Ok, maybe they did, but Network Solutions is sending out so much spam all the time, that if there was a notification about a VAT field being added to the account, there’s no way I would have seen that. Occasionally, other US companies charge VAT when they shouldn’t, but they’ve always been able to refund that once they get the number. Not so Network Solutions. Too lazy, too greedy, or simply don’t give a shit, I don’t know.

In short, they’re more expensive than other registrars, their customer support is crap, they spam me, so why do I keep using them? Good question, I see no reason.

The gist of the editor’s note is that Microsoft isn’t as bad as it’s often made out to be. Andrew Binstock, DDJ’s executive editor, takes great pains in the note to show that he is definitely not a classic Microsoft apologist, and that’s fine and credible, but way down the note towards the end, there’s this paragraph:

No other company — not Apple, Adobe, HP, IBM, or Oracle — offers such a wide range of products from the consumer level to the enterprise. In many ways, this exposes Microsoft to criticism from which other companies are immune. For example, no one takes Apple to task for its failed (and now withdrawn) server. Yet it was clearly technology that significantly misjudged its audience. The execrable Objective C language barely raises a grumble. And so on.

(Emphasis mine.)

Wha… what? WTF? “Execrable Objective C”? According to whom and which standard? One would assume that there ought to be a reference here to a study done by IEEE or at least DDJ staff which objectively had determined that Objective C belonged solidly in the “execrable” category as defined by an ANSI or ISO standard. This is the kind of writing you expect as an anonymous comment on a PC devoted web site or Apple hate site, not as editorial text, and most certainly not from DDJ. What’s going on here? So, naturally, I sent Andrew Binstock an email complaining about this. I half expected a response like “Yes, that’s overdoing it, sorry”, but what I got instead was an explanation that “[he is] not the first person you’ve run into who has this opinion.” I didn’t get much anywhere in the ensuing discussion. It seems that Andrew views it as the most natural thing in the world to have DDJ proclaim publicly that Objective C is “execrable” simply because Andrew knows some people who say they hate it. (While in the same sentence actually saying the opposite: “…barely raises a grumble”. It really makes no sense.)

My solid opinion is that an executive editor of DDJ simply can’t say things like this. It’s unscientific and simply way beneath the level of discourse one expects from such a journal. Additionally, there is not a single computer language out there that can be objectively called “execrable”. All of them are more or less suited for any particular purpose, that is all. And Objective C definitely doesn’t have more haters than any other language, if we were to sink to that level, which I don’t think we should.

I am including the full email exchange below, with the permission of Andrew Binstock. I think it is interesting reading, and I think it clearly shows that DDJ is circling the drain, as far as editorial standards go. Too bad, I used to love the mag. First, read the original editor’s note from DDJ’s site. Then the emails, in order as follows.

From: Martin Wehlou
To: Andrew Binstock
Date: 15 March 2011

Andrew,

– Martin

Here the discussion ended, and I just sent a mail to ask if it was ok to copy the emails to a public blog, and Andrew graciously agreed.

Click the image for a better look at it. No, you’re not misreading it, 99.27% of all comments I get are spam. Un-frickin-believable. Only between one and five a month get through and have to be manually removed.

Without Akismet, there’s no way I’d allow comments at all. Killing on average 30 spam comments a day to get one sensible comment a week is not what I’d call a fruitful use of time.

Right off the bat, I have to confess that my sudden blinding flashes of the obvious are brought on by an overdose of Seth Godin’s books. I’m on my fifth right now, “Survival is not enough“, with the subtitle “Shift happens“, and I’ve got six more to go. I simply bought all of them, as far as I know. (Seth, shouldn’t you provide for subscriptions?)

Everything he says, I already knew, but I didn’t know I knew until he told me. That’s the best kind of book, the one that digs out something that’s been lurking inside your mind and exposes it to the air. It’s also the easiest kind of book to read for me, since I need no convincing. It comes from me, inside myself, so it must be true (I’m almost serious).

So what about these zombies, what are they doing wrong? Well, they’re challenged, to put it mildly. All of them seem to have sales teams on crack, selling anything to anyone, if it exists or not. Then they’ve got backlogs they can’t handle, increasingly irate customers (some of them trailing lawyers and stuff), development languages and IDEs that are orphaned since years. They try one new development methodology after another, decide they have no time to implement them and abandon them again, after spending monumental amounts of money and time on stuff they never give a chance to deliver a return. They get involved, but they don’t commit (insert favorite farm animal references here).

Once they start losing orders, they abandon even more of the changes they tried out and go back to their old ways, just like a wounded animal curling up in the bushes, hoping the predators will pass them by. The worse everything gets, the more these people grab hold of methods and means that used to work so many years ago, but evidently don’t work anymore. They know it won’t work, but they can’t let go. Amazing.

Look, there’s one message here, that seems not to penetrate, and that is: if your old methods don’t work, change. The worse it gets, the more reason you have to change. The sooner you change, the more capital and time you have to bridge the change and pick up on the other side of the divide. If you wait until there is nothing left, there is, um, nothing left.

But it’s pointless. They will not uncurl and come out from under that bush. Poor bastards.

Finally, I went into a nearby store and asked if they knew where the dry cleaners were, and they pointed me to the other side of the block on another street. And there I found the place.

I pointed out to the guy that they ought to update their homepage. He told me they couldn’t. The guy that did the homepage died on them three years back and he had all the passwords, and as I understood it, the ownership of the site and the domain. So they’re stuck. They moved the store to a new location two years back, but couldn’t get at the website source. (Yes, I also find it strange that the site stays up, do they pay for it somehow? If so why? I didn’t ask.) A lot of customers walk around the wrong block looking for them and then give up. They had a notice up at the old location for a while, but the new store owners made them take it down.

The moral of the story: don’t ever let your site be set up by somebody else without getting ownership of the domain and the accounts and all relevant passwords. Especially not if they plan on dying just like that. This store is much worse off having a website than if they’d never had one. If they had no website, customers could only find them through the yellow pages, and those you can always update.

I haven’t verified exactly why this happens so I’m guessing the DNS for google-analytics resolves to at least some of the IP numbers for youtube, causing this to happen. Maybe not, maybe something else is happening.

But that’s not the important question. The thing that disturbs me more is if Google is intentionally making life difficult for people like me that don’t want excessive tracking of their surfing habits. Is that what is going on? Is it the start of a new and highly evil trend?

Little snitch rules for outbound filters

Anyway, now you know. Gentlemen, start your worry engines.

Update Jan 20: Just talked to my distributor in Sweden (Dustin) about this. They don’t have any policy. They have no idea what I’m talking about, or maybe they do and just pretend they don’t, but they say these drives have a 0.2% failure rate and if one fails they’ll see if (!) they would do something about it. BTW, I have four that are one week old, and that’s their policy on this. And, no, they would not consider halting sales of these drives, even though the failure rate is estimated to 30%. They won’t consider changing the drives to another brand unless they’re bricked first (easily done, just update to the official SD1A firmware…) IOW, don’t trust your distributor. They don’t giva sh… at least this one doesn’t.

To follow this drama as it develops, check out the Seagate support fora.

This is how one of the new one typically looks. Motorola, Win CE and crashed. But the interesting thing is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to have bothered to actually adapt Win CE much to handhelds. The errormessages still assume a user, a PC, and the usual set of input devices. How else do you explain the recommendation to check your network settings and to see if your network card is properly seated. I mean, the average shopper…?

And grandma Jonsson, please do a warm reset. But first click the OK button with, um, with my umbrella? A mouse? (Note: not a touchscreen at all, and no mouse dangling from the handheld scanner either.)

Oh, grandma, please contact the vendor of SPB2_CE.exe. That’s, um, who?

And just for kicks, this is how the holders look when the cover is missing. Several were missing, in fact:

Yes, I know what it looks like, but I promise, it’s made of plastic and not porcelain.

Looking around for a new chair, I couldn’t find much except IKEA, and their chairs aren’t really good quality. Don’t get me wrong, I buy a lot of stuff at IKEA, but I wouldn’t buy an office chair there. I didn’t find any other decent brands that I could test and experience, either. There are lots of brands and types, but it’s very hard to find a store where you can check them out, and I won’t buy an unknown chair sight unseen or seat unsat. About the only chair I would dare buy on reputation alone is the Aeron. It’s the chair a lot of programmers expect to get, just as they expect to get top end workstations. It’s a top end office chair. Just google it.

Now, price… in the US, you can find the Aeron for around $950, which isn’t exactly cheap but considering the current exchange rate, it comes out to around 6000 SEK (I’m in Sweden), which is only twice the price of most decent office chairs.

Checking out the official Aeron prices from the Swedish distributors is bound to make you sick; around 15000 SEK, plus tax. That is $2500 plus tax! Jeez… how the h… can they mark it up like that?

Second hand, you can find Aeron chairs in Sweden for around 7-9000 SEK, but then you have no guarantees. I found them on Blocket.

Next, I checked out prices in the USA and found Home Office Solutions. They’re selling it new for around $750 and free shipping within the USA. I called them and asked if they’d ship to Sweden and they told me they can’t sell new chairs to me, due to Herman Miller prohibiting them from selling outside the USA. Good old market protection in action. However, they can sell “Certified Refurbished” chairs anywhere they want, and these go for a little less, $718 plus $199 shipping (when I bought it), including a 12 year warranty. Yes, I ordered one, plus the casters for hard floors, around $30 extra. I expect to pay around 5% customs. The VAT will be added by Fedex, but I’ll get it back on the company VAT account, so it’s of no consequence. At the current exchange rate, this chair will cost me around 6000 SEK.

The chair arrived today (it took a week) in perfect condition. Even examining it in detail, I can find no sign it’s ever been used. I’m sitting in it right now and it’s simply great. Here are a couple of pictures of it, including my little son who I had a lot of problems convincing to let me use it.

I highly recommend buying this chair, and if you do to get it from Home Office Solutions. There may be other good places to get it, of course, I didn’t check them all.

Update 26 aug 2008: just got the invoice from Fedex, and I was only charged 100 SEK admin costs and VAT. No customs charge. So the grand total comes to around 5600 SEK plus VAT, just a whisker over a third of the Swedish internet mail order price for a new chair. And as I said, you can’t see the difference. What a deal.

Update 19 september 2008: this chair is heaven. It’s so good that I just want to go sit in it all the time, and while I’m there, I could just as well get some coding done. Developer managers out there, if you don’t get this kind of seat for your developers, you’re missing out on a great ROI opportunity. Payback time? I’d say a week, but I’ll claim less than a month, to be on the safe side. Ok, two or three months at the Swedish prices, but still. (No, I don’t have shares in Herman Miller or Home Office Solutions or anything related.)