- The system is an SAP server; it’s clearly not a cheap thing. So it’s not just a piece of crap, it’s expensive too.
- They have a troubleshooting pdf (!): they have a solution for Safari! But wait, what’s that? User agent spoofing.
- Piece of shit error page (just cancel the auth dialog) with grammatical errors: Bejelentkezés végrehajtva 101 mandanthoz, felhasználóhoz és HU nyelven végrehajtva.
- Client side code is utter garbage: inline in the html, mostly deals with browser detection and it also disables right click on the page. Too bad they never heard of inspectors.
- Routing error, problem triggered inside native code (http_route.c).
- Finally, a cross browser login page (using CSRF) hosted here :)
Posts Tagged ‘web’
Elmu, shameful solutions by SAP
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Elmű (Magyar Elektromos Művek, the largest (main) Hungarian Electricity Provider) created a new site not so long ago – until they had their login/password fields on their homepage, everyone was pretty happy, because it worked. A couple of weeks ago they removed it and now the login is a separate page; the only problem here: it doesn’t work on anything, except on Internet Explorer and Hungarian (!) language enabled Firefox.
Let’s examine this a bit closer:
Why the web is trash
Sunday, July 26th, 2009I really really hate when I encounter badly designed or badly built pages on the web, though I think I must understand, that the websites, in general, are more rubbish than usefulness; while hard, the fact that this will never change; someone will eventually come over and – if you had a good design/layout/frontend code in the first place – screw it all, or just most of it.
Some of the most common problems making everyday life harder than it should be:
- blogs galore; most of them have stock templates, stock templates plagued with problems: 10 or 11 px font size for content with banners everywhere (not just in a designated place, but in the posts, at the end of the posts, in a sidebar, under the menu etc) – even if the content is interesting, I am scared away by these usability issues.
- unreadable captchas: enough said. By the way I do hate the ReCaptcha service with its highly idealistic human ocr project; tie those whirly unreadable craps to a forum search function and I’ll hate you from my guts.
- registration for the simplest services; checkbox “send me advertising” already ticked (making marketing people dance with joy).
- messed up in-site searching: either it’s a stock solution, which is a crude crap (uncostumized MySQL fulltext) or just a Google search with the “site:” addendum; just add two words (be optimistic and try using quotes or logical operators) and see the irrelevant trash thrown at you.
- full flash, inaccessible sites with elevator music. When, when will you bastards learn that having a page where search is crippled, information is secondary and eyecandy is everything is not what most people need!? I can understand this for a graphical designer’s portfolio site, but for a webshop or a detailed company website this is just self gratification for the client, pain in the butt for the visitor.
- banneritis: popping up a messagebox saying that I must either turn off my adblocker (which I don’t use that often actually) or just that I gotta throw away Firefox and fall back to the holy blue letter E.
- broken or no rss at all where a news service is being used (job listing, blog posts, news, marketplace etc) – this clearly comes from stupidity and/or lazyness: programmers not “knowing” the rss/atom spec or just corporate greed, where the client is afraid of loosing some traffic (because he/she does not know that banners can be injected into feed) and in turn advertising revenue.
- supporting IE over any other browser. I’d take Lynx over IE anytime btw…
- boasting about an API, which is either undocumented or broken.
So, from now on I’ll try not to care anymore – I’ll try to understand for once and for all, that this is how things goes.
WordPress, first impressions, slight problems
Saturday, April 11th, 2009I wanted to try WordPress on my host out of curiosity, thought it would be couple of hours, but in the end I ended up tinkering it for a day and I’m totally unsatisfied with the results. Why?
- the admin interface (compared to blogger) is quite simple; there are many things I couldn’t finetune, except in the template code. It would’ve been nice to include those things at least in a config file (php associative arrays would be totally okay) – so that I don’t end up digging php or looking at the api page…
- the default new template is, well, not so nice: I find the content:before/after solution for the bulletpoint butt ugly, especially that in IE7 it did not default to the normal for me. I also find the solution for the sidebar annoying, just like the fully uncut header image to mention a few.
- the default blogger importer totally died on the remote host (no error message, it just ended with one post – and no, this was not an ssl error), while on my local machine it worked. I ended up importing my dumped sql via phpMyAdmin.
- wp stores some of the paths (with full blown protocol sign) in the db and then renders it into the html code (so instead of “/wp/” we have “http://whatever.com/wp/” which did give me some headaches.
- the clean_pre builtin formatter function removes all the line break html tags from the preformatted text (formatting.php line 94), which indeed was annoying. Btw html tags inside pre may be uncommon, but are totally valid and I used them in many posts.
- Wherever I look, maybe it’s just me, but I see php+html+js all mixed together; at least the non-admin “templates” should be nice.
My very own dedicated host: www.rosamez.com
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009I decided to get a dedicated host at HostGator, so that I can host assorted crap – nothing really serious, but I do need something more flexible than Google Pages. So, that’s it, so far I’m pretty happy with their offer and I finished making a simple landing page which (including the 3d modelled cup and the icons) took only a couple of hours. And the domain name? It’s after one of my favourite books, Rozsamez, once again, no big secrets here.
A bad case of banneritis
Thursday, March 27th, 2008While I’m perfectly aware how online ads and banners are part of the web economy, I find it astonishing, that while on television and in newspapers a certain level of quality is required, the same does not apply to the web. Just check out this Chinese tv ad for example: the watchers have been infuriated and demanded the removal of this junk – on the other hand take a glimpse on the net: the sheer amount of crap outweights the quality, creative banners; and we have no quality control at all: the highly positioned interactive IBM flash animation will be placed beside a vibrating-moving-blinking three colored gif animation. The ad server spits out the ad, whether it will catch your attention (and eventually you click on it) or not is a secondary issue.
So I think it’s no wonder that the users are looking for an effective and easy way to block out the trash: I have seen sites blocking Firefox just because it has some decent ad blockers; instead of coming up with a useful construction of ad serving, they started blocking their source of revenue (the user) hoping he or she will choose the site, instead of a tool he or she is familiar with (the browser of choice).
After these thoughts I realized, to the hell with the web economy, I really want to block out bonzi buddy and his blinking friends: so, using Opera, I also had to realize, Opera’s ad blocker sucks big time: if I put the marketing stupidity aside it’s a the simplest filter I’ve ever seen – and now I see, that’s what bothers me with Opera. Yeah, it has an awsome fast rendering engine, it has an ultra flexible user interface, but somehow I miss the little extras Firefox (even though through extensions) can offer. Should Gran Paradiso be released, I will switch.