by Alan Langford | 2008-02-25 | Observations on Everything
It’s interesting how often the question of online versus traditional shopping comes up. A friend asked me this earlier today and I gave him the same answer I’ve been providing for a decade now.
These days the response seems reasonable, but back in 1998 it was heresy. It used to be guaranteed to make a room full of start-ups and venture capitalists go dead quiet. Of course back then we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, when somehow geeks who don’t like daylight managed to convince everyone that their concept of a good shopping experience was somehow universal.
So here it is: (more…)
by Alan Langford | 2007-09-20 | Observations on Everything
In principle, the “network is the system” idea has a lot of merit. The benefits of having all your data stored in some reliable, secure, redundant database that’s centrally managed and hooking into it with whatever device is at hand — be it a desktop machine or a cell phone — has a lot of appeal. Keeping a system available on the net, up to date with fixes and patches, and secure is no trivial job. It’s exactly the sort of thing that should be left to someone who is a professional at it.
[Revised: Less than 24 hours after I posted this, I received a phone call from a salesforce.com representative, apologizing for the misuse of my information. My understanding is that one of their partners is to blame; that the misuse originated outside their organization. I was looking forward to receiving more details in an e-mail, but in preparing to let their mail pass my spam defences, I messed up — and all mail has been bounced from late Friday through most of the weekend. Hopefully they will re-send it so I can add more factual information to this. At this point, it’s clear that at least Salesforce takes this sort of misuse very seriously, and I have accepted their apology.] (more…) by Alan Langford | 2007-06-07 | Observations on Everything
I have always wanted to beat “phishers” at their own game. Briefly, a phishing scam creates a page that looks like a legitimate site, requesting user name and password information. The scammers send phony requests via electronic mail under a variety of pretenses, urging customers to follow the enclosed link. Instead of going to your bank or eBay or PayPal, the link goes to their rogue server that looks like a legitimate site and the information is logged there for subsequent criminal activity.
As a rule, if everyone who received a phising attempt (or a mortgage solicitation for that matter) took the time to follow the link, then input bogus data, then the scam / solicitation would instantly be rendered ineffective. The criminals would be faced with sorting through thousands of garbage records in order to locate the actual victims.
Unfortunately as a society, we’re don’t do all that well at things that benefit the “collective good”, so we’re stuck with scams in our mailboxes.
But AJAX changes that.
(more…)
by Alan Langford | 2007-04-18 | Observations on Everything
As a developer of web sites, I’ve had experience with quite a few hosting providers over the years. Few of them have been much beyond “satisfactory”. After watching how Rochen managed the extraordinary demands of the Joomla community web site (www.joomla.org), and considering that they did this above and beyond the call of duty — as a sponsor Rochen sees no direct revenue from Joomla, I recently decided to open an account there.
The relationship is new, but so far it’s looking very, very good. (more…)
by Alan Langford | 2007-02-23 | Observations on Everything
Those of us who do web development face a daunting task. Even with well defined web standards, every browser implementation has differing levels of compliance, bugs, and differences in interpretation that can make a site that looks great in one browser look awful, or even non-functional in another.
Then there’s Microsoft. Despite being a party to the development of many of these standards, they’re notorious for going their own way and for ignoring standards when it doesn’t suit them. The problem is that Internet Explorer is by far the most installed browser out there, so web site developers are left to accommodate their errors and arrogance. (more…)
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