I consider myself a luddite when it comes to most forms of technology, particularly with those devices that are said to “just work.” This includes photocopiers, fax machines, complex phones (e.g. multi-line phone systems, cell phones), printers, home theater systems, and other unholy bastard combinations of these devices. Somehow, they don’t “just work” for me.

Microsoft is very rare at “getting it right,” but on some things they have: one of the goals of Microsoft’s Office 2007 was to help its users more easily and quickly create good looking documents. Doing it quickly makes the user feel smart; having it look good makes the user look smart too.

When I’m fumbling around with inane office equipment and devices, trying to figure out what some flashing LED with meaningless icon is trying to convey, or trying to figure out what combinations of buttons must be pushed in what order to make some device perform some magic function, I don’t feel very smart. When I cannot get these devices to work the way I want them to, it makes me feel stupid and don’t want to use the device again, and become bitter about it (as if I wasn’t bitter enough already).

This is probably the basis for the luddite attitude of many people, for both gadgets and technology as well as computers.

I don’t think this is our fault…

Besides many manufacturers’ complete ineptitude in usability and market testing, many, many manufacturers cut corners and have electrical and hardware engineers write software and design interfaces, instead of hiring dedicated software engineers and usability experts. Just because an electrical/hardware engineer knows how to program, it does not mean they can produce good software, or even know what they are doing.

Recently, I’ve received a few error 404s on a request for “siteinfo.xml.” siteinfo.xml is a file used by Amazon’s A9 search engine’s browser toolbar SiteInfo, and is automatically fetched for every website a user visits.

This sounds pretty similar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s infamous favorites icons feature. For every site a user visited with Internet Explorer, the browser would automatically request a file called favicon.ico, to be displayed in the browser’s location bar and bookmarks. A lot of people were not happy—all of the sudden web servers would begin to get swamped for requests for this mysterious favicon.ico that did not exist. These requests polluted many web server logs, and were very annoying.

On some sites, especially dynamic ones, 404 errors are very expensive. Unfortunately this is true of most Drupal-powered sites, including mine. When using Drupal’s “pretty URLs” which uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to, well, make URLs pretty, all requests that the web server does not process (including errors) will go through Drupal. Going through Drupal means a long boot-strapping process to initialize Drupal and load all its modules, and at least one database request to find out a URL does not exist and to return an error 404. Too many requests for a non-existent file can basically become a DoS attack.

It seems Amazon’s A9 developers didn’t get the memo people don’t like tools that request files that don’t exist.

Granted, it’s not too bad: I don’t think this toolbar has much market penetration, so it’s not as if millions of people are killing my site. The siteinfo.xml specification page also mentions that the file is fetched through A9 and cached, so the file will not be requested for every user that visits, but only for the first one.

Kudos for Amazon’s programmers being a bit brighter than Microsoft’s, but eh, I can’t say how much more bright for designing a system that is a bit too similar to the favicon.ico debacle.

Microsoft’s infamous Windows Genuine Advantage program is an attempt at combating piracy of Windows, and it is supposedly working quite well.

Microsoft has had a past of “embracing and extending” various technologies, but apparently here’s an instance of them just embracing: if you visit Microsoft’s download center with an alternate browser such as Mozilla Firefox. Instead of being told to switch to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, they offer a plugin that can perform the Windows Genuine Validation within Firefox and other Netscape-compatible browsers.

I’m impressed. Go Microsoft.

For the past year this has been a problem with the server this website has been hosted on; it was the strangest thing ever that I could not understand. If you tried to view a PDF file you placed on the web server with Microsoft Internet Explorer with Adobe’s Acrobat web plugin on Windows (a very common configuration), you would get an error about the PDF being corrupt and that it could not be opened.

It worked everywhere else: Mozilla Firefox and the Adobe Acrobat web plugin on Windows, with zero problems with any combination of browser and PDF viewer on Linux and OS X.

Apache 2.0’s documentation on mod_deflate suggests to compress everything except image files:

The problem with this: there are many filetypes left out that don’t compress well, and can cause problems—like PDFs combined with Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat plugin.

The solution, add the rule:

This prevents PDF files from being compressed with mod_deflate. It’s also useful to add such files as MP3s, zips, and rars.