Ordinary Nothing

I ran a simple search on Yahoo!, for two quoted phrases, and forgot to
close the second quote. No big problem, since the normal options are
either that the search engine would guess right on its own, or will
guess wrong and ignore the double-quote character.

Instead, I received an error page, with this nice line at the bottom:

d=document; function init() { addHandlers(); } function
addHandlers() { if (oRoot=document.getElementById(‘yschres’)) { if
(!oRoot.getElementsByTagName(‘ul’)) return false; var
aSpns=oRoot.getElementsByTagName(‘ul’); for (i=0;i

The sort of thing you can expect from some improperly debugged web page, but not from a service as experienced as them.

Quite odd.

In any case, a second attempt with the same malformed search string, a
little while later, worked properly. And while I didn’t get result
(which is true, even had I close the quotes), I also didn’t see the
error message and the server code.

This is a long study about Gender Issues in College Student Use of Instant Messaging. But if you can’t read the whole thing, these are the highlights.

Mainly, they claim to find clear differences between the way men and women use IM. I read their differences. And you know what, I actually know college/university students who use their IM
accordingly. But I also know just as many, if not more, who don’t.
Heck, if what they claim was true, then I would just have to be an
hermaphrodite.

Which I’m not. Seriously.

But what I find most amusing is the general claims, beside the main
interest of the study, that most subjects were found to not use those
obnoxious shortening of words which are so common on SMS and IM conversations (Oh, wait, did I say common on IM?! Well, guess I did… Imagine that…). And that there is an extremely low percentage of spelling errors in those IM conversations (about 1%).

So very little occurrences of "10x u r gr8", and very little occurrences of people forgetting a few letters, or slightly twisting words.

That’s absolute rubbish, you know. I use IM,
and mostly with university/college students and recent graduates,
considering I’m a part of that group myself. Personally, I try very
much to keep my spelling, and using full words. And I fail on the
spelling front occasionally. Many people don’t try, or care, to work
for spelling, and some don’t care to work to write whole words. A much
higher percent than this study find...

Heck, most of the time people don’t even bother commenting
when they’re conversation partner shorten a word, or misspell a word,
because of how common it is, and how everyone is doing it anyway.

A couple of weeks ago Yahoo! changed the interface of their Groups
service. And they made some very unfortunate choices during the
overhaul, which looked nicer, but drastically reduced usability.

They did, however, provided an easy access to a feed-back form. And
they paid attention to the comments, fixing the main problems almost
straight away. And by now all but one of the problems is fixed. So
basically I’m impressed, and in a good way. Currently, the groups look
better, and retain the previous functionality, so that’s a success.

One other odd problem which I’m not sure about, related to the amount
of members in the group. After the graphical change the group I was
monitoring listed about 200 more members than there were before… And
there weren’t more than 4-5 people tops who joined during that day…
Odd, and I still don’t know whether the problem was before the update,
or after the update.

My original list of problems, as I listed in the feed-back form was:

1. The main messages list doesn’t show message ID for
individual message. This is actually useful sometimes. You also removed
the option to find a message by number/ID. I, and other people I know,
used this, several times.

2. Messages on date view are sorted as new-on-top, with no possibility
to change that. From the main list choosing "last" goes to the first
messages, and "first" to the last. In a single message view, "next"
goes to an earlier message and "previous" to the newer ones. This is
different then before, and feels very upside-down. Please either change
it back, or make it a user-option.

3. The new message posting screen allows to specify a language. The
drop-down list is not alphabetically sorted, so if someone looks for a
language they have to read all the list entries.

4. Please make the message preview, and the nice break lines, on the
message list optional. It’s prettier, but less functional when I want
to go over several messages in advance. I want the ability, that I had
on the previous layout, of seeing as many message subject at once.

5. The message view page has an ad which pushes inside the message
area. This mean that the first few text lines of the message are
shorter. This is very very bad. If some of those lines are quoted, and
the ">" character are properly formatted to fit standard line
length, the first few lines of the message will still look broken and
unreadable once the length is changed. Don’t do that.

Thank you for your attention, and please do address these issues. The
new look is nicer and friendlier, but parts of it drastically reduces
functionality, which is not worth it.

And like I said, they fixed everything, except the problem of the ads
inside messages (#5 in the message). This is still there, and still a
problem. It is a big problem, but I don’t expect they’ll fix it, since
the ads probably pay money.

But the rest is fine, so overall I’m satisfied. The next/previous
problem was fixed straight away, as where the ID related ones.

The ability to choose sort direction and preview were added later.
Currently it’s through a URL parameter, which does the job, but is
carried through all index and message views, so changing the sort
option also changes browser history, making read messages appear as
unvisited links. But that’s minor and doesn’t change often. I’m still
not sure that there are advantages to this system over others without
this drawback, but I can see why this was the simplest to implement.

I was following some posts in a Yahoo group, when they showed a pop-up
message, asking me to answer a survey. The message gives the strong
impression that it’s yet another survey about Yahoo, probably about the groups, so I decided to see what it’s about this time.

You do agree that having it titled as coming from Yahoo! Research,
and saying that it’s time to tell Yahoo what I think, indicates it’s
about Yahoo, right?

Well, wrong. It started asking me about my opinion on various
American airlines, and how likely am I to fly with them. But never
mind, Yahoo! need to make a living, and since I don’t pay direct money
for the services I take from them, I can see this as payment.

What the problem was, is that I kept being offered to take this
supposed survey again, and again, and again. It only appeared when I was logged in, so they could easily know I already took it. Why bother me
with it, then? Even if they don’t want to keep a list of Yahoo! IDs
that took it, they can surely store something in a cookie. In any case,
once I took it, I’m not supposed to see the pop-up again.

And it wasn’t just a rare occurrence. There were a few days where the
thing kept showing in nearly every second page load. Sometimes on each
page load.

And when I tried to press the Take the survey button image, I was taken to a page telling me that:

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, you do not qualify to take this particular survey today.

Nice, isn’t it? Because it was me who was really interested in going
there again, without being prompted at all, sure. And I did not qualify? Qualify
?! This gave me the strong feeling that they decided they didn’t want to
say "Sorry, we screwed up, you already took the survey, sorry for
bothering you", and instead decided it’s better to tell me it’s my fault, that I’m not up
to some standard. Not a way to make people happy, guys. If I don’t qualify, tell me why.

Even better (well, worse), this page opened instead of the original Yahoo page I was
viewing, not in a new window, and not in a pop-up window. And yet they
put a "close" link on the page, like you do on pop-up pages that can be so closed. Except… This wasn’t a pop-up page. So there was this "close"
link there, and it didn’t do anything. At all. I tried, I knew it was
out of place, but was intrigued as to what it would do. It didn’t do
anything. Very professional, I was so impressed.

Instead I pressed the browser’s back button, returned to the original
page I started from, and… Guess what? I got this pop-up image asking
me to take a survey…

Those International phone carriers I mentioned in the previous post are often also ISP companies.

This is a rant about the ISP
services of the same Barak company from the previous post. But I never
used them for Internet connection myself, so this is all hearsay. Of
course, this is hearsay from what I consider trusted sources…

First, I have a friend that the company he worked for used them as an ISP.
After several months they broke off, and switched to someone else.
According to my friend this was due to many connectivity problems, many
times where the supplied bandwidth didn’t match what they were paying
for, and problems with customer services.

Second, I have another friend who used them for his home ISP. And encountered two interesting problems:

1. He needed to access some websites in Hong Kong. And while those
   sites were linked to from other sites and forums, he was never able to
   connect, like the sites are down. Until at some point he tried
   connecting from a computer in another place, and got there without any
   problems. Some more testing revealed that he couldn’t get to those
   sites from home, but can from about anywhere else with different ISPs.
   And just in case anyone wonders, there is nothing in Barak’s terms
   specifying that they do, or can, block sites. And this was a simple
   commercial site, in any case.
2. He received very low bandwidth trying to download things using P2P file-sharing programs like eMule.
   For normal file downloads, he did get the bandwidth he was paying for.
   It wasn’t configuration problems, and those were not files with very
   low availability. Again, nothing in Barak’s terms specified them
   blocking/slowing any sort of traffic.

He contacted their
customer support about those two problems, asking if his impressions of
site blocking, and protocol filtering, are correct.

Their reply? They offered him a huge discount for an even higher
bandwidth connection. Yep, nothing about the problem, just offering him
to pay less. Sounds very… evasive, doesn’t it?

Needless to say, he said bye-bye and switched. Since then he can connect to those sites, and the eMule download speed has improved drastically…

Mycroft provide a huge collection, the collection, of search plug-ins for Mozilla/FireFox.
They have a very large repository, and since a basic plug-in is pretty
easy to make, they make it simple for people to check their own search
plug-ins and submit them.

And provide a warning that they’re swamped, so it may take a while until the submission is accepted.

I found a site I wanted to use, with no plug-in ready on the list,
so I decided to make one of my own, and send it to them for inclusion.
I sent it before mid-January. Today I got back an email, automated (or
just sent in bulk as a pre-made form. It’s alright, since they claim to
have too many submissions to be able to respond personally), letting me
know that the submission is rejected, because they already have a
plug-in for that site.

Which surprised me a bit, since in the passing months (That’s about 2.5 months) I checked occasionally and didn’t see anything.

And lo and behold, there was indeed such a search plug-in there. Which was listed as being entered today.

So if this went on a first-sender basis, it took even more time to
get the plug-in by the other guy… And if there were two of us
starting this that long ago, how many may have done the same in the
past months?

I can see that they have other things to do, and that they are busy,
and they really do provide a good service. But if updates takes so much
time, maybe someone else should do it.

If not, at least I think they
should provide some list of pending plug-ins. Make it automatic even,
based on subject lines of submissions (which they request to include
the name of the site) or something like that. Just to let people know.

I just can’t help imagining that what they should have really sent me was "Your plug-in, like 534 others for the
same website, was rejected, because we just now added the 535th one to the
list" …

The timezone set on messages sent from my Yahoo! Mail account is always PST. Which is wrong.

My account settings are correct, and at GMT+2 . Other procedures that rely on timezone (like Yahoo! Groups) get that right, and do the time translations correctly.

The email doesn’t. And the problem isn’t mine alone, or something
unique. Not only that, but it also happen with people using the
localized Yahoo! services. All messages from any Yahoo! Mail accounts (that I checked) arrive at PST, whether they are send from an @yahoo.com address, or from others (like an @yahoo.de address).

This is annoying. I do expect messages I receive to be in the
sender’s timezone, it’s much simpler for me to automatically change
hours based on the known location of the sender than on the email
account the sender is using. And I most certainly expect my messages to show my own timezone.

For comparison, Both Hotmail (which is otherwise inferior) and Gmail
do this properly. Not to mention every client-based program. I can’t
think of a single good reason for Yahoo! not to be able to.

After a recommendation from a commenter here, and various good opinions on the web, I decided to also try the Copernic Desktop Search program as a computer search tool.

I used the 1.2 version, got rid of it, and lately installed the 1.5
beta version. The review is true for the 1.5 beta build 624, but most
thing would be the same for the 1.2 version if not explicitly stated
otherwise.

Pro:

• The interface is clear, and very easy to use. It’s less useful, and wastes more "screen real-estate" than YDS, but it’s elegant and has a "professional/serious" feel to it.
• Intuitive search refinement. Like a combo-box for file date, which
  has standalone answers like "today" or "this month", but also "after",
  "before" and "between" which open additional fields for dates that were
  previously hidden as long as they were irrelevant.
• Indexes changes. That is, it monitors for addition of new files (or
  file changes?), and index them in real time. This is a huge improvement
  over scheduled scanning (like YDS does) for several reasons:
  • It takes less HD
    resources when nothing has changed. Not that scanning the disk for
    change is an heavy duty, but if the disk is constantly working, it’s
    noticeable. I had YDS
    installed on two computers, one which is mostly idle, and one with
    constant disk activity. On the one with the disk activity, the
    schedules scans were very noticeable, but Copernic was smooth.
  • When something does change you have it indexed almost immediately. No need to change for the next indexing time.
• Preview for a large amount of file types. Common file types that I tried were all previewable.
• Fast searching. For the things which are indexed, files matching various keyword combinations were shown relatively quickly.
• Result count in other categories. The results are separate for
  general files, emails, audio, pictures, video, etc… But when running
  a search on one category you get a view of result count in the others.

Con:

• No fall-back in case of errors. For example, I had a few
  non-standard xml files. It tried to show them using it’s xml viewer,
  and failed. Instead of showing them as text instead, I got an error
  message with the problem the parser/viewer encountered. This is fine if
  it was my file and I wanted to debug it, but not on the general case
  when it’s not. I think it should at least show an option to show as
  next-best-thing, which would be text in this case.
• No Hebrew support. Oh, it’s possible to enter Hebrew text in the
  search text box. But it doesn’t index it, and doesn’t find it. Worse,
  it can’t show Hebrew on previewed files. I assume this problem isn’t
  just for Hebrew, but for other languages as well.
• Slow preview for large text files. I have an IM
  log file slightly larger than 1MB. When I choose it on the search
  results, it could take a couple of minutes to load it on the preview
  pane, during which the Copernic program is unresponsive, and so is
  Windows Explorer. On the 1.2 version it was worse, and I gave up and
  killed the process after five minutes of waiting. So even randomly
  browsing through returned results can hang the program for a long
  duration.
• It doesn’t index the same log file. There is a setup option of not
  indexing content of files above a certain size, but I keep it at the
  default of 50MB. Yet searching for strings contained within this log
  file does not return it in the result list. Searching for strings in
  the file name does. Other, much smaller, log files are returned when
  searching for words in their content. This is a big problem, both because I can’t count on the program to fetch files it’s supposed to index, and because it’s not documented.
• The indexing of Thunderbird
  email isn’t working in this version, despite this being exclaimed as
  finally included in the 1.5 beta. When going to search in the email
  category I’m told that email indexing is disabled, and provided a link
  to open the settings dialog to fix it. But I fixed it. I specified that
  emails for Thunderbird
  would be indexed, and emails for Outlook won’t. It just doesn’t pay any
  attention. It’s not that it claims there aren’t any indexed, which
  would be a different problem. It claims I didn’t enable indexing of
  emails.

I got rid of the 1.2 version due to the problem of it hanging over
large text files. It made it unusable for me. The 1.5 beta isn’t very
much better, since the files are still not indexed, but it doesn’t hang
the computer, so it’s usable. Currently the computer with the high disk
activity is running Copernic 1.5 beta, but the one with low disk
activity is running YDS…

My main conceptual problem with Copernic at this stage is that it
feels like a stable and complete program, yet has those problems. YDS
also has some big problems, but it still feel like a program in
development stages, so it’s somehow less problematical. It’s all in my
head, of course, since what really matter is functionality, but still.

Posts to Yahoo! Groups are acting very strangely in the last few days.

Small delays of up to a minute between the time you post a message and
the time it shows on the group were always common. It’s understandable,
it’s a large service, with a huge amount of users.

But on the last few days it’s terrible. Some posts still find their way
to the group nearly instantly, but some don’t. And those who don’t can
be delayed for hours, for no obvious reason. I had posts
waiting about 4-5 hours until the appeared on the group, and saw posts
that waited around 12 hours by other people.

The behaviour changes from post to post, so I can’t find any obvious
cause like poster identity, thread topic, keywords, time of posting, or
whatever.

I try to imagine a method of queuing system that would have such
results, and can’t. I don’t have a clue what is going on there, and
what is their problem. I just hope they fix it soon, since it’s
becoming very annoying. You can’t have a conversation when a certain
percentage of the posts just don’t show up until way too late…

I will not make fun of the mentally challenged. I will not make fun of
the mentally challenged. I will not make fun of the mentally
challenged. I will not make fun… Oh, heck, I suppose I will.

This seems like someone that wants help writing an antenna program.
He doesn’t need help communicating to an antenna through some
interface, no, he wants to write the whole darn Antenna in code. Just
run it on any computer, and start receiving. No physical antenna
required.

Amazing. Simply amazing. If this works I suppose all those Video-In
cards are the next to go, since you could write a program that receives
TV broadcasts.

Why stop there? Why not write an edible computer program? Copying
computer programs are easy, so we could end world hunger there and then.

Sometime people just amaze me.

Hat tip to The Daily WTF.

I ran across this article, where a Greek reporter complains that the FCC in the U.S. is considering censoring parts of the Greek Olympic Games opening ceremony. Which would be very stupid and ridiculous of them, and which I agree with her can be seen as an insult to Greece, but it would be far from the first time the FCC has made a stupid decision.

In any case, I decided to try and look for myself on the FCC website exactly is it that they have to say about the issue.
I entered the search screen, searched for Olympic Games, and clicked the link to sort results by date, since this is a new issue.

Should be simple enough, right?

Wrong.

Click the thumbnail to open a picture of the returned results I got, or just go ahead and run the search yourself (to see if they fixed it, maybe).

The dates are clearly listed on the right-side column.

If you’re wondering whether maybe those dates are wrong and the sorting is done on a different and correct date field (Which would be a problem all by itself), that’s not the case. Some of the summaries contain the date as text inside them, and you can see they all match perfectly.

It seems sorted by relevance, despite the fact that it clearly states that the results are sorted by date. And after requesting a sort by date, sorting by relevance is not very… relevant.

The relevance factor seems skewed as well. How can the same document published on the same day(check the file names and summary), once in a plain text version and once in a Word document, have different relevance values? The text should be identical…

Oh, well, making important telecommunication decisions that effect the U.S., and often the entire world, doesn’t require being able to perform basic sorts.

Note: I also sent this to This is Broken, but since the auto-reply let me know that it isn’t likely it will get posted there, and will take a long time even if it does, I decided to post about it here as well.

I never used any serious desktop search tool until now, not considering the basic OS supplied ones, or a simple dir, or ls, command.

The main reason up until a while ago was that everybody wanted money for their tools. This is perfectly legitimate and fair. I’m actually quite capable of paying money for software I want and use, and have certainly done so in the past. But since I’m fairly organized in the way I keep files, I never saw such tools as more than a potentially minor convenience for me, and so not worth me spending my money.

Recently, however, some has been released for free. The first, or at least the one that got the most hype, was the Google desktop search tool. I considered giving it a spin, but decided not to due to several simple reasons (Which from the first reports I read also pretty much apply to the MSN desktop search tool):

1. If it’s a real local program, and is indexing local files, I want a real interface and not an HTML one. No matter how well made, a browser rendered HTML page is not the same, and has its limitations. For a web service that runs on a different computer, that’s fine. But if I already have a program running on my computer, why cripple the interface?
2. I don’t want to run a web server, and talk to a computer on my own computer via HTTP. Why would I need to allow a search program to provide web interface? Why should I need to deal with networking/firewall/communication settings for a program that’s fully local?
3. I want a clear distinction between what’s on my computer and what’s not. This is apparently different from the vision all those search companies are having, where information could be accessed similarly whether it’s stored on the local computer, or on some server on the Internet. What’s on my computer is mine, and I chose to put it there. What’s on the Internet someone else put there, and most of what’s there doesn’t interest me. Even searching for the same keywords, I’d choose these options totally separately and independently. But those search tools try to make everything more integrated and seamless.

The Yahoo! desktop search program is a program with a regular user interface, doesn’t require to install a web server, and doesn’t get confused between file searches and web searches. So it seemed worth a try. In addition, it’s supposed to be based on the X1 program, which exists for quite some time and has gotten pretty good reviews.

So I decided to download and try it. Now Yahoo! did set up a forum/message board for comments. I tried getting in there numerous times, with hours of difference, but it didn’t respond. I did succeed in entering the message board just one time, but after a very initial browse, to see what’s already reported, it stopped responding again.
So I’ll comment here. I assume nothing I have to say is totally new or unique (How much can I notice from a short use?), so it shouldn’t be a problem if nobody notices it.

The good bits:

1. Indexing is fairly fast.  Of course I didn’t have anything else to compare it too, so I can’t vouch for how it is in relation, but it progressed in a nice pace and it didn’t take too long for it to index (and re-index when I made some changes) everything.
2. The built-in preview is nice, and supported the basic file types I tried to search for. Not having to open each file in an external program just to see if it’s the one I’m looking for is convenient.
3. It’s easy to run additional filters based on file name, type, directory, dates and so on. The main options are on the same window, but arranged sensibly and without cluttering the display.

The bad bits:

1. Changing parameters caused the program to re-index everything instead of trying to sensibly find the differences (If I add a single file extension to index, why not simply search and add those files?). Actually, it’s far worse, simply entering the configuration dialog and then closing it, without chancing anything, caused the program to re-index everything.
2. The search edit box, where the search query is entered, doesn’t match the default system code-page. Meaning to say, the test system was a Win2k computer, with an English interface, but also support for Hebrew. But I couldn’t search for Hebrew characters since when I tried to change the input language I got the "western European" characters instead of the Hebrew ones. I assume this means no UNICODE support, also.
3. The installation placed files in places that were different from where the search interface was looking for them. When I selected a file that it could not preview, it tried to show in the preview pane an HTML file that came with the program, containing the message that the file cannot be previewed. Instead I got an error message that it cannot find the HTML file it tried to show. The files were installed into the program directory, but it looked for them under the user profile directory.
4. When it could not find a file that was indexed, the error came up in the form of a message box. This means that whatever I was doing was interrupted until I pressed the OK button. This is really really bad. It means that when I started to enter a search term, it would cut me off in the middle to show this box I need to confirm. And when I scrolled through several files, again it would occasionally just cut me off and break the flow. Errors like that should be presented without interrupting the user. You can’t find the file? Then let me go on to choose another one instead of interrupting me. Take the same text you’re showing on the message box, and show it in the preview pane instead of a fancy HTML. Due to the previous problem, this came up a lot.
5. Sometime it couldn’t find and open files for no good reason. The files were real, and exactly where it listed them as being. But no, I got an error message stating that the file cannot be found. Many of these files contained spaces in the file name or directory name, but I think not all of them.
6. When the files did contain a space, it was listed in the messages as %20, not as a space. This is fine when sending it to a browser, but not for a regular message box.

The would-be-a-nice-addition bits:

1. Index also email messages from Thunderbird/Mozilla and other mail clients. Not just Outlook or Outlook Express.
2. When rendering HTML files in the preview, maybe allow to use the Mozilla/Firefox engine instead of IE? I don’t think this is a trivial thing to do, and since these are only local files it’s not as critical as when rendering content from unknown web server, but it would be nice.
3. Try to determine file content/type for extensions that were not selected to index. Maybe this would require a separate do-not-index list for people that want this for security/privacy reason. It’s good to have control, and I could (and did) add my extra extensions myself, but I was surprised not to get full-text indexing for text files, even if their extensions were not on the list. On some level I expected that things like .log files, or .cpp and .h files, will be indexed and searchable. They’re just text after all.

That’s either about it, or about what I recall now.

What mostly bothers me about the bugs I found isn’t so much that
they’re there (since that can, and probably will, be fixed), but that
they’re the things that very basic beta testing should have found. Since
it’s based on an existing product, and since Yahoo! are certainly
capable of affording a QA team, I’m not sure how these things got
through…

Overall YDS is really nice, does a good job, and is much better than the internal windows search option. I still don’t think I need any file search tool enough to pay for it, but for a free version I’ll probably keep using YDS once they get rid of those constantly popping message boxes.

OK, Hotmail changed their log-in screen to provide an explanation as to why new mailboxes are now large while my old existing account remains at a measly 2MB.

As the log-in screen goes:

250MB inbox available only in the 50 United States, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

And since I’m not from the US, from DC, or from Puerto Rico (nice board game, though), I can stay with the old small mailbox while new users get big mailboxes.

I was also under the impression that Washington, DC, was kind of located, well, inside the US… So the separate listing may be very PC, but does not serve any other purpose. Oh, well.

An effectively international service using
an upgrade policy that depends on geographical location strikes me as odd.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get it.

Hotmail still did not increase the size of my free mailbox from 2MB to the much vaunted 250MB. Not that I can really complain, considering how much I’m paying for it. And really, that’s not what I’m complaining about, but rather the timing of their publications and announcements regarding the same size upgrade.

They actually started to publicize the intended change a long while ago. Not too long after Google came with the 1GB GMail accounts. Rumors that Hotmail will offer 250MB mailboxes for the free accounts started to circulate almost immediately. In the meanwhile Yahoo almost instantly upgraded their free mailboxes to 100MB. A long after that Hotmail started to slowly upgrade users. Much later Yahoo started to upgrade their mailboxes to 250MB and finished with all of them, this all happened relatively fast, and Hotmail still didn’t finish with their own upgrades. However, this relatively very slow upgrade speed is also not what I’m complaining about.

What annoys me is that during the last week or so the general login screen to Hotmail announces that all new mailboxes are at the new size. According to the login page a new account will automatically get 25MB storage, and will be upgraded to 250MB within 30 days.
My account on the other hand still has 2MB. This means that if I create a new account right now, they guarantee that it will begin with much more storage than my current one has.

That’s just wrong. If you can’t upgrade everything at once, start with existing customers. Offering new customers a service that current long-time customers can’t have is vexing, to say the least. It doesn’t really foster any loyalty. It makes customers feel that, even among the free and so not very valued customers anyway, they are second rate. If you can afford the storage space, upgrade people. If you can’t – don’t offer it to anyone else that just decides to open a new account.

I get lots of HTTP 404 error, which are Page Not Found errors. They’re easy to get. Just pick a site, and request some page that isn’t there. Practically everyone who does something on the Internet has seen a few.

What I’m not used to is HTTP 403 errors. Especially not ones that quote the RFC standard at me in such a manner.
Or, as Business Wire tried to tell me when running a simple search:

Error 403–Forbidden

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1: 10.4.4 403 Forbidden The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

How nice… I promise I’ll try not to do that again. Honest. And I won’t even call for an inquery into why a news source does not want to grant my request for news, refuses to divulge their reasons, and forcibly tells me to stop asking.
If this was the US’s Department of Homeland Security, I’d understand. But Business Wire??!

;-)