My new mouse – not yet

August 31st, 2007

When I first read about the new mice Logitech was releasing this month I immediately decided to by the new laptop mouse – the VX Nano. It’s going to look perfect plugged into my X60t‘s slightly indented right side USB slot.

I’m currently using a NX20, a corded optical mouse I bought a while back. The main reason was that all my USB plugs on my previous laptop were at the back, which meant I could easily forget that I have a wireless receiver plugged in and break it. Hey it happened before, fortunately the USB key (sort of) survived. You can also wind the cable around the NX20 so it doesn’t get mangled while traveling. It’s a great little laptop mouse and it’s serving me well.

So when I got back home (I read about it in a local gaming magazine Joker at my parents’ home) I immediately checked online to see when the Nano will be available. I said end of August – good enough. Next step was obvious – trying to find it on the page of the local reseller. Nothing. Weird. No launch date, no expected price, no nothing. Not a big surprise though so I went to visit them. It was probably around the 20th – so strictly speaking it was almost the end of August. They said that it’s coming and that the latest news they have is that it’s going to be in the stores on the 24th. As I later found out it was probably a misunderstanding – it probably meant that it’ll be released on the 24th which actually means leaving a warehouse somewhere in Europe.

Since I work near the place I visited the store a few more times. On Thursday, the 23th, they figured that it’s not going to be there on Friday but maybe Monday, but probably Tuesday, the 28th. When I came by on Tuesday they told me it’s not there yet and that I can leave my phone number so they’ll call me when it arrives. I decided I’ll rather call them myself. Did that on Wednesday – not there yet. Since I couldn’t get through yesterday, the 30th (was that I private call I was listening to for 5 minutes while standing in the store?) I stopped by – not there yet.

All this wasn’t really a surprise. The real surprise was that they have no idea when it will actually be available. Citing their words: “We don’t know which driver is bringing it so we cannot check where the shipment currently is and when it will arrive.” Now I’d immediately think that’s BS if I didn’t know the (low) level of service in my beloved country. And this was even more shocking than having a sales person lying to my face. How is it possible that a logistics company exists that cannot tell you where your shipment is and when it’ll arrive when it’s supposedly already a few days late?

I’m still waiting for the mouse, getting grumpier by the day. Why didn’t they just say it’s coming in the beginning of September?

Calendar APIs

August 27th, 2007

I’m looking for a calendar web-app with full API access. I really don’t want to reinvent the wheel…

Garach strikes again

August 3rd, 2007

Another brilliant video from Jurij Zrnec aka Jurij Garach for the Twingo campaign.

Get your jobs from UnorderedList

July 28th, 2007

There are no more reasons to put up your own job board or even have your own local data about it.

List all the openings on UnorderedList and go to this Yahoo Pipe to get back whatever you want to get back. You can filter by company or location.

If this is not enough for you you can always go and duplicate the existing pipe and create your own…

script language attribute / JavaScript version

July 24th, 2007

There used to be a very nice attribute to the script tag that defined what version of JavaScript is present between the script tags. You’d say language=”JavaScript1.3″ and older browsers that only supported JavaScript 1.2 wouldn’t run the code. Unfortunately this is not the case anymore – the attribute has been deprecated and browsers don’t really support it anymore. IE says that JS 1.3 is the latest version it supports, Firefox and Safari support 1.7. Opera supports 1.5 and surprisingly all the 2.x version (huh?) and the browser in Blackberry (the reason for testing this) supports everything.

I know – search for what you need, but in this case I don’t really want to check for all the objects and methods that I need…

Check your own browsers JavaScript support.

Bulletproof Web Architecture

June 25th, 2007

Why are there no books about Bulletproof Web Architecture? Do you think that it would be enough if the architects read Bulletproof Web Design?