Entries Tagged 'tech' ↓

1- The forgotten password

We all forget passwords. So you click on that link on the login form, and you’re greeted with a blank text field for your email address.

And it’s usually blank, even if you already entered an email on the login page. How stupid is that?

2 - Is that VISA or MasterCard?

It happens every time I have to give my card information over the phone. On nearly every website with a checkout form, you usually have a drop-down.

That’s stupid, because if you have a credit card number, you already know who issued it. Wikipedia has a list of credit card prefixes. Mastercard starts with 51-55, VISA with 4.

3 - 90210, that’s in New York, right?

A simple search will tell you that’s Beverly Hills, CA. This one’s not nearly as trivial as my first two points to implement. Still, asking someone someone to input city, postal code and state is annoying, pointless and adds the possibility of error.

4 - English or Français on splash pages

Our browsers already tell servers what language they want pages served in. We have cookies to track these types of preferences. Yet the Canadian government still insists that every time I go to a department web site, I’m asked: Français / English?

Taking their cue from government, businesses do the same thing, which leads me to my last pet peeve.

5 - ATMs suck

Besides their outrageous fees, every time I visit another bank’s ATM, they ask me the language question. And then they ask me what operation I want to do, with only ONE choice: Withdrawal.

Pretty stupid, no? But my bank tops that. No language choice - but it asks me which account I want to withdraw money from. Even though I only have one chequing account with them.

There are a lot of small details that can add up to a pleasant, friction-less experience. Most of them don’t take that much effort. I believe it’s a responsibility on our part to create interfaces that are as simple as possible, so that people feel empowered.

Anyone have other examples they can share?

When AngesQuebec announced $750k of funding from the Québec government, I asked what the justification was for giving money to already wealthy investors.

Austin Hill is one of the network’s members, as well as one of Standout Jobs’ 3 founders. I pinged him, teasing him about getting government financing. He argued that while he’s generally opposed to the idea of subsidies, it makes sense in this specific case. In our discussion, a few facts came out that changed my mind about the project:

-$750,000 is over 3 years, after which the network should be self-sustaining
-AngesQuebec aims to have a network of 200 angels
-Over the next 5 years, $50 million should be invested in 120 companies, creating 800 jobs
-Other angel networks have gone bankrupt trying to bootstrap from member fees.

AngesQuebec is a non-profit, trying to build a public infrastructure good - something markets tend to fail dismally on. They are currently all volunteer run, and seeking their first paid staff. Hopefully this hire can improve communications and start the process of recruiting angels in order to grow to a sustainable size.

Our workplace uses Campfire for its group chat. We get everything in there from water cooler discussions to build messages.

It was awesome at first, and quickly started to get very annoying once our numbers grew from 4 to 8. The constant interruptions became quite distracting, with Growl continually notifying me of every bit of banter that might need attention.

Upgrading to Leopard meant I could apply a hack to get better growl notifications.

Since we had started to refer to each other by initial in the chatroom, I modified the script to only pop up a notification when I was concerned.

It’s only been an hour so far, but I don’t feel the need to compulsively check the room anymore - what a relief.

I had dismissed Heroku as a toy after getting my first invite, a glorified web-based Texmate to let you code rails applications.

After Ruby Inside mentioned their new API, I gave it another look and had to change my mind. It looks like they’re set to really nail the issue of rails deployment and scaling. A git mirror, with deployment and scaling - for free!

Should OpenId support in Rails ever get really worked out (see #10604), it will become trivially easy to code and deploy small applications. Ideally, a programmer’s time is spent on modeling the business domain and creating a simple UI - not on incidental complexity of project management overhead.

On a recent project to track my wine tastings, I have been using git along with a plain text file to keep track of bugs and to-dos. bugs.txt file got checked in to the git repo; it’s simple and It Just Works (TM).

If dealing with capistrano and server configuration was getting you down on your week-end projects, check out Heroku. For your next week-end app, it might just be the thing - and they promise to keep growing capacity so if your baby grows up you may be able to stay with them.

Aaah, never having to worry about deployment again.

At Montreal On Rails #7 one presenter had to use Marc-André’s computer to do his presentation and was surprised by the fact Textmate wasn’t showing the vendor/ folder.

If you freeze all your gems in vendor/ as we do, search becomes so slow as to be unusable. Here’s the pattern to use to avoid the vendor folder:

!.*/(\.[^/]*|CVS|vendor|log|_darcs|_MTN|\{arch\}|blib|.*~\.nib|
.*\.(framework|app|pbproj|pbxproj|xcode(proj)?|bundle))$


Plug that in Preferences-> Advanced -> Folder References -> Folder Pattern

The downside is that if you want to search for a file in vendor you have to open a new instance of textmate

I took a week vacation from Standoutjobs, which of course means spending some time hacking on personal projects.

One task was to scrape the SAQ site to get the entire database of wines. Downloading with Ruby and wget / curl is child’s play. Building a scraper to retrieve data from those files should be just as easy - see e.g. Ruby Screen-Scraper in 60 Seconds. Basically, copy the XPath for the data you want from firebug, and paste inside your script - and you’re pretty much done.

This is where I hit gotcha #1. Firebug uses Firefox’s normalized html, which results in an extra tbody in the XPath, even if it’s not there in the HTML received by curl. “Oh, no problem, I’ll just remove the tbody from the Xpath”. That was wishful thinking: sometimes nested tables on saq.com have a tbody on only one of the tables, so you really have to check.

So now I’m happily going through the 7195 files that were downloaded. Some throw nil exceptions for elements that aren’t present. I fix the script, re-run the import. Rinse, repeat.

Until of course, I hit gotcha #2. Unlike missing data or XPath issues, I get this befuddling error:

TypeError: can't convert nil into String from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6/lib/hpricot/parse.rb:51:in `scan'

A bit of google-fu reveals it is a known bug: Hpricot can’t handle some files that are multiples of 16384 bytes. The fix is easy once you know:

echo ' ' >> my_specially_sized_file

Through the process I added links to del.icio.us with ‘gotcha’ and ‘hpricot’ as keywords, and noticed others had done the same thing for other projects. That could be a very handy resource when starting a project with a new set of tools.

This thread is worth following. In the past couple days:

-Jamais Cascio posted an interesting essay on “The Big Picture“, looking at the important drivers for the next 20 years.

-Prag Programmers published “Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide” (See O’Reilly’s post)

-Schneier posts about using cell phones to detect nuclear radiation. Those in power will want this to detect terrorists, but it will also shine a light on the transport of nuclear fuel and waste.

The futurists are theorizing, the alpha geeks are playing and writing software. It won’t be long until we get a political crisis because of data that citizens weren’t supposed to collect.

We lived through crunch mode and the site is live. Since we’re no longer in stealth mode,  I can now tell people what I do. Well, after I kvetch a bit.
We found out the issue we were having had been reported 4 days ago as Bug #10926. We have only managed to replicate it in our production environment, but not in staging. The consequence for us was a 404 (page not found) error when logged in users tried applying for a job. While we did work around it, let’s say that error pretty much sucks for an app that’s supposed to help companies hire people.

It was a horrible type of bug to track down. The only difference we could see? More Mongrel instances, and a 64-bit version of the OS.

• Is it in Rails’ incredibly complex routing code?
• Our own subdomain support?
• Is Capistrano doing a clean restart and getting all the Mongrels running the same version?
• Is caching an issue?

Unable to replicate the bug on staging and given it only appears randomly (1/3 to 1/2 of the refreshes, both hard and soft),  it’s the kind of experience you want to avoid on launch day.Anyhow, the site is live and the inflow of bugs has slowed. We’re still madly fixing any issues as they get reported, and we’ll have refinements over the next few days before we tackle new functionality.

Overall this is a great success. I’m happy to be working with this ‘A team’, and will have more stuff to share as soon as things calm down.

I was told Bell sucks so much that I have to go with Videotron. After I ordered a package online, they said they would call within 24 hours.

A call came from Synergy, one of their subcontractors known to call with dead air and hang up. I called back, gave some info to a person who could not speak clearly. They put me on hold 4 minutes, and disconnected me. The next person also disconnected me, after a total of 20 minutes spent on the phone.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Before agreeing to pay $136 deposits, I’d like to know when a company will deign connecting their service. Is that really too much to ask?

Recommendations of ISPs that don’t suck - or just suck less - would be heartily appreciated.

Should I buy a Meraki Mini, sign up with FON, or is there a more effective way to speed up free, ubiquitous wifi?

Mob Rules inspired me. If you haven’t yet, I recommend doing so. In that article, Mark Pesce mentions the Meraki Mini, and how that could be game-changing for telcos.

There’s a lot to like about the Minis. They’re not completely open-source, but they could run CUWiN software and are cheap. FON seems to have better backing (Sequoia, Google, Skype), but their marketing bugs me (Is that a for-profit trying too hard to be hip, calling itself a ‘movimiento’?).

My understanding is that Ile-sans-Fil isn’t trying to blanket the city with free wireless. Someone please correct me if I have that wrong. While I like what they are doing, I’m attracted to the idea of free wireless everywhere.

We don’t know who will use these technologies, or how. Pesce uses the example of Kerala fishermen, and there’s the example of homeless people using a phone number to improve their condition. The applications I have in mind for ubiquitous wireless - location-based services and augmented reality - might not be the ‘killer-app’. If there are any social aplications for these, I think there’s a good chance they’ll be built in a city like Montreal.