brainsnorkel.com

Brainsnorkel.com now allows you to register and/or comment with OpenIDs thanks to the wpopenid plugin. The plugin seems a little rough around the edges. You’ll notice the registration page is a bit rough and the error messages are a little sparse, but I’m debugging my way to victory.

***Update: I have deactivated it. There is a problem with the return URL which needs some serious debugging. ***

I built and look after a couple of little business-related sites for family. Two weeks ago I noticed that some of these sites were down. The sites in question were all hosted by RegisterFly. I tried and failed to log into the VPS control panel and SSH to try to restart them, but the VPS host was completely down (or gone away?). I went to the Registerfly site and added a ticket… and waited.

The next day there was no response to my ticket and some of my neurons triggered about something I’d seen recently about RegisterFly. I went back through my web history to find out what it was. Sure enough, there was an article at The Register that I’d skipped past without reading that was pretty eye-opening.

Although when you navigate to RegisterFly everything appears to be fine and open for business, inside things have gone seriously bad. This coincides with their regular marketing spam emails going dark. The current allegation is that they’re still taking money from new and unaware customers, even though they’re not providing any service at the moment beyond politely accepting payments and issuing receipts.

Thankfully brainsnorkel.com was not hosted by RegisterFly, though they were managing the domain name.

I made my way through the posts at a disgruntled RegisterFly user site — Registerflies — and came to the conclusion that I should transfer my domain names, and abandon any hope of getting a refund for hosting, as soon as possible. I had to get out with whatever I could as soon as I could.

Transferring the domain names was straightforward once I read about a way to navigate the labyrinth that is the RegisterFly site to my domain authorization codes (apologies whomever I’m stealing this important process from, I forget). Talk about “beware of the leopard.”

1. Remove Protectfly (domain registration privacy service) from your domains (if you have it) and unlock the domain name. This will get the transfer emails to you instead of being trashed by ProtectFly
2. Under “Manage Domains” click on your domain and open the “Domain Contact Information” + (plus/expand) button.
3. Click “Configure,” and right down the very bottom of the page you’ll see your authorization code
4. Remember to turn off all of your auto-renew settings while you’re here

Once I had progressed through the domain transfer steps to the point where I had provided the authorization code it took 5-6 days for the domain transfer to complete.

In the end I’m down transfer fees and about 6 months of VPS hosting fees, so it’s not the end of the world.

I’m not completely sure I’m home free. RegisterFly still lists my domains in my account’s “Manage Domains” interface.

Every time mum and dad visit any of their kids or their wired friends, there is usually a moment where they ooh and ahh at the miracle of the Internet. Touring the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, watching the Sydney-Hobart Yachts update in Google Earth, seeing storms roll by on Bureau of Meteorology Radar — they were certainly interested in getting on the Internet. “Why,” my siblings and I wondered, “had they not got themselves connected?”

The problem

Mum and Dad wanted to get this Internet thing to explore, and to exchange email and photographs with their family and friends.

The problem was they didn’t know how to begin or how much it would cost. Hardware and software and the terrors of the Internet all blended into a very mysterious and threatening challenge.

“How do you get a virus?”

“How do you talk to someone?”

We tried to explain, but their eyes glazed over.

The desire to get on the Internet was really 80% mum and 20% dad. Mum and dad have run a small business in regional NSW since about 1975. Mum learned how to type on a typewriter when the small business wasn’t going so well and it looked like mum would have to get a second job to keep things afloat. Thankfully that scare remained just a scare and mum rarely ever used her typing skill, or the typewriter, again.

Dad is a tradesman. Although he has held many administrative roles in various community and charitable groups and has written many quotes for the business he has never really used a keyboard.

The plan

For Christmas, my siblings and I pitched in to get mum and dad deployed on the Internet. We were all going to be home for a week with them over Christmas, so it was a perfect time to impart all of our knowledge about what it is like to be on the Internet and answer any questions that came up.

I put together a pretty basic computer — a new cheap Windows XP desktop computer with built-in NVIDIA video, a very basic AMD CPU and 1GB of ram. I tacked on an old 17″ LCD display, and about $60 worth of Canon printer/scanner/flash-card reader. I put a wireless network card in the back too, as the path from the incoming phone line to the “computer room” could not be cabled easily.

Rationale: What I would like to have done was load them up with Fedora Core 6, with which I have had success with my kids. This would have been free, and saved money on operating system and virus scan software. The decision to go with XP is a combination of cheap-ass printer driver support, frightening Linux wireless support and a lack of local (to my parents’ house) knowledge of Linux to help them when we kids weren’t around to help. All of their friends run Windows, it seems. They don’t seem to know anyone who owns a Mac except me.

I had a spare F-Secure Internet Security 2006 license from getting a “Family Pack” so I installed that for them. I also installed most of Google Pack and set mum and dad up with Gmail, Picasa, and Google Docs.

Rationale: Mum and dad want email. My experience is that most of the security and technical problems with email come from user error and the complexity of email clients, virus and spam plugins. Gmail doesn’t really require any configuration, comes with an attachment virus scanner, and spam protection. They need never worry about deleting things and if their computer fails for some reason, their email and documents are backed up off-site.

For security and training we invested in a 48 page exercise book and pencil and wrote down anything that came up. Passwords, usernames, sites, friend’s email addresses, how to launch a program; all this and more was written into the exercise book. We judged the risk was reasonably low that someone would make off with the book and steal their money or identity. All the same, the book gets put away from the computer when it’s not needed.

One day I’ll introduce them to Password Safe, but that time hasn’t come yet.

Taking some advice from my workmates, I decided to order a basic ADSL package from the reliable Internode with a random wireless router bundled. Until they’re `on their feet we’re paying $39.95/month for 8GB of downloads and 512kbps/128kbps (down/up). They don’t need anything like 8G of download quota, but the cheaper plans were 256kbps, and that doesn’t fit my definition of broadband. When they start paying for it themselves, they might want to tolerate slower bandwidth for a cheaper plan, but that decision is a little way off yet. Since making the decision to go with a non-cheap-ass plan, Internode have withdrawn their cheaper plans from the market. We might have to churn to a provider with cheaper plan when the time comes.

In general the only thing on mum and dad’s PC that needs to be backed up is photographs. Thankfully Picasa has built-in support for backups and the PC came with Nero OEM as well.

How did it go?

At first, the training was unexpectedly slow. The first task was navigating to, and logging into every account I’d set up for them. She couldn’t log in to anything and I didn’t pick up why until we were both really annoyed. She would type her password and fail to log in then I would type the same password and succeed. Although mum had once learned to type, the muscle memory must have got rewired over the years because she kept hitting SPACE when she meant to press SHIFT.

Training mum and dad about what phishing is was a bit more of a challenge. They were a bit nervous. “How do you get a virus?” was the first question. I talked about not downloading anything and installing it unless they were absolutely sure it was ok. We looked at Microsoft’s automatic updates and learned how to recognize them, and that they would usually arrive on Wednesdays. They prefer to run IE7 even though Firefox was installed (Firefox isn’t as memorable as Internet Explorer), so there is some assistance in mitigating phishing and browser hijack attacks, but I’m afraid their ability to identify threats is still quite poor.

Mum rang me at work one days and announced that been browsing the web when she’d won a laptop by being the lucky 1,000,000th visitor to a site. Thankfully she checked with me to make sure it was legit. She wasn’t entirely surprised to know it was a scam, but she did sound disappointed, having spent an hour taking notes on the terms and conditions.

I recommended that they spend about a year on the Internet before they even contemplated signing up for Internet banking or using their credit card for anything online.

Gmail is the great success story. I don’t think mum knows that there is a difference between email and instant messaging, or that there ever was a difference.

Mum says she couldn’t go back to being without the Internet. Wikipedia, e-mail and just being able to explore and find out about things is too much to give up.

Dad’s not quite so convinced. I think he could live without it, but he does ask mum if she can use the Internet to find out about stuff for him. A lot.

The Martian troops, moreover, had no control over where their ships were to land. Their ships were controlled by fully automatic pilot-navigators, and these electronic devices were set by technicians on Mars so as to make the ships land at particular points on Earth, regardless of how awful the military situation might be down there.

The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the centre post of the cabin — one labelled on and one labelled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.

• From Chapter Seven, The Sirens of Titan, 1959

Also… on The Daily Show

Tonio has a series of posts on usability inspired by Blender, a free 3d modelling application.

I’ve been occasionally scratching at a blog post for a while (ok, 12 months) which tries to distil the usability wisdom of Tog, Spolsky and Krug into a nugget-sized blog post. Tonio’s advice seems far more practical and usable.

Excerpting, directly from here and adding the later rule:

1. Consistency. It’s the bugbear of small minds, but guess what, a lot of users have those small minds. Don’t just be consistent with yourself — be consistent with as many things as possible.
2. Progressive Disclosure. Show the stuff they probably want/need to see and allow the rest to be disclosed if needed. Show the functionality they probably want/need to use and allow the rest to be disclosed if needed. Make the stuff you show as powerful and general as possible and you may not need to hide much at all.
3. Forgiveness. Make it hard to screw up (try to detect and prevent errors before they’re made), make it easy not to screw up (give useful feedback), and give people a way out if they screw up anyway (undo).
4. Visibility. If you can’t see it, it might as well not be there. More advanced users will look in more places, so make the stuff idiots need to see bleeding obvious.
5. Beauty & Simplicity. Ugliness is distracting. We don’t like ugly things for a reason, often “ugly” is shorthand for real problems — disease in organisms and inconsistency and carelessness in software. A consistent program is generally a tidy program and untidiness is the easiest form of ugliness to eradicate.
6. Maximise Generality, Minimise Steps. These (often conflicting) goals are powerful tools for rethinking and improving an interface. If you can do more with less you’re almost certainly improving your UI. Improving generality (e.g. providing a dialog that does more things) is only good if it doesn’t increase steps and vice versa — that’s the key. (Imagine you could easily put all the Photoshop filters into a single dialog, but it would have a menu of all the filters in it … so you’ve created a very general dialog, but you haven’t saved any steps.
7. Smart Defaults. When something needs to have a default value, try to pick that default intelligently (but make it easy to change). Defaulting to the user’s last choice is often a simple, effective option.
8. User Errors are Crashes. If a user makes a mistake it’s equivalent to (and often more damaging than) a crash. Treat it like one.
9. Avoid Preferences. Configuration choices are often a design failure. Is there a way to make this not an option?
10. Wizards. These are generally a sign of design failure. Why isn’t it obvious how to do what it is the Wizard helps you do?
11. Online Help. It ought to be good and largely unnecessary.
12. Frequent tasks should be efficient. (late adder from here) [...] operations you do all the time don’t need to be mnemonic, they need to be efficient

Comments off to direct comments to the original posts:

• Please Buy Cheetah3d
• Usability Could Use Some Usable Heuristics
• And for my next trick… let’s beat Blender over the head

Knowing we would be without kids over the Easter weekend, J and I decided to treat ourselves to a meal at one of the restaurants in Sydney’s foody stratosphere.

We ticked off Tetsuya’s (been there for many fantastic meals when he was in Rozelle) and Guillaume (no space for us) eventually deciding on Quay (never been there before).

At $175 each for a four course a la carte meal, and a public holiday surcharge we didn’t want to think much about money once we were there. We wanted to sit down and forget about our wallets and take in the magnificent views and sumptuous food and pretend we’re DINKs for a few hours.

The menu opened into four panels. We got to pick one dish from each panel. The food was amazing. The ingredients include truffle, abalone, hand-shelled crab, figs, squab… a cornucopia of rare and expensive ingredients artfully assembled into exquisite food.

But what’s this? One dish includes lobster, and for some reason it’s an extra $20.

Suddenly we feel like we’re at an expensive RSL.

…a match made in heaven — or nearly so. I was about to light a ceremonial bonfire and throw the new PC into it if I couldn’t get them all to coexist. I had heard that it was not easy to do, but I had also seen evidence that it was possible.

The usual method of getting software installed in Vista that has trouble self-updating or handling its own plugins is to right click on the application icon and “Run as administrator.” This provides the program with the authorization to mess with the registry and directories where executables are kept etc. without resorting to rewriting the application with the appropriate Vista mojo to handle its own updates with impunity. The “Run as administrator” trick doesn’t provide any joy for installing Firefox and Flash.

After some furtive Googling it turns out that the best way to get Firefox 2.0 and Flash Player installed on your system is to turn off User Account Control (UAC) temporarily using Vista System Configuration (Start->Run… and type in msconfig) and then install Firefox and Flash.

UAC is what asks your permission to do things all of the time you’re using Vista, for your own protection. UAC’s role in Vista is to prompt you for permission any time the system needs to do the equivalent of sudo to achieve an outcome. UAC’s secret plan is to train Vista users to acquiesce to all of Vista’s demands through reflex and not cognition.

It was hard to bring myself to turn UAC on again. I haven’t installed a virus checker on Vista yet. I wonder if the cost of doing business with UAC means I don’t ever have to run a virus scanner?

It’s Easter Sunday. What better day to upgrade my hosting, WordPress, and my theme?

My hosting is still with Tera-Byte, but this is a new host with shiny new-ish software on it so I can run Wordpress 2.1.3. The only glitch (I’ve seen) was that the old version of MySQL didn’t mind inserting strings like \\Drive\\Disk0 in the export SQL and MySQL 4.0.0+ seems to mind quite a bit. This was all complicated by the fact that the abbreviated version of the string it threw up on looked like a MySQL error itself… *sigh*

Anyway, the theme is an updated version of Freshy.

I’ve added a new graphic too. Meet Terry the statuesque, yet generic, Chinese moulded plant-eating dinosaur. He’s from the plasticine era.

As ever, please report any unexplained phenomena in comments.

Update: …and I’ve installed a new version of the excellent Spam Karma — 2.3 Release Candidate 1. Just to live a little more dangerously and make problem isolation *that* much more interesting for myself.

Aliens are invading our front yard at the moment. Aliens that look like this:

I found quite a few of these growing in the new mulch we had spread on our front garden.

Curious, and a little nervous that this might be a sign of the apocalypse, I put out a “what fungus is this?” email to a family email list. Pretty soon someone had located the fungus at a site where it had achieved “fungus of the month” status — a high honour for a fungus whose name (Aseroë rubra) literally means “disgusting red.” It also goes by the name “Anemone Fungus” but I think Aseroë rubra conveys its evil intentions more than adequately.

This charming little fungus is part of the Stinkhorn family (caution, link is NSFW if your workmates have poor eyesight). Aseroë rubra emits a spore-filled goo (spore mass) that mycologists say smells like rotting corpses (You have to wonder how they know). This goo attracts flies, slugs and snails. You don’t want to know how effectively.

As attractive as this little alien sounds, I don’t think it’s the ground cover we’re looking for.