You may have read recently that Dell have had to recall four million laptop batteries made by Sony because a few of them exploded. Well it turns out that Apple have been affected too and have initiated their own recall programme. As soon as a heard this news I knew straight away that my PowerBook would have the problem. After all, it’s only been six months since I sent its original battery back as part of the last recall. Lo and behold, a visit to the website confirmed that my suspicions were right:
I like the way they show you nice friendly green ticks, as if it’s somehow a good thing that your computer contains a battery that could blow up at any minute! Also—in true Apple style—they don’t apologise for the inconvenience or the worry. Sorry is often the hardest word to say, especially if you’re in Cupertino it seems.
I know that lots of PowerBook owners are quite thrilled at the prospect of getting a brand new battery free from Apple, but I’m not. It means that I have take a day’s leave from work so that I can be at home when the courier arrives with the replacement battery (I can’t have parcels delivered to my work). Apple use DHL in the U.K. and DHL don’t deliver on Saturdays (you know, when most people aren’t at work), nor are they able to give you even a morning/afternoon hint as to when your parcel will be delivered. The whole experience seems to be weighted against the customer. I’m convinced that someone could make a killing if they launched a delivery service that was actually geared around when most people are at home i.e. weekday evenings.
I also want to know why laptop batteries are so crap. I can accept that they don’t last that long, because I’m waiting for superconductors that work across a temperature range to completely change the world. What I find hard to swallow is having to send my battery back every six months because a tiny percentage of units have manufacturing defects, which means that all the batteries have to be replaced because the manufacturers haven’t got a clue which ones are affected. Talk about belt and braces!
Rake is Ruby’s equivalent of the UNIX make build tool. You can list all of the Rake tasks available from within Rails using:
rake -T
—Note the uppercase “T”.
I was reading about the winners of the Apple Design Awards on Daring Fireball today. Impressed by the sound of iClip Lite from Inventive, I clicked on the link to investigate. This is what greeted me:
—Talk about rude and unhelpful!
Yes, I was using IE 6.0 to try to view the site and yes, I know that it’s not as good as the latest browsers from Mozilla, Opera, Apple and Microsoft themselves—i.e. [sic] IE7. However, I happened to be viewing the site from work where I’m prohibited from using any of those great browsers because the corporate standard is IE 6.0 and frankly, you have to pick your battles. Also, there’s no getting away from the fact that IE 6.0 still has the majority share of the Web browser market.
I don’t mind an unobtrusive banner gently suggesting that I need a newer browser to get the best site experience—I think Subtraction used to do this—but to not let me into the site at all because I’m using IE is not only annoying, it’s also pretty stupid in a business sense. You just ensured that I’ll almost certainly never use one of your products, which is a shame because I definitely dress on the Apple side nowadays rather than on the Microsoft side. Insult IE users if you must, but why couldn’t you bring yourself to provide a link so that they can view the site anyway? Don’t trot out the excuse that supporting IE is too much bother, because it’s not that difficult to construct a standards-compliant site that looks good in all the major browsers.
I’m not done yet as there are two more things that I’d like to get off my chest. Firstly, Windows hardly ever blue screens nowadays, but I guess you’ve not used it since that photo of Bill was taken in, ooh, about 1985? Secondly, it’s spelt browser not brower. Now who feels silly?
It’s hard to believe, but the World Wide Web turned fifteen on the 6th of August. Hard to believe because the Web has more or less gone away. Before you think I’ve gone completely mad in the face of its ubiquity and pervasiveness, allow me to explain.
We no longer notice when we’re using the Web. Have you noticed how almost all of the URLs you see on adverts or in magazines or on the television are no longer prefixed with http://? That’s because the fact that Web URLs need to start with it has been assimilated into popular culture. That and the fact that browsers add it automatically anyway. Besides, it looks quite ugly in print. Have you also noticed that increasingly URLs don’t even have “www” in front of them any more? With good reason—usually we no longer need to draw attention to the fact that the resource we’re accessing is on the Web. For years I thought there was something special about that “www”, until I learned that it’s just another subdomain.
Most people have never made a distinction between the Internet (which has been around in one form or another since 1969) and the Web, which can be thought of as just another application that uses the Internet, as e-mail, FTP, Archie and Gopher all are. As far as the majority are concerned, the Web is the Internet. All of which just goes to show how successful Tim Berners-Lee’s original idea has been, in all but one area. In spite of the explosion in the number of blogs and user-driven sites like Digg, the balance of the Web is still overwhelmingly weighted towards consumers over producers. It’s still largely read-only.
2003–2012 John Topley