Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

The Only Thing Worse Than Viruses…

Our CTO once said:

“The only thing worse than viruses — is virus protection software. And the only thing worse than virus protection software — is free virus protection software.”

So true. The most frustrating bug reports we get at Newsvine are the seemingly random ones. We’ll get a cluster of reports from people who all of a sudden can’t vote, can’t comment, or can’t perform some other necessary function. And none of the bug reporters seem to share common characteristics like what browser they are using, what proxy they are behind, or anything else. On more than one occasion, the common thread has turned out to be that they had a certain anti-virus or “internet security” product installed on their machine. The havoc that some of these programs wreak on HTML, javascript, and general HTTP connections is astounding to me sometimes.

I remember one instance where one of our image calls was to a file called “poke.gif?ad=whatever”. The image was not a decorative element but a functional element which was necessary for dealing with our transactional logs. It took days to figure out that the mere use of the word “ad” caused Norton to block the request completely. If we changed the word “ad” to “glad” the problem was solved. And even more paradoxically, if you just put an ampersand in front of the word “ad”, that also solved the problem. Simply maddening, although it was a frustrating enough episode to at least plant a little bug in all of our heads about virus “protection” software: if you’re trying to squash a bug that seems illogical or isn’t easily reproducible, always consider that it could be because of a user’s security software.

Last night, I was trying to debug a problem with Newsvine’s new commenting system with a user who was having issues, and it turns out he is using “CA Internet Security Suite” which came free with his RoadRunner broadband service. I downloaded this thing and installed it into my Windows XP instance running inside of VMWare Fusion.

Oh my god is this software bad. The first thing it does after it installs itself is to run a scan on my system. It then gives me an extremely alarmist dialog box telling me my system has been “infected with 36 instances of spyware”. It lists the spyware inside the dialog box. All 36 pieces of “spyware” are actually just harmless (and functional) cookies from places like Newsvine and AT&T. Just for kicks, I hit “Remove” and of course it prompts me to spend $70 for the full version just so it can clear my cookies. Brilliant.

So then I open up a web browser and I notice that the CA software is now checking every single server call the browser makes against its database of “safe” and “unsafe” sites, slowing the browsing experience down to a crawl.

And then, just for kicks, I try to visit my Newsvine page at http://mike.newsvine.com, and here’s the dialog box I get:

Blocked from my own site! Because it’s a “dating site”! Ridiculous.

We haven’t resolved our problem yet with the commenting system, but something tells me it has something to do with this stuff.

Having used a Mac for the last 24 years, I’ve just never really had to use anti-virus software. It’s a rude awakening seeing how the other half lives, in this case. If I used Windows on a daily basis, I think I’d opt not to use anti-virus software at all and instead set up automatic restore points once or twice a week. VMWare Fusion lets you do restore points automatically which is really nice. If I happen to contract a virus one day, I can just roll my machine back a few days and get rid of it.

Much better than having the Norton/CA gestapo stomping on my face every time I try to make a simple HTTP call.

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14%

Of all the interesting (and troubling) things that have come to light as a result of the recent financial crisis, one of the most interesting — to me at least — came tonight: Chuck Todd appeared on NBC Nightly News with some data he ran on today’s bailout vote. It turns out most of those who voted “yes” to the bailout aren’t involved in close re-election campaigns (or haven’t been in the past) and most that voted “no” are (or have been).

So essentially, representatives that are scared about their re-election prospects voted no and representatives that aren’t voted yes. No numerical breakdowns were given, but that was the overview.

This is troubling on a number of fronts:

It shows that our politicians are reacting to a bona fide crisis not on the merits of the crisis but rather on the circumstances of their re-election. This happens a lot, of course, but during a potentially devastating crisis, it’s troubling.
It shows that what a lot of people think is the “smart” thing to do (passing the bailout), is not the “popular” thing to do. If you believe that your representative should do what you want them to do, the numbers say this bill should not pass (over 50% of Americans think it’s bad). If, however, you think that representatives should do what *they* think is best for you, it should probably pass (most representatives seem to think it’s needed, regardless of how they voted today).
It shows that politics have absolutely become part of a situation that needs to be solved jointly by both parties.
It shows that many members of Congress as well as many Americans don’t actually understand what this plan is designed to prevent and who it benefits. It may not be a perfect plan, but it’s not designed to “bail out Wall Street fat cats”. It may not punish Wall Street CEOs like many people would prefer it to, but if you want to do that, do it with a lawsuit.

I can only hope that the failure of the bill eventually just causes us to pass a better bill later this week, but you have to wonder a bit when George W. Bush, Barack Obama, John McCain, and the controlling party in the House all agree on something and Congress still won’t pass it. It’s no wonder why only 14% of Americans approve of the job they are doing.

(Side note: That Gallup site is a pretty spectacular destination for information. Great graphs and polls, updated daily.)

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A Debate Under Duress

I really hope the first presidential debate occurs as planned Friday night.

Debates, theoretically, are rare opportunities to hear from candidates when their words are unscripted. In reality, however, candidates often prepare for weeks ahead of time, including last-minute intense cram sessions like the ones you remember from your college days.

What I love about the prospect of a debate Friday night is that both candidates have been severely preoccupied with the financial bailout fiasco all week and are likely much less prepared than they would otherwise be. I think seeing Barack Obama and John McCain debate each other without all of the usual coaching and grooming that goes on before debates will be an extraordinarily better view into how much each of them really knows about the financial crisis.

I want to see what each candidate will say in the middle of a storm, not after it. Debate on…

Side note: If you haven’t read the New York Times article linked to above yet, give it a read. It’s some pretty dramatic stuff, with Henry Paulson actually getting down on one knee in front of Nancy Pelosi.

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I’m Launching a New Blog Today: “A House By The Park”

Today marks the launch of my second blog, and first new one in over four years: A House By The Park. Please head over and have a look-see!

Why a second blog when I only post to Mike Industries a few times a month? Well, I’m building a house, together with Build LLC.

The first thing I noticed after deciding to build a house is that there aren’t any well-written, well-designed, detail-oriented blogs about building a house from the perspective of someone who has never done it before. There are a number of books on the subject, several of which I’ve purchased and zero of which I’ve opened, as well as random articles and photos from people at various points in their construction, but nowhere could I find a start-to-finish, real-time chronology of the entire process. That ends today.

Ahousebythepark.com will cover searching for the right property, dealing with real estate agents, interviewing and choosing an architect, making your way through the design and build process, and probably a thousand other things… all with the goal of helping future custom home builders better prepare for their own projects. I’ve backdated a bunch of entries before pushing the site live so there are already 26 posts to thumb through.

Somebody told me once that every human being should go through the home building process once in their lifetime. I don’t know if I agree with that, but if you feel you may ever decide to build a home for yourself, I invite you to subscribe to A House By The Park’s RSS feed and follow passively until something strikes your interest. I can’t guarantee the same highly intellectual nuggets of thought that fill the pages of Mike Industries, but I will try to write with the same level of detail and accuracy. For instance, I’m making my entire spreadsheet of expenses available online and within the blog posts themselves so readers can get a specific idea of what everything costs (Yay EditGrid! Separate post on this coming soon).

Finally, please feel free to link to or write about A House By The Park on your own site or other places of interest. Every little link helps. I estimate there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers to Mike Industries so there are always great comments here, but on launch day, A House By The Park will have zero. Writing stuff is no fun until intelligent discussion and/or controversy ensues.

So that’s the pitch. Head on over, the water’s warm. I’ve even published a top-to-bottom complete chronology page to get you all caught up from the beginning without having to jump from page to page.

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LazyWeb Request: iPhone Power Miser

Given how pathetic the new iPhone 3G’s battery life is, and given that Apple recommends you essentially castrate your device in order to get more hours out of it, I have an idea for an app that would make the castration process both quicker and easily reversible:

An app that sits on your home screen and does nothing but turn a set of things on and off.

The app doesn’t even need to launch. Press it once and Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G, Location Services, and Push email all turn on. Press it again and they all turn off. Simple. Perhaps there are even three states to the button where the middle state is configurable.

With the above app, the process of going from power-sucking battery-hog to power-conserving battery-miser would take one-click.

Without the above app, here’s what it takes:

Click on Settings
Click on wifi
Slide wifi slider to off
Click on Settings Back button
Click on Fetch New Data
Slide Push slider to off
Click on Settings Back button
Click on General
Slide Location Services slider to off
Click on Bluetooth
Slide Bluetooth slider to off
Click on General Back button
Click on Network
Slide Enable 3G slider to off
Click Home button to get back to main screen

15 steps! That is crazy.

I wouldn’t even might having my iPhone in conserve mode 90% of the time if it were easy to switch out on demand, but it isn’t. I’m not sure if iPhone developers have access to system settings like this, but if they do, this would make a great app. If not, it would also make a great app… Apple!

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Design Signatures

I’ve spent a bit of time over the last month designing a new blog that I’ll be launching soon, and in doing so, I’ve become aware of some design and coding habits which, when put together, clearly compromise a bit of a “design signature”. If you’ve designed more than five sites in your site, you likely have a design signature too, although it’s probably different than most other designers and coders you know. You may not even know you have it, but you do.

Here’s part of what makes up my design signature:

I start with a CSS reset
For column layouts, I float every column (usually left but sometimes both left and right)
I use the clearfix class to clear all of my containers
I use dotted underlines for body-copy links that change to solid underlines on hover, and no underlines for links that appear within navigational lists
I use desaturated colors for visited links
I employ fixed-width centered layouts using a container div, auto margins, and a center text-align on the body

I almost can’t even think about producing a page template until all of these elements are in place, and no design would feel right to me without them. Additionally, I know the browser implications of them so well that I scarcely have to even test in IE anymore.

Do you have any design signatures of your own? If so, what are they and how do they affect your work?

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The Best Chips in the World

At the risk of turning this into an all food-recommendation blog, my girlfriend found the best potato chips ever at the store the other day. They are called Flat Earth Baked Fruit Crisps and they are the best thing since Sun Chips. In fact, they make Sun Chips taste like dirt.

The only flavor I’ve tried so far is Peach Mango Paradise and they taste like no other chip out there. Made of rice, potato, apple, peach, and mango, they are flavorful without being salty… a rarity for a chip. There’s also a half serving of fruit in every ounce and no trans fat.

Although I’ve only seen them so far at one store in Seattle (Thriftway), the Flat Earth folks have a handy store locator on their site in order to help you find a bag. Apparently, it’s a Frito Lay brand so it should be widely available.

These are game-changing chips. Seriously.

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The First Ever Men’s Uneven Bar Champion

Although I’m enjoying this year’s Olympics more than any since 1984 so far, it’s pretty obvious that gymnastics judging is at best, flawed beyond belief, and at worst, completely fixed. How these judges rationalize giving 8.8 scores to routines without any major flaws when their peers are giving 9.3s is beyond me. I’m looking at you, Argentinian judge.

Thankfully, we have world class athletes in our country breaking barriers outside the strong arm of the Beijing Olympic judging committee. Case in point, “buddysteve”, the first ever Men’s Uneven Bar World Champion who risks life, limb, and package in this video to prove to the world that the uneven bars is not just a women’s event. Go Steve:

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Captive Audience

Photo by Sunny in L.A.

A full month after the release of the iPhone 3G, I still see lines of people outside of Apple Stores around Seattle waiting to get their hands on one. Although the new, lengthy activation process is a waste of time for customers, it sure is good advertising for Apple. Having lines out front of your store tends to make passers by curious, and curiosity often leads to attraction.

After two weeks with my iPhone 3G, however, I must admit that I’m not as happy as I was with the original iPhone. In fact, if my original iPhone didn’t have an annoyingly quiet earpiece and speakerphone (should have gotten it replaced during the one year warranty period), I probably would have returned the 3G model or not even upgraded to it in the first place.

Now, granted the original iPhone set probably the highest bar for any electronic device I’ve ever owned, but here is what is maddening about the 3G version:

Battery, battery, battery. When Steve Jobs mentioned a year ago that battery life was keeping Apple from releasing a 3G version, he wasn’t kidding. Unfortunately, they released one anyway, and now even people like me who use a measly 5-20 minutes of talk time a day can barely go sunup to sundown on a single charge. It’s crippling and it’s frankly embarrassing, in my opinion.
In order to mitigate the battery life issue, I have now turned off Location Services, Push email, wifi, and Bluetooth, as well as dimming the screen. It’s kind of like buying a Porsche and replacing the engine with a Hyundai to get better gas mileage. Pretty ridiculous.
The 3G AT&T plans are more expensive, which sucks, but at least one can rationalize the data part by remembering that you are getting faster speeds. However, what explains 1500 text messages going from $6 to $15 a month??? Text messages? ~~Ten cents a message as part of a plan is highway robbery. And considering most people won’t hit 1500 on the dot, it often times ends up being much more per message than that.~~ Ok, it’s actually a penny a message.
The shape of the phone has changed ever so subtly such that I can’t even use my original iPhone dock with it. Apple doesn’t include a dock with the iPhone 3G and charges $30 for their new “compatible” dock. This is an especially low blow.
In my mind, neither the white model nor the black model look as nice as the old silver model and I don’t consider plastic an upgrade over metal.
Location Services takes quite a long time to triangulate your location and often doesn’t work. I guess since I was forced to turn it off, I shouldn’t really care anyway.
I live near downtown Seattle and a good portion of the time, I’m still on Edge.
There’s a $18 “upgrade” fee for no apparent reason to switch phones.

In the end, I’d be willing to overlook every item on that list if it weren’t for the battery life issue. I’m not opposed to charging my phone every single night but when you have to think about charging it even during the day, that’s just poor product planning. I’d gladly accept an extra few millimeters in thickness if it meant a 50% bigger battery.

So in closing, I would say that if you already have a first generation iPhone you’re happy with, by all means stick with it. When the iPhone 3G Rev B comes out in several months and sports an acceptable battery, you’ll be happy you’re not stuck with the “old” 3G model.

Don’t fall into the early adopter trap with this particular product release. Sometimes we Apple fanboys are such a captive audience that we ignore the flaws of the items we purchase. And by sometimes, I of course mean always.

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It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Inquirer will now delay the online publishing of many of their stories until their printed newspaper is already on people’s doorsteps.

This strikes me as the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a product on the decline by making a product on the rise intentionally worse?

Mmmmkay.

Why not just shut your website down entirely so that the only way to get Inquirer content is by paying for a paper to be produced and delivered to you?

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