Google has trouble counting... to 5.

Anyone using Google Analytics, AdSense and even Google search knows
there is some kind of fuzzy logic applied to the counting process,
especially when sum of all values is not quite mathematically correct.
I never wondered much about it because Google runs a lot of data
through their system and it could all just be the cloud effect, or
even really AI fuzzy logic.

Until, today I tried to access YouTube with Firefox 2, and I got this
interesting message. Admitedly, it is a nice way to promote Google
Chrome browser, but it also shows that Google has even trouble
counting to 5. For those of you not looking at the screenshot: the
text says "here are 5 ways to leave your browser", and shows only 4
browsers listed underneath ;)

Well, maybe this is really a sign of future world domination. The
original Pentium I processor also had problem with math, and Intel is
#1 in that area today.

Facebook e-mail problem

Facebook is introducing new layer of privileges for Facebook
applications. For getting someone's e-mail address. If find this to be
useful, but it doesn't look like they prepared this well.

1. At first all the links in notification e-mail were offline. I guess
all application developers went in to read about the changes and
servers couldn't handle the load. Still, main FB service was
operational, so it makes one wonder why didn't they use that powerful
infrastructure, at least for static pages like documentation.

2. I finally managed to read about what needs to be done, and I set up
the domain. Of course, there is not example given in their docs, so I
assume it is domain like mydomain.com. Anyway, I just received e-mail
saying that "We have determined from our logs that you are currently
requesting email access, but have not yet configured your email
domain". WTF?

3. And not just one e-mail... see the screenshot.

Always expect the unexpected

I got this photo from one of my users. They created a nice box, placed
a big CRT monitor inside, turned facing up, and added two controllers.
Njam for the whole family.

Linux is easy or hard...

...it depends how much you know about it.

There is 100000 ways to do anything on Linux. Of those, only 3 ways
are doable by mere mortals, of which only 2 ways fit what you might
understand, and only 1 way is the way YOU WANT to do it.

Linux is really hard for people who don't have time (or a Linux-guru
friend to help them) to find those 2 ways. Linux is easy for those who
find their true path :D

Jaybird

I took this photo during my vacation on Corfu last summer. Of course,
it reminded me of Firebird JDBC driver, which is named Jaybird. Maybe
Roman (the main developer) was on the yacht, but I didn't take the
time to check it out.

Who says you can't make money off open source ;)

How to waste money on Facebook ads

I went to facebook today and have seen an interesting, "get rated" ad
on the right-hand size. I followed the link, and got this (screenshot
attached). Interesting, eh? "You must use the latest version of
Firefox, and 3.5 is not enough :)" LOL.

I guess people at get-rated.com really know how to spend their
marketing budget. But without functional product, the money is really
thrown out of the window.

Weird characters in restored MySQL database

mysql -p mydatabase
however, all the non-ISO8859_1 characters got busted and don't display
correctly. Solution is to supply the connection character set, so all
data is transferred as UTF-8:

mysql -p --default_character_set utf8 mydatabase < dump.sql

Facebook amateurs

I really surprises me that Facebook, which is supposed to be full of
smart developers, can allow themselves to have some simple things done
wrong. They never got the back button right. While browsing, all the
links open in same window, so when you are in the middle of the very
long "wall" page and click on some link, there's no easy way to get
back there - you need to scroll the whole page. So, you need to
remember to open all links in new tab or window.

The thing that prompted me to write this post is, however, a more serious issue. I was in a middle of a long "wall" page and clicked a link to join a group. Quite a common action, but it uses javascript so you cannot "open in a new tab". I joined the group, and group page opened. I read a little about it (on group's main page, without navigating anywhere) and clicked Back to go back to my "wall"

What a mistake that was: FB completely stuck my browser, switching
back and forth between 2 (or is it 3) pages. I could not press the
Stop button (I could, but it does not stop it), nor select another URL
from the toolbar. It simply entered an endless loop, and I had to kill
Firefox to make it stop.

Looks like all the story about FB developers doing it "cool" and "smart" is not really true once you scratch underneath the surface.

Firefox 3.5 faster?

But today, I just had enough. To state it plainly: Firefox 3.5 IS SLOW!

I installed Firefox 2.0 and it flies. It must be like 3 times faster
and 2 time less resource intensive. One of the things I also disliked
about 3.5 is that sometimes when I'm not doing anything, it would
start to do "something" that requires hard disk, so my disk would get
really busy.

I hope Firefox developers get their stuff together and makes the
browser better, not just more feature-full. Some of the features in
3.5 are really strange. For example, the + button to open new tab.
There has been a toolbar button to open a new tab since forever (I
always add it after installing). Instead of simply making that button
shown by default, they apparently decided to do copycat job of some
other browser's feature. That was very cheap move, esp. since I find
the toolbar much more useful because it is always at the same place on
the screen and I don't have to search for it.

Competition is moving forward (Chrome, Opera, ...) and it seems
Firefox is losing the direction. It there wasn't for great plugins, it
would lose market share quickly.

Yii PHP framework

I got a hold on to basic concepts, and first thing that made me stuck
for a while was doing the proper URL redirection to create SEO links
instead of index.php?r=controller/action. I set up .htaccess without
much trouble, but It turned out that default applicaiton generated by
Yii is missing this line in website/protected/config/main.php:

'urlManager'=>array( 'urlFormat'=>'path', 'showScriptName'=>false, ),

The line should be placed in 'components' section, at the same depth
as 'log' or 'user'.

Stay tuned for more Yii experiences as I move along with the project