Testing

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/

IE6 and Corporate IT Stupidity

Today there was a riff on the Digg blog about whether or not Digg.com should stop supporting IE6.

Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an eight-year-old browser superseded by two full releases. It consumes time that could be spent building the future of Digg. Here’s what we’re gonna do — and not do — about it.

One thing that resonated with me is that the main reason people are still using IE6 is because corporate policy forces them to. My last four projects have all involved large companies where IE6 was mandatory. Mandatory, meaning: when I chose to download and install Firefox, circumventing various filters in order to do so, I was formally reprimanded.

Never mind the fact that Firefox is orders of magnitude more secure than IE6, and never mind the fact that I'm a professional web developer who can presumably be trusted to drive a browser around the Internet without wrapping it around a telephone pole, picking up exotic viruses, or otherwise exposing the company to risk.

This is the stupidity and condescension of corporate IT.

And while I understand that a large rollout of a new browser to 40,000 users and 217 internal line of business apps can be a costly, time-consuming proposition, suckling from the malnourishing tit of Internet Explorer is at least as costly in the long run.

Technorati Claiming Process

I still believe in Technorati.

I know nobody uses it anymore. I know Twitter and Google and Bing and Digg and Reddit are all the rage, and that Technorati's vision of being the Google of the blogosphere has probably failed. Nevertheless, I still submit my blogs to Technorati, and I still think there's a lot of value in some of the Technorati features (such as blog responses).

Anyway, as part of the Technorati claiming process you have to tattoo a unique number on your forehead...er...I mean publish a unique number on the front your blog. Here's mine:

r3scu248ia

I have to say I definitely prefer Google's method of claiming: depositing an HTML file with a unique name somewhere on your server. The Technorati method actually requires that your assigned cookie appear on the front page, even if only temporarily.

And that's invasive.

Pricing Spaghetti

In Oh, You Wanted "Awesome" Edition Jeff Atwood dissects one of my pet peeves with current software pricing models: the fact that they're often segmented.

And what are we paying for? The privilege of flipping the magic bits in the software that say "I am blah edition!" It's all so.. anticlimactic. All that effort, all that poring over complex feature charts and stressing out about pricing plans, and for what? Just to get the one simple, stupid thing I care about -- using all the memory in my server.

As anybody who's ever looked at SQL Server or Oracle pricing arrangements can verify, parsing segmented "version" pricing charts is a programming discipline unto itself. It's practically a required skill. There are legions of user experience experts at Microsoft and IBM and Google whose entire job is to guide the customer through the labyrinthine pathways of pricing spaghetti.

And while I understand that flexible pricing models can help software developers make more money from their products, and while I support a developer's right to make a nice chunk of change in return for his or her hard work...let's face it. Having five different versions of your product is supply-side hubris. Get over yourself already and give customers one or at most two or three prices they can understand.

Seth Godin and the Death of Print Media

Seth Godin had some strong words today re: the death-rattle of print media:

Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris's magazine) and yes, the New Yorker (Malcolm's magazine)), is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They're going to disappear before you do. I'm not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.

The writing is on the wall for those who are willing to see it. The problem is not so much the arrogance of traditional media as they're being shown the door; it's their lack of foresight. Traditional media has been tardy. Traditional media has been reactive. Traditional media has occasionally been petulant and angry. And now they are paying the price.

Conde Nast, by the way, is the same Corporate Overlord that owns reddit.com, where I've spent entirely too much time, and with which I've always had a love/hate relationship, and about which I'll have (much) more to say in the future...

The Bullshit Generator

The dack.com Web Economy Bullshit Generator is one of those tongue-in-cheek web apps that are so popular nowadays: useless but cute. This one generates bullshit e-business phrases in verb/adjective/noun format. Here are a few pieces of bullshit the tool generated for me:

• repurpose distributed applications
• cultivate e-business channels
• exploit wireless markets
• morph viral niches
• evolve B2C schemas

The great thing about the generator is that some of this bullshit is actually believable, i.e., I could easily see the phrase "exploit wireless markets" or "repurpose distributed applications" appearing in some pretentious whitepaper.

Hi, I'm Stagnated Turd. Nice To Meet You.

I love word games like Scrabble and Boggle, which Wikipedia technically defines as letter arrangement games, a type of (I shit you not) Language-Predicated Educational Game, the existence of which phrase makes me question the reliability of Wikipedia editors, or at least their judgment so far as Standard English is concerned.

I recently saw Word Wars, a documentary about competitive Scrabble. That led me via Google search to Eric Lippert's post about cracking anagrams programatically, which got me to thinking about one of my favorite novelty sites, the Internet Anagram Server (which by the way is an anagram for I, Rearrangement Servant, an awesome anagram if ever there was one).

I've used the Internet Anagram Server quite a bit over the last couple years. Type in a word and it gives you all the possible anagrams for that word, including multi-word anagrams. This is how I know that my name (Daniel Stuttgard) is a perfect anagram for stagnated turd which kind of sucks but oh well. The point is that I'm pretty good at anagrams.