Happy New Year to all of you and all the best in 2007!
PSPad editor
A cool free text editor for Windows: PSPad
Google’s “cruft” on my desktop
On my (apart from this, great [1]) new Lenovo ThinkPad T60p business notebook, several Google “tools” are pre-installed which neither make sense for me nor likely for anybody else who uses his notebook for serious work (I thought “business” actually implies “serious work”, doesn’t it? ;). These apps are either bothersome attention seekers (like that message center displaying nag pop-ups with latest world news headlines every couple of minutes), unnecessary battery killers and hard disk fragmenters (like the desktop search tool) or otherwise useless tools like an image management app or an IE toolbar (I need to keep IE as authentic as possible. For my daily work, I use Firefox). Now I need to uninstall these apps manually piece-by-piece.
Lenovo: Please refrain from pre-installing such silly software toys on your business notebooks. Be assured that business users tend to know exactly what software they need and want to be most productive. Thanks.
[1] Of course I deactivated the “integrated security chip” and the finger print reader
Per order vs. per volume
I like the new advertisement campaign by the Swiss bank MIGROSBANK. Among others, and that’s why I like it, it questions some of the antiquated banking practices which can hardly be “justified” in the age of e-banking, yet are still in widespread use.
For example, one of the advertisements questions why most banks charge commissions for stock market orders based on the transaction volume (or on a combination of volume and per order) instead of charging a flat fee per order.
The advertisement shows two identical pictures of someone hitting the ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard. The text below the pictures reads (IIRC, in about): “Do you see a difference? We neither. That’s why we charge the same fee for every order.”
Some people might argue that customers who potentially gain (or lose) more money (by having higher transaction volumes) should also pay more of the costs of the e-banking system. From the perspective of managerial accounting however, it makes more sense to break down these costs into costs per order rather than per volume. If no paperwork and no other per transaction costs are involved at all, it might even make sense to charge a flat rate per participating customer only (neglecting the fact however, that the software and the hardware infrastructure need to be able to absorb the peak number of transactions per time). This of course only applies to orders given using the e-banking system. For any other, more traditional services like consulting, wealth management etc. customers shall be charged for separately.
So why do most banks still charge on a per volume basis (or on a mix of per volume and per order fees)? It’s because they can. Some people might not be fully aware of how much IT changed (and will further change) banking. And most people lose their flair for “small” numbers once they deal with “big” numbers. Besides, it’s also a question of how people value their time.
Nonetheless, I hope the above mentioned bank will be able to stir up the domestic market a bit.
Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and the “AP Isolation” option
If you have a Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and wonder why Windows file sharing (SMB/CIFS/Samba) between different wireless clients doesn’t work, find out that you can’t even ping other WLAN clients, then you’ll probably need to disable the checkbox cryptically labelled “AP isolation” in the tab “Wireless -> Advanced Wireless Settings” of your access point.
Dear Linksys engineers:
- Please don’t set a default that an estimated 95% of all buyers/users of the product will need to change.
- If you set a default that most likely will need to be changed by almost any user, please don’t hide the according checkbox in a submenu labelled “Advanced Wireless Settings”, targeted at advanced users.
- If you decide to hide a checkbox for a setting which most likely will need to be changed, please don’t label it misleadingly “AP isolation” whereas the setting should rather be called “wireless client isolation”.
- Fine. So you decided to label the checkbox wrongly. Why be so cryptic about it then? Can’t you at least label it “Access point isolation” instead of just “AP isolation”? Do you believe the latter will make life easier for joe average or experts?
- Last but not least: Why isn’t the “AP isolation” feature/setting mentioned at all in the pop-up help of the according tab?
Thanks.
musique en route
If you’re into good music, bathe your ears in “balkanmania” by the interesting trio musique en route
I’ve just listened to their first CD twice, it’s convincing. I particularly like “szelem”.
(Thanks for the hint, Patrizia!)
Firefox getting fat
I’m not pleased with the changes introduced with Firefox 2.0
- Instead of getting better, Firefox just got fatter and slower (more and more reminding of a fat, dumb Mozilla than an agile and smart fox)
- The new default theme mimics the silly Windows Vista look with all the glares, the blurry “Web 2.0” (sic!) edges, borders and icons.
- Although a good thing from a didactic point of view, having “close” buttons on each tab is very unhandy: It takes too much valuable horizontal space, it’s more likely that one accidentally closes a tab instead of selecting it, it doesn’t improve usability as one could always close a tab by clicking on it with the middle mouse button, the very handy button on the right of the tab bar is now missing.
I’ve downgraded to Firefox 1.5 again.
Create screencasts, demos using Wink
When watching the openArchitectureWare screencasts I’ve noticed this nice (and free) tool for creating screencasts, demos, online “video” (actually “Flash”) tutorials and alike: Wink
Web 2.0: How to close the gap between consumer and business expectations by using JSF and AJAX
The following online presentation/demo about Exadel‘s new Ajax4jsf component library sums up nicely why you shouldn’t try hacking your own AJAX code but use an AJAX enabled JSF component library (like Ajax4jsf and others) instead:
Ajax4jsf: Rich Internet Applications with JSF and AJAX
In short: It’s all about ensuring good maintainability and hence transparency (in the sense of encapsulation and information hiding) while delivering a rich user experience nonetheless. Handcrafted, customized AJAX pages quickly tend to get complex and confusing and hardly ever follow important software architecture principles like modularization, abstraction, loose coupling, information hiding and encapsulation. The result is a piece of code that meets the consumer expectations at best (interactivity, responsiveness, etc.) but is very difficult to maintain (as server- and client-side code, customized and “standardized” code are wildly mixed). Using an AJAX enabled JSF components framework instead transparently hides the AJAX part of the code from the programmer by encapsulating it in JSF components. It’s thus possible to provide rich AJAX functionality by writing JSF server-side code as usual without needing to care about the internals of AJAX at all. If none of the existing components deliver AJAX-wise what customers expect, simply extend and customize the best matching component or write your own highly customized JSF component from scratch. JSF’s flexibility and sophisticated architecture makes this possible. Doing customization like this won’t clutter up your server-side code and will thus keep it maintainable and scalable.
While I haven’t tried this particular AJAX enabled JSF component framework yet and can’t comment on its implementation at this point (here’s a nice architectural overview of the different approaches how to combine AJAX and JSF from a framework developer’s view), the sprouting of AJAXified JSF component frameworks is a clear indication that more and more developers are becoming aware of the maintainability issues inherent to plain AJAX hacking.
For more information, here’s an interview with Max Katz, senior engineer with Exadel and Ajax4jsf committer and here’s the Ajax4jsf whitepaper.
Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone
If you missed the news: At Linux World, Trolltech announced the release of a new mobile phone featuring Linux and Qtopia: The Greenphone.
Unfortunately, the first release of the device will neither support UMTS nor WiFi (the latter being a must-have for me) according to this Heise article (in German only). Add these, and I’ll be in ;)