Month: September 2007

Feedback to the Mozilla (Firefox) Folks

Here’s some feedback I just submitted to the people who work on Firefox. I decided to put my 2 cents in after reading this article, which links to this site. I’m certainly not going to block all Firefox users from my sites – I think Firefox is an excellent browser and I think more people should be using it – but if I could I’d display a polite message to any Firefox user who’s also using an ad-blocking extension and ask them to white-list my site. Firefox not offering publishers a way to detect the use of a certain plug-in makes them complicit in the loss if income that occurs.

“I’m a happy Firefox user, but as a publisher who relies on advertising on my Web sites to make a living, it’s disheartening to see the way Firefox has embraced and even endorsed the AdBlock plugin, allowing people to use my server resources and deny me the income I need to continue to offer that content.

The issue here isn’t that the extensible Firefox design has allowed for someone to develop a plugin that someone else doesn’t like – the issue is that Firefox offers no way for me as a publisher to DETECT the use of that plugin on my site. If I could, I’d display a polite request to the people using it for them to white-list my site and allow the ads to show. I’ve found most people don’t understand how Internet advertising works, and they don’t realize that by just allowing the ads to load they’re helping the Web site. Many people think that if they don’t click on the ads, they might as well block them.

Please, do something to help the people who create the majority of the content on the ‘Net, giving it away for free, with the only request being allowing a few banner ads to load.

Sincerely,
Jason Dunn”

Xbox 360 HD-DVD Lock-Up Playing “Heroes” Disc

A few days ago the wife and I bought season one of Heroes on HD-DVD. Yeah, we’re late to the party – but when season one started last year, my TV tuner didn’t record the first few episodes properly, so I gave up on the series and figured I’d pick it up on DVD before season two started. I have to say, it’s a great TV series – Ashley and I are really enjoying it.

The first night we started watching it, we watched four episodes, putting us on disc two with one episode left on that disc. When we loaded it up last night, we immediately saw a black and red screen that said “LOADING”. We stared at that for about 30 seconds, then a cancel button appeared below the word “LOADING”. We continued to wait – over a minute later, it still wasn’t loading the DVD menu, so I hit cancel. Nothing happened. I waited a bit longer, then gave up and turned off the Xbox 360. I thought for sure a reboot would fix the problem (hey, it works with most other Microsoft products), but after a reboot and re-loading of the disc from scratch, the same problem was happening. The Xbox was fine – it loaded up ok, logged me into Xbox Live, etc. As a long shot, I went into the Xbox 360 control panel and purged the system storage of all video resume points – that didn’t help. I tried unplugging the power from both the Xbox 360 and the HD-DVD drive, then reconnecting them in sequence. Still nothing – we sat there staring at the “LOADING” message. I ejected the disc, checked it for damage, then put it back in and got the same message again.

At this point I was getting frustrated, especially since this is the one and only way I can play HD-DVDs. If something doesn’t play a regular DVD, I have at least six other devices that could come through in a pinch. Not so with HD-DVD. I left it on the “LOADING” screen and flipped over to the regular DVD player to watch a Star Trek: Enterprise episode. 45 minutes later, I flipped back to the Xbox 360…and it was on the screen saver! One flick of a button later and I was staring at the Heroes menu. I don’t know what happened, or why it happened, but I’ll say this much: I’ve never had a problem like that with a regular DVD player, so if HD-DVD (or Blu-ray for that matter) are going to succeed then they need to be every bit as stable as the format they’re trying to replace.

TV Worth Watching: Heroes

heroes-season-one.jpg

I’m probably the only self-confessed comic-book geek on the planet that missed a big, mainstream super-hero show like Heroes. When season one started last year, the TV tuner in my Windows Media Center PC didn’t record the first few episodes properly, so I gave up on the series and figured I’d pick it up on DVD before season two started. I have to say, it’s a great TV series – Ashley and I are really enjoying it. As I tell anyone who’s sceptical about watching Battle Gallactica, good drama is good drama, regardless of the setting. Great characters and a gripping storyline can exist anywhere, whether it’s in space or in Las Vegas. Heroes is a highly-serialized show where almost every episode is tightly strung together in a “To Be Continued” fashion. Like 24, once you start watching it’s hard to stop. And the HD-DVD version looks pretty damn good – though my digital-noise-sensitive eyes have noticed a few screwy things here and there.

If you haven’t watched Heroes season one, you should rent it before season two starts in a few weeks. 😉

You Know What’s Arrogant?

Here’s pure arrogance for you: having an auto-responder on your email account that responds back to every single person that emails you with a message that says “Thanks for your email, but I’m so busy that I only check email twice a day so I’ll get back to you later”. What kind of self-important person thinks that they’re so vital to the world that they need to inform me that they can’t get to my email right away? What kind of a person thinks it’s ok to clog up my inbox with a message telling me how much email they get?

What kind of a person rants on a blog about other people late at night? Wait, don’t answer that…

Quechup: The New Internet Plague

If you get an email in your inbox that looks anything like this, delete it and don’t respond:

quechup-is-a-pox.png

It seems they have an extremely aggressive way of going after people to get them to join – when someone signs up and the user says “Check for Friends” and selects their address book, rather than scanning the address book and seeing if there’s a match for any of the email addresses, it sends out an invite to every single email address it can find! That’s absolutely ridiculous and ranks right up there with the worst social engineering spyware I’ve seen – the intention of the user is to see which of his friends are already on Quechup, not invite them all. If the option said “Invite all my friends”, which is what it’s really doing, you can be sure most people wouldn’t be selecting that option. Facebook is more than enough for me to try and keep up with, thank you very much…

Looking for a Good HTML Editor

After watching Microsoft’s new Expression Web software completely MANGLE and DESTROY a perfectly good PHP file (it was trying to be “helpful” by re-mapping the CSS code), I’m not going to touch it again. Ever. I really thought Microsoft had learned their lesson after the FrontPage debacle, but it seems they haven’t. I’m looking for a good HTML editor: I prefer something with a visual preview, but at this point it’s not necessary. It should be Vista-compatible, fast, light, and while free is great, I’m willing to pay a few bucks for something good. No one say Dreamweaver, I don’t edit enough HTML pages to warrant a tool like that. Any suggestions?