I Am Your Customer Not Your Bitch.

The title is one of the comments posted at Giga Om’s post Jobs’ Mea Culpa Is Apple’s Victory.

In the original post Kevin Kelleher muses that the iPhone $100 rebate that Steve J announced was not due to a pricing cock-up or an attempt to revive flagging sales. Rather, it was planned from the start and is a very clever ploy.

As ever, it’s the stupidity of the comments that amuses me. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

From “Bender Robot“

You Wall Street analysts just don’t get it, do you? You don’t know Jack about Apple; just how many of you have predicted Apple’s demise in the last ten years and been absolutely WRONG?

Not a single word on the actual content of the post, just (it rambles bullshit for another three paragraphs) a lame attack on the blogger. Dude. Really. Comment on the content of the post or don’t bother commenting. Oh, and give us a URL where we can see how high and mighty you really aren’t. Oh, what’s that? You don’t want to take your head out of your arse ‘cos you might smell the way the internet really works? Twat.

Or this one from Morfeus:

As an iPhone buyer I feel stupid & ripped off. I feel Apple took me for granted.

here is what folks at Apple need to know - I am your customer not your bitch. I pay you and not the other way round. I need to be shown some respect. Take your 100 and shove it up where the sun dont shine. I aint buying anything Apple in the next 100 years…

So, you bought the iPhone and were probably (there’s nothing in your blog about it) quite happy with it until Stevie J announced the rebate. THEN you feel stupid? Tell you what. If you really don’t want that $100 rebate, send it to me. If everyone that has this attitude sends me their $100 rebate to spend in an apple store then I reckon I would be able to get at least two 24″ iMacs (mmm shiny!) for my desk with the wireless keyboard and mouse and the USB guitar adapter for Garage Band.

Hell, if I get enough of these rebates to buy two 24″ imacs, I’ll create a competition on this very blog and give one away as a prize. Yes, I would. Really.

Give us the Damned URL!

Just a very quick one. If you’re asking for help in the wordpress.com forum then let uss have the URL for your blog (warning if it’s NSFW!). Threads like this one do nothing to help either you or the volunteer trying to help you.

Oh, and read the bloody stickies! If you’re too damned lazy to do that then learn just this:

1. Are you blogging at wordpress.com or do you have your own host?

If you’re at wordpress.com use this forum.

If you’re self-hosted, use this forum.

See, not hard is it!

PHP 5 Required?

The Hypertext Pre-Processor (PHP - Yes, I know it’s all screw, blame the developers!) programming language is what runs most of the web these days. WordPress, forum software such as phpBB, even Blogger, all use PHP as their language of choice for communication both with the end-user’s browser and the MySQL database that holds all of the post and comment information.

30 August 2007 saw the release of PHP Version 5.2.4 for download. Most people will not care. I do. Why?

Well, following a comment on one of my Facebook posts, I started looking at how to develop applications for Facebook. Purely for no other reason than I was being nosy. The link to Dapper that Sanjida gave bore no resemblance to Facebook at all. A quick Google search turned up the Facebook Developers Step-By-Step tutorial. Guess what. PHP5 is required to run through the Tutorial.

There’s a new blogging application called Habari that I would really like to try out. Ok, it’s only at version 0.2 right now but I like the sound of it. Guess what. Yep, PHP5 required.

So, if PHP is currently at 5.2.4 then why the hell are all my hosts still running 4.4.2 or 4.4.3? Am I using shit hosts or are all hosting companies this slow to respond??

It looks like the only way to get something that’s running PHP5 is to upgrade my XAMPP install on my local server. XAMPP is running 5.2.3 which is good enough for me.

Yet Another Reason To Avoid Blogger

We all know that Blogger is the root of all blogging evil. It’s been well documented in the past that Blogger has been hacked and malicious scripts, viruses and malware installed on users’ blogs.

BBC News is reporting today that Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software noticed booby-trapped links on 27 August.

From the report:

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Mr Eckelberry said it was not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal.

You would have thought that after the first three widely publicised takedowns that Google (who own Blogger) would have tightened security on the application. Apparently not.

Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users’ mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail,” said the spokesperson.

The email addresses on mail2blogger accounts are stored in Blogger so that the system can associate the account with the email address. A simple (relatively of course) or an insider would be able to get said email addresses and pass/sell to the “gang”. This would mean two things:

1, The “gang” would be able to post the malicious scripts to blogs via cloaked email.
2. The “gang” would be able to email the script to the owner of the email address infecting their computer and causing it to pass on the script in the usual virus like manner.

I don’t know about others but I try my hardest to avoid blogs hosted by or running Blogger type software. Yes, I may be missing out on decent content but I just really can’t stand the interface, the spam advertising, the porn and the black templates of death.

My suggestions:

1. Avoid any blogs on blogger.
2. If you want to blog, use a decent service. Yes, it’s very restricted but so far there have been no reports of hacking into the system.
3. Get a Mac.

Facebook At Work? No!

In a news report from the BBC today the Trades Union Congress reckons that social networking sites such as FaceBook, MySpace and Bebo should be allowed at work:

Employees should have access to social networking websites such as Facebook during office hours, the TUC has said.

This is utter utter crap. These sites have the “social network” tag for a reason. They are SOCIAL sites, not WORK sites. I don’t know about you, but the only friends I have on Facebook are friends, no work colleagues.

When you are at work, you are there to WORK. If you are surfing Facebook you aren’t working. You are not doing your work, you are reducing productivity and effectively costing the company money.

Some firms have blocked workers’ access to the sites, or disciplined staff for misuse of the internet.

However, the union organisation says it is unreasonable to try to stop staff from having a life outside work and suggests setting guidelines instead.

My employer blocks all the social sites, including Face Book and MySpace, they even block eBay. It’s no bad thing. Since blocking these sites we saw a reduction in internet usage. We also installed monitoring software which has had a similar result. Allowing users to to access non-work related sites simply adversely affects performance.

Stopping staff having a life outside work? What utter crap. The organisation is trying to get the time back that the employee is paid for. Thankfully there is some sense in all this:

Employment Law Advisory Services, which provides advice for employers, said access should be for business use only.

Personally I believe that many more sites should be banned too. The shopping sites like Amazon and play.com would be a good start!

Does your employer block any sites? If they do, what do you think of the ban?

The Highly Inaccurate “Which OS Are You” Quiz

Which OS are You?

OS X? Pah! I’ve never even seen the damned OS! You’re wrong BB Spot! Wrong I tell you!

Yes, Ok, I’m clever. Most of the time. Fashionable? Another BB Spot quiz suggested I was 56% nerdy! Nerdy people are not fashionable. Transparent? hmm…

Encrypted Footer Links in WP Themes

Mark Ghosh over at Weblog Tools Collection recently announced that he would refuse to promote themes with sponsorship links in the footer (or elsewhere). He runs a daily “WordPress Theme Releases” post which promotes new themes for non wordpress.com bloggers.

Matt also implemented an idea for the removal of sponsored themes from the “official” WordPress Theme Repository over at themes.wordpress.net.

Sponsored links are links that are put (normally) into the footer of a blog. Whenever an unsuspecting reader clicks the link the registered owner of the link (usually the theme designer through an affiliate program) gets paid a small amount. If a theme is popular (say 10,000 sites use it) and each one of those sites gets the link clicked once per day, well you do the maths for your currency. The other benefit to the sponsor (the person that owns the site the link directs to) is that when the search engines spider the site they will see the link and (in simple terms) bump the sponsor site up another notch.

Personally I think this is fantastic. Many thousands of designers and programmers spend many thousands of hours every year coding to improve WordPress. And WordPress is Open Source. Open Source means that you should never have to pay for the software. Some people see that as a great opportunity to make a free buck or three (it’s never likely to be more than that!) and I, among others don’t see why they should.

I stumbled across a blog post this afternoon that gives methods for encrypting the code for links within the WP footer. Rather than put the link in clear type in the footer (the usual method) it’s encrypted into a different file which makes it MUCH harder to find and remove.

What does this mean for Mark and Matt? Well, nothing really. If anyone tried to upload their theme to the repository it would be refused. That said, Matt and Mark are not the only ones offering themes. There are (again) thousands of sites offering “free” themes with much less scruples than the “official” sites.

Bloggers are simple folks, they like things easy. Making a link difficult to remove is just going to piss them off, create yet more work for the folks in the wordpress.org forums and generally get a bad reputation for the theme designer. Please, if you’re designing a theme, don’t put in the sponsored links (I just remove them straight away anyway) and really don’t encrypt the damned things!

Block IE? Don’t Be Stupid!

This is a direct copy of the post over at my main blog. This is intentional.

Pressing that damned Stumble! button for yet another evening’s inane entertainment brought me to a forum thread for a Linux community called Open Addict. The first post in the thread says:

I’ve blocked Internet Explorer from viewing our front page and will implement that code on the rest of our site as we roll out the new format.

I’m sorry, you’ve done what??? You’ve blocked IE? Ooookay…

The reason, which you can read for yourself if you fire up IE and browse the front page, is that the dynamic menu code and other formatting issues looked like pure crap or didn’t work at all with Internet Explorer. Everything looks and works fine with Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc… but not IE and I’m sick and tired of hacking and tweaking things because IE has rendering bugs and doesn’t adhere to web standards like better browsers.

So, rather than make your website cross-browser compatible you’re just going to block one of the major browsers? Actually, your website doesn’t display properly with Firefox. I am running FF 2.0.0.5 (updated automatically today) and your front page has a horizontal scroll bar. Okay, it’s just 20 pixels or so, but it really is a sign of crap design. No website should have a horizontal scroll bar.

What’s the big deal? Well, believe it or not, most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE. This could hurt out traffic potentially, but I’m just fed up with IE rendering issues. So if you’re an IE user, I hope you’re not offended by any of this - it’s nothing against you as a user. Just please install and use Firefox or Opera if you use Windows. Better yet, use Linux and all of your dreams will come true.

The Big Deal? You freely admit that “most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE”. Does that not tell you something? Most Linux people are the advocates of the OS. They believe they “have seen the light” and are bent on converting the unwashed masses away from the evil of Microsoft and IE. And then you block IE visitors from seeing the “Linux Goodness”? That’s the big deal.

I have ranted about this before as it really gets up my nose. I agree that Internet Explorer is the root of browser evil, however, it’s the most used browser. Let’s do some stats:

Since 02 July (when I started running Google Analytics) I have had 2,992 visitors. 2,992 is 100% of my visitors. 2,064 or 68.98% of those visitors are using, yep, Internet Explorer. 771 or 25.77% use Firefox. The other 157 or just 5.25% visits are made up of 7 different browsers. Guess what’s on the bottom. Yep, Konquerer. Just 1 visit.

With almost 70% of my visitors using IE, If I would to block the browser then 70% of my measly 150ish visits per day would disappear. Do I want to risk that? No.

So, want my recommendations? Heres’s two:

1. Put a bloody big banner at the top of the page that simply states “Internet Explorer Sucks” and recommend alternative browsers.

Or (and this is much better)

2. Simply allow “Most People” to visit by fixing the sodding scripts, and menus.

There are millions of websites out there that don’t need funky scripts and shit to make their websites work with IE. All you are doing is re-enforcing the opinion (Wrong I know, but still it’s the consensus) that Linux users are all geeks, nerds, fanboys. or all three. Linux should not be elitist, yet you seem to think it is.

Folks - If you’re here because you got blocked by the Open Addict website, try this Linux Operating System instead.