Looking for a new text editor

Over the last eight years I’ve been exclusively using Notetab for all my text editing needs in the Windows environment. Simple to use, really intuitive and very powerful. Great for editing multiple files too.

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Web trend map 2.0

Here’s the 200 most successfull websites on the internet, according to the folks over at Information Architects, Japan:

We see that Livedoor, Monster, MSN, Microsoft and Yahoo are headed for a lot of trouble but the future looks bright for Stumbeupon, Wordpress, Facebook and Wikipedia.

What’s that telling us?

Lessons in website design

Some things I’ve learnt about website users over the years:

• Users don’t care about your website and can’t be bothered learning how to use it.
• Users just want to get their task done and then move onto something much more important than your website.
• Users can’t be bothered reading your manuals or online documentation.

If only more designers had a similar experience, we would have a lot more usable sites.

Ebay phishing scam

Last weekend, I got one of those “unpaid item reminder” emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here’s how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

1. The "To" message header says "undisclosed-recipients". No personal email addressed to you would ever be sent to "undisclosed-recipients" because it’s a sure sign that it’s a bulk email addressed to a bunch of other people too.

2. The "X-Mailer" message header says "Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00". Since when would any business, especially one the size of Ebay, use Outlook Express?

3. Because my email client is configured to ignore HTML, all I could see in the body of the message was a single sentence which says "this message does not have a plain text part". I don’t know of anyone other than rank amateurs or spammers who send HTML-only mail.

These people are about as dumb as dodos. I wonder how much money they made last week?

Advice is now chargeable

Even though I specialise in software development, people regularly ask me for advice on a whole range of computer-related issues. Hardware upgrades, home networks, virus removal. Anything to do with computers, really.

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