Jon Is A Geek

I just got back from 3 days of Moodle Moot in Hamilton, officially the hickest town in the whole world! I gave a talk on digital repositories, got to hang out with and learn heaps from a whole bunch of cool Moodle people in NZ and also from Australia (including the big Kahuna Martin himself), Fiji, Canada and elsewhere. Photos are up on flickr with the moodlemootnz07 tag.

Okay Joel, interesting argument, and I sort of agree, but please don’t make silly stuff up to support your argument: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html

“You can follow the p-code/Java model and build a little sandbox on top of the underlying system. But sandboxes are penalty boxes; they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead.”

Well that’s not really true. Java Applets died because when Microsoft swamped out the Sun JVM with its own crippled 1.1 VM, nobody could realistically write to the much better Applet APIs that came out after version 1.1, so we either wrote crap AWT applets or ActiveX controls instead (a whole other world of pain and silliness). Also, the JVM is hardly “slow” these days, and is certainly faster than your average JavaScript engine.

“What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms”

What, so JavaScript/DOM in a browser isn’t a frickin’ sandbox? Hello?! It seems ludicrous to add another language compiler layer on top of JavaScript/DOM, when you may as well write it in Java and “compile” it into an applet, which will have the same access to browser capabilities, require the same security restrictions and functionality sandbox, run a lot faster, and not require learning a new round of language, compilers and APIs.

This is a letter I wrote to Vodafone. I am SO incredibly fed-up with their BOLLOCKS voice menus, so I thought I’d be pro-active about it…

–
I want to talk to whomever developed the voice menus for 777, because I want to offer some free constructive criticism. I guess it is because I develop software for a living and dislike using poorly thought-out solutions.

The only time I (and probably loads of other people) ring 777 is when I (we) want to top up, probably at least half the time by credit card. If you check your logs, I’ll bet topping up is what people are doing at least 75% of the time.

Let us say that I want to top up my mobile using my credit card. Please refer to attached diagram. Here’s how it goes:

1. Blah Blah Blah random announcement that I can’t skip by pressing a button. Too bad if I’m low on battery life.
2. “…to top up your mobile, press 2″ I press 2.
3. “…to top up using a credit card, press 2″ I press 2 again. So far so good.
4. “To top up, press 1. For customer services, press 2.”This menu is completely redundant and should be removed. At this point, I am about to indicate (for the second time), that I want to top up my mobile with a credit card. Why would anyone with an IQ greater than a cabbage want customer services at this point? Customer Services is available by pressing 9 at the first menu.

   Customer Services should be globally available from any menu by pressing the same key, (for example 0), and help should similarly be available (for example the * key)

5. By pressing 1, I finally get put through to something useful, where it asks me to enter my mobile and PIN. Fair enough, but wait! What’s this:
6. “To register a credit card, press 1, to top up, press 2.” Fair enough I suppose, but I have already indicated (twice) that I want to top up my mobile using a credit card. Pressing 2 gives me yet another menu:
7. “To top up your mobile, press 1. To top up another mobile, press 2.” This is now the fourth time I have had to tell the system that I want to top up my mobile with my credit card. For a use case that probably occurs more often than most of your other use cases (check your logs), That is three times too many. These last two menus should be merged:

1. Register a credit card
2. Top up your mobile
3. Top up another mobile

Cheers