wonko.com

In Safari 3.1, which was released yesterday, the keypress event is no longer fired for non-character keypresses other than enter.

I was sure this was just a bug, but it turns out the change was intentional, and was made in order to imitate the behavior of Internet Explorer.

In other words, the WebKit team looked at their keypress implementation, which had some quirks but at least worked more or less the same as in Firefox and Opera, and they said, “Hey, you know what this needs? More suck!” and changed it to work like IE instead, thereby causing even more confusion in the already-muddled clusterfuck of DOM keyboard events.

If you’re developing a web browser, here’s a helpful tip: when faced with the question of whether you should imitate the behavior of Internet Explorer or [insert other browser name], always imitate the other browser. I don’t care if the other browser is Mosaic 1.0; odds are it’s a safer choice than IE.

Thoth has officially been released! You can install it with:

sudo gem install thoth

Once Thoth and its dependencies have been installed, create a new home directory for your Thoth blog:

thoth --create myblog
cd myblog

Edit thoth.conf to your liking, then start Thoth:

thoth

Take a look at your new Thoth blog at http://localhost:7000/ (or whatever port you configured). Once you’ve got everything working and are ready to run Thoth in production, you’ll probably want to start it as a daemon:

thoth -d start

Easy as pie, huh?

It turns out the name Riposte is already trademarked and in use by these folks. Since their lawyers sent me a polite letter asking that I stop using the name, the blog software formerly known as Riposte will henceforth be known as Thoth.

If you’re an awesome web developer or QA engineer and want to work on awesome things with me and lots of other awesome people at Yahoo! Search, send me your résumé.

I’m not in any way affiliated with ilovewonko.com, but I almost wish I were.

It’s a sly parody; a haunting caricature of a stereotypically lonely, tortured soul seeking solace in poetry (“No one lives forever, if only it were so / But people never see when my tears begin to flow.”), fiction (“Her magic against a warrior of his caliber was like swatting a swarm of scarab beetles with a rolled newspaper.”), music (“I’d like to dedicate this song to my ex-boyfriend…”), and Comic Sans MS.

On second thought, maybe it’s not a sly parody at all. Maybe it’s just a pathetic disaster that makes me wish I had thought to buy that domain first in order to prevent things like this from happening.

Microsoft has changed their stance and now says that Internet Explorer 8 will render pages in standards mode by default, and developers can use the previously announced X-UA-Compatible header to enable the IE7 compatibility mode. Previously it was the other way around, which was just retarded.

This is the best news I’ve heard all day.

Version 1.1.1 of jsmin-php is now available. The only change in this release is a fix for an issue that caused excessive memory allocation when minifying very large JavaScript files.

• jsmin-1.1.1.php (7.8KB)

Even before the whole Microsoft thing, Yahoo! was a prime target for recruiters. A recruiter will find someone’s website or LinkedIn profile, discover that they work for Yahoo!, then call one of the main Yahoo! numbers and either drill through the directory to find the person’s extension or simply ask a receptionist to transfer them. The end result is that whenever my desk phone rings, there’s a 90% chance it’s a recruiter.

On the whole, I don’t mind being pinged by recruiters via email or on LinkedIn. If they’ve actually seen my résumé, then they know my cell number, which they’re welcome to call as well. But my work number isn’t published anywhere, so when I get recruiting calls there, it’s extra annoying and doesn’t do much to establish a feeling of trust.

So, to avoid these annoying interruptions, I’ve simply stopped answering calls from numbers I don’t recognize, and I’ve updated my outgoing voicemail greeting thusly:

Hi, this is Ryan. I’m not at my desk right now, but if you leave a message I’ll try to get back to you. If you’re a recruiter, please hang up now.

Even so, I still get voicemails from recruiters. The ones who actually hear the message usually say, “I know your message said to hang up, but…” Some of them stoop to really sketchy levels, like giving only their first name (to imply that I should know them) and saying that “some important papers” have recently come across their desk and that I should call them right away. One woman left several messages like this and I eventually had to call her back just to tell her to stop.

But none of these comes close to a voicemail I got a few weeks ago from a guy who appears to have seen this site and thought (correctly) that talking about pie would get my attention. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of talking about pie while sounding like a creepy-ass pedophile:

Listen to the voicemail

I didn’t call him back.

When a new employee joins Yahoo!, they get to choose whether they want a PC laptop or a MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, if you choose a PC and then later decide you want to switch to a MacBook, there’s a huge waiting list (unsurprisingly, there’s no wait to switch from a MacBook to a PC).

Way back in November, my coworker Brett filed an IT request to switch to a MacBook. About a week later I filed one as well. We each got responses letting us know that we’d been added to the queue, that we could expect our MacBooks in Q1 ‘08, and that we’d get a status update in January.

When January rolled around and no status update appeared, I added a comment to my ticket requesting an update, but never got a response. In early February, I again requested an update. Still no response. Yesterday I decided to pull out the big guns. I resolved to post a poem to the ticket once a week until IT responded.

At 11am on Thursday, I posted the following limerick:

I filed an IT request
A response was promised with zest
When layoffs occurred
And Microsoft merged,
My ticket was lost in the mess.

By 11:13 the ticket had been assigned, and this morning I had a shiny new MacBook Pro.

Needless to say, Brett wasn’t too happy, since he’d filed his ticket before mine and should have been earlier in the queue. Luckily I had already written a haiku (having anticipated that the limerick would be ignored), so I suggested he post it to his ticket:

A MacBook request
filed in winter, long ago;
spring is drawing near

He posted it this morning and IT contacted him this afternoon to let him know his MacBook was being set up.

Result!

I got a mass email this morning from Dash CEO Paul Lego. It was sent to everyone who pre-ordered a Dash Express (which Dash had promised would ship by the end of February). As you might have guessed, the email contained a last-minute announcement that the units won’t actually be shipping in February:

We’ve spent the past few weeks conducting extensive product testing to assess our readiness to ship. While we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress on the product, we have a few remaining items we would like to address before we release it. We’d like to ask you to hang on for a bit longer as we complete this development work. We’re setting a firm ship date of March 27th, 2008, and are committed to doing whatever it takes to meet this goal.

Obviously I’m disappointed, since I’ve really been looking forward to the Dash Express. But I understand that they want to get things right, especially since this is their first product. I’m willing to wait a little longer for a higher-quality device.

That said, I’m angry. I’m not angry because the Dash Express was delayed or because there was no communication about the delay until the last minute; I’m angry because, in an obvious attempt to appease the disappointed masses, Dash has made the ridiculously stupid mistake of “setting a firm ship date of March 27th, 2008”.

You can’t have it both ways, guys. Either you’re committed to quality and you’re going to delay this product until you’ve got all the kinks worked out, or you’re committed to a date and you’re going to ship it—kinks and all—when that date hits. I’m willing to wait until Christmas if it means I’ll get a bug-free device, but I’m not willing to wait until March for a device that will be slightly less buggy than it would have been in February.