What happens when your message isn’t congruent with your actions?

I just got around to installing Windows 7 (an absolutely terrible operating system if you do anything more than email and web browsing) on one of the workstations at the office and I needed to read through a PDF document but didn’t yet have Adobe Reader installed. I know Adobe Reader is a slow piece of bloated, bug-ridden nonsense and thought it might be time to look for alternatives. Googling around I find out about Foxit and have heard good things from a few people so thought I would give it a quick whirl.

And I got slimed.

Installing the software just feels like a nasty, slimy experience as you click through all of the “No, I don’t want a new toolbar. No, I don’t need you to re-write my homepage bookmark. No, I don’t need eBay stuck on my browser either.” By the time I hit the “would you like us to stick bookmarks to trusted websites you already have in your browser?” I was done and it was time to stop the install process.

The wording of each option is very forked tongue. I had flashbacks to the 1990’s with the beginnings of the Internet and my first encounters with “behind your back, let me fuck your machine up” software installations. AOL strangely comes to mind. The phrasing of each option is done in such a way that you either aren’t sure if you need the toolbar for the software to work, whether you’re turning it off, turning it on, or are just asking to be bent over and taken without any kind of lube.

Okay, let’s stop this installation. Yeah, but there’s no “Cancel” button, no “Back” button. Another incongruity. ”We’re so convinced you’ll love our software and all of the bloat that we bundle with it that we don’t need to provide you with the option to cancel.” I quickly decide to bring up Task Manager and just kill the install process before this goes any further.

Here’s someone else who had the same issues with the software installer I did. http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/05/why-i-flushed-foxit.html

The marketing message states one thing, the actions of the software, and the company behind the software, are clearly something else.

So what other products does the company behind Foxit produce and sell?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

I will never find out because through a single experience of dealing with a slimy piece of software that left a bad taste, I won’t ever consider using any of their software in the future.

This is what happens when you have an incongruent message, you switch off your potential customers. You destroy a future relationship.

How much money are you making by bundling distasteful practices in to your free software, to make a quick buck? You louse up potential future sales because the user is no longer interested enough to look at what other products you create.

At least with Adobe Reader I know how to turn off what I don’t want and the registry patches you need to apply are clearly documented on various websites.

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Look, I need you to listen to this very carefully because your future career as a software developer or domain expert relies on you not doing this stuff.

I know it is really difficult to come up with your own content at times, and really, why bother when anything you want to say or write has already been, but the Internet these days has opened up a whole new vista for douchebaggery (does douchbaggery have one g or two g’s? Is douche bag one word or two?) but if you are going to plagiarise another person’s work, I have two really important tips for you:

1. You can actually write your comments and prose as well as you can write your “original” article so that it isn’t quite as obvious that you are actually, in fact, a douchebag.
2. Fix the typographic bug in the original code that you so expertly copypasta in to “your” article to prove what an expert you are in your chosen subject.

Here’s to moronic douchebags everywhere! Allowing entrepreneurs and software developers the world over to quickly and effectively discount you as a possible employment candidate due to your inability to comprehend the code you ripped off from somewhere else.

The original article:

http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/tutorial-09-cs.aspx

The copypasta douchebag:

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/dhananjaycoder/HtmlHelperMethod02222009235703PM/HtmlHelperMethod.aspx

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I have been tinkering around with the software I use for image feature extraction in my large collection of SenseCam images.

Using OpenCV, a SURF algorithm and Python I have been able to create a small command-line application that can accurately determine places I have visited before based on the captured images.

The Python script is also capable of tagging images such as “Venice Office" or “Home/Bedroom” or “Local Coffee Shop” very accurately. I am quite pleased with the results.

By automatically tagging images I can group them in to similar sets of images, and quickly locate pictures of an event or location. Next I want to start working on automatically recognising and tagging people.

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