I’m very disappointed that I didn’t get to watch any of my favorite Friday-night shows on CBS tonight. I don’t know what game they had on (can’t you just wait until Sunday for the Superbowl?), but it prevented them from airing two of their best shows…
Fooey on all you football fans. I enjoy the game just as much as the next guy when I’m there and beer is provided, but come on… Football on TV? It’s just not worth it…
RandyWalker linked me to the entry Google is the new http:// in #wordpress earlier, and I shortly thereafter commented over on Alex King’s blog about OpenDNS’s typo-search feature. You know the one – if you type in a domain that doesn’t exist, rather than giving you the default “Couldn’t find that server” message, you get redirected to a Google-powered search results page instead (containing ads).
In short, the conversation was about people utilizing a browser’s auto-correct feature for a domain, rather than typing in the full address themselves. This can vary from simply typing “google” instead of “google.com” to typo’ing it “goggle.com”. If you’re presented with a clear “the server was not found” message, it’s pretty obvious that you did something wrong.
Instead, the OpenDNS method of redirecting you to search results for that term (or the laziness equivalent of people simply relying on Google’s results to get them to their destination more quickly) leaves open what I consider a security vulnerability.
You see, banks frequently encourage you to go to your browser and type in their address directly, rather than clicking through any links you find in an email. This is to help avoid people getting caught into phishing traps that disguise links in false emails as legitimate links.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which everyone utilized OpenDNS, or simply lets Google direct them where to go by omitting the “.com”1, and relies upon the search results they’re presented with to get to their destination. What if some clever phisher is able to successfully game the system and get a top result (or even the top result) for something like… “Bank of America”?
Now we’ve got legitimate sources (OpenDNS and Google) handing out links people assume are totally trustworthy to a site ranking highly for “Bank of America” that is not in fact a legitimate bank website. Can you imagine the millions of idiots that would blindly type their login credentials into this website, simply because they got to it from Google and it looked like the Bank of America website?
I say we start encouraging users to deliberately take the time to type the full address into the address bar. Stop allowing them to be lazy and utilize search engine results to get to their destination because they don’t want to add the additional 4 characters at the end of the URL.
Just saw “Too many concurrent connections” SMTP error on (gs) GRID.Cluster.1 show up on my Google homepage.
Is there anything else that could possibly go wrong with the Media Temple (gs) service? By my count, thus far we’ve had:
Have I missed anything? With the exception of actual network connectivity issues to the broken services on the grid, we’ve hit just about everything they could possibly have go wrong….
Don’t get me wrong, I really really really hope (mt) gets these issues worked out. I’m really looking forward to their MySQL grid containers release in March. Being able to edit your my.cnf file is a real advantage if you ask me. The ability to seamlessly scale up and then back down without being locked into a new plan level is also really cool. It just doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to get any new cool grid features built, because they keep underestimating the use of their existing features. Sometimes I wonder if there was really any beta testing of this platform at all before release…
I frequently gripe and complain about things at work. No office environment is perfect, but for a vast majority of us it’s just a given necessity to having a job. Besides, when you’re trying to do desktop support, telecommuting just isn’t practical at times.
So here are two things that annoy me on a regular basis about people at work in general.
It’s broken! Fix it ASAP, because…
When you come running over and scream that something on your machine is broken, I accept that it’s a problem for you. Unfortunately, I have about 60 people in this office doing that constantly, and who knows how many clients relying upon me directly or something broken for one of those other employees.
I appreciate your urgency, but I’m sorry, I have to prioritize things on a much larger scale than your job function alone. This applies to everyone, not just you. I make the VPs of the company wait if there’s a major problem on my plate just like I make you wait. That’s right, no special treatment from me at this company (and I get support from my boss on that, so it does work that way).
Also, I honestly don’t care why it has to be fixed immediately. If you’ve got a research problem for your boss due soon, I’m sorry. The fact that you can’t open PDF files pales in comparison to the salary updates I’m doing on 7,000 employees from our largest client that have to be done by 4pm so we can send another data export to them so they can pay people this week. It’s all about perspective….
Oh yeah, I fixed that already. You can go back to your desk…
Well if you got it to work, why in the name of hell didn’t you tell me?! You can running over and interrupted my train of thought when it was broken. Why did I have to waste my time opening a support ticket for you and dropping what I’m doing to come all the way across the building, wait for you to get off the phone, and ask you to show me what’s wrong only to find out that you got it to work?!
Seems to me just to be common courtesy to let me know when I don’t need to allot some of my valuable time to fix your problem because you got it to work (likely due to user error)… Maybe that’s just me, though…
No, I’m Still Not Going to Help You…
Kirillz in #wordpress told me that my last post seemed to be cut off, and that I should give more details on why I get so frustrated with people when I’m trying to help them. So here are two that I could think of right off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this list in the near future…
#1
When you’re having a problem and have come looking for help, don’t try and tell me that you don’t think something I’m suggesting will help. If you knew all the answers, you wouldn’t be having a problem in the first place. My suggestion may very well not have any real impact on the problem, but I still expect you to walk through the troubleshooting steps I give you anyway. It’s the way I work, and during troubleshooting I’m driving you by remote control. Shut up and do it and tell me what happens when you’re done…
#2
People like people who help themselves. That’s especially true in my case. If you haven’t checked the clearly published documentation and aren’t willing to at least try to help yourself (and that includes Googling competently for the answer), don’t bother coming to ask me for help.
This also includes not giving a detailed explanation of your problem. There are just some things I expect you to walk in the proverbial door with, and a clear description of what you expected to happen and what really happened is one of them.
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