Author Archives: daniel

PNG! PNG!

I’ve been discovering just how great PNG is for screendumps. It’s not lossy, yet it compresses particularly well for screendumps off Windows… even when there’s those gradient title bars that have become fashionable over the last couple of years.

For instance, the Path Not Found dump out of Windows explorer the other day:

  • PNG 22,140 bytes
  • JPG (saved out of Photopaint at compression 100 out of 255, noticeable loss of quality in the letters – See right) 76,824 bytes
  • GIF (converted to 256 colours, so some colour lost) 22,345 bytes
  • GIF (converted to 16 colours, so LOTS of colour lost) 17,285 bytes

Okay, so the 256 colour GIF is only marginally bigger, but to produce it you have to fiddle the colours, and of course it uses the proprietary LZW algorithm for which Unisys once would have wanted all our souls. PNG is just a save, no having to even think about it. Coolness.

Web site globalisation

It’s one thing to centralise your web site to a global location for efficiency, but how about a little customisation to allow for different countries. For instance, how many global web sites get you to search a location database, and come up with state names which are two characters, because the US programmers didn’t factor in that other countries would use anything else, and the local operations are too lazy to insist on it being fixed?

This was from Avis, looking for Australian offices. Hertz did the same. Budget didn’t. I’m almost amazed the postcodes didn’t have an extra leading zero.

At least this one has managed to avoid displaying the phone numbers as (xxx) xxx xxxx when it should be (xx) xxxx xxxx (like my old answering machine used to). Chucking the extra 0 after the 61 wasn’t particularly helpful though, as use one or the other depending on where you are… never both. Not unusual though.

Reminds me of an email exchange I had with CitySearch when they first launched in Australia, asking them why they were showing event dates in mm/dd/yyyy format. Sure enough, it was because they’d got the software from the US, and hadn’t figured out how to change it yet. Pretty shoddy.

XP SP2

I don’t run Windows XP (my PCs are a couple of years old and happy on Win2K… I don’t feel compelled to lumber them with the beautiful XP), but a lot of people I know do. I want to give one of them a copy of SP2 to install, to save a long boring troublesome download via dialup.

Problem? The SP2 download page lets you install it via Automatic Updates or Windows Update. Or you can order a CD. You can order it in any country, not just North America (good) but it takes four to six weeks to arrive (bad). If the average unpatched computer can be compromised in 20 minutes, in four weeks it could be compromised 2,016 times. (Okay okay it’s on dialup, so it wouldn’t be connected all that time.) Gimboids. Even the Download.com page for it pointed me back to Microsoft.

Happily, I did find it on an APC Magazine CD. I also eventually found the Butch Microsoft Technet Geeky Professional Developers’ download page.

More for GMail

GMail is still in beta, so little changes creep in now and then. Haven’t seen this one before: a warning on what is actually an innocent message.

GMail warning

As it happens, the Learn More link wasn’t very helpful, just going to some stuff describing how to recognise a scam.

Money

It’s a few months old, but this article is a great read — telling the story of (some of) the history of Microsoft Money.

During the heady dot-com days, when all reason was tossed to the wind, Money’s success was measured against the same metrics that other MSN properties (read: “websites”) used.
…
Metrics like minutes viewed per month. Like ad revenue. Like click-through. Stickiness. I am not making this up. I sat through meetings where we were asked to research ways in which to increase the amount of time that users spent in Money. Increase the amount of time!

File not found

Back when IE4 came out, Microsoft trumpeted the integration of the Web and the desktop. Active Desktop, remember that? One of the other things they did was to make Windows Explorer look a bit more like the Web, and make Internet Explorer capable of doing Windows Explorer-type things.

I was doubtful that it was very helpful, but in any case they went too far. We now have the ridiculous situation of Windows Explorer showing the following message if you try to go manually (eg by typing) to a path that doesn’t exist.

Windows path not found error

The path doesn’t exist. Adjusting my browser settings is not going to help.

Refreshing or trying again later is not going to help.

Checking my Internet connection settings is not going to help, nor is getting Windows to do its magical check of my connection settings.

Checking if I have 128-bit security it’s definitely not going to help, for F’s sake.

Click the Back button? Try another link? I wasn’t clicking on a link!

And it says it can’t find a server, or had a DNS error. Bullshit. WhatTF use is that?

(This was in Windows 2000/IE6. Have they fixed this in Windows XP?)

Spyware

The US House of Reps has passed an anti-spyware bill, which appears to ban a lot of insidious activities such as hijacking browsers. Congress still needs to pass it.

It sounds like a positive move, though I wonder how much of the spy (eg user tracking etc) part of these things will still be legal, hidden away in the small-print of user licence agreements, happily accepted by Mr/Ms Average User merrily clicking on “Yes” when installing Kazaa or whatever.

It doesn’t necessarily help those of us elsewhere in the world, but as is generally the case a lot of the evil bastard companies doing this kind of crap are US-based, and hopefully other governments would look at introducing similar laws.

The problem with Fairfax

A while back The Age (and other Fairfax Digital sites) introduced a free registration requirement to get to read pages with any meat on them. I can kinda understand their motivation in this, it probably makes their web advertising more valuable knowing who’s looking at what.

Three problems with it though. Firstly it discourages casual viewers. While it’s relatively invisible once you’re registered, it is a pain to have to remember yet another e-mail/password combination, especially if you move around a lot. Have pity on the expat Aussies roaming from Net cafe to Net cafe.

Secondly Google News is now counting some Fairfax sites as “subscription,” putting off more casual viewers. (Curiously the SMH is labelled as subscription, but The Age isn’t.)

Thirdly one day last week I tried to look at an article in The Age and the authentication system had broken down, barring entry. Surely they should realise that they’re in the content-delivery business, not the web subscription business, and if the authentication system fails, waive the requirement to check my logon, and just show me the damn page.

Oh yeah, and why is their up-to-the-minute fast-breaking Technology Daily e-mail bulletin filled with stories that are two days old?

Office Clipboard

I’m used to the Windows Clipboard, which has one spot to put things in. Copy/paste. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s quick.

Office ClipboardDamn this expanded Office Clipboard that comes with Office 2000, with its extraneous toolbar turning itself on and plonking itself right at the top, screwing up all your menus. Damn its 12 spots which fill up and then interrupt you to tell you they’re full. I don’t care if they’re full. Yes of course I want to copy this and bump some old long-forgotten thing from an hour ago off the list.

I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. Is there some way of turning this bloody thing off?

Yes, thankfully there is.

(Thankfully in Office XP, it can be done from the Options screen.)