All posts tagged with "Geekiness"
I'm sure everyone has had the pleasure of speaking to a tech support hotline. You know the sort, outsourced call centre, expensive number, person on the other end who has no idea what they're doing... Yeah. I avoid them wherever possible.
This weekend, I was dealing with a relative's troublesome internet - ever since moving house, they had been unable to get online even though the ISP promised they had changed the phone number and address and whatnot over a month ago. I fiddled all the usual settings, routers, firewalls, passwords, etc., but to no avail. I had little other choice than to ring them up to ask what was up. I was a bit unsure about one of the settings, as it was set to PPPoA on this router but my own one uses a PPPoE connection so I wondered whether this was correct. I'd tried both but they hadn't worked, but there were also other fiddly bits I might have forgotten. Sooo, I decided to brave the call centre and ask them.
Support guy (with thick accent): Hello, you are through to [ISP] support, my name is [name], how may I help you today.
Me: Hi, I'm just having a bit of an issue connecting to your service. I've checked all the settings on my end and they are all correct, so I was wondering if you could help.
Him: Ok ma'am. Can you open up the Internet Explorer.1
Me: ... um, ok.
Him: Go to white box at the top. Delete text. Type [router IP].
Me: Ok, I've already done that and I've checked all the settings there, they are all fine. There was one thing I was a bit unsure about though - do you use the PPPoA setting or PPPoE?
Him: *Long pause* No, you take CD out. Type in the Internet Explorer.
Me: CD? No, I asked about connection types. Is it PPP-
Him: *Interrupting* Ma'am, no CD. Take CD out.
Me: ...
Him: No CD.
Me: I'm not using a CD, I-
Him: *Interrupting* Type in the Internet Explorer, [router IP].
Me: ... yeah.
Him: Type in the Internet-
Me: I've done that.
Him: What do you see.
Me: I've already logged in. I checked-
Him: *Interrupting again* Type in the Internet Explorer-
Me: I'VE. DONE. THAT.
Him: What do you see.
Me: It is showing me the settings.2
Him: You type username, password, it is [username] and [password].
Me: Yeah.
It carried on like that for several minutes, him just ignoring everything I was saying. He asked me to confirm the phone number on the account, put me on hold, then came back.
Him: Ma'am you reboot now.
Me: What?
Him: You reboot, it work now.
Me: I rebooted before, it didn't help.
Him: No, you reboot, it work now.
Me: ...
Him: You reboot?
Me: Yeah yeah, it rebooted.3
Him: It work now.
Me: No.
Him: Reboot.
Me: Again?
Him: Reboot, it work.
Me: I'm trying it on another computer right now, this one doesn't work either.
Him: Reboot please ma'am.
Me: I don't see how that's going to help.
Him: It should work, you reboot.
Me: Yeah well, it's not working.
Him: Reboot the Internet Explorer, it work now.
Me: No, it really doesn't.
Him: Reboot, it work when you reboot.
Me: Yeah. Doesn't though.
Him: Reboot again, til it work.
Me: *Hangs up*
And guess what? 10 minutes later, everything worked. And no, I didn't reboot. A reboot won't fix a connection issue unless it was a problem with the computer, and it wasn't. Stupid ISP hadn't switched the phone number over and had the cheek to try and make me think they 'magically' fixed things by trying to buy time by making me reboot. Yeah, I don't think so somehow.
——
And what if I don't want to use Internet Explorer? ^
Humouring him now ^
It hadn't. ^
So, the first beta of IE8 is out... Looks no different to IE7 but apparently it passed the acid test and it's standards compliant!1!11 WOW!!1! So obviously I had to try it and review it just like I did for IE7.
Well first of all I can't spot any of the old CSS bugs (OMG I can't have been looking properly, seriously) but there are a few general bugs. If you view this site in it, the title of the page or blog entry kind of jumps when you hover over the navigation. Also, dropdown menus can't seem to decide whether they are as wide as the text inside them or as wide as the CSS says they should be. It seems if you click the menu, it is the correct width (i.e. that of the CSS) but if you click inside another field, it goes back to the width of the text inside.
Other than that, I couldn't find anything majorly wrong. I highly doubt I tested it fully, but still: could this be the end of IE hacks and having to make a separate stylesheet for IE because it interprets everything differently? Well, that certainly seems like an exciting prospect. The only thing I wonder is why Microsoft haven't done it before now.
Oh, and it has a handy "emulate IE7" button which is good only really for cross-browser checking... Can't easily install more than one IE on a computer so that's kind of useful. :P
You may remember my last rant about people who have written their own CMS, in which my point was pretty much that people are copying a simple blog tutorial and saying it's a CMS.
In part two of this thrilling instalment1, I revisit the topic of the custom CMS to rant about the latest craze - which is... well... writing one's own CMS. Everyone and their dog seems to want to do it. It's the thing to do to earn cool points and tell everyone how great you are. I should know, I've done it.
But what I am seeing at the moment is people who have no idea what they're doing. People who simply want to make a CMS because it's cool. When I wrote this CMS, I did it after almost 3 years of being comfortable with the language, knowing exactly what I wanted and what each function does and why. I knew the security implications involved in it, the problems I might experience, the limitations of what I had to work with, etc. I didn't even write my first script until I'd been comfortable with the language for two years. Editing, picking apart other scripts was fine, but my own script? If you ever saw PHPAskIt v1 (it's still out there, worryingly enough) you'll know I wasn't even ready then. However, I'll still admit I only wrote this CMS because I was totally jealous of Jem it was cool. :(
As you may or may not know, I have been learning Ruby on Rails for the past 6 months or so. I am fairly familiar with it at the moment but I am freely able to admit that I am not under any circumstances ready to undertake as large a project as a CMS in it. I don't know how RoR can be exploited, I don't know what sort of problems there are by using X rather than Y - I just don't know enough at the moment. I'm comfortable hacking about existing scripts and adding on little bits and pieces, but that's it.
So my point today is this: before you decide "zomg!1 I must write a CMS!1!!", ask yourself the following questions:
- I'm going to be using PHP and MySQL. Do I have enough knowledge in these areas to make my CMS work?
- Do I know what the limitations of my server/host/databases are?
- Will I have access to PHP4 or 5? What's the difference?
- Why am I writing a CMS in the first place? What do I need it to do that others out there can't?
- What do I know about security, particularly remote file inclusion, XSS and SQL injection? How will my CMS deal with these areas?
- I want my CMS to do X, Y and Z. Do I know how I can achieve this?
If you're unsure of the answers to any of these questions, my advice would be you're not ready yet. Keep looking at existing scripts and see how they're doing things. Search the internet for vulnerabilities in those scripts and how they are exploited to ensure it doesn't happen to you. Get friends to try and break your script as much as they possibly can. I can guarantee that some things normal internet users might do, you'll never think of - for example I found people were trying to go to non-existent tags on my site or page numbers that didn't exist and it caused my site to break.
However, don't think I'm discouraging you from writing a CMS (much :P ). A CMS is the perfect way to develop confidence in a programming language and to learn more about it than you ever could have otherwise. By all means start trying to write your own CMS and learning techniques to make it work the way you want to - but here's the important part: don't put it online. Install yourself a web server (I have XAMPP - very easy to install, has everything you need and installs in a single click. Mac OS X has built-in web server features but you can get XAMPP and other similar packages for it if you're not entirely sure how to use the built-in stuff, I must admit it's always confused me) and develop your up-and-coming CMS there; learn how to interact effectively with MySQL and all that in your own time without hacker types lurking everywhere and undoing all your hard work. I made the mistake of writing the first version of PHPAskIt online and ended up with all sorts of security issues. While I was writing the CMS, it stayed offline for 8 months because I didn't feel it was secure enough to go online - would my host tell me off for too many database queries? Would my PHP version and theirs clash?
Don't think you have to write a CMS just because "everyone else is doing it". You need to feel you can do it and that there is actually a point to doing it. If WordPress or similar does everything you need, is it really necessary? There is no shame whatsoever in using WP. The only reason I stopped using it is because it started to take over my site in ways I really didn't like and I'd modified it so much in the end that every time there was an upgrade I had to update each file individually to make sure it didn't mess with my changes. You also need to make sure you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. If you don't know the slightest bit about PHP, it really isn't worth it.
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