ID card smoke screen
Thursday, December 22, 2005
All this time I've been worrying about ID cards and I should have been worrying about
the routine tracking of all UK drivers via a vast network of cameras and a big ass database.
What a fucked up nasty Big Brother state we live in. Between this and the retention of mobile phone records, the Government will broadly know where I am at all times now.
I may as well get my ID card and be done with it.
Nice of the Independant to mention civil liberties in one small paragraph in the article. That'll make people sit up and take notice.
Hurray.
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Compare and Contrast
Friday, December 16, 2005
Bug reporting in Fogbugz (the tracker we use at work) is very simple. There aren't many fields and you can't customize it much. QA are sometimes frustrated by this but on the whole most people agree that Fogbugz got instant and widespread buy in precisely because it was simple and has been a great success. Joel himself summarizes the principal like so:
People add so many fields to their bug databases to capture everything they think might be important that entering a bug is like applying to Harvard. End result: people don't enter bugs, which is much, much worse than not capturing all that information.
So far so groovy.
The other day I spotted
what I consider to be a bug in Firefox, the posterchild Open Source browser.
Being the good citizen I am, I thought I'd report it so I went to the Firefox
Bug Reporting Page.
Are they having a laugh? Have you seen the steps I am expected to go to before a I register a bug?
- Use the latest nightly build of Firefox with a new profile
- Check if you can reproduce the bug in Mozilla (Application Suite)
- Check if the bug is already filed
- Finally, read the official Bug Writing Guidelines
Even if I jumped through these hoops, I know for a fact that when I get to make the report I would be presented with Bugzilla which is, to all intents and purposes, the anti-fogbugz.
It's like they don't want to know about these things. Even in Open Source land, a bug is not the user's fault. If you want to know about it then you might want to treat them gently, cause chances are you are catching them at the point when they are least disposed to be charitable to you.
My issue remains unreported.
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