means it’s time to move to the bigger and better ring you’ve been building down the street.
Anyway, I don’t want to lose area jobs. But I would like to see the Dulles area get a flagship company that doesn’t symbolize everything that’s wrong with the internet.
Alas, poor Vonage
Vonage shakeup: CEO resigns, cost-cutting announced
Things are not looking good for my VOIP-provider of choice. I suppose I don’t blame Verizon for suing Vonage instead of attempting to compete, since certainly they have a clear financial incentive to see Vonage go away. But it’s still a crappy thing to do.
And losing a CEO is usually not a sign of positive things to come. Sure, maybe they’ll find someone else to take them through this. But when you lose the CEO because he just left, rather than you taking a proactive step of replacing him, that’s less “shakeup” and more “rats from a sinking ship”.
Looks like I will soon have to find a new VOIP provider. It will not be Verizon.
Its book review time!
I mentioned earlier that I was reading “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreau. I just finished it last night.
It was interesting. He presents three possible scenarios – the “Heaven scenario”, prominently advocated by Ray Kurzweil, the “Hell Scenario”, foretold by Bill Joy, and the “Prevail Scenario”, which he learns about from Jaron Lanier.
The Heaven Scenario is where technology moves us past such problems as sickness, hunger, and death, and into a utopia. The Hell Scenario is where technology moves forward without us, and we’re all eaten by rogue self-replicating nanomachines or wiped out by a bio-engineered super plague. The Prevail Scenario is where we take control of the rush of technology and use it to find new ways of connecting people. The key element of the Prevail Scenario is that we are in control. The other two predict that the rapid rate of change in technology, which is currently increasing, is going to be too fast for us to have any input on where it’s going.
As I read the book, I went through a few phases. First, I read about the Heaven Scenario, and envisioned myself enhanced and posthuman, immune to disease, constantly connected to an ever-present network, and immortal. It was pretty sweet. Kurzweil thinks we’ll have significant changes in what it means to be human in the next 2-3 decades. Then I read about the Hell Scenario, which seems less likely. Maybe I do still have a little faith in humanity that we won’t totally destroy ourselves just yet. Probably we will before the sun goes out, but that at least gives us a little time. Although, if we do have a man-made global killer, it’s going to suck pretty hard.
The Prevail Scenario is less concretely defined. It’s almost like an extension of the web 2.0 user communities into all aspects of life. Instead of people being kept physically apart, sitting at computers in basements, new technology would allow richer connections between people than are possible now, combining the best of online communities with the best of physical communities.
In all, it’s a good read. Even those who don’t know much about the tech side of things should be able to follow along. The writing style is accessible. And it’s exciting. The idea of transcending humanity is really fascinating, and it doesn’t sound that far-fetched.
Next on my list is Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which is actually a novel about posthumans. In the first chapter, we already have a duel for making eye contact and a no-strings-attached orgy just for fun. The future is awesome!
Soon you can eat a clone
FDA OKs Food From Cloned Animals – washingtonpost.com
Because scientists concluded there is no difference between food from clones and food from other animals, “it would be unlikely that FDA would require labeling in those cases,” Sundlof said.
I saw this today on Accidental Hedonist, and now on the Washington Post. The issue here is not safety, or how different or not different clones are from normal animals. The issue is that some people don’t like the idea of cloning, and don’t want to eat a cloned animal.
Personally, I don’t care if the animal was cloned. I don’t care if nano-scale assembly robots built my prime rib from individual carbon atoms. I’ll eat it either way. But I want to know what I’m eating. Give people the information to choose for themselves, and I’m happy.