Three pieces of news lately about Google+ make it clear that when Google claims they want you to use your “real” name, it’s a load of hooey. First off, a legally mononymous Australian journalist named Stilgherrian was told he couldn’t use that name — his actual, legal name — on Google+. He was not at all pleased, and has written one fairly professional complaint and one vitriolic and expletive-soaked rant about it (indeed, even the URL of the latter post could be considered NSFW).

Then Microsoft employee M3 Sweatt had his Google+ profile suspended. Unlike Stilgherrian, M3′s name is the one his parents gave him when he was born. His name also has the virtue of having a recognizable first name and last name. Nonetheless, Google+ says it doesn’t count.

Finally, the Internet personality who goes by the (non-legally-recognized) moniker Rainyday Superstar changed her Google+ profile to list her as “Rainy O’Leary”, and told Google very explicitly that this was not her real name. She also set every other field in her profile to say, “My name is Rainyday Superstar”.

Of course, Google reinstated her Google+ account. (She has since deleted it.)

Taken together, these three events make it very clear that Google doesn’t give a damn if you’re using your “real” name. They just want you to use a “normal-looking” name. Google wants you to use a WASPonym, a name that looks like it comes from middle-class, white-bread, suburban America.

This is just one of the reasons why I’ve been putting the “real” in “‘real’ names policy” in quotes all this time. There’s also the question of what makes a name “real” at all, but it seems pretty clear that by any sane standard, M3 Sweatt’s name qualifies. It’s the name his parents gave him at birth, and one that he feels a personal attachment to.

But it’s not a WASPonym, so Google says that if M3 wants to keep using G+, he’ll have to change his handle to a name that’s not his real name.

It’s not a “real” names policy at all. It’s a WASPonym policy.

I have no idea why they’re insisting on it, but it will do absolutely nothing to hold people accountable for their words or actions, or to stop spam, or any of the other things Google keeps claiming. All those excuses are a lie and a ruse.

There is no longer any sense in calling this policy “a ‘real’ names policy”; continuing to use that terms merely aids Google’s attempts to confuse the issue. It’s a WASPonym policy, and I will call it that from now on.

The next morning at 7:53, I got a call at home from a number that didn’t report any name. I always let those go to voice-mail. I heard another recruiter leave a message, including “it’s eleven o’clock”.

Two different recruiters in two days, making such elementary mistakes? I’ve been working on this article on the back burner for a couple of years, but it’s obviously time I finished it up and posted it.

Never Call a Prospect At Work

And I really do mean, never. You don’t know if your prospect’s current employer monitors calls. You don’t know if your prospect has already told their employer that they’re looking for other opportunities — but it’s safest to assume that they haven’t, because it is definitely not safe for an employee to tell their employer that. Especially in “at-will employment” states (like California), where an employer can terminate an employee at any time, for any reason or none at all, there’s an all-too-real possibility that the employer will just fire the worker immediately. (I’m not saying this would be a smart thing for the employer to do. And I’m not saying the likelihood is high. But it does exist, and it’s too much risk for the employee to take.)

Telling your employer that you’re looking for a new job can get you canned, posthaste. Having your employer find out from some third party that you’re looking for a new job can also get you canned. You know what’s the one thing that would be even worse than getting fired for being on the job market before you can find a new job?

Being fired when you’re actually not on the job market and very happy with your current situation! That recruiter said, “I understand that you’re not looking right now, but I was wondering if you could provide me with a referral?” The answer is: Absolutely not. If I had friends who were looking for technical work, I would never foist them on a recruiter who calls prospects at their workplaces!

Even if you already have a business relationship with one of your talent, calling them at work risks getting them fired. Now consider that the call I received a few days ago was a cold call. This person introduced herself to me by placing my job in jeopardy. Learn from her mistake.

Know What Time Zone You’re Calling

This applies to any kind of business relationship at all that spans across time zones. (Actually, it applies to personal relationships, too, but those aren’t the focus of this post.) Luckily, the East Coast recruiter who forgot about time zones waited until 10:53 Eastern Time to call me. If she’d tried me at 9:00 am her time, it would have dragged me out of bed at 6:00 am… and I probably would have gotten out of bed, because I’d have assumed that a call that early might be some kind of emergency. And that kind of shock-and-letdown is also no way to begin a constructive business relationship.

West Coasters generally realize that we shouldn’t try to call the East Coast too late. East Coasters, however, seem far more prone to forget that their first-thing-in-the-morning calls to us can easily happen before the sun even rises over here — and somehow, the folks who are most likely to make this mistake are the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed early risers who think everyone should be in the office by 7:30 at the latest.

When you’re contacting a coder, programmer or hacker, this gets even worse. Many of us are nocturnal by nature, and really hate being woken up before 11:00 or so. (There is a reason why Silicon Valley startups all have flex time: It’s so the coders can work from noon until 8:00 instead of 9:00 to 5:00.) Really, the only way an early morning call to a coder has any chance of working out well is if you call so early that you reach your prospect before they go to sleep.

There are any number of multiple-time-zone clocks on the Internet. Find one you like, and use it before calling new places.

Email Beats Phone. Don’t Use Both At Once.

Geeks often prefer email. We also consider it more polite to send email, because it’s an asynchronous communication medium. What we mean by that is, we can answer it at our leisure, rather than having to pick up the phone right now.

This means that sending an email, and then immediately phoning to say, “Hey, I sent you an email,” is doubly silly (and hence doubly annoying). In fact, it can sometimes mean that you’re interrupting your own self — I’ve had times when I was in the middle of composing a reply to an email that had just arrived, only to be yanked away from it by a phone call from the same person. This is frustrating, and makes you look pushy. Or maybe desperate. Either way, it makes a very bad first impression.

Other Minor Bits

If your email includes a link to the full job description on your web site, make sure that the page looks decent in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and that it doesn’t pop up a couple of JavaScript alert boxes with error messages in them while the page is loading.

Java and JavaScript are two completely, utterly different languages. One runs on servers, the other in the user’s browser. If you want to be a recruiter in any programming field, you need to understand this at least as clearly as you know that there’s no ham in a hamburger. Also, you need to make sure that any keyword-matching software you’re using also understands this. If you tell your software to find matches for a position that requires Java, and it spits back résumés that have JavaScript (but not Java) in them, then you need to throw it away and get better software.

(Of course, a company like that isn’t about to hire any QA testers, so you folks haven’t got the option of working for them. And I’m not a QA tester, I’m a developer. So the rest of my advice is pretty much aimed at fellow devs — but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect you QA folks. Seriously, y’all deserve a lot more respect than you get, and I love it when you make my life easier by finding my bugs for me.)

The skills, talents, and basic mindset that make a good developer are entirely different from the ones that make a good QA person. Asking one to do the other’s job is a mistake as fundamental as expecting graphic designers and accountants to swap places. Let me explain:

Developers hate repetition. We hate having to repeat anything more than once or twice; that’s why some of us become developers in the first place: because we can write programs that automate repetitive drudgery, and hence banish it from our lives.

It’s not just repetitive tasks, either. A good developer will also have a strong aversion to repetitive code and data. If two procedures differ by only one or two minor details, a good developer will combine them into one, and parameterize it, or otherwise figure out a way for the machine to make the decision. (A poor coder, by contrast, will produce “copy-and-paste code” that’s scorned by more advanced devs, because it’s more brittle as well as being less elegant.) If data must be stored somewhere, the prevailing wisdom is to keep it in just one place — “Don’t Repeat Yourself” is the maxim.

But a good QA checker has to deal with repetition all the time. It’s a fundamental part of their job. Run this test plan — this particular series of actions — over and over again, on each of the platforms we need to test on. Log every step of it, so that if something does go wrong, we can reproduce it.

Then, once the coder has checked in the changes that (hopefully) will fix the bugs you found… do it all over again. Just the exact same way. On every platform.

This is a coder’s nightmare. A developer’s natural response to this situation is to write some kind of automated QA-testing software. Of course, that software itself will then have to be checked for bugs before you could possibly rely on it… and you can’t trust your software to find its own bugs.

In the absence of such software, asking a developer to do bug-checking means asking them to do something that goes against their very nature. You can force them to do it, but they’ll never be really good at it.

Of course, all of that is totally leaving aside the obvious point that asking someone to find the flaws in their own work means asking them to see past their own mental blind spots — a developer’s test plan will be based on the same assumptions as their code, without the coder even realizing it. And that’s to say nothing of the obvious implications once you put the human ego into the picture. Human beings are flawed, and too many see “find the bugs in your own code” as equivalent to “show me all the ways you suck”.

Don’t ask a developer to do QA. Development and QA testing are fundamentally different disciplines, with completely different skill-sets and personality requirements. A developer can no more cover for a QA tester than a QA tester could fill in for a developer.

And if you’re a developer at a company that wants you to do your own bug-checking? Your employer thinks what you do is so similar to bug-checking that you’ll be good at it. They think they can cut corners on quality, and pay you one salary to do two jobs at once (including one job that it is in your nature to hate). If you can’t make them see reason, it’s time to brush up your résumé.

Uh, what?

Let me get this straight: Not posting any updates on Facebook, and not checking my friends and family’s Facebook updates, is supposed to help me connect with them? Turning off my cell phone, and refusing to send or check my email is supposed to bring me more into connection with other people?

What in the world do this event’s organizers think the rest of us are doing with Facebook, with email, and with cell phones?

The organizers are a group called the Sabbath Manifesto, and they espouse ten principles. The first two are “avoid technology” and “connect with loved ones”, respectively.

How the hell am I supposed to connect with my loved ones without using technology? Fewer than 10% of my friends, and absolutely none of my family, live within walking distance of me. (And I’m a fast and powerful distance-walker.) If I drive down the Peninsula, or take CalTrain to go see a friend, that’s using technology. If I quit using technology, I’d have to give up at least 90% of my social circle.

I’m not the only one to notice this contradiction. The very first comment on the Connect With Loved Ones page says:

…technology has brought my family together closer than it ever has in the past. If it weren’t for social media, I doubt that I would know what’s going on in the lives of many of my family members. We are spread out all over the country. I’m several thousand miles away from one of my favorite nephews, and yet I was able to congratulate him within hours of him becoming a father. That all happened on Facebook.

Another user commented on both the Connect With Loved Ones page and the Avoid Technology page, pointing out in both places that the two principles conflict. Like me, his family is spread out across North America; he says he’s told his grandchildren that it’s OK to use the phone to call their grandparents on the Sabbath. Another commenter on that page points out how useful technology can be: “I happen to like Bach (YMMV). I can’t have a small orchestra of live people come play for me in my house, but I can put on a CD anytime.”

The problem with the entire “Day of Unplugging” concept is that its core assumption is that technology inherently promotes isolation and dehumanizes us. But the reverse is true: Creating and using technology is at the core of what it means to be human. Technology doesn’t isolate us; it brings us closer together. In many cases, it’s the only thing that enables certain connections at all — or the only thing that makes it at all practical.

Over and over again, surveys of people’s online habits show that the most plugged-in among us are using technology to connect to others. We use email, chat, social networking, web forums, bulletin boards, wikis, mailing lists, and IM. And yet somehow, the bizarre myth of the “lonely computer user, sitting alone in their house witih nobody around them” still maintains its currency in the marketplace of ideas. It’s time we got rid of that idea, just as we wouldn’t believe that “people who drive cars are antisocial and lonely”.

My social circle isn’t any more “addicted” to technology than any other these days — it’s a bunch of mostly 30- and 40-somethings, in fields ranging from web development to arts therapy to academic psychology to a literature professor. If someone in my group took this “unplug challenge”… well, for only 24 hours? We probably wouldn’t immediately notice their absence. But if they were unplugged for a week? When they popped up online again, we’d be asking, “Where were you? Are you okay? Is or was something wrong?”

“No, I’m fine”, they’d respond. “I was just taking the Unplug Challenge for a week.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“To reconnect with my friends, family and community!”

“Uhh… you mean us? The people who haven’t heard from you in all this time?”

For the past decade or more, every time I’ve heard someone say they’re going to be off the Net and have their phone turned off, they’ve meant: “I’m going to be inaccessible. I’m not going to be communicating with anyone.” It’s the exact opposite of connecting to people. (It usually goes with a vacation — which used to be a much more efffective way of disconnecting from people, back when mere physical removal was enough to cut off all communication.)

The computer doesn’t isolate me. It helps me connect to a much richer, more diverse group of friends than I could otherwise stay in touch with. Even my Bay Area-local friends don’t get to see me face-to-face all that often; after a day at work, we’re all too tired to spend another hour on the freeway just to have to turn around and go home early. But by posting on Dreamwidth and Livejournal and Twitter, we can converse with each other for as long as we can stay awake. We can even rejoin the conversation the next morning, catching up on whatever we missed overnight.

And friends who’ve had to move across the country can stay in touch, and even form bridges between their old communities and the new social circles they find in their new areas.

Ever since the telegraph — heck, ever since the invention of smoke signals, talking drums, and signal mirrors — people have used technology to talk to each other. Just today, I’ve comforted a friend in Boston; maintained contact with my sweetheart; exchanged jokes and banter with friends in Las Vegas and Sunnyvale; congratulated a friend on the Peninsula on a personal success; and had general conversation with two friends in San Francisco, two in the East Bay, one on the Peninsula, and one in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And today hasn’t been at all unusual in that regard (except for the friend needing comfort; luckily, emotional crises among my friends are rare). And the day’s not over yet.

I used to have absolutely no socializing at all until after work, and then only on the few nights a week when people could get together in the same place at the same time. So instead of seeing maybe a half-dozen friends once a week, and larger numbers on much less frequent time-scales, now I’ve interacted with ten friends already, and can look forward to doing so every day of the week.

Tell me again how “isolated” and “antisocial” the Internet and the computer have made me?

I am not a fan of government secrecy. Maybe some things should be kept secret, but by and large? Our government has overused that excuse to the point of absurdity. We can no longer trust the government to keep its citizens informed about what it’s doing.

Since the run-up to the Iraq War, it’s been pretty obvious that we can no longer trust the news media to keep us informed, either. At that point, journalism utterly failed in its civic duty to question the government and inform the populace about critical issues. Someone needs to step into that gap.

Why I’m Not Pro-WikiLeaks

Some of the information they leaked includes data that identifies people in the field. This puts real people at real risk — people who are trying to do good. This is not responsible reporting.

For all the reasons that it was bad when the Bush Administration blew Valerie Plame’s cover, it’s also bad now that WikiLeaks has blown the cover of various sources in the field. I can’t support that.

Why I’m Very Much Anti-Anti-WikiLeaks

For all the danger that WikiLeaks’ cover-blowing has caused, I feel much more threatened by the attempts to censor the Internet and shut down discussion. The idea that Senator Joe Lieberman can ask Amazon to pull the plug on any organization’s Web presence and have it done in under a day is absolutely chilling.

Now, upstream providers are denying service to WikiLeaks mirrors as well. There’s a concerted effort to turn WikiLeaks into the Internet equivalent of an unperson. And “unpersoning” people is not the action of a free society. It’s the way a totalitarian regime operates, not the way I want my democracy to behave.

I’m disgusted with the number of financial institutions that will happily process donations to the Ku Klux Klan, but not to WikiLeaks. It’s been pointed out with some accuracy that it’s now easier to send donations to al-Qaeda than to WikiLeaks.

This says something about who and what it is we really oppose. And I don’t like what it says. We need to stand for freedom, for an informed citizenry, and for justice.

(In that vein, AlterNet’s list of Six Companies That Haven’t Wussed Out of Working With WikiLeaks is somewhat encouraging.)

Regarding DDoSes as A Form of Protest

I agree with the EFF’s statement that it “doesn’t condone cyber-vigilantism, be it against MasterCard or WikiLeaks. The answer to bad speech is more speech.”

Regarding the Pentagon Papers Parallel

The argument that this is in any way different from Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers is ridiculous. The two are very similar. If you ever wonder how you would have stood during that incident (“sure, it’s easy to see in hindsight what was right… but would I have done the right thing back then?”)… take a look at your reaction to WikiLeaks. The two parallel each other pretty well.

To the journalists who are calling for Assange’s prosecution: Are you mad at him because he’s doing the job you should have been doing? Are you so full of spite that you’d advocate to eviscerate the First Amendment that protects your own profession? Oh, right — many of you weren’t really making use of the First Amendment’s protection anyway, since you’re not rocking the boat. That’s why Assange had to rock it instead.

Regarding Rape Allegations Against Julian Assange

There has been a lot of disinformation about this. The pro-WikiLeaks side have been claiming some things that are completely untrue. The only reason I can think of to spread such disinformation is that they don’t want anyone to know the real allegations. That doesn’t make them sound like they’re very confident in Assange’s innocence, by the way.

The charges against Julian Assange include allegations that he tore a woman’s clothing off, that he had sex with a woman without her permission while she was asleep, and that he held a woman down by her arms and pinned her with his body weight.

These are real charges of real rape activity, and the things you may have heard about “a condom broke”, or some bizarre thing called “sex by surprise” are all 100% fiction.

Furthermore, the pro-WikiLeaks side’s false claims haven’t just been about the charges against Assange, but also about the women who brought the charges. For example, there’s a claim that one of them is “a feminist” — as if wanting equal rights should be used as an excuse to deny her justice? There’s the claim that she wrote some kind of “article about how to get even with men”, which is also completely false: she translated a preexisting English eHow.com article on revenge in general, not “against men”. Then there are the claims that either or both of the women are in the pay of the CIA — claims that have not a shred of evidence to back them up.

Assange’s supporters have gone beyond simply smearing these women, and have posted their names, addresses, and other identifying information. In many cases, people claiming to support Julian Assange have threatened to rape his accusers. Then they’ve gone ahead and harassed and bullied other women who had the temerity to point out that the “it was just a broken condom” claim was a lie. And of course, that harassment includes death threats — threatening to kill people merely for trying to speak out publicly.

This behavior is completely unacceptable. It’s inhuman. It’s disgusting.

I am in favor of the free flow of information. But I’m also in favor of taking rape charges seriously. And I’m in favor of whistleblowers, accusers, and those why cry “An injustice has been done!” being able to get a fair hearing without being subjected to death threats. That applies to the Swedish women’s accusations against Assange just as much as it does to WikiLeaks’ revelations about the actions of world governments.

And so, in the fullness of time, most people learned to never, ever use the <blink> tag. And that was good, for a while. But more recently, people have started putting new — and even worse — moving doo-dads on their sites: Animated Twitter feeds.

I’m talking about the kind of feeds that refresh or scroll every five seconds (or sometimes more frequently). You can see them all across the web. Here are just a few examples:

• Any comments page on Whedonesque (Joss Whedon’s site). Try to read the text, and your gaze gets pulled over to the constantly-updating “Twitteresque” box on the right.
• Any article on WikiHow. You have to scroll down one screen before the “Recent Changes” box becomes visible on the right — but that just means the problem isn’t apparent to a cursory, design-level glance; it only becomes obvious when you try to actually use the site for its intended purpose, by reading the content that’s published on it.
• Even Webmonkey has gotten in on the action. Again, you need to scroll down a screen (unless your browser is way taller than mine), but the “Recent Articles” box will try to grab your attention as soon as you read past the screenshot in the main article text.
• Like Webmonkey, you’d think TechCrunch would know better than to do this. Admittedly, they do put their “PostUp Beta World’s Best Tweeters” box further down the page, but their articles are longer, too.

Why would someone put something on their web page that effectively says, “Hey, don’t waste your time reading my content! Go look at my Twitter feed instead! Or even at some total stranger’s Twitter feed!” I’m honestly mystified. (That’s why my own Twitter-feed widget, Hummingbird, does not and never will have any kind of auto-scroll feature.)

But what mystifies me even more is: Why would people who (I presume) would sneer in disgust at the very idea of putting a <blink> tag on one of their pages — even for just one or two words — then turn around and put a much larger, more annoying motion distraction on every page in their site?

The fact that it uses AJAX and a Web 2.0, RESTful API doesn’t make a paragraph-sized chunk of never-ending motion any less of a design and usability nightmare. And this is not exactly a new concept: the W3C advised against constant motion back in 1999.

At that, they were Johnny-come-latelies compared to Jakob Nielsen, who called out “constantly running animations” as far back as 1996. In other words: The days of Netscape Navigator version 2.0x called. They have some usability advice for you… that you apparently still haven’t learned yet.

It can’t be that hard to figure out… can it?

Page Transitions

When a user clicks a link, they’re sending a specific message with a specific intent. That intent is “show me the information I’m interested in”. It’s not “show me a nifty animation effect that takes another 5 seconds out of my busy schedule”.

Users (rightly) consider page transitions to be the space in between what they’re actually interested in. Don’t force them to pay even more attention to them.

Reinventing Scroll Bars

This error is so common, and people screw it up so badly, that I’ve already written an entire post about it. However, I’d be remiss in not listing it here, as well.

Auto-Playing Sound

Speaking of things I’ve written about before… people have been complaining about auto-playing sound since Netscape Navigator first gave us the ability to include such an abomination, way back around 1994. Eleven years later, I listed auto-playing music as a “no-brainer”, in the sense that excluding it from your site should be a no-brainer decision.

Some people will apparently never learn.

Assuming Everyone Has Enormous Bandwidth

Yes, broadband is much more common in the United States now than it used to be. That means that people are less ready to wait a long time for your page to load, not more. And a designer, developer, or other professional who understands how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work can arrange things so that at least part of the page (or AJAXified web app, or whatever) is usable when only part of the code has arrived at the user’s browser.

If it’s possible to provide the user with something more useful than a “Loading…” indicator before all the code has arrived, then why do Flash developers never actually do so? (This is a real, not rhetorical, questions, and an open invitation for Flash designers and developers to answer it.)

Here’s Why So Many People Disparage Flash “Designers”

For a trifecta of awfulness, check out the site for Alembic, a bar in San Francisco. On my fiber-optic, 6 Mbit connection, it takes nearly 10 seconds just for the site’s intro to load. Then, once the little rocks glass is full of liquor, the page blasts some sound at me — sound that doesn’t even convey any information. (Believe it or not, I already know what a crowded bar sounds like.)

Then there are the slow transitions from sub-page to sub-page. All told, it took me a ridiculous amount of time just to find out what their hours were. But for a true dose of awfulness, try clicking on “Menus”. Then try clicking on one of the other main menu items. The site’s “background” doesn’t even realize that there’s still a “window” open in front of it… even though both the “background” and the “popup” are just visual elements of the same Flash object!

The real kicker comes when you try clicking on one of the menu pages. Rolling over zooms them a bit, but clicking? Launches a PDF document! A separate one for each page! That zoom effect was apparently just a red herring, and trying to get the place’s full menu would require seven separate PDF downloads.

I suppose they could, somehow, have disrespected their users a little more. At least the page doesn’t literally throw a drink in the user’s face. Just figuratively.

Please, if you’re designing your sites in Flash, don’t make them like this. Don’t be the web equivalent of “that guy”.

When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on.

(Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone needs to be charged every night. No problem there.) But given that, when I press the “on” switch, I should see the screen light up within, say, one second. It should not take ten seconds. By the time ten seconds go by, I’ll assume that I must not have pressed the power switch hard enough, and I’ll try pressing it a second time.

Did you know that the Palm Prē stores power-switch presses in its input buffer? That means that when the phone finally does get around to waking up, it processes the first impulse, lights up the screen… and then immediately blanks it again as it processes the second impulse. This is extremely frustrating.

When the screen lights up and shows me an “unlock” icon, it should actually let me unlock the unit.

I’m not complaining about the fact that it shows me that icon. I recognize that it’s there to conserve my battery life by making me prove that I’m a human being, and not an inanimate object that jostled the phone in a crowded purse or backpack. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is having to try three-to-five times to get the icon to recognize my input. And it’s not like the Prē stores this stimulus in its input buffer, so if I just wait for it to catch up… it blanks out the screen and I have to try again.

When a call comes in, I should be able to answer it.

I’ve lost track of how many incoming calls I’ve missed because I couldn’t get the phone to turn on in time to catch the call before it went to voice-mail. The screen was showing me the name and photo of the friend who was calling me — sometimes a friend who I’d explicitly asked to call me, and whose call I was anticipating — and yet I couldn’t actually pick up the phone and say hello to them.

This is what we in the user interface biz call a total, ignominious failure.

(Most of the time, the failure is because the damned “unlock” icon wasn’t taking input yet, so this is really just a special case of the problem above — but it happens in such a different context, and it has such different consequences, that it counts as a separate item.)

When I type on the keyboard, the characters should show up within 5 seconds of the keypresses.

This has the benefit of allowing me to realize that the keypresses have triggered, as well as letting me see what the hell I’ve already succeeded in inputting. It lets me see if I need to go back and fix a typo. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that the phone might actually respond to my input, instead of just sitting there imitating a sleek, shiny, black, sexy rock.

Waiting a full ten seconds (as has happened to me on occasion) is even worse. I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that 5 seconds is the worst delay I’ve ever seen on the Prē; it’s just the limit of what I’ll accept as “basic minimum functionality” (and I think even that is being incredibly generous).

At least once per day, the Palm Prē fails me on at least one of these completely basic requirements. When it works, it’s kind of nice, and even manages to be useful some of the time. But there are just too many occasions when it flat-out fails to function. I’m sick and tired of being out on the town with friends and having someone say, “Can we look up such-and-so on Yelp?” and then struggling with my phone for five minutes before giving up and saying, “No. I can’t look that up for you”. At which point some kind soul with a working smartphone takes pity on me and finishes the job in about a minute.

This is also not meant to be an exhaustive list of the Palm Prē’s failings, or those of webOS. There are all sorts of UI and UX decisions I could rail against, but I don’t want this blog to become a full-time anti-Prē and anti-webOS blog. I have wider interests than that. This post is just meant to be a list of the basic, core usability failures that have driven me to distraction.

But this time, when I followed that link, I found a page that’s so short, I can reproduce it in its entirety here:

The Slackware Package Browser

The old package browser was broken — instead of trying to fix it I am creating a new one from scratch. I’ll be using the Django framework. I’m also looking into Solr and Haystack to see if they can be of some use here.

It’s not going to take a lot of time and I will publish the working portions of the Package Browser as I finish and test them. Also, we’ll have some other thing to announce in a few days, so stay tuned ;-)

You should follow us on Twitter here.

The cherry on top of this sundae of fail awaits at the Twitter feed: the last tweet in it is from October 23rd, 2009. As of the time I’m writing this, that’s four months ago.

The one saving grace is that that last tweet includes a link to a web-browsable repository where I was able to download the package I needed. And yes, I do realize that Slackware’s essentially a volunteer project in Patrick Volkerding’s spare time. And I really do appreciate and love the distro’s commitment to remaining Unix-like.

But I need something that’s a little more rigorously maintained.

(Now I need to figure out what to migrate to. That’s likely to be quite a headache.)

The problem lies in the core configuration file 72_active.cf, which contains a wide variety of “currently active” rules. On line 543, it says:

header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

For those who don’t read regular expressions, this rule will match any Date: header that contains a string like 201x, 202x, 203x, etc., where “x” could be replaced by any digit. So, back in 2008, this rule would catch email that claimed to hail from the year 2010 or later. (Well, up to 2099.)

Starting on the morning of last Friday, this rule started triggering on pretty much all mail that hadn’t been delayed, thus adding 3.384 points to every piece of incoming email. Naturally, this could easily push mail over the threshold from “not spam” into “spam” when it doesn’t belong there.

If you’ve been expecting some mail that hasn’t arrived, and your mail host uses SpamAssassin, you might want to check your spam folder.

According to a note on the SpamAssassin project’s main page, you can easily correct this problem in either of two ways:

1. If your system is configured to use sa-update, run it now.
2. Remove the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule altogether by putting “score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0″ at the end of your local.cf file.

Alternatively, if you’re the mail administrator, and you don’t mind setting up a Year 2020 Bug for yourself, you could always change the part that says Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ so that it says Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ instead. After all, stuff that claims to be from years in the future (or past) is likely to be something you don’t feel like reading. But if you do this, I strongly urge you to find some way to send yourself an alert around December of 2019, warning yourself that you need to fix that problem. (And that may be easier said than done.)