alex.mullr.net/blog

Google provide an API to create pretty graphs and charts. Along with that API, they provide a little information on how granular your data should be, which looks something like this:

Google also own Feedburner, and they provide the pretty (and very, very detailed) graph shown below. Can you see where I’m going with this?

If you have received this message in error, do not open any attachment but please notify admin@domain.co.uk deleting this message from your system.

If you have received this in error, please notify us immediately and delete the email.

If you incorrectly send me an email, surely it’s your fault. If it’s in my inbox, it didn’t get there by some fantastic stroke of luck; so don’t tell me what to do with it.

The unauthorised use, disclosure, copying or altering of this message is strictly forbidden.

What does that even mean, “forbidden”? Is it legal to forbid me from acting on something you’ve sent me, if you sent it by accident?

Facebook status after Facebook status after tweet of… people complaining that there are absolutely no summer jobs. I guess it’s to be expected (note please, I haven’t used the R word), but the effect is still incredible to see.

Twitter Search: summer job

(A way to search/filter my friends’ statuses would be nice, hint hint Facebook)

There’s no substitute for this kind of marketing, this direct contact with customers. They’re not even employees of the company; the Twitter bio reads:

We are Former Managers for IN-N-OUT BURGER, we are not from the corp. office

California beckons, and I can’t wait.

In-N-Out: you have a pretty big reputation to live up to, and I really hope you taste as good as you tweet.

Hey, First Capital Connect – we need to talk.

You know databases, right? Those things that can store a whole load of data for you? Yeah, start using them properly. Don’t send me my password cleartext in an email, and don’t send it all uppercase when that’s not how I entered it. Do you even support case-sensitive passwords?

Oh, and find the guy who designed this part of your UI, take him out back and beat him up a little:

…simply untick the box.

Which box?

Earlier this week, news that Nottinghamshire teacher Peter Harvey was arrested for the attempted murder of one of his students broke. BBC News is now reporting that he’s been remanded in custody.

Regardless of what you make of the story, it should be obvious that details are a little sketchy; things have only been going for a few days or so, and nothing major has got out yet.

Nevertheless, some people have managed to prove their stupidity by offering completely unwanted and idiotic opinions on social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s a couple that made me cringe:

Jack Waterhouse looks like a little shit that deserves beatings.

— from the Facebook group of the same name, by one Scott Haynes.

You are a hero to the average, respectable, working man. Kick these little gobshites back to their chavy council estates. Another fooking kid whose mother is sponging off the state

— Phil Mcavity

Jack Waterhouse is almost certainly a fresh-mouthed little smart arse that needed a good slapping. I blame the (single) mother.

— John Fitzgerald

Apologies for the language and distasteful comments, but I wanted to get this across. Why people think they have a right to do this on the Internet is totally beyond me – it’s not even like they’re doing it because of anonymity. It’s ridiculous; part of me hopes it’s illegal, because frankly I’d love to see what would happen if some of these people had legal proceedings taken against them.

Oh, I couldn’t help but update this post after seeing the latest comment on the original group, linked above:

He looks like a right cheeky shit , unaware of who his father is.. what the class put that teacher through was awful, no respect at all

That from Jake William James French of Coquet High School, Newcastle. No offence Jake, but if we’re judging based on looks—as I’d guess you yourself are—your profile picture doesn’t seem much better.

13^th July, 1am: I keep telling myself there’s no point arguing with trolls, and there’s no point arguing with idiots. I need to spend less time on Facebook, before it drives me insane. Joe Jimothy, from the lovely state of Pennsylvania, has this to say:

In my country we would have stoned him.

Really, Joe? Stoning’s legal in the US, is it? Moron.

Last night, my redesign of the internal Maths department VLE at the University of York went live. When I started at the department in October last year, it looked a little like this:

Click the image to view it in all its glory. I'm not going to draw your attention to some of the things I've come to love most about it, because frankly it speaks for itself.

As you might expect, looking at that got boring and started to hurt my eyes pretty quickly. In May, I went to see Henning Bostelmann, the guy who looks after all things Maths & website there, and offered to try my hand at creating something. This is what's happened over the last couple of months:

Leaving Henning's office last week, he remarked how there would now be “600 happy users” in the department – thank you, Henning, for your help testing, fixing, testing, updating, and more testing.

I love university; there's so much freedom to do anything and everything to improve departments, societies, colleges, the list goes on. I hope I don't sound too much like a naïve little first year, but I really do think it's the case – here's something which will (hopefully) outlast the time I spend at York, and that means something to me.

The boring interesting stuff: it's a fairly hacky CSS job (so no judging my [lack of] coding skills from here, please), using the gorgeous Silk icons from famfamfam – so many thanks to Mark James for providing his icons free of charge, they're such a great resource. Moodle, the open-source (!!, ♥) learning environment that we're using, is actually impressively easy to mess about with. This seems to be one of those “20% of pages used 80% of the time” situations, so it's nowhere near finished and there's always room for improvement; might do the same thing again next year to just tidy it up.

What follows are a few parts that I'm really happy with…

Dear National Express,

Brill, you’ve finally failed. Now instead of money-grabbing like you’re so used to, why don’t you think about cost-cutting for once? For example, I was having a think about those great tickets of yours…

This is what gets printed for me if I book a return journey from London Kings Cross to York:

So, how about we rejig a few things. Even if you guys don’t save any money from printing, you’ll get that fuzzy warm hippy feeling from using less card or paper.

See, what I did there is applied a very complicated design process called “make the stuff that people actually care about really big”. Unbelievably, it doesn’t matter to me what that long number is, so I made it small. Are you catching my drift yet? “What’s a ToD?”, I hear you cry. I have no idea. I also don’t care.

Using the first, we’re down from five tickets per return journey to three. Now let’s suppose you make the collection receipt optional (I’ve been on your service every couple of weeks since October last year, and I’ve never needed one) and uncheck the box by default. Two tickets per return journey instead of five.

The second’s probably a little ambitious, but wow, imagine the possibilities of a company actually removing stuff that isn’t useful on 99% of journeys (this statistic was very accurately calculated using a technique known as “making it up”).

Yes, I’m sure there are reasons things haven’t changed. National Rail probably set up some beautiful unified system in 1994 that every train company can use to print tickets, or whatever. Once again, I’m reminded of how big business and IT (or the web) are a match made in heaven.

Dear Apple,

I’ve had my iPhone almost a year now. It’s been out for a little over twenty-four months, if I can add up right. Is there a decent reason that I have still have to jump through hoops to add music I play to Last.fm? Sure, Last.fm is a comparatively small site¹ – but you’re touting Facebook and Flickr exporting features as a pretty major upgrade to iPhoto. Plus, I can’t imagine that something like this would be particularly difficult for you guys to code.

It’s not like scrobbling is really data-intensive, either. Basically, I just don’t see why you haven’t done it yet.

Cheers,

Alex

Click the images for bigger versions. No, you get no points for realising I did them in Photoshop; it’s not tough.

While talking to Adam last night, he mentioned that a certain online bookmarking company had been particularly unhelpful when he was emailing their tech support. Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find ‘Luke’ had updated my Twitter support ticket. I’m not sure whether it’s the person, the coders or the company, but something’s crap here. This is the story…

On the 8th of April I opened a ticket to let Twitter know that they’d spelt Twitterrific incorrectly on their downloads page. Fine, it’s a tiny problem, and an easy fix, but nonetheless something that should be fixed. ‘andr8a’ replied within a day, and was very grateful.

Thanks for the heads up! We truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Andrea

Poking around towards the end of last month, the problem still hadn’t been sorted. Fine, another support ticket opened, how tough can this be to fix? After jumping through hoops (they now close your ticket with a list of FAQs without even reading it, sigh), this is the reply I was left with this morning:

Thanks. This will not be fixed at this time.

What the hell? How hard is it to fix one typo on their own site? And I didn’t need an essay back, but did he have to sound so pissed off when I was clearly trying to help? Thanks, Twitter. You guys rock.