
SCons
Having lived with
make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better.
I’ve been enjoying getting to know both
Python and
scons together for the last few months.
What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add to the mélé with my opinions.
Check it out : scons.org.
Website #FAILs.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.
This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.
What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?
14.4 Accept-Language
The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…
Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.
The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.
Ouch. That hurts.
Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?