Technocrank

Re-build as Universal binary.

Ver­sion 1.2 now avail­able on the Down­loads page.

It’s been reported that Steve Jobs responded to an iPhone app developer who was told by Apple legal to change his app’s name. Apparently, he suggested that changing the name of the app as demanded wasn’t that big of a deal.

In the same spirit, I’m going to start a company called Apple. I think they’ll understand when my legal team demands they change their name. Not that big of a deal.

I’ve updated the Quick Look generator for bittorrent meta files. Thanks to Guillaume Lessard for pointing out the deficiency in calculating total sizes for super-large torrents.  So…it should be okay for a while…

Version 1.1 now available on the Downloads page.

I’m fascinated by people’s relationship with technology and this recent posting on Lifehacker is a prime example of the wrong questions being asked.  We’ve heard about Internet addiction – there was a story last week out of China with a death related to an Internet addiction rehabilitation program.

What’s most interesting to me about the Lifehacker article is that there should even be an article at all.  Its subject “Is The Web Crucial To Your Morning Routine?” is about as germane as “is the telephone crucial to your morning routine?” or “do you turn on the TV for the morning weather or open a newspaper?”

My routine involves roughly, turning on the computer and leaving it to boot, make a pit stop in the washroom, to the kitchen and make some tea, pour some cereal and then sit down to check out what news or weather updates have come up – on the net.  It’s my main (and preferred) source of information that informs my day and it seems that it should figure into the start of it (I don’t have kids yet, will change, I’m sure).  However, is it really that much different from looking to the sky to see if it’s going to rain today or running around the corner to grab the paper to see if the economy has tanked and I should buy extra tins of food for the bomb shelter?

Just today I logged into Facebook and discovered that it felt that the email address I had supplied as a contact was no longer valid.  It provided me an inline form to give them a new address as well as a link to click if I thought this message was in error.  Action on either front made it cough back an message saying what I’d given them was still invalid.

I did a bit of digging around the site’s help pages and I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that it’s pretty much impossible to contact an actual person to help you out.  I do have to credit the CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s enormous ego with creating what is possibly one of the most successful sites with the paradoxically worst support system ever.  The customer forum is composed of an unbelievably byzantine interface link structure that rivals Microsoft’s.  It’s pretty much impossible to find the answer to a problem which they don’t deem to be an official “issue”, nevermind one they do.

Anyway, I did eventually find a solution (without input, of course, from any Facebook staff, possibly from Google).  For some reason, they’ve started scanning their database for contact emails that they deem “generic” (e.g. “mail@…” and “info@…”).  At their request, I changed mine to something else, something equally generic but not what they’re flagging and then set it on my email server side to forward to the address I had previously given Facebook.  This seemed to satisfy it.

I did notice in the “help” pages that some customers had tried to follow Facebook’s instructions but on doing so, became locked out of their accounts.  They’re now stuck in purgatory.  I won’t dwell on this too long, since it’s only a matter of time until I too, am banished with all my contacts, groups and fan pages blown to dust.

Seriously, Facebook:  F.O.

Also, anecdotally (from the “help” pages), more than one customer had reported finding a help page in there somewhere that directed them to contact Facebook support at the following address: “info@facebook.com”.