Allow secure passwords!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
A brief rant here…
If you use the Internet much, then you are almost definitely going to encounter passwords. Lots of people use very insecure passwords, like “password01″. But those of us who actually don’t want our identity stolen use more creative ones. Unfortunately, many companies out there seem to have incompetent web-developers.
Here are a couple of examples of sites which could be major opportunities for identity theft if an account gets hacked:
- British Gas — customer login for paying gas/electricity bills — doesn’t allow special characters
- Virgin Media — customer login for broadband, email, personal webspace, and telephone / TV billing — passwords must be 10 characters or less
These are ridiculous. Ask any security expert. Special characters are a major boost to password security, and it is preposterous to limit a person’s ability to use a pass-phrase consisting of multiple words.
Part of me really hopes that the web-developers responsible for these get their identities stolen online and lose all their money. Poetic justice. 
Information finding on Oyyy.co.uk
Posted by Peter | Filed under Interface and Usability, Websites
On a recommendation from my dad, I decided to try shopping at Oyyy.co.uk — it’s an online shop for various computing and other technological things. The experience was good and I had no trouble finding the products I wanted. However, there was an apparent lack of information in one key area.
Before I go into this, please don’t read this as any kind of criticism of the Oyyy.co.uk shop or its staff. This is simply intended as an analysis of a usability problem. As an online shop, the site is better than many I have used, so this one issue is not a big deal at all.
Staples and lessons in e-commerce
Posted by Peter | Filed under Interface and Usability, Websites
Many people are familiar with Staples — supplier of general office supplies and furniture and the like. I think they have a reasonable reputation, so I decided to order a new office chair from their website. There are some good points about the site, but unfortunately, there are also some flaws which almost made me turn to a competitor.
Read the rest of this entry »
All I want to do is TopUp!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
After having been a Vodafone pay-as-you-go mobile phone customer for about 6 years, I’m finally changing to a contract deal with O2.
However, it will be a few days before my contract gets setup, so I needed to add some calling/texting credit one last time to my Vodafone mobile. I decided to do it online using my debit card… but to no avail. Here’s what you have to do in order to TopUp online:
- Register an account on the website
- Confirm your mobile phone number via security code
- Register your credit/debit card details with the site
- Select a 4 digit security code to represent your card
- Enter the 4 digit security code again and the last 4 digits of your card
- … What’s next? Who knows? I didn’t get this far…
The first 2 points are absolutely fine and to be expected. But the remainder of the process is ridiculous. All I want to do is use my debit card to make a one-off payment… I do NOT want my card details permanently stored on their server. I appreciate their attempt at security too… but remembering off the top of your head which cards you have and have not registered with them, and which security code you picked, is going too far.
Maybe that system works for some people… but it’s a nuisance. It would be much simpler just to let me enter all my card details in full, every time I want to TopUp online. Sure, it might not enable all the “text to TopUp” features which automatically charge your card/account… BUT I WOULDN’T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN ANYWAY!
Call me old-fashioned, but my debit card details are mine to look after. If some people want to have theirs stored online for convenience, then fine… but do not force the rest of us to do it too.
Google Docs
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
Over the past number of years, I have found myself steadily moving more and more of my day-to-day computing activity online… in keeping with much of the computing world, I suppose. However, I had not really moved into the realm of online document editing until recently, largely because I had no need.
I started using Google Docs when I was collaborating on a paper to be submitted to a journal, and was immediately impressed by how simple yet powerful a tool it is. It is now becoming almost indispensable to me, as it allows me to create and edit documents from nearly anywhere I go, without needing to download software or synchronize copies. I can keep things private, or ’share’ documents with specific people to whom I want to give read and/or write access, or open them up to the world. It’s certainly no replacement for fully-fledged office software when it comes to final drafts for print or such, but it’s amazing at what it does, and it is reliable. (Regular automatic saves, and document revision history… how can I live without it?)
That’s just the word processor. I have looked over-the-shoulder of somebody using the spreadsheet, and was astounded by how slick it all is. The integration with form-based input for users is amazing too.
I am also turning to Google Calendar more now, which I have found to be very useful in many ways for organising my (hectic) schedule. Alongside other useful stuff I use regularly, including GMail and GoogleCode, and of course, the inimitable Google Search Engine (with all its handy tricks), I really am a big fan of this .com giant, founded by some crazy/genius blokes who couldn’t spell googol properly.
Flickring into life
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I haven’t blogged in a few days, so here’s a “filler” piece. My Flickr stream is, after a year of no use whatever, finally being resurrected… at least a little. I’m using it to post pics of my side-projects, such as the Slide Toggler, and Stackable Graph Cubes (the latter gaining surprising popularity, and prompting the development/request of some interesting spin-offs).
I also have a newly rejuvenated YouTube channel for hosting videos and tutorials of the projects, mostly to save me bandwidth! Getting quite a few views already… although nothing groundbreaking.
Aside from anything else, the pics and vids provide a bit more exposure for the tools… not so that I make money off them (because they are free and open source), but hopefully so that folks will find them useful, and maybe even learn a thing or two from the source code. Honestly. Fame isn’t my goal at all.
My avatar, on the other hand, is all about the fame… 
Making Videos
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I’ve been making some videos of Second Life stuff lately (tools I’ve developed, including the Slide Toggler and the Stackable Graph Cubes). It’s a learning curve, but I’m getting there, and I’ll likely have to make more soon to document the SLOODLE tools.
What’s involved? First of all, I need to record what I see on the screen, which I do using FRAPS — you can get a free version which lets you record up to 30 seconds of video at time, so I just do everything in 30 second chunks! That produces a bunch of ‘AVI’ files, which I then load into Windows Movie Maker, which I use to stick them together, with simple intro and ending title screens.
Still in Movie Maker, I record the narration to go with the video. That usually takes a number of attempts, and I’ve found it’s useful to ad lib it a few times to get a feel for the timing, then write down the script, and then record it for real. Different approaches work for different people I guess.
Next comes the music, which I typically get from the wonderful SoundSnap website. Unfortunately, Movie Maker doesn’t seem to be able to mix audio tracks, unless one of the audio tracks is already embedded in a video. The sneaky way round that is to render the video out to WMV (or whatever other format), load that back into Movie Maker, and add the music tracks (cropped to fit as necessary). Finally, it’s rendered out, and uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. I also like to embed the YouTube videos on the site at useful locations.
You can check out my YouTube channel to see my results.
Oh alright… I’ll Twitter…
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
I seem to remember encountering Twitter a couple of years ago, and at the time giving the sound judgement that it’s silly and won’t last. Who’d bother with a site which just allows a tiny bit of text?!
I failed to realise 2 salient points:
- Twitter is part of the larger “web experience”, so limited and simple functionality is actually a refreshing change
- Integration! (I’ve added mine to FaceBook)
On the integration front, here’s my Twitterific self in action:
Folks seem to be using Twitter for lots of things, and it seems pretty effective from what I’ve heard. If you can’t beat them, join them. Or at least attempt to thinly justify this as a “research exercise” in personally evaluating socially constructed and interaction-driven web resources. Or something like that…
SLOODLE website gets a face-lift
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE, Websites
After much discussion and chatting and ideas and then silence for a few months, we have finally given the SLOODLE website a face-lift. I am really very pleased with the result. Check it out:
The theme was based on a Moodle theme called EduMoodle, which was itself based on a Joomla theme by dudes at EduGeek. Our little variant was originally modified by our good friend and Sloodler, Chris Surridge, using screenshots (swiped) from the inimitable Sloodlebrity, Gia. I then tweaked it a touch to suit our needs, and also mercilessly hammered it into the approximate shape of a WordPress theme, to keep our SLOODLE blog looking nice and consistent. (I nearly hammered my computer mercilessly too… I hate CSS sometimes! Silly float attribute…)
The astute observer will also notice that we have some handy new pages in our lovely new navigation menu: About, Research, and Tutorials. They are still under-construction, but well worth checking-out.
Chemistry for the YouTube Generation
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
OK, I know I’m guilty of the horrible generalisation of calling anything technology-related a “generation”… but it seemed like a good name for this entry. I’ll be brief! If you’ve never seen it before, I strongly recommend checking out the Periodic Table of Videos, starring some of the lovely folks from the University of Nottingham. It’s a series of videos, with one for each element in the periodic table, some short, some long.
It’s a wonderful endeavour, making lots of interesting chemistry facts available to folks like me who sometimes watch far too many videos online! Thanks Nottingham Uni dudes… great work! 
