Global Nerdy

If you’re already using Vista, you’ve probably run into at least one of those annoying “Cancel or Allow?” dialog boxes lampooned in the Mac ad above. Now it turns out that you can’t always trust them. The Symantec Security Response weblog has an article in which they say that in some cases, Vista’s UAC approach “becomes a chicken and egg situation when the user is making a decision based on a false sense of trust.”

The article’s a little bit on the technical side; I’ll translate it into layperson’s terms and post something later today.

Link

Pardon me if I don’t get too terribly excited about Om Malik’s news that Digg, the new Slashdot — and no, that’s not a compliment — is going to adopt the OpenID standard. Om reports:

Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg, is about to make this announcement at The Future of Apps conference sometime later today and will be giving out more details. The support is likely to be in place later this year, Rose said. We did not talk long enough to fill in the gaps but will update the story in a few hours.

The interesting part is that Digg’s jumping on the bandwagon a few days after AOL’s announcement of its support for OpenID means that the online identity standard will have been adopted by both the left and right ends of the technology adoption curve by the end fo the year, and by groups that have been at one time or another, been blamed for ruining the ‘net’s signal-to-noise ratio.

(Pictured in this article: Internet Tough Guy Magazine, which would seem to come free with every Digg account.)

Link

Trulia, the real estate search site that lets you search for homes for sale and look at housing price trends across the USA, has opened its API. If you’ve got the programming chops and an idea, you can use the Trulia API to get:

• Real estate price trends for any state, county, city, ZIP code and neighborhood in the U.S.
• Information about real estate online search behaviour dating back to June 2006.

According to the announcment in the Trulia blog, the practical upshot of having access to their API will mean that you can write applications to answer questions such as: “What was the average price of a 2-bedroom home in ZIP 94002 on the week of 11/27/2006?” (The answer is $809,533) or “Which neighborhood was the biggest winner/loser in Manhattan over the past 6 months in terms of search traffic?” (The biggest winner was the Flatiron District, the biggest loser was Battery Park City).

I can see some interesting mash-ups as a result of this API becoming available. Imagine an application that let you cross-reference real estate with other geographic data that househunters are interested in, such as nearby schools, groceries, shopping centres, public transit and so on. Or perhaps you might want to test the generally accepted theory of the “Starbucks effect“: that a nearby Starbucks will raise the value of homes in the area.

Links

• Trulia blog announcement of their opening up their API
• The Trulia API site (developer.trulia.com)

Never mind all the reviews that tell readers not to upgrade to Vista unless it comes bundled with a new computer, all the write-ups that say that it’s only incrementally better than XP or the recommendations to go with the two-year-old Mac OS X 10.4 over the brand-new Vista. Vista’s slow sales, according to Steve Ballmer, are the fault of pirates in the “BRIC Countries” (Brazil, Russia, India and China, all of which are emerging markets for the high-tech sector).

His proposed solution, according to The Inquirer: “increase the intensity Windows Genuine Advantage as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from developing nations.”

It’s probably not the best tack to take, considering it’s only been a couple of weeks since the rival Steve talked about making music DRM-free and since the president of Romania admitted to Gates that his country’s booming high-tech sector (which I’m sure generates lots of business for Microsoft, both directly and indirectly) was buit on pirated Redmond goodies.

Link

I don’t know if it’s something that everyone goes through, but it’s common enough that I’ve been able to commiserate with friends over a beer about it. You may have heard of or been through this scenario: You go on a date, and your date keeps bringing up his or her “ex”. It’s a sure sign that the date has nowehere to go but downhill.

(The worst of these incidents happened during our college years in something that George and I like to refer to as “The Double Date of Death”. Long story short: my friend Derek and I took our dates to the engineering semi-formal, and as the night progressed, their conversation kept moving towards their ex-boyfriends. By the end of the night, our dates were both in the bathroom, weeping and consoling each other over a couple of other guys, while Derek and I consoled each other over some very stiff vodka drinks.)

I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Windows Vista, which seems to be going the same thing. According to Iljitsch van Beijnum over at Infinite Loop, a large number of people writing reviews of Vista keep bringing up Mac OS X. Worse still, some of these review are rather akin to your date saying “You’re not as handsome/pretty/smart/cool/charming as my ex was”:

• “Ironically, playing around with Vista for more than a month has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan.” (from Technology Review)
• “That’s not to suggest Vista’s perfect or even as polished as Mac OS X.” (from Top Tech News)
• “Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive…” (from ZDNet)
• “If Vista’s price, especially for Europeans, is its most eye-popping feature, its second most eye-popping feature is the Aqua Aero desktop interface.” (from The Register)

The coup de grace comes from MSNBC.com, of which Microsoft owns about one-fifth:

• “(If you are a Macintosh user, the whole issue of which Windows you use is of no interest to you, and Vista really isn’t going to change your mind. In fact, you’ll have a field day noting things on Vista that have been in the Mac OS for years.)” (from MSNBC.com)

That’s like having an aunt or uncle approach your date and saying “You can do better, dear.”

Link

Joel Spolsky’s latest article on Joel on Software not only follows one of the “How to write headlines that get attention” rules that have been making the rounds at Techmeme these days, but it lists some lessons that he says he learned during the early days of Fog Creek Software, when he did tech support:

1. Fix everything two ways. “Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.”
2. Suggest blowing out the dust. Sometimes, a suggestion to do something that may seem obvious won’t be carried out by the customer, who’ll indignantly refuse to do so because “it’s so obvious”. “Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back ‘just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.'”
3. Make customers into fans. “When customers have a problem and you fix it, they’re actually going to be even more satisfied than if they never had a problem in the first place.”
4. Take the blame. Sometimes the best way to make a customer’s anger disappear is to say “it’s my fault”.
5. Memorize awkward phrases. “It’s easy to get caught up in the emotional heat of the moment when someone is complaining. The solution is to memorize some key phrases, and practice saying them, so that when you need to say them, you can forget your testosterone and make a customer happy. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault.’ ‘I’m sorry, I can’t accept your money. The meal’s on me.’ ‘That’s terrible, please tell me what happened so I can make sure it never happens again.’
6. Practice puppetry. “There is only one way to survive angry customers emotionally: you have to realize that they’re not angry at you; they’re angry at your business, and you just happen to be a convenient representative of that business. And since they’re treating you like a puppet, an iconic stand-in for the real business, you need to treat yourself as a puppet, too. Pretend you’re a puppeteer. The customer is yelling at the puppet. They’re not yelling at you. They’re angry with the puppet. Your job is to figure out, ‘gosh, what can I make the puppet say that will make this person a happy customer?'”
7. Greed will get you nowhere. “I know of software companies who are very explicit on their web site that you are not entitled to a refund under any circumstances, but the truth is, if you call them up, they will eventually return your money because they know that if they don’t, your credit card company will. This is the worst of both worlds. You end up refunding the money anyway, and you don’t get to give potential customers the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, so they hesitate before buying. Or they don’t buy at all.”
8. Give customer service people a career path. “Many qualified people get bored with front line customer service, and I’m OK with that. To compensate for this, I don’t hire people into those positions without an explicit career path. Here at Fog Creek, customer support is just the first year of a three-year management training program that includes a master’s degree in technology management at Columbia University. This allows us to get ambitious, smart geeks on a terrific career path talking to customers and solving their problems. We end up paying quite a bit more than average for these positions (especially when you consider $25,000 a year in tuition), but we get far more value out of them, too.”

With the US Congress’ 2005 ruling that daylight savings time should start three weeks earlier and end one week later taking place this year, DST has become the new Y2K. Apple just pushed out a system update that includes adjustments for these changes. I’ll let ITWorld give you the boring text; I’ll give you a pretty picture instead:

Oh, yeah — there’s also a security update, as well as a Java update. Mind you, I already got my Java update — it’s called Ruby.

Link