Most clients and employers only think about 1-2 days ahead of the project. They want it done now.

“Take shortcuts”, “Fix it later” seem to be their war cry. They fail to remember that they change their minds at least 10 times during the development process. Those shortcuts they made us take, the ones they insisted we take to save a half a days work, they just added 2 - 3 days work of going through dirty code that wasn’t cleaned up or refactored. Let’s go ahead and multiply the time it adds if another developer must be the one to work on it.

Is this the Client’s fault? Partially. We should take some blame here too. We should have an answer or rebuttal why they should not take these shortcuts. We need to be able to convincingly give an argument that supports proper code architecture and design. Why taking the time to create something right is beneficial in the long run.

This is easier said than done. A lot of programmers just aren’t confrontational people, especially with their boss. A lot of bosses are. The boss generally mows them down with phrases like, “it needs to be done yesterday”, and, “We’re losing money by not having this right now”. Unknowingly, they probably put the project behind by not having a plan and enforcing a rush from step to step in the project.

Should you stand up for yourself?

I say, “Absolutely!”. If the man (or woman) in charge is any kind of reasonable, then they will respect your opinions. After all, this is what they hired and continue to pay you for. You will have to sell the reason why you do something, especially when at first glance it seems to take longer than rushing through the project. If you don’t and the project takes too long from you caving in to the pressure of your client, they will only blame you. You will not have any excuses, because theirs will be, “I thought you knew what you were doing”, or, “Why didn’t you tell me that was the wrong way”.

How to avoid being misinterpreted and being looked at like a person who just thrives on arguments.

I don’t know if I can be much help here. I’m always being misinterpreted as I shoot from the hip, rather crudely sometimes. In my old age I’m starting to be a little more manipulative considerate and helping others understand me better. I’m starting to reflect more on what I can do to ultimately get the job done. This means being able to identify the feature and benefits of proper development procedures. Identify how it will either make life easier or make the person more money. This can be by cutting future development costs (future can be within the same project when the client changes his mind) or by creating a better product due to the extra time you’ll have not sorting through the undocumented spaghetti code you wrote just 3 weeks ago.

Unfortunately, sometimes standing up for yourself or telling the client no will ultimately lead to a dismissal of your services. Whether it be an employer or a client, these things can happen. You need to decide what your limit is, and whether it’s for the best. I’ve always felt that most clients must be saved from their ignorance.

HellaNZB.com linked me up on their home page and I’ve started to receive a lot of interest in HellaPhone. I’ve decided to make some time to further complete HellaPhone and add functionality that I wanted. Since I created HellaPhone a few things have changed. The most important one is the introduction of iui. This will help greatly in bringing some interface improvements that I wanted to do the first time around.

I plan on adding live monitoring for the downloads and queues of HellaNZB. That is my primary goal. At some point in the future I would like to be able to support all mobile devices, but I don’t have the time nor the equipment to test with at the moment.

If anyone has any suggestions or features they would like to see, please drop me a line and let me know.

I logged into Zecco yesterday and noticed the site was broke. I was using Safari. The layout looked a little different (Most of it was broke), so I tried opening it in Firefox. Aha! It works, and it had been changed. I sent a nice email off to a contact person listed on the Zecco.com site.

The new layout is horrible for Safari. I haven’t tried it on my iphone yet, but it’s probably pretty similar.

Ok, so maybe not terribly nice, but as you can see from the screenshots, not un-truthful either. The following reply I received surprised the hell out of me.

Hello Buckley,

Let me start with the short answer: Zecco does not support Safari. The reason is this:

Zecco supports the following four dominant OS/Browser combinations:
Windows + IE6
Windows + IE7
Windows + Firefox
Mac + Firefox

We have tried to also support other (Mac) browsers, like Safari and Camino for instance. However, optimizing HTML code for these often means sub optimization for the four dominant OS/Browser combinations.

So please switch to Mac + Firefox.

Hope that helps. Thanks,

Zecco Editor

PS: I am a Mac and iPhone user too.

What really surprises me is that this is a fairly large broker who depends on it’s website for it’s business. We’re not talking about some small, short sighted “web development” house that is just ignoring a large portion of mac users.

It’s really a shame these days to not be cross browser. It’s one thing to not support some weird, hardly used browser, but Safari makes up most of the Mac users. The worst part is that it easier to develop for Safari and Firefox and gracefully degrade for IE. They support Firefox, but can’t make the layout work with Safari?

On the mobile front it’s worse now the iPhone is out. This is the most capable browser on a mobile phone. Before you Google geeks scoff, android uses webkit, as does Nokia highends.

It also says they support the four dominant browsers [used on their site]. Of course Safari will not show up there, it doesn’t work! How about, use web standards that degrade gracefully for stupid browsers (IE) instead of “optimizing” (whatever that means in his terms).

With that same type of thinking we as a society would not have anything new. Could you see any would be car company at the turn of the 20th century creating a new product and investing the time and money to sell it when no one was using cars. Of course no one was using cars, there weren’t any available yet.

It’s this kinda of reasoning that should be illegal for accessibility’s sake. It’s this sort of reasoning that keeps a 6 year old browser in the mainstream. No one wants to switch to a better browser when developers aren’t whole-heartedly supporting newer technologies. When I say newer, I mean 3-4 years old. When moron web developers who don’t know how to create a cross browser site, they encourage moron, Microsoft Systems Admins to discourage anything other than IE for their users just because they like to use a site made by inept web developers.

I’m surprised by this attitude mainly because the company runs like a web 2.0 company. They don’t charge for standard trades and they make their money on advertising and premium services. Hell, they even have a social networking section with an investing twist. Maybe I can help make enough waves to change this deficiency in the Zecco.com website.

HellaPhone 

I currently use hellanzb for all of my usenet downloads. It’s much simpler than anything I have used before and is a simple install. Very simple if you are on a Debian (Ubuntu), or Darwin System (Mac OS X).I developed this interface for my own personal use and nothing more. That being said, there is very little error checking if any, and even less error reporting in the interface. I planned on releasing this when it is more complete, but I have not had the time to spend on it due to other projects that put food on my table. The app does work pretty well for a quick newzbin search and download to your existing hellanzb install. It just doesn’t monitor the downloads or report an error if the download doesn’t initiate. I planned on rectifying that at some future date.The requirements are:

•  php5
• cakephp 1.2.x
• allow_url_open - (maybe, I may have changed it to curl, can’t remember, don’t care)
• hellanzb install with allowed network access
• newzbin account

If enough people show interest I may make time to work on it some more. Please, if you are interested in upgrading or continuing work on this project, Leave it in the comments. And of course donations are always welcome. Download from the HellaPhone page  Some screenshots