Dean Scarff’s perpetual struggle with technology, and other anecdotes
I’ve previously mentioned how Matthew Scott’s reStructuredText for WordPress is a good hack for making wordpress usable. However, revision 5 from the rest-wordpress bazaar repository was broken in a few ways.
The most annoying way was that the options I’d configured up the top of the file weren’t having the desired effect. I wasted the better part of an hour in debugging until I recalled how horrid PHP scoping was. It was a simple fix.
It came with the header:
Subject: Turn your skills into cash at SourceForge.net Marketplace
At the very least it was annoying bacn, but it’s really spam.
In May 2007 there was an invitation to register interest in SourceForge’s new Marketplace product. I declined. Evidently sourceforge (or at least the Marketplace product manager) was disappointed in the uptake among developers, and started an opt-out bacn campaign, consisting of sending the same message to developers every few months telling them to check out the new service.
Well, bacn is one thing, but the most annoying thing was the obfuscated unsubscription procedure. The relevant sentence being:
… if you would prefer not
to receive information about SourceForge.net Marketplace, please update your
communication preferences by visiting the Profile Center.
When these emails were sent, there was no text “Profile Center” on the SourceForge marketplace page. There have been some frustrated bug reports as a result.
So it turns out that the “Profile Center” text in the original email (which was small, light grey on white, and had no decorations differentiating it from the surrounding paragraph) was an indirect link (via click.marketplace.sourceforge.net) to the Profile Center. The Profile Center leads to the Subscription Center, where
If you wish to unsubscribe from ALL publications
from SourceForge.net Team, check the box and click the update button
below.
Except that it’s not “ALL publications from [the] SourceForge.net Team”, it’s just the spam from Marketplace.
I spent a while searching for an MP3 player in the leadup to xmas 2007. I thought my criteria were reasonable:
I ended up with a shortlist of:
On separate whims I came close to getting the iAudio 7 and an NWZ-S616.
So the belated birthday present from my sister was an M3 SP, 8 GB, stocked with the T 2.003.3 firmware. I christened it “simble”. Here are my first impressions, chronologically ordered rather than logically categorised.