Category Archives: web

software: TurboTax lameness

Posted on 2013-03-24 by skierpage

After a long break I bought TurboTax to do taxes. Intuit has had 20+ years to get this software right. Let’s see how they’re doing. Re-enter contact info I have to enter my name, address, and phone number to register … Continue reading →

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non-support: PayPal can’t help itself

Posted on 2012-08-25 by skierpage

Another day, another company that won’t let me tell them what’s wrong with their site. Same as it ever was. This time it’s PayPal. Their interface to Subscription payments is poor. Firstly, you can’t find it under Send money, or … Continue reading →

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music: piracy is wrong, copyright matters

Posted on 2012-07-14 by skierpage

The Trichordist tore into an NPR columnist who admitted to having 11,000 songs but hardly paying for any of them. Now Free Software guru Richard M. Stallman wades in, and gets it wrong. I criticize him thusly (originally on Slashdot … Continue reading →

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software: misplaced Linux desktop angst, just make HTML5 great

Posted on 2012-06-29 by skierpage

Linux users and developers bemoan the few apps available for their desktop. Where are the app developers? is a typical lament. But every commercial next-gen platform going up against Apple/Android — BlackBerry X, Tizen, even Windows — has figured out … Continue reading →

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web: Wikipedia editing ideas

Posted on 2012-06-05 by skierpage

Wikipedia wants to attract and retain editors. “Ideas are cheap, implementation costs,” but here are my thoughts anyway as a long-time but sporadic contributor. For all I know these have been discussed at length and rejected or deferred… New pages … Continue reading →

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web: automating bits of Sprint Picture Mail

Posted on 2012-05-19 by skierpage

(The good programmer is lazy; instead of typing something over and over, she writes a script to automate the steps. The wizard programmer writes a set of object classes that model the problem at hand, and tells those objects to … Continue reading →

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web: getting your pictures off Sprint Picture Mail

Posted on 2012-05-16 by skierpage

Sprint Picture Mail was an easy way to upload pictures on a feature phone to a web site where you could organize them into albums. But Sprint was never a serious player in the “online photo site” business. I criticized … Continue reading →

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software: the future desktop environment

Posted on 2012-03-23 by skierpage

Since Windows blew up I’m happy enough running a free Linux desktop, the KDE environment running on the Kubuntu distribution. Three big Linux environments are all chasing a new vision: Gnome Shell, Ubuntu Unity, and KDE Plasma are all trying … Continue reading →

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web: RIP Google Wave

Posted on 2012-03-21 by skierpage

Google is shutting down wave.google.com. Back in 2009 it was the most exciting piece of software to come along in years. A real-time multi-user rich document editor!! So it can be a chat window, a collaborative Word document, a scrapbook, … Continue reading →

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web: ten thousand pages about a hundred ways to do any one thing

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Developing stuff on the web isn’t hard, anyone can View > Source your work, someone made those billion web pages, and a lot of web designers promote themselves by writing about their work. In general this is great and we … Continue reading →

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