ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Canadian Tech News, October 8th – Groups, CBC v CC, Netflix

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    So I missed last week’s post due to an unprecedentedly busy week and this week I’m in the US of A. Suffice it to say, this weeks’ post is a little different than the others in this series.

    The state of group buying in Canada:

    A couple of months ago I had not heard of a single group buying sites for the Canadian market. That all changed this month, there has been a mini-explosion of group buying options:

    CBC Hates Creative Commons

    Reddit user mcantelon discovered a thread of comments buried in the Spark show notes. Spark has a history of using Creative Commons music for intros and bumpers throught the show and providing links to this music with every episode.  A commenter asked where he could find the Creative Commons link to the music used in the latest episode. Show producers Dan Misener and Lilly Mills jump in to provide explanation. Turns out, CBC is not allowed to use Creatives Commons licensed due to a collective barginning agreement! One commenter, Andrew Butash, puts it best “…this is incredibly unsettling. The CBC is a public broadcaster that receives funding from taxpayers. They should not be signing exclusive contracts with any agencies or unions. Disallowing the use of creative commons media is excluding tons of Canadian content from being used by CBC, not to mention wasting money by requiring CBC programs to use non-free media.”

    Netflix Gotcha

    With the launch of Netflix Canada I was wondering what would happen if you try to log in to netflix.com from the USA with a Canadian account. I was hoping that you’d instantly get access to the US content, allowing for the possibility of a way to spoof your IP from Canada. Unfortunately that’s not what happens. Netflix.com simply does not recognize your Canadian credentials, giving a standard “invalid username/password” type message. When you try to access netflix.ca from a US IP, this happens:

  • Other People Suck @ Email Too

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    Maybe TheOatmeal has seen my ‘People Suck At Email‘ column, or maybe email is just terrible.

  • Reddit is so Awesome!

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    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?