Sephy’s Platzish

This is one of those long-time bugs that I’ve experienced with a piece of software that I truly love because of what it can do with your phone budget if you have folks overseas (or just if you have a curiosity about free telephone numbers over there as well), Skype.

This particular bug involves trying to send a text message to a friend who is offline at the time. For some reason, whenever they send me a message and I’m offline, the message comes to me when I get online, but when I try to do it, I get the almost dreaded "Message not sent yet" note on the screen, even after they sign in.

The really annoying thing is that when I am fairly certain that person is online and I send a message with some unsent messages still there (because they didn’t get sent when they came online in the first place), those new messages get stuck!

It’s really fucking annoying and there is no reason that my messages can’t be delivered when both the sender and receiver are online. Thankfully there is one way to solve the problem, but it is quite annoying - calling the person usually gets the messages to go through, unless they are truly offline in which case I get sent to voicemail.

To be honest, as much as I love Skype, this problem is quite infuriating and should be something quite simple to fix, if you ask me. Of course I’m not a software engineer, so there ya go.

As some of you may remember, I wasn’t too impressed with Firefox 2 when it first came out, mostly to do with a single change to the structure of the search box. However, I finally broke down and upgraded to it and I’ve liked it, especially with the addition of a few extensions like tab mix plus to make my browsing experience my own.

Strangely, though, when I went to my home page, Firefox Central, and saw the redesign of the page the other day, it was a sign to me that the new version of the browser was out. Now, you’d think that with my prior history with a new version of software and not liking it too much, I decided that I’d be back on the cutting edge of technology and download the new version. So I did, and I have to say that I’m impressed overall, but there are a few qualms that I have.

New Location Bar

The most talked about feature by far of the new version is the redesigned location bar - dubbed as the "Magic Bar". It’s not a lie - it is quite magical. For example, if I know I saw a page about something, but can’t exactly remember the address (which for me is highly unlikely, but that’s me ), I can just type in a word that was in the title, like "Gruen" and that will bring up a list of sites that I’ve visited or bookmarked that has Gruen either in the title or in the address -

Something that you don’t see is that when a site is bookmarked, it’s got a little gold star next to it, which brings me to my next feature - one-click bookmarking. I didn’t buy into it before, but in practice, it’s devilishly simple. To bookmark a site, I usually drag it to my folder called Sites on the toolbar, but now all I have to do is click on the star in the toolbar (it shows where the go arrow is in the screenshot above) and it’s saved. Then, another click brings up a menu, which lets you file the bookmark where you want it. This even works for sites you’ve already bookmarked, such as my local radar -

Other neat features

One of the things I have a lot of are links to different RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and from time to time they don’t work. Usually it’s because of an error, but one thing that they’ve added to the menu that comes up when you click on a "livemark" is something deadly simple - a menu item that says "Open "Site name"" - which does just that - open the main site for the livemark so that you can view that page directly.

Also, they’ve added some other useful menus, such as the Most Visited under the bookmark toolbar, where you have a list of the ten sites you’ve visited the most over the last few days, along with the option to save your session without having to tweak your homepage every time you want to use that feature. Of course, you can still just exit the browser, but this way you have the flexibility to do that if you want.

One caveat

And it’s not even Firefox’s fault. Whenever you upgrade to a new version of Firefox (or any browser for that matter), some things tend to break. It’s no different in this case where some of my most favourite add-ons have proven to be incompatible with 3.0, but I think that’s more of a simple coding change that needs to be done.

At first, Adblock (I have regular adblock, not adblock plus) was incompatible, but just as I went to check for updates, it looks like it has been updated.

However, Firebug, Fasterfox, Tab Mix Plus, and All-in-One Gestures are not compatible yet. I would suspect that it won’t be too long before that’s sorted out though.

Overall impression

Overall, I have to say that I’m glad I’ve upgraded to the new version of the browser - it adds quite a few features that are really neat (including being able to resize the search box), and it uses quite a bit less memory - I’ve had it open for quite a while now and it’s only using 117MB of Virtual Memory and 108MB of RAM. Also, and to be honest, I haven’t noticed this too much since I have relatively fast Internet, it’s apparently much faster at loading pages.

If you’re someone who waits for software to be stable before it’s released, that’s alright, but I don’t think you’d be going wrong to take a chance and upgrade to Firefox 3.

A thought occurred to me when I was writing down my phone number recently, about something that we had taken for granted (and see less frequently even on TV) - the 1 you dialed for accessing long distance calling. I haven’t used it for dialing a phone call for at least a half of a year (when I fired the old phone company), and even before then, it was rare for me to use it because we just didn’t do that much long distance phoning.

Here’s the ironic part - as far as I can tell, for a long time, the numbers for area codes (i.e. three digits, second was a 0 or 1), were likely reserved as unavailable. The reason for this was that the telephone numbers used to be Two letters followed by a varying number of digits (in big cities, out where I live, it was more like a ring pattern that was dialled). In fact, some businesses took that particular tactic of advertising their old letter prefix into the 80s, as seen here by this series of Lincoln Carpeting commercials from Chicago -

Of course, the 0 and 1 don’t have letters (unless you have one of those phone models that have the Q and Z on the 1, even though it’s common practice to put them on 7 and 9 respectively), so they weren’t part of the mnemonic dialing system of the olden days, along with a lot of other opening combinations which really didn’t have a logical word to correspond to them like 57. Though of course, I expect to be proven wrong on that.

Why is it that we’re not using the 1 as much as we were before? Simple - the advent of digital phones. The first time I experienced not having to dial the 1 was when I was at my last job when my boss pointed out to me that I didn’t need to dial the 1 to get access to the main phone system out of the office and out of the area. Then, we move a few years into the future and we get the digital phone activated at home, and I try dialing without the leading zero, and voila, it works perfectly.

I know that you can’t repurpose the first number of the 11 in the dialing sequence (i.e. the 1) because of the people who dial into the country from overseas and kind of need that number to make sure that their call gets to here instead of winding up somewhere in Africa or Asia, but I do wonder if it is possible to consider a way to use that almost new opening for another digit to be added to phone numbers, which should alleviate the problem of reducing available phone numbers and constant expansion and contraction of area codes.

About a week ago or so, I finally got my hands on one of the digital converter boxes I’d talked about not being available at Wal-Mart at all. It turns out that Best Buy has literally scads of them for sale. So, they’re $10 more than the Wal-Mart ones, but you’re getting a much better box.

Interestingly, the box that is sold at Best Buy (under their Insignia name) is manufactured by LG Electronics for Zenith. As we all probably know, LG make some darn good products, and they haven’t gotten this one wrong either.

Now that we’re finally getting towards the cutoff of analog TV and we finally have the digital converter boxes (set top box, STB for short) available in stores, and to be honest, I’d be prepared to buy another one at full price even for my room, or for the computer.

As it stands, with analog TV, using rabbit ears, we’d get 11 channels over the air, and the signals on those channels went all the way from fairly clear to barely watchable. Of course, since it is digital, now all the channels come in crystal clear, and there’s 28 of them. That’s just from Milwaukee!

The only problem is that this number goes down to around 8 when something happens. This happens when the noisy neighbor comes through. Its presence interferes with the UHF signals (I think the term for that is “multipath” - where the signals bounce off of something causing confusion), so I’m only left with the 8 channels of public TV, including one which shows Mr. Rogers Neighborhood at midnight…

However, the greatest thing is that I can get all the programs in HD now. Well, not purely HD, but it’s widescreen and just as clear as HD pictures, just downscaled to the proper resolution for an analog TV. Seriously, if you haven’t gotten a coupon for the digital boxes, you can do it at dtv2009.gov - the program should still be available for a little bit of time from now.

I’ll have some shots of the digital channels soon, because there is something annoying about some of them.

As much as I love Skype, and think that everyone should have a go at trying it out (trust me, it can be quite revolutionary in how you go about communicating on the internet), there are a few faults which only become apparent when you are a keyboard-intensive user, or have certain disabilities.

Keyboard shortcuts

When you go through setting up Skype, you have the option of setting up keyboard shortcuts for only a few things - Show/Hide Skype, Answer Incoming Call, Place Call on Hold, Mute Microphone, Hang up/Ignore call, and Find users.

If you try to use the keyboard to find out what events are new, you can try, but it requires a lot of tabbing through the window to find it. Also, if you want to exit the program? You must use the mouse and right click on the taskbar icon. There is no way in the main window (through the file menu) to exit Skype; all you can do that way (or with Alt+F4, is close the window.

Maximum Font Size

Last night, as I was preparing to go over to the couch, I went into a chat window (because that is the only way you can do this) to change the font size from its current 8 point to a more reasonable size for viewing from slightly afar - 20 or greater, or so.

The list in the dialog only went up to 12, so I did the old trick you could do in Word - type in the size I wanted. When I went to click the OK button, I got an error -

Font size must be between 4 and 12 pixels.

Because of that, I have to use the magnifier built into Windows in order to use Skype from my couch. However, it got me to thinking that this isn’t good for someone who has a hard time reading small print on a screen. Sure, they can use a Screen reader or other accessibility accessories, but if that is the only program that they need to use it for, then they might think that Skype isn’t worth the bother to use if they can’t see what is going on in the program.

As great as the program is, you have to wonder how many folks have shied away from it for just this reason.

By the way, if you’re interested, the reason I’m using the couch to work on the computer, my chair has had a minor fault, and I’ve requested a replacement part be shipped to me. Luckily, I have the warranty still in force (for at least another 2.5 years) on some parts of the chair. It should be around just in time for next weekend to start.

In the meantime, I am using a chair from the kitchen for up close work, and can easily move to the couch for other things (like writing, etc) thanks to the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have.