blog.shrub

Hanlon’s razor tells us that we should “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

I’m still unable to figure which is the case with Facebook’s new promo guidelines. Bad linking policies are nothing new — we’ve seen them from Fast Company, NPR, Starbucks and KPMG.

But these stories are old, man — the most recent is from 2004. Surely an Internet-savvy company like Facebook would know better, right?

Wrong.

According to Facebook, it’s okay to say “Check out the Company X Page on Facebook,” but you MAY NOT (capitals theirs) say “Check out the Company X Facebook Page.”

What, pray tell, is the difference? How does the latter “imply partnership, endorsement or sponsorship”?

Sigh.

If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile.

Look at the email itself:

What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them useful information, Friendster, too is nothing but a click whore.

When you upgrade your TiVo, you lose everything.

Season passes, wish lists, saved thumb ratings, channel configurations — everything. Yes, you can transfer recordings — but only one at a time. It’s a very slow, very manual process.

What TiVo needs is a migration assistant. When you get a new Mac, the Mac OS X setup assistant automagically copies over your applications, network settings, files, user account, password.

After you’ve migrated everything, you log in to your new Mac, just like it was your old Mac. You don’t notice a difference. Just that it’s faster.

I recently purchased a TiVo HD. The TiVo was pre-activated, so I didn’t have to activate it on tivo.com.

Before I pass on my old TiVo (a series 2), I want to transfer the programs from it to my new TiVo HD. In order for transfers to work:

• both DVRs must have active service agreements
• “allow transfers” must be enabled on tivo.com
• both DVRs must be associated with the same tivo.com account

For some reason, my new TiVo was associated with the account of the person who ordered it, not my account.

I called TiVo, confirmed a few details, and they sorted everything out.

So, what’s the problem? It requires human intervention. The first time I attempted this process, the TiVo call center was closed. This account transfer should be a self-service option.

When I forget my password for AT&T’s web site, they text me a new one. It’s a pretty smart idea — communicating the secure information out-of-band.

My TiVo should have a unique identifier — other than the service number — that’s only visible from the device itself. Since my TiVo connects to the Internet already, this should be pretty straightforward. Once I enter that information, TiVo can confirm ownership of the box, and transfer it over to my account.

It’s not Bungie Spins Off From Microsoft, but rather “Microsoft cuts cord.”

My session is Putting the Quality in Quality Web Applications.

Here’s the blurb:

A misspelled word, stray pixel or errant semicolon can erase your data, confuse your customers or put you on the front page of the New York Times. Learn what’s important when it comes to web app quality and how to make your site test itself while you sip margaritas.

This is going to be a presentation, not a panel. I’ll cover diverse aspects of web application testing — from CSS bugs to typos to buffer overflows. What are the most common problems? How can you fix them? How can you avoid them? How can your computer do the work for you—how can you automate as much of this as possible? Lots of demos, code samples, real-world best practices.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is having email problems:

Tony is a UI engineer. He gets a lot of recruiter spam. Usually it’s related to his skillset.

This time, however, the recruiter was looking for a filesystems engineer.

They had this hilarious exchange:

Recruiter: We’re looking for somebody with 7-10 years of experience writing filesystems.
Me: The only person I know with that level of experience writing filesystems is Hans Reiser.
Recruiter: Have you worked with Hans before? Can you send me his resume?
Me: http://www.idiom.com/~beverly/hans_resume.html
Recruiter: You are too funny! We’re willing to let our developers telecommute but the state penn. wasn’t quite what we had in mind. Thanks for making me smile though :)

If it costs you more in employee time to screen bug reports and mark them as duplicates than it would to actually fix the bug, fix the bug. Now.