Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

Sometimes this stuff drives me nuts...I get an email with a link, but the URL itself is attached to a graphical button, and Outlook doesn't let me copy the hyperlink off an image. I click the button, which launches my default browser (firefox), which the site doesn't support, so they redirect me to URL/unsupportedbrowser.aspx in a way that doesn't allow me to hit the back button to see the original URL.

In fact, the application, which literally includes a button that adds you to a list of people attending a meeting, does NOT actually support firefox. I have to assume the time they spent coding in a nice "your browser is unsupported" message far outweighed the time it would have taken to support a firefox user clicking a single button, but that's another gripe session. For some reason, this particular app also crashes firefox when I add the site to the IE Tab Sites filter and let IE run the app.

My easiest method for dealing with this situation (without changing default browsers just for this scenario), is to change my firefox user agent, let the broken application load, and copy/paste the URL into a real IE.

Not until crazy stuff like this is resolved will average users really pick up firefox. Well, that and getting the browser pre-installed on machines. ;-)

I do like this router, and it's good to see it come through certification. It seems like we've been waiting forever for 802.11n finalization, but things are moving slowly.

Review: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30087/96/
Product Page: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=530&sec=0
Certification press release: http://www.dlink.com/press/pr/?prid=341

I was listening to a podcast this morning and the person was talking about NIH Syndrome. This is one of those things that consistently rubs me the wrong way, primarily because I believe that managers' actions and managers' talk diverge significantly in this area. Many things that are not invented here cost money. Because, as a coworker once put it, "man-hours are free", the tendency for a lot of managers is to use their people to re-invent the wheel rather than putting together whatever justification the organizational bureaucracy needs to cut a PO. Since people are now re-inventing the wheel, to satisfy their ego they must be able to do it better. Do this enough times, and it's clear that NIH really is the symptom of poorly performing management.

Of course, person-hours are not free, rather they've already been negotiated for, while budgeting extra dollars for outside products or services often involves more administrative work. It's the management path of least resistance.