OhRyan.ca

The top story in the programming subreddit for most of yesterday was a self-post abou the sorry state of subway.com’s HTML. Take a look for yourself, it’s easily the worst major corporation website I’ve seen in years. The post has garnered 2537 up votes (1134 downvotes) to date; based my previous experience, I suspect this sent an extra 10,000-20,000 visitors to subway.com. I left a comment suggesting that Subway work on their site…

Today, subway.com still has terrible html. But they did fix a giant javascript switch and replaced it with this comment:
/*
Now the that big switch is gone, here are some fun facts:
1. This site was created in 2002, using Visual Studio 2003.
2. Yes there was some editing done in frontpage. The editors worked better than VS 2003, and we had a license for it.
3. A lot from the funky mark-up is from some early generation .NET thirdparty controls we've been maintaining.
4. We look forward to updating the site as much as you (probably more in fact!)
Thanks for the QA, Redditors!
*/

Or, to put it another way:

Reddit Accomplishments for Sept:
1. Convince Steve Colbert to hold a rally – Check.
2. Raise hundreds of thousands for educational charities – Check.
3. Help some dude who needs a new wheelchair with funding – Check.
4. Get Subway.com to optimize their website – Check.

What wonders await for October?

Netflix Finally Available!
Netflix opened the doors to it’s dot-ca today, offering unlimited streaming service at $7.99 – $1 or $2 less than early rumour suggested. I’ve personally been looking forward to this ever since our household signed up for cable TV again. After poking around a bit today, I’ve found that the selection seems quite limited and random. Hopefully this will improve once Netflix has a larger user-base to offer to rights holder. I am happy that the service does not seem to be influenced by CanCon legislation. Which is to say, there does not seem to be a higher concentration of (obviously) Canadian Content, like there was when iTunes started offering video a few years ago.

I wonder what happens when you log in to Netflix in the US with a Canadian account and vice versa.

Pandora abandons Canadian expansion plans
Tim Westergren – CEO of music streaming service Pandora – slammed Canadian performance rights agencies today, citing high royalty rates as the main reason we won’t be seeing Pandora in Canada any time soon. Starting next year Re:sound wants to increase the royalty rates it charges to websites streaming to mobile devices – up to 45% of the site’s revenue or $0.075/song. In Westergren’s words “over 20 times what radio delivered over AM/FM pays.” Unbelievable!

Calgary firm launches the hippiest car ever
As if electric cars weren’t a hard enough sell for the average consumer already, Calgary’s Motive industries have come up with a way to make them seem even more ludicrous. Hemp-based bodies. The jokes write themselves.

Canadian Governments Respect Internet Privacy
Google has released their latest government requests transparency report – a colleciton of stats about how much private data various governments asking about, or demanding removal of. I was pleasantly surprised to find Canada at the very bottom of the list, making fewer than 10 removal requests

Spark is Back
CBC’s brilliant technology radio show (available in podcast form) is back for another season of Nora Young‘s soothing voice and intelligent commentary on tech issues.

Official Opposition Opposes Copyright Bill
Digital Copyright Canada posted an email they received from the Office of the Official Opposition. TLDR

…we believe that Canadian consumers who have legitimately purchased a CD or a DVD or other product should also have the ability to transfer their purchase onto their iPod or make a personal backup copy on their computer, so long as they are not doing so for the purposes of sale or transfer to others.

RIM Acquires Documents To Go
Earlier last week RIM confirmed rumours of their acquisition of the makers of popular mobile app Documents To Go – a smartphone app that allows native editing of doc,ppt,xls and pdf. I guess RIM was feeling left out without their own documents offering.

Boxee Box out November 21st
OMGNOTTHATBOXXY! In Canadian product release date news: the long awaited D-Link Boxee Box – set-top media extender, online tv streamer of your nerdy dreams – is going to be available on the same date for the same price as the US. November 21st, for $199. It’s unclear whether this price is an introductory pre-order price or the final retail price. Hopefully Netflix Canada will have launched by then…

Bell Launching Internet-Based TV
I’m pleased to see that all the big telecom players are slowly coming on board with IPTV offerings. This move from Bell Canada mirrors service we’ve seen out west from the likes of MTS and Telus for a few years now. Once all cable TV providers offer phone service and all traditional phone providers offer TV, maybe we’ll start seeing some real country-wide competition.

A bit of a slow news week this week. I blame Labour Day.

Vidéotron’s cellular network goes live today
Quebec internet and cable TV provider launched it’s wireless offering today. This is the second new celluar network (after Wind) to spawn from the wireless spectrum auction a couple years ago. The service claims to cover 90% of the province. Assuming you don’t want to use your phone out of province, their voice packages are not bad and data starts at $5/mo for 50MB.

Gap launches Canadian web store
In a classic example of a US giant completely missing out on the Canadian market, it only took the Gap 10 years to launch a dot-ca store. So go nuts Canadians, buy some jeans like it’s 1999.

RCMP attempting to kill Craigslist erotic services
Craigslist censoring it’s adult section has been all over the US-centric tech news this week. Hearing these stories I just kind of assumed that Craigslist was censoring the section across the site. But apparently no one except the RCMP bothered to take a look at Craigslist’s non-US domains. If you take a look at craiglist.ca, you’ll find the erotic section alive and well.

Sometime in the past 24hrs my copy of Google Chrome updated to version 6. Along with a more native UI, it now sports a bold red skull and cross bones when you visit a site with an unverified SSL certificate. How awesome is that?!