CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

since my laptop broke down i had to use one of my dads computers which happens to run windows vista. at first I thought about just wiping the drive and put on windows xp right away, but I gave it a shot and I must say I am quite surprised.

Internet connection:

i took the computer to my room pluged it in and there was no internet connection. grr, but i turned out that there was just an old configuration still in place and it took two mouse clicks to geht this machine online. so bassically not more difficult than on my mac.

Networking:

vista is crazy about permissions, and so it took me quite a while to figure out how to share a folder on another computer in order to copy some stuff to this computer. In windows defense I must say that I had file permission problems as well when sharing files between my girlfriends mac and my own.

installing software:

no problems there. just downloaded the couple of programs that I use and after one hour i was ready to contiune working on the same website i was working on my macbook pro befor it crashed. if could even install xampp without any trouble

the notoriouse cancle or allow question:

well it comes up once in a while but stays within acceptable

I bought my MacBook pro in September 2007 and I loved it til early afternoon of today – 20.8.2008.

A year ago my Sony viao laptop broke while I was on a business trip in the Ukraine. After the 4 month nightmare I went through I just wanted to forget about Sony but now since my macbook pro broke as well I want to post the story and compare the Sony tech support with the apple tech support.

So I left my Sony viao notebook in the office for three weeks without ever turning it on and leaving the battery inside the casing – Don’t do that. Take the battery out – When I returned after three weeks the notebook was dead and there was no way of turning it back on. The battery somehow went dead during the three weeks of not using it and took along the main board.

So there I was in the Ukraine with another 4 weeks of work ahead of me without a laptop. Bad if you work as a webdesigner.

So I tried to call Sony support in Austria. Impossible since they use some weird phonesystem that can not be reached from abroad.

My dad called them and they told him there is no support for viao in Ukraine, and the support guy also pointed out that of is my fault If I travel to such “underdeveloped” countries like Ukraine.

Alright so I was lucky to borrow a computer from a colleague since there was no way of getting the broken laptop to Austria. A week before I went back to Austria a couple of friends came to visit me in Kiev and they took the laptop with them so Sony could finally pick it up for repair.

When I got back a week later the laptop was still at home waiting for Sony and it took another week till they picked it up. We are now 5 weeks from the day it broke.

After two weeks into repair I called Sony to find out how my notebook was doing. The online tool for support status did not work of course. The support guy told me that the main board was fried and they needed to order a new one and that it will take about another ten days.

I called after two weeks. The guy told me there are no more main boards for this two year old notebook so I will receive a replacement and Sony will call me with an offer. They never called.

I called again. By then I already know the thirty digits to dial by hearth. Well he was really surprised I haven’t gotten an offer yet and he will send a massage to sales again since they are in charge now. 2 months after the laptop broke.

Sales never called, so I called sales. Sales told me they are not in charge. So I called tech again. Again and again. By then I already knew the names of most call center employees, but I was refused to talk to a manager in charge. They don’t talk to clients.

After another week or so I finally got an offer. A laptop far worse than mine, but I accepted in order to avoid further delays and because was already determined to buy a mac at that point.

After a while I called again to ask about the shipment of the new notebook. They did not know anything about a new laptop to be shipped. I was alrwady tired of yelling to the stupid support people, but within a few days the finally managed to order a new laptop for me.

In the beginning of November I finally got my new useless piece of shit Sony vaio notebook.

I sold it in order to refinance my macbook pro that had been shipped to me two weeks before Sony’s even though the orders for both were placed in the same week.

Bottom line :

Do not buy a Sony product ever again!
They don’t care about customer satisfaction!
I hate Sony and their incompetent team of call center monkeys!

More and more web 2.0 applications reach a level of sophistication usually only found in native desktop apps. One of the biggest topics right now is cloud computing and cloud storage. So I got my docs in google docs and I got my pictures in flickr and so on. Many apps by now already offer the possibility to import files from your local computer and some even are capable of taking stuff from other 2.0 web apps. The problem with this development is that each web app offers an API to make use of the data stored with the service. Now that would mean that every web app that wants to allow the user to user data from other web apps would have to implement all the APIs of each of those web apps. It is obvious that this will lead to chaos, poor connectivity and poor performance.

each line represents a API connection between a web service

A possible solution:

The next generation browser becomes a hub for all this data APIs. The APIs are implemented within the browser and the browser can then provide the data to web apps as if they were either stored locally or via a unified API. Lets take the simple example of pictures. I have a picasaweb account with google and a flickr account. boot use the same type of data – Image Data – but they are not compatible. both flickr und picasa offer the ability to upload local files. If the browser knows this as well he could then take the picture from my picasa account using the given API and then present it to the flickr account as if it was a local file. This is the most simple implementation of this idea.

The dream would be that all Web apps offer an API that fulfills predefined standards for different types of data. If I then have a webapp like google docs or this wordpress blog and I am asked to upload a picture I do not only get to browse my local pictures but also all the pictures from all of my webservices like google and flickr.

each webservice may use their own API for sending data but will receive data from the browser if it were local

advantages of this concept:

• so all the APIs only need to be implemented once in the browser and not by every webserice
• future APIs can be built directly to this framework which will increase connectivity even more
• the cloud becomes real as it really does not matter any more where the data is stored

Usually a scriptaculous draggable will only start the drag if you click on it. As I was adding drag and drop functionality to a web based filebrowser I actually wanted to start the drag of an other object when the user clicked on a file and dragged it. So the user clicks on a file from a list view but does drag the actual dom element from the list view. the click on the file calls a function that slips a file icon under the mouse of the user and starts the drag of that file icon. That way a user can drag and drop just the icon which looks much nicer and gave me the ability to drag and drop all selected files from the list view. its actually pretty simple, you just pass on the click event to the initDrag method of your draggable.

</pre>
$('yourObjectThatWillBeClicked').observe('mousedown', function(event){
 //observe the object for clicks
 $('yourActualDraggable').setStyle({
 // slipping the draggable under the users mouse
 position:'absolute',
 top:Event.pointerY(event)-16+'px',
 // this gets us the position of the users cursor
 left:Event.pointerX(event)-24+'px'
 })
 Drager=new Draggable('yourActualDraggable',onEnd:function(){Drag.destroy()});
 // making it a real scriptaculous draggable
 Drager.initDrag(event)
 // passing on the event and starting the drag
 }
<pre>

screenshot that illustrates this technique in my application

script.aculo.us