Cookie management in Firefox is too much of an all or nothing thing: either block everything or block nothing or be annoyed by constant cookie popups:
Here are a few simple improvements Firefox could make to vastly improve user experience while maintaining privacy:
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Friday I installed one of my Christmas presents, a complete set of 1:100000 scale topo maps of the U.S. for my Garmin eTrex Vista GPS receiver. I’d rather use the more detailed 1:25000 maps I bought from James Associates; and I’d rather use my Mac to load them onto the GPS unit; but Garmin won’t document the protocol for uploading maps; and that protocol doesn’t seem to have been effectively reverse engineered yet; so I had to boot Windows and load them from the PC using Garmin’s own MapSource.
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There’s a disturbing belief found throughout the programming community that it’s OK for an application to do the wrong thing by default, as long as there’s a way for the user to do the right thing. Stated that blatantly, it’s obviously false; and yet I keep running up against this belief time and time again in widely separated areas. Here are just a few:
Over the last few days I’ve been trying out quite a bit of new software as part of a couple of new projects. This includes the Vienna RSS client, the WordPress blogging engine, and the PHPMyAdmin web-based interface to MySQL. Along the way I’ve noticed the same repeating problem in each of these products, and it’s one that I’ve seen in numerous other products over the years. (more…)
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours avoiding real work by upgrading my software. Specifically I upgraded MySQL 4.1, Apache 2, and PHP here on cafe.elharo.com after noticing that MySQL had crashed. I didn’t do any major version upgrades, just moved everything up to the latest point release of the branch I was using. Along the way I noticed big, gaping holes in the documentation for all three. Not one of them had any upgrade instructions. They all had poorly written instructions for a first time install (Apache was probably the least bad here, PHP the worst) and a couple had instructions for moving between versions (e.g. 1.3 to 2.0 or 4.1 to 5.0) but not one had anything to say about how you should upgrade from 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 while keeping your data, configuration, and extension modules intact. Since point releases often fix security holes, these are the most critical upgrades. I had to go to IRC to figure out how to upgrade MySQL, where I was told it would happen by “magic,” which would be nice if it were true, except it wasn’t.
