Awful Verbiage from Xbox Live
Jan 20th
Horrible Verbiage
Pretty self explanatory here but this doesn’t even make sense! All I did was add some points I didn’t just signup for an account…
This whole things started as I wasn’t able to use any of my current cards in Xbox Live. I don’t know if it was because there were already “pending” charges on the card or what but I had to use the website and enter a completely new card in order to add some points… Pain in the ass!
Federal Gun Laws Make Me Laugh
Jan 6th
Ok so perusing through the North Carolina gun laws I came across the Federal gun laws and laughed my ass off after reading this little bit:
C. Eligible Persons
1. Federal Law Requirements
As a general rule, the following categories of persons are ineligible to receive or
possess a firearm under federal law:
…
d. The person is an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana, or any
depressant, stimulant, or narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance;
…
“By the books” if you use caffeine or tobacco you are not allowed to own a hand gun… as you are most certainly addicted to both… chemically in fact and they are both controlled substances.
Asheville Snowstorm – December of 2009
Dec 22nd
I would have blogged sooner but my girlfriend and I were without power since Friday at 4:00… Perhaps later I’ll chronicle my adventures but for now here’s the visual story of the disaster that was my road. Enjoy!
Glad I didn't use the front door!
I don't think my car is going anywhere…
This is my driveway… There were about 12 trees knocked down.
Ah, Home sweet home…
Further down the road…
More Trees Down
A little further down the road…
Alexa, Compete, and Other Educated Guesses
Dec 15th
Hey you! Yeah you, the one obsessing over your Alexa rank… you CEO, you “webmaster”, you marketing guy, you whomever you are…
STOP
Seriously… you people are driving me crazy with your Alexa rank whoring. It’s the same few things over and over and over again that I hear:
- WTF my traffic went up like eight fold and my Alexa ranking hasn’t changed!
- OMG my Alexa ranking dropped like four million places but my traffic is still the same!
And I always answer with the same reply… Who fucking cares?!
First off you need to understand that the Alexa number has no bearing on your business in the slightest. It is a reflection of your business… and a cloudy one at that. I know people that I swear would take a loss in traffic if it meant a gain on Alexa. Where are your priorities?!
Second you need to understand that It’s an educated guess as to how your site may or may not being doing based on a very very very very small sample size of the entire Internet. Do you even know a single person who has the Alexa Toolbar installed?
The last time I even HEARD of someone having the Alexa Toolbar installed I about punched them in the face for browsing my admin area (you know who you are) and having it prefollow all the delete links… luckily we did nightly backups.
Compete is even worse. I have a property that was closed down in 2007 and they show I peaked my traffic in January of 2009… need I say more?
What about Hitwise vs comScore vs Nielsen?
Save your fucking cash… These giants will bend you over backwards, upside down, and rail you un-lubed till you’re broken and bleeding. Ok that was a little strong but seriously… There are very few companies that should be subscribing to any of these services. Unless you’re in the SEO market (and I mean providing SEO to clients), online marketing, or another broad sweeping / far reaching online company, you DON’T NEED IT.
You would do better to focus on improving your business rather than comparing yourself against your competitors… the real kicker is you’re comparing educated guesses against other educated guesses about numbers that really don’t matter! If your competitor did 50% more sales than you are you going to know why from those numbers? No, you’re going to spend 200 hours looking at the numbers over and over again.
Nothing Else Matters
Instead, why not try looking at your competitors from the end user / customer’s point of view. What do they offer that I don’t? How easy is it for me to checkout / purchase on their site compared to mine? Then take an analytical top level approach to comparing your business. Where do they advertise? Where does their traffic come from? Do they have an affiliate program? One step further on the technical side you start asking… What is their page load time compared to mine? Where do they host? Do they use a CDN?
These are questions whose answers matter…
Don’t pay $30k – $50k a year for a service when you’re only interested in one market… hire someone full time to do nothing but run numbers for you. It would be the same cost in the end except you’d employ more people and if you really wanted you could have them install the Alexa tool bar to bump up your fucking rank… groan
/endrant
Smarty Templates… Get That Shit Out of My House
Dec 15th
If the title wasn’t strong enough for you, allow me to rephrase. Anyone that thinks Smarty is a good idea to implement should be shot in the face (or at least immediately removed from all developer responsibilities) because I’m tired of it junking up the tubes…
First of all there is absolutely NO reason anyone should use Smarty. The “Why Use It” page at Smarty says, “One of Smartys primary design goals is to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation.” That’s complete bullshit… there is no separation of application code from presentation with Smarty. In fact, in every implementation I’ve seen there is more logic mixed in with the templates than any other method… Including one template in a loop inside of another template is complete fail right off the bat and that’s the entire premise of Smarty.
Let’s break it down by their bullet points:
Designers can’t break application code. They can mess with the templates all they want, but the code stays intact. The code will be tighter, more secure and easier to maintain.
Look I’ve been doing this for 10 fucking years and I’ve never worked with designers that even break up their own designs (I know they exist) let alone dick around in templates… LET ALONE WHO KNOW TEMPLATING ENGINE LIKE SMARTY!
Errors in the templates are confined to the Smartys error handling routines, making them as simple and intuitive as possible for the designer.
OMG really? I can has ANOTHER error system to feed me where the problems supposedly are? Except this time it’ll be less robust and more cryptic?! And what happens when a developer removes an “assign” from the logic end? They get to yell at the designer to fix it? Who knows how to fix it anyway? The developer that doesn’t have to touch the template or the designer that doesn’t have to touch the logic? Some mythical breed of designer who not only knows Smarty but also knows PHP?!
With presentation on its own layer, designers can modify or completely redesign it from scratch, all without intervention from the programmer.
Oh you mean like designers do with regular XHTML/CSS in every other system? You know… by separating out your controllers from your view using… OMG… PHP?!
Programmers aren’t messing with templates. They can go about maintaining the application code, changing the way content is acquired, making new business rules, etc. without disturbing the presentation layer.
See the part above where this is accomplished by… PHP!
Templates are a close representation of what the final output will be, which is an intuitive approach. Designers don’t care how the content got to the template. If you have extraneous data in the template such as an SQL statement, this opens the risk of breaking application code by accidental deletion or alteration by the designer.
Here we see why Smarty is so fail… They put SQL statements in their templates before they created Smarty?! Way to be MVC guys! Which, I’m guessing, is what they’re trying to be with the Smary system itself? So essentially we had some people that didn’t know the first thing about the MVC design pattern up and decide to design a templating engine for PHP that would be more MVC like… awesome.
You are not opening your server to the execution of arbitrary PHP code. Smarty has many security features built in so designers won’t breach security, whether intentional or accidental. They can only do what they are confined to in the templates.
LOL, what?! Your designers don’t have access to all the files in the dev environment? and you don’t version control your source? and all your designers know how to code as well?! Look if your company / team falls into the three categories above there is no way a templating engine for PHP is going to solve your problems… it’ll just complicate things.
What have you accomplished?
So essentially what you accomplished by using Smarty is to do something which you already could have done using only PHP and that is inherently done in good MVC code. Except this time you get to load an entire templating engine… and here’s my favorite part. You get to load every single template into memory and then parse through all of it to look for special tags! And then when you find the special tags you need to perform their actions whether it’s printing a value, running some pseudo-PHP code contained in the template, or my personal favorite… loading another fucking template!!!
The first time I see a conditional to determine what additional template should be used (if any, ugh) inside a Smarty template I want to smash the developer that wrote it IN THE FACE!
Summary
Here’s the short version… By using Smarty you incur massive amounts of overhead by having to read every template into memory and parse through them all looking for special tags. You also introduce an additional pseudo language requiring developers and designers to know this additional language while making your code base less readable by anyone other than who wrote it. You increase development time for all projects because you now have to use extra methods, variables, etc… and you are completely dependent on another system for your code base to work…
For all of these negative aspects what do you get?! A code base which is less scalable and less readable… congratulations, you built a better mousetrap.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Worst Game Matching EVER
Dec 10th
CoD: MW2 is quite possibly the best multiplayer FPS game ever made however it has one of the worst matching systems ever seen. This problem is amplified if you try to party with ANYONE… even adding a single person to your group causes massive headaches. I just tried playing with a friend of mine during my lunch break and over the course of an hour I was able to play … two games… that’s it, two fucking games. Talk about a waste of time.
While I’m at it I’d like to rant about some pretty fucking key features that were over looked in development that cause more frustration in this game than anything else…
First up, hey devs! How about checking to see if you’re in harm’s way BEFORE you spawn someone in? Seriously how fucking hard is that and how did that make it through testing and out the door? I’ve spawned in only to get killed by a “poorly placed” care package, air strikes, AC130 rounds impacting, shit I’ve even spawned in only to die because I was IN someone’s line of fire. In fact now that I think about it, the whole spawning system sucks. If you play Modern Warfare 2 I’m sure you’ve run into the scenario of stalking a small group of enemy players with cold blooded pro on only to have a team mate suddenly spawn in AHEAD of where you are just to the flank of a group of enemy. Which of course sets off the alarm, the bloodbath ensues and whoever is left standing is left standing… real fucking great when you’re trying to be stealthy about it. So yeah, the entire spawning system is major fail.
Second, why the fuck haven’t they released a patch yet for the exploits that are running rampant. Instead they threaten everyone with the ban hammer. I think it would be a lot more enjoyable if you said you’re not banning anyone so that people could at least be on an even playing field. If someone is exploiting with the Javelin then let us all do it. Instead we have to sit idly by and hope it doesn’t happen, or fill out a useless report, or drop the game (take the loss) and start another one…
This is partly why I was only able to play two games over the course of an hour… I had about 6 games fail to start in one manner or another. I spent about 15 minutes in “finding a new host” screens, I played 30% of about two games before someone on one of the teams set off a nuke because they were being boosted by clan mates on the opposite team, and the rest of the time I was in menu systems… talk about a complete waste of time.
Third, and last, I only play ground war… do you know why? Because I like to play with friends and talk to them without being berated by 11 year olds and 18 year olds that act like 11 year olds over the fucking mic the entire time I’m playing. I don’t want to listen to whinny bitches, douchbags who think they’re cool because they can rip on people behind the mask of anonymity, and asshats who call everything “gay”… I like to call them “gayers”. So I’m stuck playing one game mode if I want to be able to talk to my friends while I play, that’s fucking fantastic.
Oh and one last thing about the shittiest fucking game matching system in the history of online gaming. I’m tired of getting the same fucking map over and over and over and over again, IN A ROW! Because your PoS game host system keeps crashing, dropping people out, matching you to a server and then dropping your team mates out (without telling the party leader), failing to connect, or whatever other bullshit that causes you to have to join a new “session” where you are promptly served up TDM Terminal or TDM Highrise. I don’t even fucking like playing TDM but I’m stuck playing it because there’s no “Ground War: Domination” or Ground War anything else for that matter…
If you’re looking for a clue as to why so many people play Ground War it’s not because of the increased team sizes it’s because you can talk to your friends while you play. Why the FUCK would you want to subject yourself to the general chat on XBox Live when you play a game?! Just let me talk to my friends isn’t that what the whole experience is about?
Book Publisher Fail
Dec 9th
Brendan sent me this article: Two Major Publishers To Hold Back E-Books
Yet another industry failing to get with the program…
First up:
“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”
The right place for what? for you to make the most profit while desperately clinging on to the last remaining shreds of your ancient and outdated business model? Aaaaand you need to do this now because soon it won’t be an option? If you really think it’s going to stay an option because you switched now you should find a new job that’s not effected by the digital world. Perhaps working as a farrier because I doubt that’s going to change much…
Next we have some more nonsense:
David Young, chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, said that Hachette, beginning in January or February, will delay the e-book publication of the vast majority of its titles for three to four months.
“We’re doing this to preserve our industry,” Mr. Young said. “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.”
At least this guy doesn’t sounds like he believes his own hype about preserving the model. Instead he tries a creative spin, throwing in the word authors to make it sound like this is going to effect the authors. The only thing that’s going to effect the amount these authors get paid is these jackasses slowing down sales to sell more books that have a higher profit margin. The author will still make the same amount (most authors will anyway that have a standard contract). If they were embracing the digital market they would probably be making even more money as the number of books they sell would be higher… I’m not 100% sure on today’s ebook contracts with authors but I’m willing to bet they’re in favor of the publishers… And what is the deal with “bargain basement prices”? You know, if you’re selling me an ebook that costs zero dollars to manufacture then yes, yes I expect a significantly reduced price.
And now for some quotes from the sensible crowd:
“In the Internet age you don’t enjoy the same degree of control,” said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, LLC, an online media measurement company in Beverly Hills, Calif. “You can’t create artificial scarcity by withholding content in one form and making it available later.”
An Amazon spokesman said, “Authors get the most publicity at launch and need to strike while the iron is hot. If readers can’t get their preferred format at that moment, they may buy a different book or just not buy a book at all.”
Thank you Eric (and nice name btw) and unnamed spokesperson of Amazon; the only thing this model is going to do is drive people to pirate the ebook and then they’ll never end up purchasing your product AT ALL… ebook or otherwise. I’ve got an idea, let’s release music albums on CD and then 4 months later we’ll sell the electronic copy! There’s no way that would effect the number of people who acquire an illegal copy OR effect the sales numbers across the board.
The final piece or retardation in this article:
Mr. Garland suggested that just as consumers now pay 99 cents for a song they want instead of $15 for an album, they may come to feel the same way about $25 hardcover best sellers. Once they become accustomed to paying $9.99 for a book, they won’t go back, he said.
Wow, analogy fail… CD album price is to digital track price as hardback price is to ebook price? First of all, there’s no fucking way I’d pay $25 for a new book and obviously I’m in the majority here. Book prices have been increasing at a much faster pace than inflation and you’re offering the same damn thing you were 15 years ago. I started buying used books almost exclusively because of the massive price difference. I remember when softcovers were $4.99 and I used to read all the time. Now they’re over three times that and I don’t read nearly as much as I used to.
So what I got out of that article is a few book publishers (so far) are flailing about, crying a lot, and trying to save their entire market instead of taking a few hints from… I don’t know, every other fucking industry that’s been effected by the digital age. I can hear them now because they all sound the same, “but our industry is different, we’re not the same, whaaaaaaaaaaa”.
Google Chrome for Mac
Dec 8th
A short post this time around… I just wanted to make sure people landing here (for whatever obscure reason) know that there is, at long last, an OS X build of Chrome. While it’s not a full release I’ll take a Google beta over an alpha any day:
Get it while it’s hot!
Internet Explorer – Holding Back the Internet… Again…
Dec 4th
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team needs to pull their collective head out of their ass and get with the fucking program. IE6 has long been the bane of many a web developer and designer and it looks like IE8 is going to be the same way. First, let’s take a look at CSS3 selector support: No Surprises Here! You could also take a look at this page: CSS Browser Compatibility and see just how many red NOs there are in the Internet Explorer column…
It’s sad that Internet Explorer is the only browser to come preinstalled on so many computers and even sadder still that it’s so widely used. I would love for someone to calculate the amount of time wasted on IE6 compatibility over the years by developers and designers around the globe. What I’m really after is the dollar value that can be assigned to all those lost hours. I’m sure Microsoft has cost this industry $Billions in lost hours when it would only take them $Thousands to do something about it. Any company that stands idly by while that happens and has the resources to do something about deserves a public beat down. I hope they get one.
So who’s doing it best? Apple’s WebKit is holding it down at the number one spot in my book and thankfully it’s garnering a large amount of industry support rather quickly. Currently Apple, KDE Project, Google, Nokia, Torch Moble, and more are actively contributing to Apple’s WebKit. WebKit has a GNU style license with a few parts having a BSD style license and thankfully my personal favorite browser for PC (Google Chrome) uses WebKit.
So here’s my advice to you Microsoft, if you’re not interested in keeping your browser up to date with the latest open standards support then adopt WebKit. Every web developer and designer in the world would rejoice if we could have one standard library rendering everything on the web. Tens of thousands of development hours would be saved every year, progress wouldn’t be halted due to one major browser falling behind, and you can still keep your own branded browser to deliver to the masses… every day you stand idly by I lose respect for you.
The Out of Control Taxation of Tobacco
Dec 3rd
Most people aren’t even aware of why the cost of a pack of cigarettes is so high. I’ve come across numerous articles and blogs with comments from people ranting when major cigarette manufacturers raise the cost on a pack by a few cents. The problem with cigarette prices isn’t the manufacturers… in fact they’re the only ones justified to be raising costs since their costs of manufacturing are undoubtedly rising. The real problem here is taxation from both the Federal and State Governments.
Once the crack down on the tobacco industry began, taxing tobacco quickly became an easy way for politicians to gain funding for programs that would not normally pass a vote. It’s much easier to raise taxes on a product used by less than 50% of the population than it is to create new taxes on goods and services the majority of consumers use.
In January of 2009 the Obama Administration expanded the SCHIP Program adding $32.8B in funding. You can probably guess where those monies are coming from but do you also know where they’re going? A large part of this additional funding is going towards opening up this program to illegal immigrants. I’m not too sure how the US Government thinks they have the authority to tax US residents to pay for illegal immigrants but that’s the way it’s going down. This little expansion raised the Federal taxes from $0.39 to $1.01 per pack.
This doesn’t even touch on the out of control state taxes. You can find state tobacco taxes ranging anywhere from Rhode Island’s whopping $3.46 per pack to South Carolina’s minimal $0.07 per pack. Sadly, more and more states are beginning to raise their taxes and now cities are also beginning to jump on the bandwagon. NYC has long had a $1.50 per pack tax on cigarettes making it the most expensive place to buy a pack of cigarettes with a total tax amount of $5.26 ($1.01 Federal + $1.50 City + $2.75 State). Oh and let’s not forget to pay tax on that tax because everyone loves sales tax!
If you were to tell one of our founding fathers that in the future citizens of the United States would be paying taxes in excess of 1000% of the cost of goods, I’m positive they would have spent a little more time drafting a few documents to limit federal and state taxation. But how could they possibly have guessed this would happen when the majority of US citizens can’t even believe it themselves?
