Time Unknown (Entries tagged as bad ideas)

How to annoy most people visiting your site

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:25:43 +0300

Today I visited Wowio, a site that offers DRM-free PDFs of books. Real books. I spend an hour on the site ooh-ing over the books and adding gazillion of them into my queue. When I was finally done, I went to the queue section to download. I was asked to register. That's ok, they have to form some sort of idea who visits the site if they ever want to have any revenue.

However, they did not let me register. The site told me it's currently only for people in USA, and cannot serve me. I did not even get access to my queue listing, so I could not even take the list and go buy the books. What a waste of time! Why couldn't they let me know of this limitation when I first entered the site?

So, if you really want to annoy people visiting your site, make them jump through hoops and then tell them 'gotcha' and deny them the service.

Better laptops, not just prettier ones

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 10:28:17 +0300

This concept laptop looks beautiful but without any physical feedback touchtyping on it will not be very easy as one need to verify finger placement based on the letters on the screen instead of feeling the edges of the buttons. In addition, if touch alone is enough to press a key, the typist will need to hold his hands off the keyboard and that adds tension to the arms and shoulders.

I'd like to see a hightech laptop that fixes some of the ergonomic problems of the current laptops instead of adding new ones.

The hoax that keeps on giving

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:03:47 +0300

Thanks to sites like Digg, the April Fools has become a multiday event. People submit their jokes on April 1st and then it takes a day or or two for them to get digged for the front page.

Fleamarket security

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:26:00 +0200

I recently rented a shelf from the local self-service fleamarket. Even though the sales covered the rent, I'm not sure I would repeat the experience as the security was appalling.

The rent was paid beforehand. Nothing bad about that. There are cameras and a security guy, which is good. Unfortunately the process itself seems flawed.

The goods are marked with labels telling the price and the shelf number. The shelf number is used to tell which seller gets the money. The fleamarket has a policy of not allowing large bags into the area, however large bags come and go as the sellers restock their shelves. The sellers are expected to clean out their shelf by end of Saturday and I bet a person with enough nerve could easily empty any shelf on Saturday afternoon and not get caught unless the seller renting that particular spot happened by. After cleaning their shelves the nasty person could probably also get the cash from their sales, given that they knew which rental periods were ending. They did not even ask my name when I came to get my money, and as I restocked my shelf only couple of times during the week, I'd be surprised if they'd remembered me.

There are lesser problems with the shelf number being used to identify the seller of the goods. During the week many things from other shelves had drifted onto mine. Using just the shelf number causes a problem when items have been misplaced long enough that the seller is no longer renting the shelf. The item will then be sold on behalf the next seller instead of being identified as belonging to the previous seller.

Fake internal .com domains

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:28:00 +0200

In the past couple of months I have twice ran into a situation where a person is convinced that they want to set up a fake .com (or .net or so on) domain in their local network. To me it seems pretty much unsuited for anything than to be a clever exercise given as networking homework. You'll get many hassles that you really do not need to go through in real life.

If you just want to try out having a DNS service but do not have a real domain to practice with, you can set a fake domain of your own using a fictional toplevel domain, which your dns server also serves. Or you can create a subdomain of your existing real domain and practice with that. You can do this even if you want the subdomain to be local, see this rather elegant example.