The Silicon Valley Geek

Yay!

I fell in love with Firefox 3 beta 3 for its speed (compared to Firefox 2) on the Mac and started using it almost exclusively.

Then beta 4 came out and it was slooooow! And crash-prone too!

Now that RC1 (aka release candidate) is out, I am in love with Firefox again. It’s as fast as beta 3 and hasn’t crashed on me yet.

Well, okay, once bitten twice shy. So I’ve upgraded and will use RC1 but I’m saving the love for later.

The RC1 is available for download here.

Craigslist or Craig’s List is a free, online classified ads website that is eating the lunch of traditional printed classified advertising.

The first time visitor might be tempted to think that you can find anything on Craigslist. Just like on Ebay (famously illustrated by that scene in Men in Black 2). Nothing is further from the truth.

Craigslist is a pretty small outfit so employees themselves don’t do the policing.

Instead, the site depends on the “community” (i.e. users) to “flag” inappropriate ads.

To put it unkindly, the community police are like your nosy neighbor. You know, that guy down the street who is always peering through the window blinds and who calls city hall every time you park more than 18 inches away from the curb? I used to have a neighbor like that and he denounced everyone living in the street to the point where he had no more friends. During  WWII, these people would have denounced young Jewish girls to the Nazis.

The good thing about Craigslist, is that they use a democratic system for removing posts. They don’t depend on complaints from just one single, cranky person. Instead, a post needs to be flagged many times before it can be removed. Which is nice. I wished the San Jose city hall would do that.

Obviously, to be removed, a post needs to violate posting guidelines. I had a post removed once and it was in violation of some very obscure rule which even the Craigslist community forum folks had trouble figuring out. Which goes to show that some people need to get a life that is outside of memorizing Craigslist posting guidelines…

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I found out the office hours of the community police.

Some Craigslist newbies tend to put up the same car ad multiple times, listing them as being sold in different cities/counties in the SF Bay Area. This violates one of the posting guidelines: thou shalt not put up multiple posts to sell the same item within X hours.

At 7am this morning, I found multiple violations which had not been removed. Wow!

At 7.45am, the posts had been removed.

My guess: folks wake up at 7+ in the morning, turn on their PCs, make coffee, skim Craigslist. And start flagging ads for removing.

So if you are a newbie advertising on Craigslist, put up your ads early in the morning. Preferably before 7am.

The problem is: the people you are targeting probably keep the same hours as the Craigslist community police…

Last Friday, I left a Windows Vista notebook running over the weekend because I needed to download an ISO image.

For the non-techies, an ISO image is a copy of a CD that exists as a file your hard disk. You can use the ISO image to re-create a copy of the CD. ISO images tend to be very big. The one that I was downloading was more than 600MB in size.

This morning, when I came into the office, the notebook had been powered off.

What the….!?

I found out that Vista had downloaded an update and had automatically powered off the notebook after that update.

Needless to day, my download was 95% done when that happened.

Think of this: the download was for work. Now I have to restart the download and WAIT for it to complete. Think of how much money this is costing my company in terms of manhour costs.

Multiply that by the number of Vista users and you can imagine how much Vista is costing businesses in wasted time.

This automatic-shutdown-after-an-update feature of Windows is of a monumental stupidity.

I have had that happen to me while I was running virtual machines on another PC: the host operating system (which was XP) shut down by itself after an update. All this without first shutting down the guest operating systems that were running on the virtual machines. This is like powering off a PC without first shutting down the operating system. A big NO-NO.

I cannot imagine what must be going on in the heads of those people in Redmond when they came up with this scheme. Were the technical aspects of “doing it right” so daunting that they had to take such a shortcut?

For this is an engineering shortcut. There is no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, it just kills the user experience and wastes everyone else’s time and money.