When you buy proprietary software, you get suffering

Posted by Tom Moertel Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:45:00 GMT

After reading about the ordeal a paying customer went through attempting to get Adobe to fix a simple mistake, I was reminded of why I lost my faith in proprietary software. After a bad experience reinstalling Win2k, it dawned upon me that software vendors could waste my time, make me jump through hoops, and sell me barely functional crap, and all I could do, as a paying customer with a valid license, was take it.

This poor guy, for example, ordered a Mac OS X version of Flash CS3 and got sent a Windows version by mistake. Not his fault. But he’s the guy who ended up wasting weeks fighting Adobe’s ineffective customer support trying to get what he paid for in the first place.

This guy is a paying customer. He paid for that treatment.

Look, folks, the world of open source isn’t perfect, but it’s better than that. Since dumping Windows for Linux, here’s how much time I’ve wasted on stupid vendor hoop-jumping: None. Nada. Zero.

In the world of open source, you never have to worry about getting stuck with the wrong version of software. That’s because you are always free to download the right version. No need to ask for vendor approval, fax in your “Letter of Destruction”, or wait for an activation code. You just type in “yum install whatever”, the software installs, and you go back to work. That’s it.

Until I switched to the open-source lifestyle, I never realized how much time (and blood and sweat) I had wasted on the side effects of proprietary software. If you’re still in the proprietary world, take a moment to consider how much time you have wasted and how much time you will waste in the next few years on stupid vendor crap. Maybe it’s time to stop jumping through hoops. Maybe it’s worth your while to give open source a shot.

Go ahead, grab a Fedora Live CD and test drive it for a few days. What have you got to lose but a world of hurt?

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Bloglines doesn't handle inter-element white space properly

Posted by Tom Moertel Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:51:00 GMT

If you’re reading my blog via Bloglines, you may have noticed that some of my posts look terrible, especially when they contain code snippets. I am sorry for that, but it’s not my fault. Bloglines doesn’t handle white space properly.

Here’s the more detailed explanation. When you request one of my feeds in, say, Atom format, you get back a bunch of XML that contains the most-recent posts from my blog. Each post is represented as lovingly crafted HTML, escaped per the Atom specs. When Bloglines gets its hands on this very same HTML, it attempts to scrub it nice and clean – get rid of any naughty bits, you know. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Except when the scrubbing goes horribly, horribly wrong. Which is exactly what happens when Bloglines encounters perfectly legitimate markup that represents syntax-highlighted code snippets.

What does Bloglines do then? It strips out all of the significant white space, turning each block of code into a single, mile-long, unbreakable line of NoSpaceText that forces your web browser to expand the page until it is wide enough to enshroud a small solar system. Then you are forced to scroll forever to read each line of the text column. Ugg.

More specifically, each syntax-highlighted code block is represented in HTML as a preformatted (PRE) text block. Each word in that block is wrapped in a SPAN element whose class attribute indicates the word’s role in the original source code. Keywords get one class, identifiers another, and so on. For example, the code “import List” might be represented as follows:

<span class="kwd">import</span> <span class="name">List</span>

But when Bloglines gets its hands on that markup, it strips out the whitespace between the SPAN elements:

<span class="kwd">import</span><span class="name">List</span>

Thus the markup renders as “importList” when it hits your web browser. Now imagine the same space-denuding bad behavior applied to all of the inter-element white space in a full-length block of code. That’s right, what you end up with is a single, insanely long LineOfUnbreakableText that your web browser chokes on. Again: Ugg.

The folks at Bloglines have had similar problems in the past, most of which have been fixed. I hope they fix this particular problem soon, too.

Until that time, however, you might want to consider other feed readers.

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Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Posted by Tom Moertel Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:26:00 GMT

Recently I visited Amazon.com and was assaulted by a fat stream of marketing blurbs. Amazon tried to convince me that I was actually enjoying an innovative blog written by my favorite authors, each trying to “connect” with me, but I found the attempt to be shallow and annoying. To me, it was still a fat stream of marketing blurbs.

And what do the marketing wizards at Amazon call this blurb stream? Your Plog.

The plog: marketing drivel posing as bloggy goodness

Amazon explains it like this:

Your Plog. Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

I explain it like this:

Your Plog. Amazon.com thinks you want your time and attention delivered to every guy who wrote a book that you somehow indicated interest in. You don’t. Your favorite authors already have blogs, and you already subscribe to the ones you care about. As a result, Your Plog contains nothing but stuff you don’t care about and stuff you might have cared about, had you not read it five times already from other sources. It is an annoying waste of your time and attention, foisted on you by the ravenous marketing weasels at Amazon.com.

For example, whenever the Pragmatic guys come out with a new book on Ruby or Rails, I hear about it from Andy Hunt’s blog, Dave Thomas’s blog, the Riding Rails blog, emails from Andy, ruby-talk postings from Dave, and now – thanks to “my” Plog – Amazon’s home page. (In fact, my Plog contains no fewer than three blurbs from the Pragmatic guys – all stuff I have seen before. I like the Pragmatic Programmers and think Andy and Dave are good guys, but I don’t see what they gain by being associated with Amazon’s Plog-based marketing.)

Other takes on the Plog

Here’s what other people are writing about Plogs. From Changing Way:

When I go to amazon.com these days, I’m shown a “plog.” What does this ugly term mean? It told that it denotes a weblog personalized to me. What it turns out to be is a blog by someone I bought a book from years ago. I’ve nothing against this person or her book. Neither do I think that her blog is bad. It’s just not of interest to me, and so doesn’t belong on Amazon’s home page, or on my “personalized” version of it.

From FactoryCity comes a post entitled Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” – if that’s really the best you could come up with – and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage – should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

Amy Gahran has a more analytical consideration of Plogs in Amazon ‘Plogs’ – What Do You Think?:

I think the idea of plogs may have great potential for relationship-building, if implemented carefully and with an eye toward timeliness and relevance. But frankly, this Amazon implementation feels off-base to me so far…. Well, [an author’s participating in Plogging] could be terrific or terrible, depending on the content quality and relevance [of the author’s contributions].

Bingo. That’s why Amazon’s Plog concept will remain more annoying than useful. Authors do not want Amazon to own what they consider to be their conversations, and thus the Plog will be used as little more than a marketing mailing list.

Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation

It’s the quality of the conversation that counts, and smart authors will not want their conversations to be confined to Amazon. Instead, they will set up their own sites where they can have greater freedom and greater control. That’s where the authors will open themselves to honest conversation, and that’s where the best stuff will occur.

Amazon’s Plogs will get the scraps – bits of the real conversation that have been converted into marketing blurbs and pushed down the Plog channel. In fact, it already seems to be going that way: a lot of “posts” in my Plog appear to have been recycled from real blogs or web sites.

Amazon, count me out

Even though my immediate reaction to discovering “my” Plog was mild disgust, I did try to give it a chance. After having given it a week to grow on me, I am convinced that I want nothing to do with my Plog. It wastes my time and attention and gives me little in return.

Did Amazon Plog you yet? If so, what do you think?

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