Terminally Incoherent

Here is a question for my IT/Sysadmin readers out there. When you get a user who has an apostrophe, or an unusual character in their last name, how do you go about setting up his or her email address? Do you:

1. Drop the apostrophe and special characters and/or replace them with the closest ASCII equivalent to keep it easy
2. Keep the special characters and force everyone in the world to struggle as they try to email that user

Apparently IT people at a certain bank that I will not name (but let me just say it’s initials are HSBC) think that option #2 is a good idea. Why? Let’s think about a hypothetical scenario in which, for example and apostrophe in the email could be a problem. Again, this is just a make believe situation that has never actually happened yesterday at my company.

So, hypothetically speaking a made up user JC calls me up yesterday and tells me that she can’t send email to one Frogurt D’mangello who works at the said bank. Why can’t she do it? Because Mr. Frogurt’s email looks like this:

On the surface this is ok - after all apostrophes are allowed to be part of the email address according to the RFC, right? I know this, you know this but apparently whoever hacked together SquirrelMail didn’t. So when you try to send an email to Mr. Frogurt via this popular and widely used webmail application his address becomes:

Yes, someone is running mysql_escape_string method on all input fields, even those which legally are allowed to contain MySQL unfriendly characters. I should be mad at SquirrelMail but you know what - they are doing the right thing. I sanitize all my input fields too when I work on a web application. Better be safe than sorry. Naturally, they could use strip_slashes just before actually sending the email but what are you going to do. It’s a bug (which might have been already patched in then newest release), but I can’t fix it because I do not maintain the SquirelMails server.

But the situation is now a conundrum because JC is behind some draconian firewall which blocks all outgoing ports save for port 80 meaning she can’t use Outlook to send emails. She also can’t use SquirrelMail due to this peculiar bug. So how do they communicate?

This could have been easily avoided if certain IT department simply had a policy which said “only dots and alphanumeric ASCII characters in usernames”. And not just because certain email packages may not support all the different addressing formats as specified in the RFC. It’s also because everyone thinks they know how to validate emails but they don’t. Half the validation scripts out there is just plain wrong. You actually need a 6.4K regular expression to cover all the different addressing schemes covered by the RFC. So if Mr. Frogurt wants to subscribe to some mailing list, or sign into some popular web application he might at one point be told his email is not valid. Remove the apostrophe, and even the most broken email validator will let it through.

Not to mention the hassle of emphasizing the apostrophe every time he tries to dictate his email address to someone over the phone. So really, other than blindly following the RFC, what other benefits are there of putting that non alphanumeric character in his email? Would Mr. Frogurt really mind if his email started with frogurt.dmangello? Would it really make his life a living hell, or would it actually spare him some potential hassles, misunderstandings and unnecessary tech support calls?

I too have a non-standar letter in my name. If I wanted, I could set up my email as: Łukasz@example.com. It would be legal under RFC but I would probably spend the rest of my days explaining to people what that “weird L” is and how to get it in Outlook. Oh, and no iPhone user would probably ever email me because these poor schmucks can’t copy and paste yet. ;P

I say stick to alphanumeric ASCII and dots. Anything more is just asking for trouble.

The internet is killing Microsoft these days. Ever since man climbed down from a tree, learned how to walk upright and figured out how to write AJAX apps, the number of chairs thrown at unsuspecting developers in Redmond has been climbing exponentially. Let’s face it - the interweb is the great equalizer. It levels the playing field - because it doesn’t really matter whether you use Windows, Apple or Linux to access your Gmail, Google Docs and your Facebook. Your desktop is slowly becoming a thin client for the ever-richer web applications.

This is a direct threat to Microsoft’s defacto monopoly - and they are fighting back, the only way they know how - by implementing a vendor lock in strategy. Silverlight is just that. It is an attempt to create a Flash like plugin that will run great on Windows, somewhat acceptably on Apple, and not at all on Linux/Unix based systems. Yes, I know there is Moonlight but I suspect it will always be lagging behind the MS releases, and it will come loaded with proprietary codex that won’t be bundled with the public releases.

Same old shenanigans - you know how it works. Besides, we have been there before. Remember how we couldn’t play Youtubes for a while there because we were stuck with Flash 7 while Windows and Apple folks enjoyed versions 8 and 9? I remember and I Adobe didn’t even have a vested interest in putting Linux down. They just didn’t care enough. Microsoft on the other hand is poised to profit if the plugin doesn’t work well on other platforms. The internet leveled the playing field, and they are planning to tilt it again by getting into these huge Silverlight contracts for the government, libraries and educational institutions.

I’m writing about this now, because my heard of nooblets (and I tell you, heading cats is an enjoyable past time compared to herding throngs of flabbergasted luserati) started asking about it. They want to know what the “Silver Lights” (or “Silver Flight” or “Sliver Lite”) are, and why do they “pop up on Microsoft” (whatever that means). And when they ask, I simply pull out my pocket version of this very image:

Yes, I keep Admiral Ackbar in my pocket especially for those occasions when I must condescendingly point out an obvious trap to someone. It also works for identifying tarps. I like the blue tarp the best.

It’s a trap my friends. Don’t be fooled by their promises of a 100% compatibile moonlight release. It’s called moonlight, because you will be up all at night, and will end up howling at the moon in despair if you try to compile it and get it working on a linux box that does not run some version of Novell on it.

This new and exciting technology is nothing else than a vendor lock-in for the web. And I’m worried about that because I’m a linux user, and my prospective progeny will also likely be linux users. And I don’t want to find out one day that I have to sit at the “gaming box” to access tone governmental or educational websites because Mono folks are dropping the ball on Moonlight.

This is not just some silly rant of a random linux loon. It is a real concern, and the great state of Cali-fornication is also taking it very seriously - to the point where in October of 07 they asked the District Judge to extend the Microsoft anti-trust settlement for another 5 years - precisely because of issues surrounding Silverlight.

I just want you to keep this in mind. When your boss asks you if you should invest in that “Silvered Lights” platform, you just whip out your Ackbar and yell at top of your lungs: “IT’S A TARP!”

The old hacker motto used to be “information wants to be free”. This was the driving philosophy of the 80’s and the 90’s when the Internet was going through it’s awkward onset of puberty, and turbulent teenage years. We currently live at a peculiar junction in history where information is truly free. And it’s all thanks to advances in communication technology, ubiquitous broadband access and ever growing transfer speeds. Information is no longer scarce - it is a commodity much like water, or electricity. It’s obviously not worthless, but it’s relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things and it’s plentiful. For a modest monthly fee you have unlimited access to all the water and electricity you want.

In the very same way for a flat monthly fee you get unlimited access to the Internet which contains most of the information you will ever need. Every song, every movie, every book or piece of software ever made is out there for the taking. All you need is a torrent client and a little patience. Sure it’s not entirely legal but the odds of getting caught are incredibly small - not much bigger than the odds of winning the lottery. And there is just nothing that can be done about it right now. Neither the lawsuits and aggressive take downs of p2p networks nor the copy protection and ever more restrictive DRM have put any dent in the overall p2p traffic. Anything that is in digital format can be copied - no exceptions. Anything that can be copied will end up on the internet. Anything that is not in digital format, but can be digitized, will also end up on the internet. For free. And unless we completely change the fundamental rules of electronic communication this trend will only escalate.

Naturally the cost to produce these digital goods (movies, songs and software) is nonzero. It is actually quite expensive make them - both in terms of investment capital, and labor. But thanks to internet, their effective market price approaches zero. You either sell yourself cheep, and loose money or sell high, and put up really tough competition from p2p. This competitor is different though - he cannot be thwarted, legislated away, sued into oblivion or absorbed via hostile takeover. You are competing with the basic human nature. There is nothing - and I repeat, NOTHING that can be done against this. Unless of course you can figure out a way to turn back the clocks, and cripple the internet to where it reverts to it’s slow and non-threatening form you remember from the 80’s. For better of for worse, you are stuck with broadband internet as the most efficient distribution system, and the fiercest competitor you will ever encounter.

How do you compete with free? Obviously you can’t cut the price, unless of course you are willing to pay your customers to use your product. The only thing you can really do is to add value to your product. Believe it or not, but people are always willing to pay for a superior quality. Think about this next time you are shopping for a new cell phone. You provider probably offers a fully functional free phone with the service, but a lot of people opt for the sleek looking $200-$300 alternative which has extra features, bells and whistles. You have to do the same - you have to add bells and whistles to your product - and once you do, people will eagerly hand over their money to you, even if a free version is available.

The only problem here is that you can’t add value to information by combining it with more information. Adding bonus tracks, or blooper reel to your album or dvd doesn’t do anything because these things will end up on the internet as well. You need to add something that cannot be easily digitized and sent over a wire.

Kevin Kelly in his excellent article Better than Free identifies 8 value adding features you can use to make your digital product more desirable to customers. I highly recommend reading his piece in it’s entirety but if you are to lazy here are the 8 things he proposes:

1. Immediacy - ie. the ability to ship the product to the customer before 0-day crack comes out
2. Personalization - tailoring your product to customers specific needs
3. Interpretation - lifetime support, warranty, 24 hour helpline, etc..
4. Authenticity - genuine article is bound to have highest bit rate, sharpest picture and no embedded trojans
5. Accessibility - pay once, download from anywhere and in any format
6. Embodiment - no mp3 can beat a live concert, and no ebook is as nice as a beautifully bound hard cover edition
7. Patronage - fans usually buy original cd because they want to support their favorite musician - not because they can’t find the mp3’s of the songs it contains
8. Findability - iTunes are more user friendly than bittorrent - even with the DRM - you can capitalize on that sort of thing

So there you have it. Kevin goes into much more detail there, but I don’t want to steal his thunder. Read the article and see if you agree. All you need to do to make money on the seemingly free data, is to implement one or two things from this list above. And most digital content producers are already halfway there. They are just to set in their old ways to develop their strengths and capitalize on them. They still think it terms of distribution and scarcity. But this is a dead end.

Internet is the most efficient distribution channel you can imagine. You can’t get your data faster to your customer than over a high bandwidth fios connection. And if you try to use a slower channel or introduce artificial scarcity, into the equation to drive the price up the consumers will simply pick the free (illegal) alternative. If you concentrate on adding value in one of the 8 ways listed above however you can easily rise prices without scaring away or alienating the customer.

The funny thing however is that information is not the only thing that is becoming a free ubiquitous commodity. Even the physical products that were once scarce are heading that was as the technology improves and the prices fall due to normal market mechanics. Just go and read Kevin’s Technology Wants to be Free essay. I don’t think I can explain this concept any better than he does. But he is right - and his vision of future is certainly bright for us as consumers.

I noticed a disturbing trend recently among many users. This includes my coworkers, students and family. See if you noticed it too. I can for example tell someone to go to some website - let’s say I want to point someone to this very blog. I would simply tell them to go to terminally-incoherent.com. This is the process these users go through to get to my site:

1. Open IE which by default opens up the MSN website with all the flashing flash animations
2. They click in the address bar and type in http://www.google.com (yes, they actually type in http and www parts)
3. Then they click in the Google search box despite the fact that Google uses Javascript to make it the active box on the page
4. They type in http://www.terminally-incoherent.com in the search box
5. They click the search button with their mouse
6. Finally they inspect the search results and click on the link to my page

I swear - this happens so often that I no longer get surprised to see it. I can understand the excessive clicks and the silly insistence on typing http and www in front of every address. What I really do not get is why people insist on using Google as the intermediate step when trying to navigate to some address?

In fact we had a guy call up our help desk recently because he could not access one of the company’s new websites. I think he spent half an hour on the phone doing various troubleshooting steps before someone realized that he was actually using the process outlined above. Naturally the website, being an internal service used only by the employees is not and does not need to be indexed by Google. When he was instructed to type in the URL he was very confused and it took him 3 or 4 follow up questions to actually locate this “mysterious address bar”.

The things users do these days baffle me sometimes. I really do not understand their logic. It’s almost as if there was this huge gap between us and the lusers. And instead of closing up, this gap seems to be widening as new generations grow up with technology learning to use it without ever even trying to understand it.

It’s funny, back in the day used to wonder how the future will look. It seemed really bright and positive back then. We figured that kids will be growing up with technology, and using computers on every day basis. We figured that they will play and tinker just the way we did, and every generation will be more computer literate. We were wrong.

The level of computer literacy did not increase. The kids learn to use computers very early, but they do not learn how to understand them. The myspace generation has no fucking clue about technology - all they know is how to awkwardly browse the web and IM eachother all day. Nothing else.

It almost seems like some of us are predisposed for this stuff. We are naturally drawn towards technology and we love figuring out how things work, and how to do things better and faster using the available tools. Others are destined to remain clueless forever despite the fact they have every single opportunity to learn and experiment. Having easy access to technology does not always imply any level of familiarity with it.

I came to accept HTML email as somewhat necessary evil. Or rather, I’m wiling to acknowledge that it has legitimate uses. For example HTML links are much nicer and convenient than those 5 mile long URL’s. Most email clients will take a URL and linkify it for you, but when the address spans 3 lines (like for example every single website on microsoft.com) a simple link is usually more elegant than truncated or word-wrapped URI. So if you send me an email which contains a HTML link or two I really won’t get mad. In fact at least one of the applications I coded up recently, routinely sends HTML emails - but these are essentially time sensitive reports that need to be formated into tables. And HTML tables look nicer than ASCII tables - at least to normal people.

What irks me though is the blatant abuse of HTML at the hands of some people. For example, is writing your entire email:

really necessary? I can really understand the aesthetic value of being able to write some words in bold or italics for emphasis, without using some old school tricks like using asterisks or underscores but come on. Using this type of formating is a selfish, and inconsiderate. Fortunately most clients are able to strip shit like that out of emails. For example my KMail is able to rip off any funky formating generated by Outlook but it leaves well formed HTML alone. I’d like to think that this feature was developed for this very reason. Unfortunately the HTML emails generated by Thunderbird are not stripped and so I’m still left to suffer ugly ass correspondence.

If your email looks anything like the example above you need to seriously stop. It’s not cut! It does not give your emails more personality - it just makes them look as tacky as your myspace page. All it does is tells your recipient that you are a pompous, selfish luser with no aesthetic tastes whatsoever. If you want to play around with HTML get a myspace account and create a lovely theme with a dark on dark color scheme and a screamingly bright background image that just drowns out everything else, like everyone else does. But leave your email in the default boring font - especially your work email. Yes, I actually exchanged emails with people who used similar font and color for official work related correspondence.

These people were not working with me, or for me. My boss would probably have them publicly flogged for something like that. I guess the email etiquette rules at their place doesn’t really exist. Nevertheless I found it very unprofessional - not to mention annoying.

You already know my opinion on tacky email signatures. I just needed to get this out of my system. Email is not your myspace page. People actually need to read it (does anyone actually read myspace pages? I thought they were mostly about pictures and ugly ass layouts). Note that not everyone enjoys your super sized, raging pink font as much as you do. Be considerate!