Based on a harrowingly unproductive experience this afternoon, I’m proposing the following rules:
If a user has entered information, or changed fields in a web form, do not force a page refresh if the form hasn’t been submitted.
If you must, then preserve that entered information.
If you can’t, or mustn’t (ala passwords), refer to point #1.
You’re free to disregard or disagree with these, but know you’re deploying a user-hostile application.
It’s been seven years to the day since our last grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. I was reminded of the old Rubenerd phenomena from a message from a dear friend.
Clearly this issue needs to be resolved. I will quote an earlier lesson, with required modifications:
Welcome to your tenth grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. If you missed our previous lessons, feel free to refer back to them before proceeding. And as usual, feel free to take notes.
As far as I know, nothing that the fabulouls Hewshack has drawn Sinon holding here is a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think they are.
Incidently, the last grilled cheese sandwich obersation lesson pre-dates Sword Art Online and the hipsters who not only didn’t like it, but had to tell everyone constantly about it. I should use it in more examples.
The technical specifications and design of the new iPhone look amazing, but the conversation has been fixated on the lack of a headphone jack. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.
First, Apple isn’t alone doing this; they weren’t even the first. Motorola removed the jack from the Moto X, and we can surely expect the likes of Samsung to follow now that their photocopiers Apple has.
I don’t buy the simplistic argument that the 35mm jack is the same as the removed floppy drive in the iMac though, for reasons those feinging ignorance still know, and I won’t insult your intelligence by spelling out.
That said, it does fit Apple’s behaviour and design priorities. Apple doesn’t like messy wires. If something can be made thinner, lighter and faster by outsourcing functionality to another dongle (which adds the weight and bulk back in spades), so be it. If you want the otherwise vastly-better ecosystem of Apple devices, you need to accept this or move on.
My next phone will be the iPhone SE; it remains the best form factor, and has the benefit of having a jack for all my devices. Time to enjoy the convenience while I can.
As reported in the International Business Times:
Japan has sent warning about Brexit in a 15-page message to the United Kingdom and the European Union. The Asian nation is worried that the UK’s exit from the EU would negatively impact the Japanese businesses operating in Europe, and has therefore warned that some companies might have to transfer headquarters from the UK.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan has fired off a 15-page warning to the UK and EU, declaring the country’s wish list for the British exit and reminding the UK government that it had lured Japanese companies to Britain by promising it was a “gateway to Europe.” But with the UK leaving the European Union, it would no longer serve as the opportunity it claimed it would be.
“In light of the fact that a number of Japanese businesses, invited by the Government in some cases, have invested actively to the UK, which was seen to be a gateway to Europe, and have established value-chains across Europe, we strongly request that the UK will consider this fact seriously and respond in a responsible manner to minimise any harmful effects on these businesses,” Japan has demanded.
Surprisingly, many commentators I’ve seen against Brexit also suggest Japan is over stepping here. I’d argue the portion highlighted suggests their concerns are entirely reasonable, and not limited to Japan. If this were an agreement with customers, it’d amount to bait and switch.
Something tells me the Leave crowd didn’t think a lot of this through.
People are so quick to go online and write about negative experiences, so I’m attempting to balance with positivity. In this case Amex asked me to do a user survey based on an automated call I’d done earlier in the week.
I got the new PIN sorted out within a minute, so rated it “good”. In the field for comments on why I didn’t choose “excellent”:
It turned out my issue was I hadn’t assigned a PIN, even though I had been using the card already. The service asked me to create a PIN before forwarding me to a customer service agent, but the PIN was what I needed! So a simple prompt asking if this had solved my problem would have been useful.
And in the field for why I would recommend Amex to a friend:
Customer service
I just realised:
Rubenerd started using Let’s Encrypt SSL certs, mostly because this site is one long, over-engineered experiment.
All HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS
My cipher suite doesn’t include support for Internet Explorer 6
Therefore, Internet Explorer 6 users can’t get here. Which means no more IE6 CSS hacks!
I kept the IE6 hacks around because I knew them off by heart, and my design is simple enough that it wasn’t much effort to include anyway. This finally gives me the impetus to remove these entirely.
The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.
02:11:34 – Jimbo!! Doc Sleaze!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubenerd!! Mike Boody!! A textury and fabulous collaboratorium about Strange Places, hosted by PQ Ribber with the ONSUG Week In Review with Jimbo!!
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The imitable Webmaster Hales sent the following feedback about my four power supplies post yesterday:
Hey Ruben,
Redundant power supplies are not unusual in server gear. I'm not sure about the multiple PCI slot positions though -- at first I thought they might be SATA bays, but it turns out they are on the front. In fact the front is nothing but SATA bays:
A reverse image search of your picture reveals that it's of a HPE Proliant ML350. Pdf with lots of info.
Regards, Hales
Thanks :). And that machine looks like a monster; imagine having all the money in the world and filling such a machine with SSDs or 15K SAS drives.
We use plenty of 1U and 3U rack servers in our data centres at work, but it’s very different seeing this kind of capacity in a tower machine. Those server PSUs also look like they’d be just as loud as those rack servers, so presumably you’d want to stash this as far away from general human habitation as possible.
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19:13 – An Officeworks small talk adventure, USB keys, evening beach strolls in North Arm Cove, choosing a pocket travel camera, catching up with people, Seinfeld on the latest QS, podcaster theme songs, and other insufficient catchup material!
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released September 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.
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I was trying to tab complete rgrep, but got this command instead. From its man(1) page:
rgb2ycbcr converts RGB color, greyscale, or bi-level TIFF images to YCbCr images by transforming and sampling pixel data. If multiple files are specified on the command line each source file is converted to a separate directory in the destination file.
This would have really helped me a few years ago, because the Gimp didn’t do CMYK. I’m not sure if it does now.
Regarding rgrep, I’ve aliased it to grep -R. I haven’t checked if ack has compatible options to alias to that.
