#2648: Feature request: Support Amazon S3 (closed)

#2741: Feature request: Amazon S3 (closed)

How many things are wrong with this? The fact that the person who shut down the feature request did so unilaterally, immediately, and with absolutely no discussion? The fact that the person used a pseudonym that doesn’t link back to any kind of profile or policy, so there is no way to get context on who this person is or why they made their decision? Or the arrogant tone of the response, which almost ensures that the people who took the trouble to file these feature requests will never do so for this project again?

For commercial products, feature requests are gold. Clearly, for some open-source projects, feature requests are an annoyance at best. It may be possible that FileZilla’s mission is “support dessicated IETF and W3C standards only,” but there’s no way for a civilian user to know that. Most civilians look at FileZilla’s mission as “transfer files from one place to another.” In that context, this kind of feature request is not unreasonable, particularly since many other file-transfer utilities (including the commercial product Transmit, which I use on OS X) have supported Amazon S3 for some time. If it’s really unreasonable to support a mode of file transfer because it wasn’t part of an IETF standard codified in the 1980s, then I have a new feature request for you: plugins. Just like Firefox does. Duh.

Ultimately, the technical solution to the problem isn’t really the issue here. Maybe providing this feature is too hard or outside the scope of the project’s mandate. But if that’s the case, then say that (and take a second to link to more information about your rationale). If somebody who worked for me provided such glib, dismissive responses to a feature request, they would be fired. The fact that we’re probably dealing with a volunteer here is not the issue. The fact that FileZilla is a free/open source project should also not make a difference. The snotty attitude (for this and many other open-source projects)  poisons the ecosystem and ensures that the software remains second-rate.

Your open-source project is not your fiefdom.

Nobody Said That Open Source Projects Were All About Customer Service is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

I’m not including the URL of this page in case somebody figures out how to turn this into an exploit, but in a way I almost wish somebody would, because after filling out these guys’ survey and getting this horrifically amateurish error message on the final page, my first impulse was to figure out a way to crawl into their database and delete all my personal information out of it.

(BTW, if you’re looking for customizable online survey portal software that’s free/open source and not horrifically amateurish most of the time, check out Tinypug.)

Web Developers: Don’t Do This is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

"Helmet fire" is an expression for a mental state characterized by unnaturally high stress and task saturation and loss of situational awareness. The term originates in the military pilot community: military pilots are trained in high-performance aircraft and wear helmets to protect their cranium and muffle out engine and wind noise. A fire aboard any aircraft is considered a serious emergency, and the term helmet fire is used jokingly to say that the pilot is undergoing so much stress that his brain is on fire or smoke is coming out of his ears.

Helmet fire – Wikipedia is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

While accidentally contemplating this out loud, I muttered, "Why are the security procedures different at every freaking airport?" and the droid behind the x-ray machine gleefully volunteered "because it confuses the terrorists!" And I am pretty sure he was serious, which made me literally angry with rage.

At this point, my genius wife, who is invaluable in situations where I accidentally start speaking truth to power, shushed me, preventing me from blurting out the fact that the 9/11 terrorists actually had valid IDs and boarding passes, hello.

This all happened after the security droids made our baby take off his shoes. (But for some reason they didn’t make him take off his diaper. Could he not be hiding an even bigger bomb in there? He certainly subjects us to large diaper-delivered bombs on a daily basis at home.)

Anyway. I think that as a libertarian social protest, parents with infants should insist on taking off their children’s diapers and sending them through the x-ray machine at airports.

A Little Security Theater To Conclude Our Vacation is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

How do you expect people to debug their applications if it takes this long for your sandbox to respond?

Also! It would be neat if there would be a way to see a list of all the transactions that were submitted to your sandbox account the same way you display outbound emails.

Kisses,

Jeffrey

Dear PayPal, is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Let’s Have A Discusssion Around Around is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Since Christmas morning, the device has gathered dust on my desk. The problem is that the device doesn’t come with its own software for converting and loading movies; you have to use the loathsome Windows Media Encoder to convert movies. The settings required by the device are totally nonstandard, and the instructions they provide (PDF) seem to be written by a non-native speaker of English. The guide also doesn’t seem to cover the version of Windows Media Encoder that Microsoft currently provides for download. Naturally the instruction manual didn’t actually come with the device either; you have to search the web for it, and if you’re lucky you can find it on the OEM’s web site (Memorex Electronics). But the fact that they hid the instructions doesn’t matter, since the instructions don’t accurately describe how to get the device to recognize converted videos anyway.

There’s a good comment thread on this where people have been trying for months to get the device to play converted videos. It doesn’t look like anyone has been able to get it to work.

They might as well have wrapped the "import a movie" feature of the device in electrified barbed wire, and when you think about it the reason is obvious — Disney doesn’t actually want you to convert the movies you’ve already paid for (or created yourself) to use on this device, instead they want you to pay them $20 a pop for them to reformat the movies you already own and sell it to you on an SD card.

The next time I got to a Disney theme park, I plan on hurling this
device off the top of the Matterhorn in hopes that it breaks into
enough pieces that no one else will be tempted to waste time getting it
to work. Avoid this product at all costs.

The Christmas Present That’s Gathering Dust is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

"They think they can take out their frustration on government in general" by abusing the [parking control] officers, who work 40-hour weeks for about $40,000 a year," she said, adding, "They say, ‘I’m tired of the city taking my money.’ "

There certainly is money in parking tickets. San Francisco issues 1.9 million parking citations and brings in more than $40 million a year from violators, according to the transportation agency.

There’s obviously no excuse for beating up a meter maid, but it’s also not the case that the assaults on parking enforcement officers in San Francisco are some sort of random happenstance. This NY Times piece (in which only union officials and "parking experts" are quoted) seems to imply that it’s Californians’ crazed affinity for cars that’s to blame. (This, by the way, is probably the millionth NY Times piece that uses some lazy, pointless and ultimately inaccurate cliche about the culture of the West as its launchpad.)

Anyway, if the "car crazy culture" bit were true, parking enforcement would be as manic and dangerous in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara as it is here. But it’s not. It’s a fact that our city does some very aggressive parking enforcement and consequently demands a lot from its meter maids/tax collectors. Anecdotal example #1: I’ve received at least five tickets parked in my own driveway in the past year. Example #2: Last year we got a ticket while we were repairing a flat tire. The meter maid didn’t even stop to see if we were OK, he just whizzed by and took down our license plate. If we’d been murdered in a drive-by shooting in front of a fire hydrant, would the meter maid have pinned the ticket to our corpses?

San Francisco is not a car-crazy city, at any rate. We love our public transit here (one of the reasons why we moved to our neighborhood is because it’s near a BART station). As the Times piece points out, the only thing wrong with public transit in San Francisco is that there isn’t enough of it, but on the other hand, no duh, that’s the problem with public transit in every city on the globe.

I’ve always wondered how parking enforcement might change if there weren’t a profit motive in it for the city, but I suppose that’s a pointless fantasy, since parking fines represent such a gigantic chunk of the city’s annual budget. (To put it in perspective, the $40 million in parking fines plus the $33 million in parking taxes pay for about 25% of the budget of the entire SF Police Department.) I realize that the money’s gotta come from somewhere, but taking it out of the pockets of people who happen to roll to a stop in front of a red curb after getting a flat tire seems sort of wrong to me.

End of embittered municipal rant. I thank you for permitting me to indulge myself.

San Franciscans Hurl Their Rage at Parking Patrol is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people.

“Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance,” Mr. Bock said.

Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

“Children are a secret weapon in my arsenal for making investment decisions,” said Heidi Roizen, a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley firm.

From the Lips of Children, Tips to the Ears of Investors is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.