What idiot designed the email component of Lotus Notes? How is it possible that something so broken can be so popular?

Who decided that replying to an email with an attachment inside it should send the attachment back to the original sender? It’s in my Sent Mail; I don’t need to see it again. Waste of space and bandwidth!

And who decided that when replying it should ignore the From address and use the Sender address instead? Yeah sure I sent it from my Gmail, but it was on behalf of xyz; replies should go to xyz!

And why does it sometimes screw up email names and addresses? I’ve just seen something CCd (unsuccessfully, I assume) to John.Smith@company.comJohn.Smith — WTF?!

(And elsewhere in Lotus Notes… have you seen the state of the permalinks it produces in web sites?! I mean really, does anybody think something like http://www.doi.vic.gov.au/DOI/Internet/transport.nsf/AllDocs/CF55EBCAB40CEB3DCA2571F80004823E?OpenDocument is a sensible URL to present to human beings?)

H:\ says N:\ is not accessible.

Sometimes using the window title for your dialog title isn’t such a hot idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of SecondLife. And I know some people are really into it. But wandering around an empty virtual world is pretty underwhelming.

This article about the success of Facebook’s applications platform and its growing population got me thinking… with Facebook’s population booming, and SecondLife’s slumping, I reckon some of those organisations that spent a bundle setting up shop in Second Life must be wondering why they didn’t put their efforts into Facebook instead.

How much taxpayers’ money did the ABC waste building that island, for instance? We do know that a City of Melbourne project cost around $100,000.

It’s not surprising the ABC Island has had barely any visitors: some figures (from February) suggest there are only about 3000 Australians on SL. Compare that with almost 2 million on Facebook, and I know where I’d be building my applications. Do you want to potentially reach a tenth of the population (and growing) or 0.015% of it?

Now, if Facebook come up with a virtual meeting place to chat to your friends (and friends of friends), then I reckon they’d kill SecondLife stone dead.

• 6/9/2007: If SL is really becoming so deserted, I wonder if it has virtual tumbleweeds?

I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries – the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error – “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without javascript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” – with javascript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They inforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

It took them about a fortnight, but 2Clix have finally issued the Notice Of Discontinuance on their action against Whirlpool.

Bungie has split from Microsoft, so maybe Halo on the DS isn’t an impossibility after all?

There’s a lot of classic games showing up on mobile phones now. I haven’t tried this, but here’s one I used to love: Archon.

I recently got a new PC at work, which for the first time has an LCD screen and ClearType turned on. Switching to my usual option of using Times New Roman for my code editing… Without judging the quality of the actual code, I must say, it’s beautiful to look at. Reminds me of that WordPress slogan, “Code is poetry.”

It’s a real pleasure to finally be working with a PC that’s fast enough for my current needs, too.

(Yeah, I’m a bit behind on getting all the points in Jeff Attwood’s Programmers’ Bill of Rights…)

Memo to self: Turn off ClearType when doing screen dumps. Well, at least the important ones.