My Singapore Life, Part DXLVI

In what's become a near-weekly occurrence, I got hit by a car while crossing a crosswalk this afternoon. I was halfway through the crosswalk next to the McDonald's at Tampines Mart here in Singapore, walking towards my home in one of the adjacent blocks of flats, when a red cab hit my hip as I was jumping clear of him. He was doing at least 10-15 kph going up to the exit gate, which is typical for the cars here. A raised crosswalk with zebra-stripes, especially with posted "yield to pedestrians" signs, is supposed to mean that pedestrians, of whatever ethnicity, who are already in the crosswalk before a vehicle crosses the adjacent limit line have the right of way. What's left unwritten, in this most racist of officially non-racial "countries", is that the rules only apply to Chinese drivers if the pedestrian is Chinese.

As I indicated, this happens to me at least once a week, and there's a certain…predictability…to the particulars of the offending driver. I saw a Malay woman crossing the same crosswalk about three weeks ago get hit and knocked down, and the driver just kept going.

Singapore is a very popular tourist destination in South Asia, but if you're coming here, be aware of certain sensible ground rules. Stay in the tourist/expat "bubble" areas, generally downtown. Be prepared to spend lots and lots of money. And, whatever you do, don't take any of the tourist propaganda about "multi-cultural, non-racial Singapore" as anything other than the sick joke it has become in recent years. If and when we get a post-PAP Government, that may change. But I'd be very surprised if it was markedly less in any time-frame short of a generation or three.

YAHA! (Yet Another 'Hey, Apple…') Hey, SingTel, you, too.

Hey, Apple…

I like what works, and what helps me work better/faster/more enjoyably; the more of these boxes that get ticked, the better. After all, that's why I'm sitting in front of two iMacs with a MacBook Pro and iPad close to hand.

However…

The new iMacs are a wonder. A 27" display, 2560 x 1440 resolution; absolutely gorgeous. I can have two full-page views plus a Terminal open on the same screen. Two steps forward for usability.

Now for one step back. The mouse cursor appears to be the same size as on my 15" MacBook Pro, even though I'm now looking at nearly three times as many pixels and, more importantly, screen area. How about taking a page from somebody else's playbook (for a change) and have some key sequence that would do a "radar-style" visual locator for the mouse cursor?

The Middle, or The Muddle, or Both

Seriously, I'm in love all over again with this new system. And if I weren't in one of the last Soviet-class customer-last economies, I'd be able to make even better use of the new tool.

With new hardware and software come new opportunities for learning. Anyone who's ever learned or discovered or done something new, or even new to him- or herself, has experimented; has pushed boundaries. Sometimes, they push back the first few times. "You'll know the pioneers because they're the ones with all the arrows in their backs" might be an Americanism, but its meaning is perfectly clear to anyone who's ever challenged Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"; it's the things you don't know that you don't know that offer the greatest opportunities for learning — if you survive them.

Apple have always had a symbiotic relationship with leading-edge technical norms. The latest example, in OS X Lion, is that for the very first time since Macs have shipped back in 1984, no operating-system media (floppies, CDs, DVDs) come with the system. If you want to nuke from orbit and start over fresh, you use something called Lion Recovery. It's a sweet, eminently sensible idea: most Mac customers have access to fast enough Internet connections that downloading most of what you need to reinstall is less of a hassle than rooting around trying to find some discs that you just know you put in a drawer. Somewhere. Maybe it was in your home office. Maybe in the away office. Maybe they're in one of those bulging boxes marked "Computer Stuff" up in the attic. It could easily take you longer to find physical media than to download four gig or so of bits on a reasonably-modern, properly-managed and -provisioned connection.

Hey, SingTel…

And then there's Singapore.

Advertising here is (in)famous for always having the language "Terms and Conditions Apply", which in practice seems to mean "We don't have to do a single thing we said we would once you give us the money if we can think of a reason not to, or if we do deign to provide the promised product or service, we expressly reserve the right to make the experience as unpleasant as our most innovative Government Scholars™ can conjure up".

Case in point: said Lion Recovery. The way it appears to work is that when your Mac phones home to Cupertino, it then fires up a for-purpose Web server that listens on the usual ports for authenticated incoming connections (from Apple). Cupertino or its CDN upload the data to your Mac, which uses it to reinitialise your installed system. This only works, of course, if your Mac is connected to a network that allows you to do such things, without being blocked by either policy or incompetence. Ah, those terms and conditions.

The Singaporean Interwebs are full of woe documenting Apple customers' fate as victims of SingTel policy and/or incompetence, with Lion Recovery being the latest poster child for the meme. SingTel and StarHub, two of the three major telecoms companies here (and the two popularly thought of as more closely tied to the PAP Government) have intermittent-or-worse problems, while the third (M1) is apparently less hassle. People speak of tethering their Macs to their M1 phones and spending over five hours (in at least one case) successfully performing Lion Recovery. This would be greatly preferable to not being able to recover at all. Unfortunately, the M1 signal in the HDB tenement-with-pretension that I'm living in is too weak and unreliable to support that.

So I'm back to waiting, impatiently, for SingTel to get their cranial appendage out of whatever orifice it's presently stuck in, and work with Apple on fixing the problem. Apparently Apple have run against the proverbial brick wall on multiple occasions to try to help solve a problem over which they have zero control.

Hey, SingTel…

ANFSD: Fascism Bites Everyone In The Pocket (Among Other Places)

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, for it represents the fusion of State and corporate power.

— B. Mussolini

If you've lived in the USSR, former Soviet republics, or much of south Asia (including Singapore), you're quite familiar with the concept of "exclusive distributors", which the Free World seems to have thrown on the ash-heap of history at roughly the same time as leaded petrol. For those who've never had the displeasure, it works just like it sounds: one appointed business entity is the only way for subjects of a particular country to lawfully access the products or services of a particular (foreign) company. In places like Singapore which follow a State-capitalism model, that exclusive agent customarily has strong ties to either the Government or to entities acting as agents of the Government (sovereign-wealth funds, public officials who also run nominally-private-sector companies, and so on). This rarely, if ever, is a boon for the consumer.

Case in point: today, I wanted to buy a good fan, a Vornado Compact 530, comparable to the Vornado fans I owned when in the States.

Naturally, I can't buy a fan from the Vornado Website, though it gives me plenty of information about the thing. A little search engine-fu tells me that Home-Fix are the exclusive distributor for Vornado in Singapore.

Naturally, I can't order anything, or even get any product information, from Home-Fix's site. I could, however, get the phone number(!) for their nearest store, and called to enquire about availability and pricing.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Can you tell me if you have Vornado fans?

Clerk: Yes, we do. Which one are you looking for?

Me: The "Compact 630".

Clerk: Yes, we have that one, in white and black.

Me: How much is it?

Clerk: S$170.

Me: $170?!? So your rate on the US dollar is about three Singapore dollars, then? The list price on the Vornado Website is US $49.99!

Clerk: (as to a very small, very slow child) Oh, that's the online price. It's bound to be cheaper.

Me: Well, I've done some checking on various US, European and Australian stores; the walk-in retail price is right about the same.

Clerk: Well, our price is S$170.

Me: Well, thank you for your time.

Not to be terribly unfair to either Home-Fix or the clerk; that's the way the system operates here, and any company that didn't jack their prices up to whatever the marks will pay isn't doing things The Singapore Way. It's not as though it's actually people's own money; they're just holding it until those who pull the levers of State decide they want it back2.

So, ragging at Home-Fix or any of the many, many other businesses whose prices have no apparent correlation to corresponding prices elsewhere won't accomplish anything. If, as was let slip during the Singapore Presidential "election" this year, the Government's sovereign-wealth funds and people connected to High Places really do control 2/3 or more of the domestic Singapore economy, then complaining about any individual companies is rather like the man who's been attacked by a chainsaw-wielding madman who then worries about all the blood on his shirt. Fix the real problems, and the small ones will right themselves.

Incidentally, this also illustrates why I support the Occupy movement. If Americans want to see what another decade or two of economic and political polarisation between the top 400 families and the rest of the country will look like, Singapore is a good first-order approximation. And some sixty percent of Singaporeans apparently either couldn't be bothered to think differently, or were too afraid to.

Sigh. I still need to find a reliable, efficient fan.

Footnotes:

1. According to the current XE.com conversion, 170 Singapore dollars (S$170) is approximately US$130.19,, or some 260 percent of the list price. In a free society, that would be called "gouging"; here in Singapore it's called "buying a foreign product". Remember, no foreign companies really operate here. When you walk into a McDonald's or Starbucks or Citibank in Singapore, you're walking into a local, almost invariably Government-linked, franchise or local representative. The quality and experience difference can be, charitably, stark. (Return)

2. Known in the US as the "thug defense", after a Los Angeles mugger who used that line of "reasoning" as the basis for an attempted pro se defence in court. He was, of course, unsuccessful. (Return)

Know when to walk away; know when to run

This started out as a reply to a comment on the LinkedPHPers group on LinkedIn; once I started writing, of course, it quickly grew beyond what was appropriate as a conversationally-inline comment. So I brought it over here. It's something I've been thinking about for a couple of weeks now, so let me get this anvil off my chest.

---

To R Matthew Songer1: I'd advise adding Ruby on Rails to that list of alternatives. I've been writing PHP for fun and profit since PHP 4 was still a future hope wrapped in hyperbole. Now that we've finally got a (mostly-)decent language in 5.3 for some serious software development, I'm burning out. Part of that burnout is due to what I see in the PHP community, part to geography, and part to other factors that approach "fit for use".

I've recently taken a post as Chief Engineer at a little startup nobody's heard of yet. Our prototype was done in PHP; it got the idea across well enough for our initial investors and customers to bang on our door. So the CEO and I thought, great, we'll find another senior2 PHP guy, write a real app (the prototype doesn't even have testable seams), and we're off.

If I were looking to hire a battalion of deputy junior assistant coders whose main qualification as PHP devs was being able to spell it whilst taking endless trips down the waterfall, I could do that. I was aiming higher: I wanted someone who knew his way around current best practices; who realises that being experienced is no excuse to stop learning aggressively; who understands how to build web apps that can evolve and scale; who looks for the best feasible way to do something instead of just the first one that pops into mind. I especially needed to find someone who was as BDD/TDD-infected as I am, and recognised the value of building tools and automation early (but incrementally) so that we'd be a lean, agile development machine when the rubber really needed to hit the road, a (very) few short weeks from now.

In the States, or in much of Europe, or basically anyplace outside Singapore, I'd probably have a decent chance of finding such a person. Here, not so much. I was especially concerned by the way PHP usage seems to be devolving in these parts. There are lots of folks who think that it's a good idea to reinvent Every. Single. Wheel. themselves, without really knowing all that much about what has gone before. Frameworks are a good example; if you aren't intensely aware of how good software, sites and Web apps get built; if you don't even bother with encapsulation or MVC or SOLID or on and on, how can you expect anybody who does know his Craft from a hole in the ground to take you or your "tool" seriously? It might wow the management rubes who proudly admit they don't know squat — but in the world as it is, or at least as it's going to exist in the very near future, those will (continue to) be a vanishing breed even here. Even in a Second World Potemkin village of a city-state where what you are and who you know is far more important in most situations than what you've done and what you know, you're still running a risk that somebody is going to come along who actually gets up in the morning and applies herself or himself to writing better stuff than they wrote yesterday. And, eventually, they're going to wipe the floor with you — either you as an individual or you as a society that remains stubbornly top-down-at-any-cost.3

In contrast, my experience talking with Ruby and Rails people here, even people with absolute minimal experience in Rails, is chalk-and-Friday different. For one illustrative example: one book that more than half the yes-I've-done-a-bit-of-Rails folk I've talked to here is Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby (ISBN 978-0-321-58410-6). Your average PHP dev — or C++ dev or Java dev — is fighting the dragons (schedule, complexity, communication, etc.) far too much to get out of fire-drill-coding mode and into writing. If you believe, as I do, that all truly competent software is written as a basis for and means of conversation between humans, and incidentally to be executed by a computer, then you know what I'm driving at here. Knuth's dictum that programming is a creative, literary act is too easily lost when you're just throwing yourself against the wall every day trying to see which of you will break first. (It's very rarely the wall.)

If you write software that can be read and understood, and intelligently expanded on or borrowed from, and your whole view of the omniverse changes. Your stress goes down, your written works' quality goes up, and you enjoy what you do a lot more. Automating away the repeated, detailed work and having a sensible process so you don't give yourself enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot regularly (with apologies to Alan Holub) is the most reliable way yet found to get your project schedule under your control instead of vice versa.

All this does however have one pre-supposition, which I have received numerous complaints on here locally: you and your team must be fully literate and fluent in a shared human language4. The vast majority of software to date seems to be associated with four such: Business Standard English, Russian, Japanese and Chinese. If your team shares a different language at a (near-)native level, with one or more of you having similar skills in the earlier four, you should be able to make do for yourself rather nicely. Having others build on your work, if desired, is going to be a bit more problematic. Poor communication has been at least a strong contributing cause, if not the root cause, of every failed project I have seen in my career. If you can't speak the customer's language effectively enough, with nuance, subtlety and clarity as needed, then your chances of project success are somewhat worse than my chances of winning the next six consecutive Toto jackpots — and I don't plan on buying any tickets.

Footnotes:

1. "I am sitting here tossing the options around for a business application, browser based, and trying to decide...PHP, Java, Python, .NET?" (Return)

2. Why insist on a senior guy when they're so rare here (at least the PHP variety)? Because I figure that with a senior dev coming on a month from now, we'd spend roughly half the time between now and our first drop-deadline writing magnificent code, and the other half building infrastructure and process to make building, testing and deploying the magnificent code we write straightforward enough not to distract the team from the creative acts of development. There's not enough time to wipe anybody's backside. (Return)

3. The phrase "at any cost" always reminds me of a company I contracted to back in the late '80s. My boss there had a (large) sign above his desk, "We will pay any price to cut costs." The company eventually paid the ultimate price — bankruptcy. (Return)

4. I'm describing what used to be called "college- or university-level language skills", but as any university teach will readily tell you, the skills exhibited by students have dropped precipitously and measurably in the last three decades or so. (Return)

The Formerly Magical Trackpad

My Apple Magic Trackpad died tonight, aged less than six months, after a week-long illness. Numerous battery transplants, resets and reboots were unable to revive the patient. In lieu of flowers, donations to its replacement are now being gratefully accepted.

Whiskey. Tango. Fox?

Hardware — any hardware, but especially Apple kit — isn't supposed to die after mere months of daily use. I expect better from systems, and especially from Apple. Were I anywhere else on the planet besides Second World Singapore, I would have a reasonable degree of confidence that those expectations would be fulfilled. PAPaganda notwithstanding, this is the Potemkin city where having the highest-paid politicians on the planet doesn't mean that products or services (beyond political control-related security "services") are up to the same levels as would be expected in, say, Tanzania.

So I'm back to using the mouse that I'd been using for nearly two years before buying the Trackpad. With the wheel and five buttons (that I know of), it's certainly adequate for most ordinary-user or Web-developer tasks in Snow Leopard.

But trackpads are The Future™, a reality emphasised by the new OS X 10.7 "Lion" release, and by what's rumoured for Windows 8. While mice are comfortable and familiar to essentially everyone who's used a Mac in the last 27 years, or Windows PC in the last 15 or so, there are actions and gestures that the trackpad is simply a more natural fit for, and to which a trackpad user's "muscle memory" rapidly adapts. Going back to the mouse feels both familiar and foreign, not unlike attempting to ride a bicycle for the first time in thirty years (another recent experience).

So, I'll probably buy a replacement trackpad fairly soon. That is, if I can stay online long enough to get useful work done; we've had intermittent failures in the DSL service here of late. (Or am I allowed to say "intermittent successful access"? This is Second World Singapore, a family-run company town that dislikes any attention paid to the clay feet of its mighty statuary (and I'm not dissing the Merlion here).

Sigh.

Time v. Money v. Risk v. Frustration

I just spent three hours beating my head against The Joys of Wi-Fi Networking. No doubt because it saved $50 or so, the HDB public-housing flat I live in here in Singapore (which are "affectionately" known as 'chicken coops' for their quality and structural integrity) didn't put telephone jacks in every room. Nor did they run conduit between rooms so that suchlike could be added later. The upshot of this is that my DSL modem, in the living/dining room, is 15 meters and two concrete-slab walls away from my study/office, in a bedroom (with no phone jack and two power outlets).

Up to now, this hasn't been an insurmountable problem, because the DSL modem/802.11g router the government-linked telco sells you when you open a DSL subscription could punch a (barely) usable signal through those two concrete walls; desktop and laptop computers strewn around the study were on the LAN, with quite serviceable WPA2 encryption to keep private bits private. The router (in the living room) claimed to have a 14 Mbps connection to The Net; the aggregate total bandwidth available in the study ranged from 3 to 5 Mbps; not fantastic but usable. The world was in a survivable state of chaotic flux.

Then, yesterday morning, FedEx delivered a bright, shiny (actually used, in a Target bag rather than original box, no longer in the Polycom US catalog but still serviceable) Polycom SoundPoint 501 SIP phone, courtesy of my newest client (thanks, Nathan, Matt and Margaret - I'm not kvetching, honest!). An hour of work with jackhammer and flamethrower cleared sufficient space on the desk for the new trophy. Now to plug it in and fire it up.

Plug it in? To what? My ear?

Just to make sure I had my head straight, I looked at what it would take to run line from point P to R. Two solid concrete/rebar walls, routing around various doors/windows, across the span of the living room.... no, that wasn't going to happen, certainly not by Thursday. Put the phone in the living room? Not a chance. Wait a minute - they have these things called wireless Ethernet bridges; I should be able to get one of those, stick it in the study, connect the phone to it and it to the existing wireless LAN, and I'm good to go.

I went out to the local "IT super-mall", Funan. It's the best place in Singapore to buy electronic gear of whatever variety from reasonably reputable dealers. After visiting some 25 different shops, large and small, I was firmly reacquainted with one of the basic facts of Singapore life.

This is a firmly Stalinist economy in the areas that matter. All imports (which is to say, anything of value) are brought in through a small number of generally well-connected exclusive distributors. When one shop says "finished, already!" (the de facto motto of the city), everybody is going to say the same thing. That is, if you're fortunate enough to even run into some salesperson who actually understands what you're looking for. I could find things easier (and often cheaper!) in Vietnam.

Then I happened to pop into one hole-in-the-wall one-man shop, Crystal Systems. The "one man" said "say, I understand what you're trying to do; I did exactly that for a firm here recently; all you need are two routers." The archetypal light-bulb moment. (Remember, I'm a software craftsman, not a hardware/network engineer.) This is where the "time v. money v. ..." of the title comes in. What I should have done was to buy two identical brand-new 802.11n routers. That would have cost me about S$190 (~US$136 or so), and would have given me a perfect excuse to replace my aging 2Wire 2700HGV-2, But this has already been a bit of an expensive month - new hard drive, various software - so after some consideration I decided to try to salvage the existing router (apparent POS though it may be) and just spend the minimum necessary. So I went home with one S$69 TP-LINK TL-WR340G router.

It features the now-customary browser-based setup - just remember to use a hard-wired link rather than wireless (d'oh!), and it's almost as easy as falling off your seat. Bridging mode is pretty obvious; the TP-LINK wants to know the MAC address of the router you're connecting to, along with its encryption setup.

In bridge mode, the TL-WR340G only supports the obsolescent WEP encryption, not the current and generally superior WPA2. The 2Wire - along with every device currently connected to it, obviously - uses WPA2, and does not support a mixed WPA2/WEP environment.

Back to the store I go tomorrow; the only question now is: one new Netgear N router (which can fall back to 802.11g) or two?

Misadventures with Customer "Service": With Service like This, Why Bother?

Doing a job search using various Websites became really popular about ten years ago as an easy way for candidates and companies to find each other without any (visibly obvious) middlemen directly involved. I understand that in some geographic and employment areas, it's still a useful tool. I've had myself registered on fewer than half a dozen for several years, even though my last 6 jobs were all found through other means.

Job sites aren't typical consumer Websites in that they're really trying to target two distinct groups of customers: companies with jobs on offer (who generally pay the bills) and jobseekers (who generally don't). Even though jobseekers don't have any up-front money dangling in front of the site operator, wise (or experienced) operators of such systems know that they should "take care" of these site users well, since:

• Companies will be less likely to pay to advertise on general-audience sites with few users, and
• Users who have negative experiences (on any site) are often motivated to "spread the word".

Any business which is heavily dependent on its Website for revenue or for customer service knows (or quickly learns) that locking actual or potential customers out of their site through defective, easily-correctable site implementation has a direct and negative impact. The pathologically clueless operators don't seem to know or care why this happens; they just notice their monthly traffic figures dwindling over time, with revenues to match.

This even applies, although to a lesser extent, when the market being served by the site encourages a lack of competition. This is the case quite often here in South Asia, and notably in Singapore. Only two media companies serve the English-language market here, both with apparent Government ties. Broadcast television and radio are similarly throttled. This becomes apparent to anyone who spends more than a few days here. Individuals are engaged in frenetic, all-consuming competition with each other, while favoured companies and industries don't (visibly) engage in such grubbiness.

All of this went through my mind again over the last few days, after I'd had a series of consistently unpleasant experiences with one particular Website operator. Necessary background: I have been essentially Windows-free (and thus virus-free and botnet-free) for some five years now, initially using Linux systems like Ubuntu and then the Apple Mac. What has made this change practical, for me and for tens of millions of other people, has been the emergence of open standards in desktop computing, particularly with regard to open data formats. A classic example with which anyone reading this is familiar is HTTP. Any device, from large mainframes to appliances to mobile phones, can be used to produce or access information via HTTP, most commonly in the form of Web pages. Other "standards", like MP3 for audio or Microsoft Office document formats, are proprietary to a company or organisation but widely implemented by competing or collaborating systems. This reliance on actual or de facto standards, as much as any other single factor, is what has enabled much of modern technology, particularly the Internet (which many think of as synonymous with the World Wide Web).

Not everybody has always "played fair" with these standards, however. Microsoft, in particular, have been infamous for their commonly-used practice of "embrace, extend and extinguish" has led to several instances where they support an existing standard (such as HTML for Web pages or Kerberos for network authentication) and either introduce incompatible features or defective versions of standard features into their implementation. This has the effect of "locking in" users who support Microsoft's implementation rather than the actual standard. These usees, as they are often called, face significant actual or perceived costs and difficulties were they to switch away from their now-Microsoft-specific infrastructure. Microsoft have by no means been the only ones to do this sort of thing; they are, however, often quite brazen about it — and their usees don't always have an accurate understanding of the true costs of their "investment."

In particular, during the "dark ages" of Web development in the mid- to late 1990s, it was common for sites to have text on each page proclaiming "Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer"; the tools which they were using to create the Web pages (often Microsoft FrontPage), did not always (or easily) generate valid HTML, CSS or standard JavaScript — all of which are needed to make interactive, "dynamic" Web sites work. As the relevant standards have become better-known to amateur and semiprofessional Web developers, the tools used by professional developers mature, and those using Web browsers become more aware of the importance of these standards, we have seen an increasing Web "Enlightenment", where once again, anybody (or anything, like a Google search crawler) can access all content for a site.

There are exceptions to this, however, just as there are trailing-edge sluggards in any social or technical change. These can give excuses about lack of resources, perceived lack of need ("We're doing fine the way things are") and so on — which quite often attempt to mask either ignorance of the issues involved or, at a fundamental level, disrespect for their current and actual customers. When a well-equipped, motivated (outside) organisation is in a position to gain from that ignorance or contempt — as Microsoft for so long was with regard to Web development and standards — those "sluggards" will continue to pat themselves on the back for their "prudence" and "conservatism" — right up to and often past the point at which the business dies.

One such organization appears to be the company which owns and operates the JobsDB.com group of employment Web sites. With "specialised" sites for Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and other countries, and an apparently large advertising and promotion budget, it's safe to speculate that millions of people have at least seen their advertisements, if not actually made use of their site. Those who actually do try to browse for a job there, however, can face significant problems — if they're using anything other than Internet Explorer on Windows as their browser. (And the message seems to be finally getting through to many users — Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows itself cause numerous security and stability problems that are comparatively unheard of on any other system.)

I browsed jobsdb.com.sg, the Singapore-themed version of their online job service. I got as far as entering my details in an application form for a position, when I ran into insurmountable difficulties. Numerous pages display poorly in any of the browsers I tried. "Obviously using archaic design," I thought, "but as long as the function isn't too badly broken, I can still deal with this." I eventually got to the a page with a form to be filled in by those wishing to apply for a specific job (at SingTel) and ran into fatal problems. I clicked on the link to report a problem with the site, and included the following description:

SingTel application page misbehaves horribly with Safari 4.0.2/Mac. An ASP alert box, (URL omitted for this blog post), is displayed in a new tab, taking the entire browser window; the message "Please correct the field(s) with red exclamation mark(s) (!). You can click on the exclamation mark for instruction and input relevant information." indicates that there was an error on the initial page (which is still open in its original tab), but no red exclamation marks appear.

Very 1998ish.

Sixteen hours after filing the initial report, and getting an auto-generated email indicating that it had been received and entered into their ticketing system, I get the following email from "sg-cshelpdesk@jobsdb.com.sg"):

Dear Sir / Madam,

Please clear the cache of your browser by deleting the cookies and temporary internet files, enable the java and javascript, disable the popup blocker, open a new browser and try from there.

Otherwise, please try other browsers like firefox or Internet Explorer 6.0 & above to access the Career Portal and verify that your Internet Settings are configured correctly against http://sg.career.jobsdb.com/faq/documents/Internet_Explorer_Settings.pdf. Then open a new browser and submit from there.

Best Regards, Customer Service

Absolutely no problem-specific content whatsoever. This could easily have been (and in my opinion probably was) an automatically-generated message that was sent when no relevant response would be forthcoming within 24 hours after filing the problem (the '16:44' in the timestamp, or 4:45 PM local time, sounds suspiciously like "it's the end of the day, nobody got to this, blow him off and hope he goes away.") There continues to be an explicit assumption within the fluff mail that I'm using Internet Exploder; even though the second paragraph mentions "firefox" (sic), the PDF link supplied says that it relates to IE.

I'm getting used to companies, particularly the all-pervasive oligopolies, here in Singapore treating the customer with contempt. Knowing that no living human would probably ever read it, however, I did send one last complaint email.

Dear Customer “Service”,

Did you actually read the report I filed? Here are a few Statistically Improbable Phrases to clue you in:

• “standards-compliant (non-IE) browsers”. I tested your site with ten different browsers on four different operating systems. In no case did it operate correctly. By the way, Microsoft does not make a version of Internet Exploder for non-Windows systems.
• “Safari” — Safari is the standard, comes-with-the-system browser for Macs and iPhones, and is available for those wishing to upgrade their Internet experience on Windows as well.
• “an ASP alert box...is displayed in a new tab” — obviously not what was intended by the coder; however, competent JS wouldn’t do this.

I am a Web developer with nearly 15 years experience. I have been teaching Web development for ten years. If a student of mine from my very first class, back in 1999, had submitted work with such grossly defective JavaScript, he would have been required to redo it. You see, even since the early days of the World Wide Web, there have been standards that even Microsoft can comply with – though they also “support” their own proprietary, non-standard version of HTML and JavaScript and have encouraged careless or inexperienced “developers” to lock themselves in, breaking sites for anyone using a non-IE browser. That includes half the smartphones on the planet, every single non-Windows desktop or laptop system, and search engines like Google.

You should take http://www.amazon.com/Novelty-Sign-Brain-before-engaging/dp/B000K62V92 as a gentle but firm recommendation.

Sincerely,

No, I don't expect a relevant reply. Yes, I do feel better. No, I won't be using JobsDB or any related site, and will happily explain to any who ask my opinion precisely why.

A final note: There is a nice little site called yougetsignal.com which offers a nice set of network (Internet) diagnostic and information tools. One page on the site, http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/, does what's called a "reverse IP address lookup". I used this page to find out what other sites are hosted by the same server as jobsdb.com.sg. Try it yourself; the results included apparently all "country-specific" jobsdb.com sites — as well as the site for Target, an American retailer. Interesting.

Not that I expect it, but if any of the parties mentioned here were to reply to what I've written here, I'd be happy to publish their response.