Computers & Tech - Diary Of An ADI

Eastman Kodak Bankruptcy

19/01/2012

This is one of those unfortunate “I told you so” moments. Kodak (or, Eastman Kodak, to give it its full name) has filed for bankruptcy after 132 years in business.

The familiar yellow and red logo is one I’ll always associate with my seaside holidays as a child, and the annual purchase of a suitable film cartridge for the old Kodak Instamatic to take with me.

However, I bought my first digital camera (a Casio QV-10) in 1995 – that’s nearly 17 years ago. I absolutely KNEW these things were the future, even if the QV-10 by itself wasn’t.

The QV-10 couldn’t possibly have been selected over an Instamatic when it came down to quality and resolution, but within 5 years a digital camera was easily up to the job of taking holiday snaps (even if printers weren’t, at the time).

Unfortunately, Kodak failed to realise this, and it waited for too long before trying to ride the wave. To be fair, it did climb on board the digital train – possibly a little late – but its real mistake was trying to bring the old film-based business along with it when it eventually made the jump. As a result, its digital printers (which are pretty good), are only now getting close to making a profit for the company. So it came too late.

Part of the original problem is still being echoed by those “saddened” to hear of Kodak’s troubles. A Photography Professor at Toronto University (hey, Canada has Mickey Mouse subjects, too) wails:

There’s a kind of emotional connection to Kodak for many people. You could find that name inside every American household and, in the last five years, it’s disappeared.

And a 69-year old Kodak employee says much the same:

It’s one of the few companies that wiggled its way into the fabric of American life and the American family.

‘As someone at Kodak once said, `We put chemicals in one end so our customers can get memories out the other.’

It’s precisely that attitude that got Kodak in the mess in the first place. You don’t move forward by standing still! Firms who do that simply die.

Kodak won’t disappear, of course. There’s too much American emotion involved for that to happen.

WordPress WYSIWYG Editor

29/12/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I wrote recently about my unfortunate experiences with Foliopress WYSIWYG – a WordPress plugin text editor – and the even more unfortunate attitude of one of its authors (that type of person who thinks he’s right about everything, and even on those occasions when he actually is, he can’t leave it there and has to be so right-with-knobs-on that he ends up wrong anyway!)

We’ve all encountered these unpleasant individuals.

The long and short of the matter is that when I installed Foliopress back in May this year, it was much better than the default WordPress editor at that time, but it still had some limitations. It took a lot of effort getting it to work anything like it was supposed to (which introduced me to the extremely distasteful aspect of the user support interface). Then there was the unbelievable “it doesn’t work with any Microsoft crap” attitude that was dumped on everyone without warning (a poor attempt to disguise the fact that they couldn’t get it to work with Internet Explorer – the most common browser out there). It wasn’t true WYSIWYG, either. You really had to mess around to get it even close to WYSIWYG – but this was initially tolerable, as were the frequent updates.

But the last straw came when it simply stopped working – even in browsers that weren’t “crap Microsoft” efforts. I guess that rampant intellectual inferiority must have spread to the rest of the human population, leaving the Foliopress plugin as a lone beacon (albeit, without anything to act as a beacon with, since a plugin depends on the product it is written for, and not the other way around) in the software development community.

So after one final experience of appalling customer support, I got rid of it once and for all.

Anyway, anyone out there who is also looking for suitable WYSIWYG editors for WordPress might be interested in the following.

First of all, WordPress’ own editor is now pretty good. In all honesty, in terms of text formatting, it is just about as WYSIWYG as I could ever get Foliopress to be (and that was after asking for help to set it up). The text wraps around images, and you can resize the editor window to alter the WYSIWYGness of the display. OK, it’s only black Times New Roman on a white background, but you can use it to get a reasonable idea of your post/page layouts – and in any case, you still have the Preview button..

But I have found something which is absolutely and completely WYSIWYG. It is also standalone – not a plugin – but it connects to your WordPress account so you can publish posts or pages, or simply safe them to draft as it suits you. It downloads the template for your blog and uses that, so what you are typing is exactly what appears when you publish.

It’s Windows Live Writer (part of Live Essentials). Yes, yet again the solution to a problem existed, and it was a Microsoft solution!

Unlike plugins, which must be installed on each blog or site you use them on, Live Writer can be linked to any number of blog accounts, because it resides on your computer – not on the blog site. You can get various plugins for the program to make adding symbols or Flash easier, or you can simply use cut-and-paste, etc.

It does take a little getting used to, but if you use Office then it will be easier. If you want genuine WYSIWYG then this really is the business.

DAB In-car Radio, Analogue Switch-off

22/12/2011

DOAADI

ADI, Computers & Tech, News

This report in What Car? talks of plans to switch off the analogue radio service and go completely digital. It points out that 90.7% of the UK population listens to the radio every week, but only 2% have in-car DAB.

If that’s worded right, it’s like saying 90% of the population eats chicken, but only 2% buy large eggs! It’s meaningless. And deliberately alarmist.

What Car? tries to argue that cars without DAB will have less value. Well, seeing how you can get a Pure Highway (with FM transmitter) for as little as £60, you’d have to be selling one hell of a banger to someone with extremely odd priorities for it to be a significant financial burden.

And just think of that lovely clear FM spectrum to tune into when the switch-off happens. I expect that What Car? experts think that turning off the analogue signal means it isn’t there anymore!

On the radio, Halfords is advertising daily that they can fit a DAB radio into “almost any make of car”.

It reminds me of a situation I’ve mentioned before. Back in the early 80s, the standard storage device for a home computer was a cassette tape recorder. Magazines had cassette tapes stuck to the front in those days. But disk drives were becoming affordable, and many started switching to floppy disks instead.

There was uproar. Well, what it was really was the loudest and stupidest people just making a lot of noise. They opposed the change. I suppose 200-odd years ago they’d have been called Luddites. Today, they’re just idiots.

The sooner we go digital, the better.

People Who Rub You Up The Wrong Way

16/12/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, General

Or subtitled: DO NOT USE FOLIOPRESS WYSIWYG PLUG-IN AS YOUR WORDPRESS TEXT EDITOR. EVER.

For any non-UK readers, when you “rub someone up the wrong way” what you are doing is going against the grain, aggravating them, creating unnecessary conflict, and so on. I think the phrase is derived from the old advice about rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way (wear leather gauntlets if you do). Everyone does it to everyone else at one time or another, but every so often you encounter someone who just does it every time.

It might be a certain popstar with a whiney voice, or carefully cultivated persona intended to appeal to anarchic youths. Or it might be someone you casually meet (ADI meetings are good places to find them) who has a fixed opinion on something and who just won’t shut up about it. The worst ones, though, are those you are stuck with. I remember one from my time in the rat race – he was a manager to whom I reported for a mercifully short time – who could start an argument in an empty room. Even when he agreed with something, he had to disagree to show how clever and thoughtful he was. But you get the idea.

A while back I mentioned that I’d found a WordPress plug-in, Foliopress WYSIWYG, which was much better than the default text editor. At the time, that was true. However, I first encountered a genuine problem with it in July this year, after I discovered that it was screwing up HTML tags when formatting text (it was nesting them incorrectly). I posted my findings on their forum and asked if it was by design, or had I found a bug. The author replied:

You shouldn’t be putting so many elements on a single piece of text in the first place…

…Not only that but using underlining on the web is extremely bad practice as underlining is assigned to hyperlinks.

We do our best to provide the best possible WYSIWYG editing environment but if you bang your head against the wall hard enough, you are sure to draw blood and/or fade into unconsciousness. No helmet will protect you.

Now, if I want to underline something for emphasis – like this – then I will. My “so many elements” amounted to just two: <span> and <ul>. The problem was that you had to use formatting buttons in a very specific order otherwise the text editor nested them incorrectly, and this made subsequent editing a major headache if you inadvertently “split” the tags, and then inserted some more. I told him that I was reporting a find, not asking for a lesson, to which he replied:

You have no idea how many people chase us around on our plugins and contribute nothing.

It will be difficult to resolve the nesting tags issues as they are part of the core FCKeditor (they might be better in CKeditor and we are preparing the move to CKedtitor now, but probably not)…

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Your contribution is much appreciated. Please report any other issues you find and we’ll do our best to resolve them. This one is out of our power.

Now, he could have told me that right away. But he didn’t. He chose to rub me up the wrong way by trying to be superior about it.

A few weeks later the plug-in was updated, and it contained a great new feature making adding links easier. I started using it a lot… only for it to stop working completely following a further update. Again, I asked if I had missed something or done something wrong on their forums, The reply:

Check the release notes please.

OK. I’m already biting my lip here. I replied:

I’m really sorry to be a pain (and a dumb***), but where ARE the release notes. They’re not in the ZIP file if I download the latest version. And the link you gave me just points to all the comments from previous months and years.

I can’t find a reference in these comments on this page to the change that occurred this week.

And when I Google “foliopress release notes”, lo! and behold I find an article on this site that tells me about the very new features which appear to have gone missing having been introduced as exciting new features!

Another author answered this time and provided the correct links to the release notes (though I should point out that it is usual practice to include them in the download package). However, the original guy comes back with:

We do NOT recommend using IE9 with Foliopress WYSIWYG at this point. There are serious enough issues that we’ve removed support for the browser until FCKeditor and CKeditor work properly in Microsoft’s browser.

Until that point, we cannot troubleshoot any issues with IE9.

I’m biting my lip really hard now. My preferred browser is Internet Explorer – through a conscious choice. But what they then did was disable Foliopress WYSIWYG so it wouldn’t run on IE at all (even though it was working to a usable degree before). Not just the new features, but the entire plug-in was disabled, and if I remember there was some nerdy comment about Microsoft if you tried to launch it from IE. This would be like buying a new car, then finding out that while you were asleep the manufacturer had come round and put wheel clamps on all four wheels, and thrown eggs at your front door. Your only option was to rush out and get another car!

I switched to the Chrome browser for editing my blog posts and all was well. Until this week.

WordPress was updated to v3.3. I did the upgrade and everything was fine – until I tried to add a link to some text. I was faced with a stream of PHP errors and warnings. I waited a couple of days, because I assumed that the problem was due to the plug-in authors not having caught up with WordPress yet. So after the expected Foliopress update a day or so later, I again tried to link some text. Same problem.

I contacted the authors and provided a copy of the errors. The reply (guess who from):

We have a very active forum these days: [link]
Please contribute your findings there.

Thanks!

I’m biting my lip already! So, I copied the text from his reply email and made a post in the forum. His reply on the forum:

Your post above is not very nicely formatted and very difficult to read. Please make an effort not to vandalise our forums.

I’m seeing red now. His email client has added line breaks with “>” at the start of each new line, and I’d pasted this into the forum message rather than type the whole lot out again. I didn’t even give it a second thought. It’s no big deal (except to a prat). I replied:

I copied it and pasted it from the email which you replied to but didn’t answer [name].

As I had typed it all out once, I didn’t want to do it again. I’m more concerned with getting the product… working than reformatting text which gets mangled by your contact form.

Now look, if we could please stay on the very specific topic of Foliopress not working after a WP update, and not my typing or grammar, I would be VERY grateful.

His reply:

Perhaps you should be a little less hot on the trigger with WordPress updates.

We will have a fix by January.

If you would like better service, please be more polite and please do not deface our forums. Text cleaning is not difficult.

PS. Your attitude is not appropriate. The commercial price of an editor like the one we provide would be what you donated on a per site basis.

The guy simply cannot get it into his thick skull that I was reporting a bug – nothing more. But it was like trying to get a baby to eat mush from a spoon when it doesn’t want to!

But anyway, we now have confirmation – which could have been given in that first email asking me to put it on the forum instead – that Foliopress doesn’t work with WordPress 3.3. And it won’t work until January at the earliest. Or, in other words, as well as not working with that “rubbish” Microsoft browser, it now doesn’t work with any other browser either.

We also have the idiotic advice not to upgrade WordPress (even though 3.3 has been in beta since October). Upgrades often include security tweaks and features that users actually want. And it’s also worth reminding certain people that Foliopress depends on WordPress – not the other way round.

I pointed all this out to Mr Annoying. His considered response was to delete the entire topic. I’d guess this is partly in an effort to conceal the problem from those who need to know about it – the users. After all, the fact that it doesn’t work is now not known to anyone happening by the plug-ins download library.

Foliopress is now off my system, and it will never go back. My advice to anyone looking for an editor – and this is based solely on my own overall experiences – is not to go anywhere near this plug-in. It is flaky, which might not have been such a problem if it hadn’t been for the attitude of one of its authors.

UKHosts Transfers to Media Marmot Ltd

15/12/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I got an email this morning advising me that UKHosts is transferring operations to Media Marmot Ltd. It says the transfer should be “seamless”.

Transfer Of Business From UKHosts to Media Marmot Ltd

UKHosts Ltd are currently undergoing the reorganisation of the way they run their business and therefore, with effect from 1st December 2011, all hosting and associated services have been transferred to Media Marmot Ltd. The transition should be seamless and if you have any queries in regard to this, we would appreciate it if you would contact us at your earliest convenience.

Welcome To Media Marmot Ltd

As a UKHosts customer we would like to welcome you to Media Marmot Ltd with open arms. We aim to honour and continue the excellent service you’ve had from UKHosts over the past 12 years as we continue to expand our business. Most of the work moving clients from UKHosts to Media Marmot has already taken place behind the scenes however we understand that there could be the occasional admin error so we would appreciate it if you could spend some time reviewing your contact details and associated orders below.

I’m not going to kick them, but I was with UKHosts for a number of years and “excellent service” isn’t a term I’d use to describe what I got – not overall, anyway.

To start with, contacting anyone was almost impossible. The phone was never answered and they often didn’t reply to messages or emails. When they did, it was ALWAYS the same guy, who was clearly the tech there as well as the troubleshooter and customer service contact. Since I am pretty much self-sufficient with computers this wasn’t much of a problem most of the time.

But what did it for me was when one of my clients called to mention that his website was down. When I logged into the server via my FTP client, every index.htm file and every image file was gone!

When I eventually got through to UKHosts, I learned that they had been “hacked” some considerable time previously – many weeks earlier, if I recall – and I got the usual “we tried to inform everyone” spiel. I asked why they didn’t have a back-up they could have used to restore the server, and I can’t remember what they told me. I was furious, because it took me a while to get all my sites up again (even though fortunately I had backups – customers take such opportunities to request updates and alterations).

I know from hits received by this blog that they have been hacked at least one more time since I left them.

I’m with 1&1 now, and I can’t fault them. Tech Support comes back within 24 hours via email, or they are there 24/7 if you want to phone.

Anyway, Media Marmot’s website looks better than UKHosts’ ever did (a few typos notwithstanding), so just going on that suggests things might be better for them in the future… although the email I received is based on a domain they think I have with them, but which was transferred probably 6 years ago.

Theory Test App for Android

15/11/2011

DOAADI

ADI, Computers & Tech, Training

I found this on the Android Market today – it’s a theory test app from the AA.

The free version lets you try out 70 of the question bank questions, but the full version has all of them. The full version only costs £1.99, and it has a nice, clean design and interface.

I assume that it will auto-update when the questions change, since the spiel says it is good for tests after 2008 (which implies it is the current question bank, which will be valid until the end of the year).

From January 2012, the questions will no longer be exactly those on the actual test – this app is at pains to point out that those it contains ARE the same as on the theory test proper.

I’m going to start mentioning it to my pupils. I can’t see anyone having a problem spending £1.99 on practising for their theory test – though I’m sure some will resent even that, and will still try the free route whenever they can.

I also can’t wait to see what the ADI glitterati have to say about it when they find out. The screenshot above is NOT the full display – it scrolls down – but I bet some prat will try and argue that it is a steep hill DOWNWARDS (it is), and the AA is wrong.

This is just one of several similar apps you can get for practising the theory test questions – you choose whatever suits you.

Sorry for the Lull

05/09/2011

DOAADI

ADI, Computers & Tech

I’ve been a bit quiet lately as far as blog posts go. The main reason for this is that I am trying to get the current theory test database on to my server, and so I am playing around with a lot of programming for various reasons (which keep changing).

I’d initially started typing in the questions and answers from the question bank – reasoning that if I did a handful of questions each day then it would only take a few weeks to get them all in. But then I had trouble getting a suitable GUI for the MySQL database – one which didn’t involve a lot of clicking and which would allow me to repetitively enter question and answer text. So I wrote my own.

I’d had a close look at the Driving Test Success DVD and couldn’t find the questions database or any readable files. But then, one of my pupils who has a Mac had had problems running the DSA disk, so she gave it to me and I got her a Mac-compatible one.

The DSA disk has all the questions as XML files.

So, at the moment I am writing a PHP utility to extract the data and convert it to a suitable file format that I’ll be able to import to a MySQL database.

Skype Phishing Scam Email

27/08/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I just checked my spam folder and found this hilarious email (spot the typo in the first line):

New Skype Has Been Releases

This is to notify that new updates have been released for Skype.

Following are major new features :

* Up to 5-way group video call.
* Redesigned calling experience.
* Improved video snapshots gallery.
* Improved browser plugins performance on some websites.
* Reduced false positives on browser plugin phone number recognition.
* New presence icons.
* Improved handling of calling attempts made when the user has run out of credit.
* Improved access to sharing functionality

To download the latest version , go to :

Start downloading the update right now and let us know what you think about it.

We’re working on making Skype better all the time !

Talk soon,

The people at Skype

Short piece of advice: DON’T!

It’s a scam. To check for updates, run Skype and click on About >> Check for updates. Install this piece of garbage and you’ll end up with Heaven knows what on your machine.

It cracks me up how these people who can’t speak English or send out non-spell-checked emails still get idiots falling for it!

Copyright Laws to Change

03/08/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, Music

I’ve been hearing this on the radio all day (Planet Rock, of course). It’s appearing on the newsfeeds now.

The government is to modernise the intellectual property (IP) laws – for most of us, that means that copying your own (purchased) CDs to your computer of MP3 player will no longer be technically illegal, as it is at present.

On the radio, ministers were using the argument that technology has moved forward in such a way that an overhaul is urgently needed. I couldn’t agree more.

Mind you, it is only a change in name. Most people have been recording their stuff since it came on vinyl. I’ve got to be honest and say that I always transferred my vinyl straight to cassette tape back in the days when that was all we had. I did it for two reasons:

I didn’t want to damage the vinyl
I wanted to listen to it in the car

Cassettes were notoriously unreliable. If your play heads got dirty, the crap transferred to the tape and it was virtually ruined as far as the sound was concerned. If you left cassettes in the car, the heat in summer was liable to weld the tape on the spool, so the chances of a major ravelling episode was high. And the sound quality – even on the few I purchased as originals – was inferior to that of the vinyl.

Of course, there was the added bonus that if you made your own tapes, if any of the above happened then you could just make another one.

I’ve never purchased a pirated copy of any album, and I’ve only recorded or ripped those that I own.

Now, in the Napster days I did download some stuff after I got my first MP3 player in the late 90s. But the quality of some of the stuff on there was appalling, and people lied about their connection speed – you’d have some yokel in rural America claiming he had a T1 connection, when he was connected by a piece of wet string and two coconut shells. It could take days to download a single track you were after. Or you’d wait hours to get something, only to find that it was a version by the idiot hosting it on his Bontempi organ or Stylophone.

And then there was that time I downloaded a track, only to find it was a VBS file named as the track in question (I didn’t open it).

Are Internet Explorer Users Stupid?

01/08/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

An article in The Telegraph reports that a survey of people who took a free online IQ test reveals that the lowest IQs were found amongst Internet Explorer (IE) users.

As you can imagine, this has got a lot of people wetting themselves in excitement. But what it really shows is how badly a lot of people understand statistics.

Until very recently, IE was the deafult browser installed on computers. People with above average IQs would have been the ones most likely to install another browser. Likewise, people with above average IQs would be the ones most likely to want to install another browser.

This would mean that there would be a slight shift from the norm, and there would be a slight tendency for those with above average IQs to be using browsers other than IE. This is borne out by the fact that the results for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari…

…were very slightly above average. Camino, Opera and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame were scored “exceptionally” high.

As the article reports, changing browsers is something typically done by computer geeks.

Further evidence that they’ve all got the wrong end of the stick comes with…

Within the group of IE users, version 6 users score lowest, while users of version 8 do rather better.

That’s because users of IE6 have probably just sat with the default setup since 2001 (and probably still have Windows 98 running), and aren’t even aware that there are updates to either the OS or the browser.

More useful information weakening the interpretation of the results is seen if you look at the full report from the consultancy which ran it, AptiQuant. What they say is:

it has been suggested that individuals on the lower end of the IQ scale tend to keep using outdated versions of antique web browsers.

This suggests that they set out to prove this premise. And in their conclusion, they say:

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser.

That last sentence highlights the massive weakness of the survey from a statistical viewpoint. It isn’t a matter of “choice” of browser - which would be a positive action - It’s down to not doing anything at all to change from the default. So, although it is clear that their IS a tendency for those using IE to have lower IQs, it isn’t because they chose it. It is because they didn’t know how to change or (or that you could).

For the record, my IQ is above 150 (the test I did some years ago only went up to that). I use IE9 through choice. I have Chrome if I need it, and I’d install any of the other browsers if I needed those. I don’t need them, and I’m not trying to make a statement – the main driver behind switching from IE for most geeks.

And also for the record, if you look at browser usage statistics – and I mean global ones, not those from the highly skewed geek websites – IE still (in 2011) has nearly about 45% of the market share, with Firefox the closest rival at 30% (in Europe, it’s 50:50).

Update: Not sure what’s going on, but this BBC story suggests it was a hoax.

Does this mean that all non-IE users are total prats, like the perpetrators of this?

Category - Computers & Tech