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Most information here is in English. Only entries not relevant for the international audience are in Dutch.  2004.03.29How to handle telephone spamming? Don't we all hate it when people call us trying to sell us their financial products, newspaper subscriptions, pension funds, etc.? They call you just when you are having dinner, because they know that most people are at home that time of the day. The type of customer they like best is the customer that orders their product. Fine, if this is with mutual agreement, then the customer will not perceive this as an intrusion. I am not that type of customer, but I used to be the type of customer they like second-best: I used to cut off their sales pitch within the first 10 seconds of the conversation. They love customers like these, because this avoids them having to invest time in a customer who is not willing to buy; it gives them the time to proceed to the next customer. Now I have become their worst type of customer, and I urge you to do the same. I do not buy, yet I make sure that I take as much of their time as possible. If you have the time try to determine the background of the call center operator and what he earns. Perhaps create a standard script to guide you through the conversation. They have a script too and it gets funny when two people are each trying to follow their own script. A second option is this: tell them you are perhaps interested, but that you are always busy at that time of the day. Ask them to call you back at an impossible time, e.g. 23:00h, knowing that this is very difficult for them. When and if they call back, you cut off immediately. My favorite technique is this: when they call me I interrupt them immediately and ask them to hold on. My telephone has a nice hold tone, the kind of tone you hear when you are placed on hold in a call centre. Then I do the dishes, which takes about 10 minutes. Then (if I remember 8-) I go back to the phone and tell them I am not interested. It costs me nothing, saves a few other people their calls, and if I am lucky, I will be placed on their black-list. Of course, I will never again buy from a company that made an intrusive call and I always ask to be removed from their lists.
Matt May wrote a nice blog entry about the use of captchas against spam. Captchas are little tests often found at the end of a web form that are hard for computers and easy for man. Usually they are visual puzzles. These little Turing-tests should make it difficult that spam bots can automatically gain access to resources such as news groups, mail lists, etc. A good idea until the spammers catch up. The example he provides is so funny, it must be true. Spammers automatically fill in the web form for the resource they want access to, and redirect the captcha to free porn sites. So the visitor of the pron site solves the puzzle in return for free entry. The answer from the porn site visitor is then used by the spammer to obtain the access that they wanted in the other system. It is free-trading pleasure for a little of one's time. By the same mechanism the initiative from Microsoft as launched by BillG recently will ultimately fail. Gates proposed that if one receives an email from an unknown sender, the email is suspended and a challenge is sent back to the original sender. That challenge is a hard cryptographic puzzle that takes a few seconds to solve on the sender's computer. If the reply to the puzzle is not received within reasonable time, then the original message is dropped, otherwise it is passed on to the user. The idea behind this protocol is that a spammer sending out millions of spam messages a day will get so many cryptographic challenges, that there are not enough seconds in the day to solve them all without buying a lot of additional expensive hardware. The problem is of course that the challenges can also be redirected to free porn site visitors' computers. Paying a few seconds of cpu-time for free access is probably in most visitor's view a fair deal. The only solution a real hard money. True euros. Sending email should cost hard cash like snail mail requires hard cash for the stamp. Sending out millions of spam messages is possible but very costly. Redirection to free porn sites is also possible, except that these sites then will no longer be free.
In the thread on Joel on Software that I mentioned yesterday, David B.Wildgoose wrote about my date notation preference: Other than that, yes, let's standardise on YYYY.MM.DD for dates An anonymous then replied: On the contrary, the reverse is better for every day use. I probably do not really want to know the year a letter was written, for example, I am more likely to be interested in the day and then the month. By all means use the reverse format internally if that is what makes life easier but people in the West generally read left to right. My reply: The major-minor order is used in our company for everything, not just dates. Version numbers, times, file paths, people's names, project monikers, paragraph numbering, telephone numbers, addresses, file names, etc. We have a few simple rules that are easy to memorise and that take the variance out of much of our decisions. Call it an example of knowledge management. and: I should have added that my notation also works when used in file names, although it is wise to leave out any form of punctuation. All my files have names like these: As a matter of fact, in our case this is not a preference, it is the only correct notation. Our company motto is 'Simple. Powerful. Robust.'. Now this is an example of simplicity. There are no preferences.
Een paar tips voor relaties over het voorkomen van overlast door spam, virussen en hoaxes en voor het kiezen van goede wachtwoorden.
Yesterday, I posted a link to my blog on Joel on Software in a thread about blogging readers of JoS. For some reason my latest article caught attention and someone started a new discussion (sorry, not a permalink) about my article 'Hiring your next user interface designer'. Some of the comments made are fair, yet others totally missed the point. I agree with the original poster that my proposal is impractical, for the simple reason that there are no user interface designers with a stage director skill set on the job market. So even if one agrees with me, the problem in use interface design is not immediately solved. However, it at least gives a clue where to look, how to develop the UI design process, and what skills to look for in a new job applicant. The claim that user interfaces should be designed by an interaction designer, is always correct by definition, but this is playing semantics. It completely avoids answering the question what the skill set of this person should be. The only fortunate thing about the term interaction designer is that it stresses the interaction between man and machine and hints at the epic element that is needed so badly in my experience. Now more concretely, should the user interface designer be a professional stage director as was asked by Philo? As I mentioned in the article, a lot of his professional training is of no use in user interface design. Drama history and acting, are useless for the user interface designer. Scripting, directing, planning, managing, people management are useful though. The point of my article is not that the stage director has the perfect skill set for the job. The point is that he has exactly that skill that is the most important for the user interface designer. So maybe one should hire a trained stage director with sufficient affection for user interface design, or a professional developer who is a great story teller. As long as there is no specialised eduction for user interface design or interaction design, this is the best option. And when there is such a professional training, it will be more like scripting and stage directing than programming. I thank everybody for the comments, and no, I am not an Arts & Humanities type myself (-8
Who should design the user interface for your next application or website? A programmer? A graphic designer? A master of arts proficient in writing English? The psychologist or specialist in human factors? Programmers should provide their input from the technical angle. However, user interface design is not their field of expertise. Let programmers design your user interface and you might end up with something that is graphically ugly, uses a language that only bares a resemblance to English, requires the user to twist his mind, but that is a showcase of technological wit. You also need the latest version of your OS, various toolkits and database installed. Unfortunately, nobody is interested in that. The application is used because a job needs to be done. [complete article]
In the literature one can find excellent references to research about the best working environment for programmers. See the bionic office for an office designed with programming specifically in mind. Unfortunately, offices like these are often beyond the horizon for smaller start-ups. At Garabit we have a small team of developers who work in the same office. Although we do not have private offices, we have paid considerable attention to working conditions. Our experience indicates that a reasonably good office for software development does not have to be very expensive. [complete article]
It is a problem for all non-native speakers, and many of the native speakers too: how to spell words correctly without mixing up British English or American English? If you are either American or English this is less of a problem, because you probably have been submerged in a language with consistent spelling your entire life. However, for foreigners this is almost impossible without a dictionary, even when they speak English excellently. Still the question remains whether to use British or American English. [complete article]
My first article in this series is about planning as practiced in eXtreme Programming, or rather the lack of it. In the past five months, we have used XP-techniques in our development project with more than satisfying results. The project has been delivered in (a little) less time than expected, within budget, with functionality as previewed, and as far as we know, bug free. Add to this a number of stress-free developers who have had a wonderful time at the development studio and a social life after work. At a later time, I shall explain how I can have had expectations about budget, time, functionality and quality when there was no plan. [complete article]
Vandaag werd ik gewezen op het nieuwe initiatief van het Ministerie van Economische Zaken 'Actieprogramma TechnoPartner'. Het is me nog te vaag om er over te kunnen oordelen, behalve dan dat de titel vreselijk Nederlands is. Maar dat is een ander punt. Maar er is iets wat me onmiddellijk opviel: de staatssecretaris Mevr. van Gennip is afgestudeerd ingenieur.
Today I made the first of a series of articles on digital preservation (archiving) available online. The issues concerning digital preservation do not deprive the average computer user from his sleep, yet. However, I am convinced that almost everybody will run into archiving problems in the coming years. Read here what is coming to you. [complete article] Shadows [1958] has been recovered While we are at it: according to today's newspaper, two copies with the first version of John Cassavetes' movie debut Shadows [1958] have been found. They were deemed permantently lost. I wonder if this would have happened if the movie had been placed on a hard disk 45 years ago. Let alone the problem of finding the application software, the equipment and trained personnel to run the application to show a digital copy of a movie 45 years later.
More and more applications are trying to be smart and fail miserably. Either put the user in charge and do not interfere in his interactions, or be really intelligent, read the user's mind, and be 100% correct. [complete article] E-mail disaster finally closed It took Euronet 3 months and 2 weeks to make the changes in their system so that email to Garabit is routed via their servers. Several letters, several faxes and dozens of telephone calls were needed. They promised to call us back about ten times, but it happened exactly once. Since yesterday, everything works fine and we even have recovered the mail that went into a digital black hole during 3 weeks. Thank you Sir, thank you very much.
Ask 10 programmers about their favorite tool for writing quality software, and 9 will mention a debugger. However, I have disturbing message for them: debuggers actually decrease the quality of the code. [complete article]
People often ask why I spell Dutch the way I do. Here I explain (in Dutch) the reasons. In a future article (in English), I shall do the same for the way that we spell our English at Garabit. [complete article] All my blogs: |
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