Following up on an old article on this, where I pointed out the “issues” I had with .net’s e-commerce challenge… (read the original article)

Recently I got an email from Phil (www.branchesdesign.co.uk) about the write up we did, and largely he agrees with what we said. He also pointed out some things we missed – but generally it supported the “concern” that the software match off was a bit biased.

He said:

I found your site whilst looking through my stats and found you linking to the .Net demo site we did for Olivers Organics using ‘out of the box Actinic’. I have to agree with you whole-heartedly. The so- called panel of ‘experts’ at .Net just… wasn’t! I don’t understand why they just didn’t have a wander outside their offices and grab 10 people off the street to have a review session.

I couldn’t agree more. That would have been a MUCH better idea, and really would have actually provided some insight for other developers.

Whilst I agree that Hannah’s {the “winning” entry} design was very nice indeed, it did appear as though some of these ‘experts’ didn’t even look at all of the sites in much detail. For instance, on ours a reviewer said there was no special offer on the home page. In the screen grab accompanying the review it can be seen! Oh dear.

The winning web site was evry nice – we said that the first time round, although on subsequent comparisons I am not really still sure it deserved to win. I had missed the special offer thing – but it is a good example of the problem with using industry “experts” to review a site.

.Net’s credibility, unfortunately, took a bit of a nose-dive in my estimations. Still, we haven’t done too badly out of it with lots of hits to the Organics site… c’est la vie.

Sadly, I cant really say I ever gave .net much “credibility” as far as its experiments go (it could have a whole site of bad science…) 🙂 It is good that it has generated traffic – the organics website (http://www.branchesdesign.co.uk/oliversorganics/) is very good, as is the designers site – www.branchesdesign.co.uk. It gives a feeling of “Cosmic Justice” to think that, despite the poor structure of .net’s code-off the entrants are getting some reward!

On an unfortunate note, this month’s .net magazine shows they refuse to learn from their mistakes and have set aside the best part of six pages for a “bad science” special. The article is about how a website has 50 miliseconds to make an impact… Now, I am sure .net are just faithfully repeating a research abstract but they should know better. Without going into too much detail about how this article is really not much more than a “filler”, I will highlight one question – when does the time start? From when you click a link to when the page renders is going to be about 100 times longer than that – even for a well optimised page on a LAN. It is an example of a farcial headline grabbing statement, which then descends into a mediocre peice about web design.

Well, it seems that despite the linuxquestions site giving great and helpful information – and my YaST apparently having installed Apache 2 and PHP 5, I still cant get the thing to work.

My love of Linux is rapidly running out. This is very frustrating, especially as setting up Apache/MySQL/PHP/CF on a Windows machine took about 10 minutes top and worked perfectly out of the box.

I will perserve but any advice / tips welcome.

Well, the longstanding diatribes against Ubuntu not withstanding, I have spent a fair amount of time on this in the past few weeks. To such an extent that when I came back to the SuSE machine (which I am using for this), I had pretty much lost the ability to do anything.

The shame will never end.

In short, the SuSEbox has been largely untouched for the last month or so, so when I came to it today it needed a fair amount of admin doing – packages updating etc. I also decided this was a good time to bin the old apache 1.3 it was running and install apache 2 with php5.

What a mistake.

In the last month or so, it seems like I had forgotten how to do the simplest of admin tasks. I couldnt add new repositories to download up-to date software and had to resort to installing (often followed by repeated uninstall, reinstall farces) the software from a CD burned months ago. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately the wonders of Google saved the day and I got to http://www.linuxquestions.org/ – which fortunately had pretty much the answer to every question I was suffering.

Sadly, for some reason (and even though CF, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Python etc are all fine) I cant get apache to serve PHP pages properly. It still sends them with an unknown mime-type. (And yes, I have edited the config files by hand…)

Oh well.

Now, most (if not all of you) will be aware that the Linux Site is getting out of date and we were about to do an overhaul to bring it kicking and screaming into 2006. However, as things were about to begin a debate opened up as to keeping it “for posterity.”

Overall, I am not a nostalgic person, however some of the comments made did make sense and now there is a bit of a rething going on.

Plan A (the original favourite) is that we use the current site, bin all the old data and revise everything in line with 2006 software, hardware and prices.

Plan B (which is growing in support) is that we retain the “old” site and create a whole new section for 2006 – new style, new prices etc.

Please, feel free to let me know what you think (email/posts/news/blogs etc) and in a couple of weeks the outcome of “public opinion” should be visible on the site 🙂

It is with great pain and suffering I have to make this rant today. I am a big fan of Linux and love it. It is running now. I am using it to play music, download USENET artciles, render and image and burn a cd all at the same time – right now!

However, I have to confess to one pretty significant annoyance.

Webdesign.

Now, given *nix’s functionality on the internet, you would think that it would be the ideal platform for web development. Largely it is. Native FTP / SSH is wonderful. It is an easy task to SSH into the webhost and make changes directly. I can set up cron jobs to automatically update / refresh / back up my files etc.

However, there is big failing – there is nothing to compare with Dreamweaver. Nothing. Nvu is good – very good – but at anything other than static HTML pages it becomes a terrible chore to use it. I have been trying to use it for site development for quite some time now – and overall, I have had to resort to going back to the Wintelbox and using Dreamweaver.

Now, on price issues NVU wins hands down. If I was purchasing this for my own use I would never have even contemplated DW. There is always the chance that years of practice fighting DW may mean I am biased but I would be interested to see anyone who has tried both, and finds NVU is better for PHP/ASP driven sites.

For some reason, over the last five hours or so Wikipedia hasnt been showing images. Is this price of fame, or has upload.wikipedia.org just gone down?

This is in addtion to the problems I have had over the last few weeks where typing www.wikipedia.org or wikipedia.org into the address bar of IE causes it to crash – only en.wikipedia.org works here.

Odd to say the least.

Well, in the interest of furthering the available skill set at WhyDontYou, there has been some early experimentation with the Google Maps API and using things like AJAX. For those of you who have read this months .net, you will immediately see where the inspiration came from…

Have a look at our implementation of the google maps which shows the locations of Sci-Tech and CompuSkills sites. This works pretty well and we are (so far) more than happy with the .net tutorial. Well done guys.

Also, check out the “dashboard” – this is a 100% accurate implementation of the tutorial provided by .net (in which they claim it should work fine in FF and IE) yet it completely fails to work in either firefox or internet explorer. Bah.

For info and interest (well it is interesting to technical nerds), I am going to look at trialing Hamachi by setting up a secure VPN. Over the next couple of weeks I will look at how it functions and see if it lives up to its promises. Any thing I find / work out (etc) will be posted here.

Sorry I couldn’t resist that. As someone who actually works with statistics, I can confirm almost any statistics you examine in detail turn out to be based on spurious data.

The Bad Science article was particularly effective in uncovering the mythical nature of the doubling (1.4 rounded down to 1 and 1.9 rounded up to 2). Ben Goldacre even managed to explain the impact of clustering in comprehensible terms. Wow.

Rounding formed the basis of the oldest forms of computer crime (Round the results of millions of money calulations down and you can amass and, obviously, remove the invisible money that results. 100,000,000 times .5p is half a million pounds. Nowadays, the banks are wise to it of course – they keep the invisible money themselves)

Statistics are used to support almost any argument. This is not a fault in the statistical procedures. (I am prepared to take their value as given, insofar as I will never understand half of them.) The problem comes from the way statistics are embedded in social relations. Pure research for its own sake is rare. Who would pay for it? So any published statistics are created for some purpose – to direct the use of resources, to evaluate the success of a policy, and so on.

The “so on” includes influencing public opinion. The media are not interested in publishing dull statistics but they are very keen on inflaming public opinion. We have an infinte appetite for hearing that the young people are behaing worse than in the past, so how could a newspaper resist a headline grabbing statistic that involves youth, drugs and things getting worse?

Many thanks to Ben Goldacre for paying attention to a use of statistics and for having the wit to ask the rare questions – what are these numbers? what do they mean? who collected them?

Very good point in post in the entry below about tutorials for beginners that leap from “Hello, world” to how you programme the space shuttle.

It is almost impossible to find an introductory book for “idiots” or “dummies” that doesn’t do this. There are books that promise you can learn to use SQL, PHP AND Apache in 24 hours. I don’t know how much of a moron this makes me. I can’t even read a couple of thousand pages of a novel in 24 hours , let alone read a couple of thousand pages of a book that’s too heavy to lift while actually writing and running the code.

If the Trades Descriptions Act covered these books they would have to be titled “Learn enough of x to be reasonably confident, if you have access to good internet forums and a few mates who know all about x, over the course of 6 months solid effort. Oh, and by the way, you had better be really good with computers to start with”

This would probably shift a few less books. However, when you did the introductory bit that lets you write “My first x application” and display your own name onscreen, then wondered if your book had been sold with a dozen missing chapters because the next page says “Now code the operating software to control a nuclear reactor” you would at least be prepared for it to take some effort.

http://www.bunchball.com/

http://www.krugle.com/

 

That Ruby on Rails introduction below is probably one of the worst introductory sentences imaginable. Could anyone read it and bring themselves to read on?

It’s impossible to write about computers without using technical terms but technical terms are not the same as jargon. And there is almost never a good excuse for using the bastardised version of the English language that has become pretty well standard in business.

Business language exists to allow people to say nothing while emitting possibly thousands of words. It has evolved so that consultants can produce content-free reports that still justify generous consultancy fees by their volume. This involves using words like “leveraged” that look like they mean something technical and precise but have no meaning when you get closer.

The average consultancy document is an alchemical spell. It changes words into gold. Therefore it must be composed in an arcane language that can’t be understood by mere mortals. No one ever reads more than a pargraph of the things but that paragraph must be incomprehensible enough to show that the writer has the magic power to write nonsense. (After wearing a suit with conviction) this counts for more than almost every other human skill. Just try getting a business loan or government grant without one.

Maybe .net accidentally got one of their consultants to write the Ruby on Rails tutorial.

It is coming thick and fast today. Obviously this latest issue of .net is either suffering from too many pages and not enough content or it is actually an April Fool. Not only is the ruby on rails tutorial torturous to the point of unreadability but they follow this up with a tutorial on PHPizabi.

This time, the writing is perfectly readable and the tutorial follows reasonable step by step processes. However, it takes it to the level of idiocy. It runs from page 95 – 99 and is about four pages longer than it should be. The opening part of the tutorial is about how easy PHPizabi is to use and set up, yet it takes more tutorials than the impenetrable Ruby on Rails… What lunacy is this?

Page 1 is dedicated to unzipping the software and FTPing to your webspace. A whole page and 9 steps. If you use something other than the WinXP inbuilt zip handling or you use your own FTP client this whole page is pointless. Even if you are the three people in the world who use this set up, the article is pointless unless your level of IT literacy is incredibly low – if it is, why on Earth are you setting up your own social networking / dating site?

It continues in this vein. Each step is so simplistic you have to question the target audiences ability to actually read what is displayed on the screen. It is surrounded by “TOP TIP” boxes with things like this:

If you’re on an earlier version of Windows, you won’t be able to automatically extract the zip archive PHPizabi arrives in. Try PowerArchiver from www.powerarchiver.com. It also supports GZIP and RAR formats.

Good information but, I suspect, some what redundant for anyone other than a hermit who has been in his cave since 1994.

The next top tip is brilliant:

Parts of the current version of PHPizabi are encrypted using ionCube, a PHP encoding and decoding system. You may need specific server side support for ionCube, or perform some additional installation stages. Check out tinyurl.com/pzhtf

Amazing. People who need to be taught in NINE stages how to unzip an archive are also assumed to be able to determine the requirements for installation of this. Wow.

Honestly, I can only assume that this issue was one big April Fools joke, or that it is a bit of a quiet period and they were struggling for things to write tutorials about. Any sane human being would have swapped the Ruby torture-tutorial for the PHPizabi nonsense in a heartbeat. Maybe the editor has been on holiday?

Well, after the last rant I thought I would check up the useage of the term leverage. In that rant I mentioned how .net had used the phrase “We’ll leverage Rails to generate our application directory…” in a tutorial.

I had a moment of doubt about the term – maybe it had been used properly. Off to the internet I did go. The wonders of Dictionary.com came to my assistance and defined the word as:

1. 1. The action of a lever.
   2. The mechanical advantage of a lever.
2. Positional advantage; power to act effectively: “started his… career with far more social leverage than his father had enjoyed” (Doris Kearns Goodwin).
3. The use of credit or borrowed funds to improve one’s speculative capacity and increase the rate of return from an investment, as in buying securities on margin.

Now, correct me if I am wrong but none of them are appropriate for the word being utilised as it was. Is there a reason why the sentence couldnt have read “We’ll use Rails to generate our application directory…” or is that not Web 2.0 enough for .net magazine?

Well, it is a new month now so obviously more rants are required 🙂

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I actually quite like .net magazine and think it really is a worthwhile read. I even subscribe to it! So please take my complaints with that in mind.

Following on from our previous rant, it seems things have not improved this month. In fact, I suspect a lot of the articles are in fact “Aprils Fools” – only slightly late.

The cover disk still claims it offers tools worth “over £140” – however I would be hard pushed to value the software anywhere near that level for insurance purposes… I suspect this is something that will never, ever go away with regards to computer magazines and their cover disks. Personally I would be happier if they dropped the magazine price by a pound and sacked the cover disk. I may be in the minority though 🙂

Anyway, the main thing I want to complain about is the bloody “Ruby on Rails” tutorial. If you have the magazine it is on pages 82 – 89 and is, simply put, the single worst tutorial I have ever come across in my life.

It is not just badly written, but this is a tutorial which appears to be aimed at getting novices up to speed with the rails development framework and help them produce an application.

You can tell it is going to be bad. This is the first paragraph:

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source framework for the rapid development, testing and deployment of agile database-backed web applications. It is the marriage of Ruby, which is an elegant and powerful scripting language, and several classic programming design patterns. The result is a full-stack framework designed around the Model-View-Controller ( MVC) design pattern, which means you can use Ruby in all tiers of your application.

Now, I am not imagining things am I? Was that even in English? I cant help but get the feeling that the author (I will not name him, you can find it in the magazine) knows less about Ruby / Rails than he is letting on and has resorted to printing marketing blurbs from 37Signals.

Normally, .net tutorials are well written, informative and easy to follow. The Ruby on Rails article is none of that. While it is possible that if you follow the tutorial from start to finish you will have a working Ruby application, this is far from likely. The whole thing jumps from stage to stage, and of course suffers from the common computer tutorial problem of starting out for dummies then you turn the page and are expected to code the Hubble space telescope.

Every few sentence contain phrases like “We’ll leverage Rails to generate our application directory…” Seriously. It actually uses phrases like this as though they mean something. It is the worst abuse of the English language I have seen in (non-PR related) published material in a long time. The rest of the tutorial suffers from a combination of assumptions and “terminology gaffes.”

In parts, it seems to assume no prior knowledge at all, then jumps to startling difficult concepts which are hardly explained. The “migrations” are brought from no where and then readers are expected to start generating them. The section reads:

For our lightweight message board application, we need to generate two database tables: one for the discussion threads and another for posts left by users. To begin using migrations, run the migration generator for both by typing: (code)

Now, oddly, the only earlier reference to the word migration is about migrating data from one system to another (the examples give are MySQL to PostgreSQL). It is amazing. This happens repeatedly.

In essence, I suspect that even if you followed the tutorial line by line you would not end up with any better idea on how to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications. I know I didnt.