B10[mg]

Online shopping is getting more and more popular but how much fun can you have with online shops? A shopping cart is which you can dump the items you want to buy can be really fun! Let's look at a few random results.

First I'd like to show you mijnwinkel.nl (translation: myshop.nl). This website offers you an easy way to setup your own shop. A keyword on the site that caught my attention, was "reliable service". They claim to host more than 1000 shops and all of them suffer from the same error, the incorrect shopping cart! Let's look at an example shop: Veronica (a Dutch TV Channel). Imagine you want to buy the "Denver Music Centre". They will charge you € 149.00 (non-members).

Too expensive! Let's order 0.01 Denver Music Centres!

Now we pay 1.49, much better!

As mentioned, this bug applies to all of the mijnwinkel.nl shops (like ANWB, OV9292, Nyenrode, and TU Delft).

Ok, so that's fun. Let's find some more. What about this merchant ? Do we get a refund with our goods?

Fun stuff ;-)

Of course Joffie pointed such things out to me years ago, but it's fun to see it still works.

online shop, shopping cart, form

Every now and then I read up on some usability tips and now I give one to the website building world! Of course I'm not entirely original, Adam Kalsey gave a hint already, but I like to stress the point.

Adam points out the following (well, quoting Paul Scrivens, but his website is (currently?) not available):

He suggests using a single name field instead of separating first name from last name unless you really need the names separated. The problem with this is that you never know what future uses you might have for that data. If you don't make sure its in a format you can use, its useless.

Why do I care? Well, my mother-in-law is soon visiting my country. She's Javanese, and as Wikipedia tells you Javanese (amongst others) don't use family (last) names!

Booking online flights is almost impossible, for the first and last name are always mandatory! So to get things straightened out, I have to call the airline to make sure how to bypass their too strict website (usually a dot or slash is ok, sometimes the "helpdesk" manually can change stuff).

So, if you're going to design a signup form, ask yourself the question: "is it really necessary for me to get a first and last name, or can one field (full name) do as well?".

The Javanese people (and the non-Javanese, but planning for Javanese people) will be very thankful!

usability, family name, java

Last night, I received a mail from Stanley Go, a technical recruiter for Google. They were checking to see whether I was interested in a job with Google or not.

"Finally!", I thought. After all, BOK was contacted by the evil empire over a year ago!

It was just funny though. I'm not listed anywhere as looking for a job, as far as I remember, and the email looked extremely canned. Let's have a look at (parts) of it:

I found your information online on your homepage and see that you are an experienced Perl software developer with many distributions from Acme::Terror::NL to Webservice::LastFM::SimilarArtists. Your experience with coding and software development might be a good fit the Google.com engineering team.

Now, the email was sent to my CPAN account, which looked odd to me to begin with. I only get my Perl modules's bugs and patches on that account (and spam, occasionally).

Let's continue:

With your background and knowledge in software development, I feel that your skill set would be a good match with the Google.com team.

Based on a few modules he can judge my background and knowledge? C'mon! Especially after last week's Dutch Perl Workshop I do not consider my Perl knowledge that good.

This must be a joke, I figured and started looking at the links in the mail. They all linked to the real google.com site. Mmmm, headers? Sure enough it looks like it's coming from Google. It hits a few google corp relays.

Unlike Lee, who wrote about a similar mail, I think this is the lowest kind of recruitment, for it's simply canned spam. Maybe my first assignment at Google would be to write a script to send out even more emails to Python, Ruby and other programmers? ;-)

If they did take time to learn about the people they contact, as Lee claims, they would have found my posts on google eq evil

Shame on you spammers! Shame on you google!

google, recruitment, spam

My country is plagued with free newspapers. The train stations are flooded by three free newspapers, being De Pers, Spits, and Metro.

The first one claims to be a quality newspaper, while the latter two are just plain horrible and I refused to read them for a while now. Today, however, I decided to give the Metro paper another chance, and unfortunately, it was the last time.

In Indonesia, addressing another human being always goes hand in hand with polite forms. Females are addressed with mbak, or ibu (depending on the age), males with mas or bapak (also depending on the age of the man).

These polite forms go far. Husbands and wives use these "titles", even brothers and sisters. Therefore, almost every one calls me mas (I'm not so old yet ;-) or bapak (or bule which refers to my skin color (white) and being a foreigner).

Today, the Metro paper posted an article about a tragic event about a woman poisoning her four kids and herself, out of money problems. This she apparently recorded with her cell phone.

The article is in Dutch, so I'll translate just a phrase:

In a goodbye letter to her husband Pak, the woman wrote: "Pak, the money is gone. I took the kids to show them heaven".

The name of the husband is not Pak! That's just the abbreviation of Bapak!

As it turns out, the Metro "journalists" just copy news and add their own incorrect conclusions. That's it Metro, now I will stop reading your paper ... again.

metro, newspaper, translation, bahasa indonesia, dutch

I bet a lot of geeks like me are curious what it takes to launch and manage a successful website. To answer these questions, I'll contact the owners of such websites and just ask them :-)

Today, the first episode about: 30 Boxes (which is also one of my favourite websites at the moment). 30 Boxes offers users a calendar system that is rather quite impressive. Usability seems to be the main goal, which results in an intuitive calendar that actually makes it fun to update. Add some command line scripts to it and you can say you have a successful website!

They host their servers at The Planet (or so it seems).

Nick of 30boxes.com was so kind to answer the following questions:

1. When did you start with 30 Boxes and what made you think of this idea?
The three of us (Narendra, Julie, and myself had the simple need of seeing each other's calendar to schedule social things and vacations together, and we needed on-line access to we could see them from anywhere (work, phones, friends houses, etc).

2. Google's 'tag-line' is "don't be evil", what is yours?
"It's Your Life" is the primary tagline. Sometimes we use "Life inside a box isn't all bad".

3. How many people are currently involved in operating this service?
3

4. How many users (approximately) do you currently have?
85,000

5. How much bandwidth would you say your users generate?
Don't know.

6. What is used for operating your site (amount of servers, operating systems, CPU/RAM, programming languages.)?
2 quad-proc Intel servers with 2GB ram each.

7. What made you choose the programming language(s) you're currently using?
PHP, Mysql, Linux. Free, enormous support available. Easy to use.

8. What are the future plans for 30 Boxes?
We have finished most of the product development we envisioned and will focus on gaining more users and collaborating with other services.

The fun part -to me- is that only 3 people can generate a product like this, which definately blows away the competition (like Yahoo! and Google). Well done and keep it up!

30boxes