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Shantanu Oak
Dec. 11th, 2005
12:17 pm - Micro$oft excel usability issues
The problem with these kinds of solutions is that they are rarely what the user needs (or wants, or expects) which can result in a lot of frustration. In this case, my mother-in-law had to go through the document by hand and identify which dates were corrupted by this “feature”. (It turns out that she could have just changed the format of the column to text, instead of date—the data itself was not altered, just its representation—but again, that’s hardly intuitive to someone who is not very familiar with spreadsheets.)
Be predictable. Think like your users. Better yet, be your own user. It’ll be much rarer that you’ll come up a non-solution like this one.
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bein
Comment: I have stopped tracking Excel frustrations I have seen over the last 10 years. I have no plans to write a book on that subject!
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frustratedOct. 30th, 2005
05:49 pm - Resource id #3
When I echo ed the following statement
$sendto1 = mysql_query("select email from yubmail where mail_alias = '$to'");
I got the message
Resource id #3
I thought it's an array so I tried mysql_fetch_array but did not get the expected results.
I checked using is_array function and found that it's not an arrary.
I tried a lot of other ways to find out what the actual value is.
At last (Should have done it first), I googled
"Resource id" php output
And the Forth result gave me the exact answer to my question.
It's a mysql issue and I have to add mysql_result function
$sendto2 = mysql_result($sendto1, 0);
I don't know how does adding one more layer helps, but it's working now.
I think open source and free software had no meaning if the powerful search engine like google was not there!
Oct. 23rd, 2005
08:04 am - Myweb? Really?
Jeremy has written about PC Mag article on Myweb 2.0
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/arch
I have something to say about myweb and not about the toolbar or bookmarklet issue.
I think My Web 2.0 is more community oriented bookmark sharing tool rather than social bookmarking tool in it's true sence.
Another issue is when will it be integrated with Yahoo 360, the networking platform where I can share photos, groups info, etc.
What will happen to myweb 1.0? The FAQ page says all the bookmarks can be transferred to My Web 2.0. But when I upgraded to My Web 2.0 I could not access my 1.0 bookmarks! I had no other choice but to upgrade to Myweb 2.0 because the "XML Share" option available to most of the users is not working for me.
http://tinyurl.com/bu4yj
My Web 2.0 can't solve the problem either because it doesn't support RSS! Both the versions are in BETA and 2.0 was introduced before coming out with a final 1.0 version. Yahoo has messed up with the concept or maybe I am not getting it.
pissed offOct. 1st, 2005
05:21 pm - MySQL Bug
Just came across this bug in my code, if you have something like:
DELETE
FROM randomstrings WHERE userid
IN
(
SELECT
userid
FROM users
WHERE username = '$user'
);
And users table does not contain a column named userid, what does MySQL do? Give you an error message? No, it deletes everything from randomstrings, and tells me that the query executed successfully!
http://nerdierthanthou.nfshost.com/2
annoyed