Shallow Thoughts

"Cookies are small text files" -- what?

"Cookies are small text files which websites place on a visitor's computer."

I've seen this exact phrase hundreds of times, most recently on a site that should know better, The Register.

I'm dying to know who started this ridiculous non-explanation, and why they decided to explain cookies using an implementation detail from one browser -- at least, I'm guessing IE must implement cookies using separate small files, or must have done so at one point. Firefox stores them all in one file, previously a flat file and now an sqlite database.

How many users who don't know what a cookie is do know what a "text file" is? No, really, I'm serious. If you're a geek, go ask a few non-geeks what a text file is and how it differs from other files. Ask them what they'd use to view or edit a text file. Hint: if they say "Microsoft Word" or "Open Office", they don't know.

And what exactly makes a cookie file "text" anyway? In Firefox, cookies.sqlite is most definitely not a "text file" -- it's full of unprintable characters. But even if IE stores cookies using printable characters -- have you tried to read your cookies? I just went and looked at mine, and most of them looked something like this:

Name: __utma
Value: 76673194.4936867407419370000.1243964826.1243871526.1243872726.2

I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of time reading text that looks like that.

Why not skip the implementation details entirely, and just tell users what cookies are? Users don't care if they're stored in one file or many, or what character set is used. How about this?

Cookies are small pieces of data which your web browser stores at the request of certain web sites.

I don't know who started this meme or why people keep copying it without stopping to think. But I smell a Fox Terrier. That was Stephen Jay Gould's example of a factoid invented by one writer and blindly copied by all who come later, (the fox terrier -- and no other breed -- was used for years to describe the size of Eohippus). At least that one was reasonably close. Gould went on to describe many more examples where people copied the wrong information, each successive textbook copying the last with no one ever going back to the source to check the information. It's usually a sign that the writer doesn't really understand what they're writing. Surely copying the phrase everyone else uses must be safe!

Tags: web, browsers, writing, skepticism, tech, firefox, mozilla
[ 20:25 Dec 01, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry ]

Quick Firefox tip: Hide the "Additional plugins" bar

Dave just discovered a useful preference in Firefox.

So many pages give that annoying info bar at the top that says "Additional plugins are needed to view this page." It doesn't tell you which plugins, but for Linux users it's a safe bet that whatever they are, you can't get them. Why have the stupid nagbar taking up real estate on the page for something you can't do anything about?

Displaying the info bar is the right thing for Firefox to do, of course. Some users may love to go traipsing off installing random plugins to make sure they see every annoying bit of animation and sound on a page. But Dave's excellent discovery was that the rest of us can turn off that bar.

The preference is plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin and you can see it by going to about:config and typing missing. Then double-click the line, and you'll never see that nagbar again.

Tags: web, browsers, firefox, tips
[ 11:09 Jul 14, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry ]

Newbie Greasemonkey script writing

I was reading a terrific article on the New York Times about Watching Whales Watching Us. At least, I was trying to read it -- but the NYT website forces font faces and sizes that, on my system, end up giving me a tiny font that's too small to read. Of course I can increase font size with Ctrl-+ -- but it gets old having to do that every time I load a NYT page.

The first step was to get Greasemonkey working on Firefox 3.5. "Update scripts" doesn't find a new script, and if you go to Greasemonkey's home page, the last entry is from many months ago and announces Firefox 3.1 support. But curiously, if you go to the Greasemonkey page on the regular Mozilla add-ons site, it does support 3.5.

I've had Greasemonkey for quite some time, but every time I try to get started writing a script I have trouble getting started. There are dozens of Greasemonkey tutorials on the web, but most of them are oriented toward installing scripts and don't address "What do you type into the fields of the Greasemonkey New User Script dialog?"

Fortunately, I did find one that explained it: The beginner's guide to Greasemonkey scripting. I gave my script a name (NYT font) and a namespace (my own domain), added http://*nytimes.com/* for Includes, and nothing for Excludes.

Click OK, and Greasemonkey offers a "choose editor" dialog. I chose emacs, which mostly worked though the emacs window unaccountably came up with a split window that I had to dismiss with C-x 1.

Now what to type in the editor? Firebug came to the rescue here.

I went back to the NYT page with the too-small fonts and clicked on Firebug. The body style showed that they're setting

font-family: Georgia, serif
font-size: 84.5%

84.5%? Where does that come from? What happens if I change that to 100%? Fortunately, I can test that right there in the Firebug window. 100% made the fonts fairly huge, but 90% was about right.

I went back to greasemonkey's editor window and added:

document.body.style.fontSize = "90%";

Saved the file, and that was all I needed! Once I hit Reload on the NYT page I got a much more readable font size.

Tags: web, browsers, firefox, greasemonkey, programming
[ 11:30 Jul 12, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry ]

Bing thinks we're WHERE?

Lots has been written about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. It's better than Google, it's worse than Google, it'll never catch up to Google. Farhad Manjoo of Slate had perhaps the best reason to use Bing: "If you switch, Google's going to do some awesome things to try to win you back."

But what I want to know about Bing is this: Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave runs it under Omniweb on Mac?

In every other browser it gives the screen you've probably seen, with side menus (and a horizontal scrollbar if your window isn't wide enough, ugh) and some sort of pretty picture as a background. In Omniweb, you get a cleaner layout with no sidebars or horizontal scrollbars, a different pretty picture -- often prettier than the one you get on all the other browsers, though both images change daily -- and a set of togglebuttons that don't show up in any of the other browsers, letting you restrict results to only English or only results from Portugal.

Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave uses Omniweb?

Equally puzzling, why do only people in Portugal have the option of restricting the results to English only?

Tags: tech, browsers, mapping, geolocation
[ 09:37 Jun 10, 2009    More tech | permalink to this entry ]

Avoiding jargon may be harder than you think

An interesting occurrence at a Toastmasters meeting last week offered a lesson in the difficulties of writing or speaking about technology.

The member who was running Table Topics had an interesting project planned: "Bookmarks". I thought, things you put in books to mark your place? Then I saw the three-page printout he had brought and realized that, duh, of course, he means browser bookmarks.

The task, he explained, was to scan his eclectic list of bookmarks, pick three, and tell a story about them.

Members reacted with confusion. Several of them said they didn't understand what he meant at all. Would he give an example? So he chose three and gave a short demonstration speech. But the members still looked confused. He said if they wanted to pick just one, that would be okay. Nobody looked relieved.

We did a couple rounds. I gave a rambling tale that incorporated three or four bookmarks. One of our newer members took the list, and wove a spirited story that used at least five (she eventually won the day's Best Table Topic ribbon). Then the bookmark list passed to one of the members who had expressed confusion.

She stared at the list, obviously baffled. "I still don't understand. What do they have to do with bookmarks?" "Browser bookmarks," I clarified, and a couple of other people chimed in on that theme, but it obviously wasn't helping. Several other members crowded around to get a look at the list. Brows furrowed. Voices murmured. Then one of them looked up. "Are these like ... Favorites?"

There was a immediate chorus of "Favorites?" "Oh, like in an Explorer window?" "You mean like on the Internet?" "Ohhh, I think I get it ..." Things improved from there.

I don't think the member who presented this project had any idea that a lot of people wouldn't understand the term "Bookmark", as it applies to a list of commonly-visited sites in a browser. Nor did I. I was momentarily confused thinking me meant the other kind of bookmark (the original kind, for paper books), but realizing that he meant browser bookmarks cleared it right up for me. A bigger surprise to me was that the word "browser" wasn't any help to half the membership -- none of them understood what a "browser" was any more than they knew what a "bookmark" was. "Like in an Explorer window?" or "on the internet" was the closest they got to the concept that they were running a specific program called a web browser.

These aren't stupid people; they just don't use computers much, and haven't ever learned the terminology for some of the programs they use or the actions they take. When you're still learning something, you fumble around, sometimes getting where you need to go be accident; you don't always know how you got there, much less the terms describing the steps you took. Even if you're an übergeek, I'm sure you have programs where you fumble about and aren't quite sure how you get from A to B.

You may sometimes be surprised at meeting people who still use Internet Explorer and haven't tried Firefox, let alone Opera. You may wonder if it's the difficulty of downloading and installing software that stops them. But the truth may be that questions like "Have you tried Firefox?" don't really mean anything to a lot of people; they're not really aware that they're using Internet Explorer in the first place. It's just a window they've managed to open to show stuff on the internet.

Avoiding technical jargon is sometimes harder than you think. Seemingly basic concepts are not so basic as they seem; terms you think are universal turn out not to be. You have to be careful with terminology if you to be understood ... and probably the only way to know for sure if you're using jargon is to try out your language on an assortment of people.

Tags: tech, browsers, writing, muggles
[ 11:23 Sep 28, 2008    More tech | permalink to this entry ]