May 27 2005

I hate commercial advertising

Tag: Opinion, PersonalAdam Wright @ 11:51 pm

And, what’s more, I hate the fact that it’s everywhere now. Today, a shiny new set of DVDs arrived on my doormat. I popped in the first disc, and was treated to…an advert, telling me to buy more DVDs. They used the “No skip” flag designed for FI warnings and the like to mandate that I had to watch this garbage, and will have to watch it every time my DVD player resets - 5 minutes of utter tripe, for something I’m not interested in, on a product that I just paid for!

Now, can someone from Paramount please tell me why I shouldn’t just visit my local Bittorrent hub and download what I want, rather than paying money for the privilege of being a captive audience for garbage? I very much doubt I’ll purchase a boxed set from you again, so that might be the only option.


Apr 29 2005

AJAX is a cleaning product

Tag: Opinion, ProgrammingAdam Wright @ 12:01 pm

Whenever I find a person using the damned awful term “AJAX” to refer to the use of XmlHttpRequest to fetch data asyncronously in a Javascript program, they instantly get +500 idiot points in my mental intelligence map. We do not need yet more pseudo-funny acronyms floating around to describe years old technology.

It serves only to massage the egos of the people talking about it by making them think they’re “on the cutting edge”, when they’ve instead been suckered into a fad/meme that’s been used by professional developers for years. Since the mass marketisation of programming patterns (a good thing), I’m seeing people misuse the terminology far too much (a bad thing). I’ll post on this in more detail later.