Flickr fail?

Time for another tech post: fresh from the saga of Photobucket's disastrous changes of last year, I once again find myself discussing an unpopular change to an online photo hosting service but this time it does affect me personally. Back in the mists of time I had an account at Fotopic.net but since that company went out of business, Flickr has been my (and many other photographers') site of choice.

After a tough recent past that has seen a lot of ups and downs as part of the Yahoo empire, Flickr has now found itself in the ownership of fellow photography site SmugMug, which it was hoped would create a new era of focus and stability. However, in recent weeks a controversial and potentially damaging change to Flickr policies was announced, sparking a vocal backlash in the wake of Photobucket's similar actions. Read on to see the message in full and why I think this change isn't all bad news...

Very un-appy with eBay

My first proper post of this year is unfortunately another rant about the bizarre actions of a tech giant, this time eBay for their inexplicable decision to remove their mobile app's compatibility with older Android versions and woefully inadequate response to the resulting backlash. It all started when I did a factory reset on my phone. It's a Samsung Galaxy S2, which may be old but I've looked after it so it still works fine and perfectly suits my needs of reading emails, Facebook browsing, a few calls and texts, and the occasional photo. I deplore the wastefulness of modern society and can't stand to see perfectly functional products thrown away simply because they're old, so I can't justify replacing the old S2 to myself while it still works.

The reset installed Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2, the newest version of the operating system officially supported by this device. Everything was going well and all the apps I installed worked fine - until I tried to install the eBay app, only for the app store to refuse to download it as it is "not compatible with my device". Huh? The version I had before worked fine, going from version 4.0 to 4.1 isn't even a major upgrade and Android 4.1.2 was released only about five years ago so it's hardly an ancient obsolete operating system that no one uses anymore. Being unsupported but still usable is one thing but incompatible and totally unusable is quite another, so how come the eBay app is no longer compatible with my OS and why aren't eBay doing anything about it?

Retro Review: Ford Simulator

Although I work in the IT industry I've never really been one for games. I'd describe myself as a very casual gamer who maybe spends a couple of hours a month gaming, and I'm an impatient sort who wants to make quick progress so I tend to stick to simple fast-paced games. As a car enthusiast, naturally it is driving games that appeal most to me and nowadays there is no shortage of ultra-realistic games and simulators to suit all tastes. I grew up in the simpler time of the late eighties and early nineties though, and here I look back at a very odd, obscure and crude program (I hesitate to even call it a game) from 30 years ago that played a part in shaping my childhood.

What kind of super-realistic simulation awaits when I press the space bar?

Photobucket's commercial suicide

A return to the subject of tech after a few months of vehicle-related posts. You will no doubt have noticed a recent major change to the Photobucket photo hosting website as the consequences are far-reaching and have single-handedly destroyed a large part of the internet through what I fear is a commercially-suicidal decision. For years Photobucket have offered free third-party hosting and thousands of people have taken advantage of this to host photos for use on forums, auctions and blogs, but they have now got greedy and decided to start charging an annual subscription of $399.99 for the privilege of displaying Photobucket-hosted images on other sites. Needless to say, there has been a huge backlash and the company is losing custom at a rapid rate, so the popular nickname of 'Photofuckit' is fully justified as angry customers give up and move elsewhere.

The most hated image on the internet right now. It's everywhere and has replaced countless photos.

The ethics of unfriending

Some more musings on Facebook, this time the ethics of unfriending and when it is acceptable to remove someone from your friend list, an action that can easily cause offence and awkwardness if not handled properly. I have recently been suffering fairly regular unfriendings by people I considered good friends and over the past few months have seen my friend count steadily decrease. Of course, a user is perfectly within their rights to control their friend list and unfriend anyone at any time, but these unfriendings often come completely out of the blue so why they have chosen to unfriend me is something I struggle to understand. Personally I consider unfriending someone to actually be quite rude and something only to be done with very good reason as there are plenty of alternatives.

Facebook and the tag-comments

I haven't written a tech-related post for a while, so here's one on what seems to a relatively new phenomenon on Facebook that is spreading at a rapid rate and really detracts from the user experience: the 'tag-comment'. I can't be the only one who, when viewing comments on a post, wants to see people's opinions and reactions to it, rather than a huge and meaningless list of names who have been tagged by their friends just to draw their attention to the post.

Fixing the sharing problem

How to fix Facebook showing the wrong text and image when sharing a Blogger post...

Like most bloggers, I share my blog posts on Facebook to attract more readers, and it used to automatically pick up the right image and description. Since I added the Featured Post widget there on the right, things started to go a bit wrong and no matter what I shared, Facebook always used the text and image from the featured post instead of the one that was shared, which was really confusing for my readers. Having spent quite a bit of time researching the problem, it turns out this is a well-known and long-standing issue with the way Blogger works, and various workarounds have been proposed but the one described here definitely solves the problem. It isn't particularly advanced but does require a little use of the Blogger HTML editor.

A compendium of bad error messages

The subject of computer error messages is something that is guaranteed to get me riled. Errors are a sad fact of life in computing and something no one really wants to happen, but so many IT companies really don't help themselves with their unhelpful and often flippant attitudes towards them. It shouldn't be difficult to write a clear, concise description in language the average user can understand of what went wrong, what caused it and how to solve it, yet even in the short time I have worked in IT I have seen so many error messages that are quite frankly terrible and unfit for purpose and become utterly exasperated by them.

They range from the indecipherably technical to the overly 'friendly' and vague, via total gibberish, patronising nonsense, inappropriate frivolity and instructions that are quite simply impossible to follow, but all have one thing in common: they have singularly failed in their sole duty of helping the unfortunate user to understand and recover from the error. Here, in no particular order, is my own personal compendium of the worst error messages I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. You may find some of them hard to believe, such is the scale of their sheer awfulness, but I can assure you every one is genuine and has been seen on a real live computer system in the 21st century.

Clearing up a Facebook misconception

Facebook seems to be one of those Marmite things that you either love or hate. For all its faults (and there are many) it serves a useful purpose, but there is still strong resistance to it in some quarters, especially among the older generation who may not fully understand the world of social media. One particular misconception is especially prevalent among those who don't use it: there is a widespread belief that Facebook is one of those platforms that is completely invisible and unusable unless you have an account, which is not the case at all and there is a great deal of content that can be viewed without a Facebook account being necessary. Read on to find out how so much of the world of Facebook is available to you even if you don't have an account.

Facebook's secret feature change

I'm sure many of you will agree that a lot of the changes Facebook make don't improve the user experience at all, and I have been very critical of them, but for once they have actually made a beneficial change that is genuinely useful and solves a real issue. However, they seem to have neglected to tell anyone about it as the majority of users haven't realised anything has changed and the problematic behaviour it was supposed to prevent is still occurring so I feel more attention needs to be drawn to this change. It affects what happens when you reject a friend request: that person now no longer has the ability to send you another request so you won't be bombarded by those annoying persistent users who keep sending a new request every time you reject one, and this should have put an end to that irritating practice of friend requests being left pending indefinitely.

Ctrl-Z again!

Just a quick one to vent my frustrations. Remember my angry post about the stupid Ctrl-Z behaviour that deletes the entire text of your work-in-progress post? Even though I now know about this there is a further twist that I've just fallen foul of, resulting in the total loss of a piece that had been at the draft stage for several months and was nearing completion - I can't be bothered to rewrite it all so now it will never be published. What happened is that I once again pressed Ctrl-Z too many times and wiped the text, but knowing I would be snookered once the autosave function ran I immediately pressed close to exit without saving and preserve my work. Sure enough, a message popped up saying "You have unsaved changes that will be lost" so I clicked OK expecting my changes to be discarded and the text to be preserved, but no, it appears to have saved anyway and all my hard work was gone with no way to get it back. It seems you can't win and as soon as you make the fatal mistake of pressing Ctrl-Z your work is as good as gone.

I know people have suggested Blogger posts should be drafted outside of Blogger, e.g. in Microsoft Word, so you have a backup copy, but that really shouldn't be necessary and defeats the point of a cloud service that should provide better safety and availability without needing to keep multiple copies. If I thought for one minute it would make any difference I would be writing a strongly-worded complaint to Google, but sadly this is a company that is not immune from the attitude I so deplore of large IT firms not giving a damn about their users and completely ignoring any criticism. I guess I'll just have to train myself not to use Ctrl-Z in Blogger, but that will be difficult as it is a universal shortcut that I use all the time and works correctly everywhere else, and the proper solution is for Google to remove this behaviour. Beware once again - the power of Ctrl-Z is even mightier than I thought!

Making better use of the news feed

As a software developer myself, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing IT companies, especially the large ones with user numbers in the thousands or even millions, is effectively communicating product changes to these users. Many companies fail dismally at this, resulting in much of their user base remaining quite simply unaware that these changes have been made unless they stumble across them accidentally. Putting news in a support forum or on a webpage is ineffective as the majority of users don't visit these sites and won't see these posts, and emails are fraught with problems of delivery failures and spam filtering with no guarantee of receipt. What is needed is a way to communicate information on software changes directly to the user through a medium they are already using to receive other types of news, and it suddenly occurred to me that Facebook already have the perfect platform for achieving this, yet are not exploiting the full power of it.

Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.

Beware of Ctrl-Z!

This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.

I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.

N for 'no point'

The sad and pointless life of the Windows N versions

Browsing the operating systems available through the university’s Dreamspark account, I came across something I had never heard of before: a load of Windows versions with an N suffix in their name. I was intrigued but Dreamspark failed to explain how these differ from the normal versions, so off to Google I went, to discover a story of yet another cack-handed response to a legal challenge that eclipses even the infamous 'browser choice' app for sheer stupidity.

The trouble with Facebook groups

Facebook groups are great. They bring together people with common interests, no matter how obscure, and are a fantastic way to share things with like-minded individuals, and if there isn't a group for your interest you can easily set one up. That's the theory anyway, but unfortunately there are a few problems with the way Facebook have decided to implement the group system that make it a rather less pleasant experience than it should be.

Databases and Digital Democracy

Modernising the voting system

Thursday's General Election highlighted to me just how antiquated and inefficient the voting system is in this country, requiring huge amounts of manpower and paperwork to administer with so much potential for mistakes. It's the 21st century so why are our election results still being determined by people counting marks on pieces of paper? As a computer scientist with a particular interest in databases, this seems an ideal use of such a system to me and having given it some thought, from a technical viewpoint this is actually a very simple problem that can easily be solved with current technology.

Time, gentlemen, please

...stop trying to sort my news by 'interestingness'

A new trend seems to be spreading through the world of computing and I have to say it is one I deplore as it is technology for the sake of it and actually makes the user experience worse in my view. Not so long ago, your news feeds would be organised in a simple chronological order with the newest stories at the top, so you could scroll down until you saw a post you had seen before and instantly know you had seen all the new content and everything below was older. All nice and simple and everyone understands the concept of time, but that isn't good enough for many technology giants as sorting by time is basic stuff that doesn't show off their talents. Nowadays, there is an increasing trend to implement algorithms that deliver content organised by relevance or 'interestingness', which while technically clever do nothing to enhance usability and are a solution to a problem that doesn't appear to exist.

Facebook friend frustration

I hope I'm not alone in my feelings towards Facebook friends - the sense of satisfaction when a friend request is accepted but also, more pertinently to this post, that feeling of disappointment and self-doubt when you realise a request you were confident would be accepted has been either rejected or worse still simply ignored and left hanging as a pending request. These feelings are even worse when you see these same people becoming friends with many of your friends and making you feel left out.

Cloud computing is the future for universities

This article began life in late 2013 as an answer to a question in an assignment for the Cloud Computing module of my undergraduate degree programme, in which each student was given a cloud technology and asked to explain how it could benefit the university, mine being Rackspace hosted services. My response was well received by the lecturer and I feel it has genuine real-world merit as a solution to the challenges of academic IT provision so it is deserving of a wider audience, hence my decision to share it here. It is reproduced largely as submitted but with minor edits to remove references to the specific institution that would be inappropriate to reveal in public, and the mention of Rackspace by name is not showing favouritism but simply because that is the specific technology I was given by the lecturer; other similar cloud services are available and equally valid in this scenario. Although this text is now over a year old, the situation has not changed greatly and most of the problems discussed remain contentious issues, so it is still just as valid as when it was written.