Welcome to my new blog home.
My previous blog – mrt – is being replaced with this one. The reason is just that my university now offers hosting of blogs for us, so I can stop running my own blog software. This removes work and hassle for me, and makes my life easier – always a good thing.
I have moved the contents of the old blog over here, and the old one will shortly be removed. If you have a bookmark, please update it now.
Just as everyone else, I regularly get spam. One of the common scams are “phishing” mails – pretending to be from a bank or other institution where you might type in your password.
Today, I got one that appeared to be from the NatWest bank. With this one, the scammers actually had a better starting point with me than most, since I actually do have an account at that bank (so it’s not quite as obvious as being asked to update my details at some bank in Timbuktu that I’ve never heard of).
But I don’t think the scammers quite thought this through to the end, as you might notice looking at the URL that the “Log in” button links to – stupidity or just refreshing honesty?
Collecting user data without any concern for privacy or users’ wishes has become commonplace on the web.
It’s wrong, and we should start to act against it by avoiding the sites that don’t respect users’ privacy.
And if you are a designer of such a system: Do the Right Thing. Let your users control their data.
Doing user support can be a bit tiring sometimes. Then again, sometimes it can be funny.
We all have problems with software sometimes, and it is good if you can mail some support person to get some help. In our development team, we get quite a bit of mail from our users. But obviously, some users are better at asking questions than others.
Should you ever find yourself in the situation where you need to ask a question, maybe it will help to keep the following examples in mind.
Here are some of my favourite user questions and comments from the last few years.
Some of the articles on this blog last week resulted in quite a bit of traffic. As I was looking through our logs to see what they looked like, one surprising thing stood out: the percentage of Firefox users.
The graph above (thanks to Google Analytics, an amazing web traffic analyzer service that we run here) shows the proportional distribution of browsers used to access this blog over the last week.
And the result is: Firefox is taking over the world…
When I wrote the article about the Microsoft patent application on Friday, I hoped that the visibility it might generate would help our case against this application.
It did. And much more quickly and efficiently than I expected.
It seems that Microsoft will withdraw the application. They have apologised. And all that on a weekend.
Wow. That has caused a little more than a ripple.
Yesterday, I wrote the article titled “Microsoft patents BlueJ” about Microsoft’s patent application. I thought a bit of public visibility can’t hurt our case.
It certainly has generated some visibility. The story made the front pages of digg, slashdot, reddit and del.icio.us. The article has had more than 20,000 hits in the last 24 hours.
Many people have asked me to keep them updated, so I’ll do this with a short summary.
Okay, okay. You know what it’s like with writing headlines: Short and catchy. Accuracy counts as a distant third.
This is my attempt at catchy headline writing. But the truth isn’t far off. It really should have said: Microsoft applies for patent for core BlueJ functionality.
And that’s really true. After blatantly copying BlueJ (without reference or attribution), Microsoft have now filed for patent for the functionality they knowingly copied from us.
Why? To sue us out of the market? To make us pay? Who knows. Sad fact is that this could destroy BlueJ.
Many of you will have seen the icon we use for the BlueJ project: the head of a Bluejay.
But what does the rest of the bird look like? My daughter (Feena, 6) provides an answer.