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CMN3101E The system is unavailable due to "CMN0420E".

Yesterday I did something that made me feel like a total plonker. I was using a social networking site (I won't say which one - though many of you will know by now) and as these sites do it has the feature to check your webmail address book for existing members and send invites to other people. I avoided the "Auto-invite" option and went to "Manually invite". The next screen presented me with the title "Find your friends who are already on XXXXX" and a button labelled "Next", and a list of addresses with a pre-ticked checkbox next to each (and no uncheck all option).

Oops. Pressing that Next button did not find which friends were already members. It sent invites to everyone.

I'm really sorry if I spammed you.

Usability lessons

• Don't use "Next" as a label for the final step. To me, and I think to a sizeable number of others as well, "Next" implies that you'll be going onto the next step of a multi-step process. The final step that actually does something meaningful should have a more meaningful label.
• Give every page or every step of a process a unique page heading.
• Limit the number of emails a single user can generate at one time.
• Provide tools to help users manipulate large sets of data (i.e. an uncheck all option).

User lessons

• Don't assume that the people making the site have got the above right.
• If you're even slightly confused as to what will happen, assume the worst rather than the best and act accordingly.

After this I had a look at my Gmail address book. It was full of rubbish. People I had emailed just once (all those unsubscribe@ or abuse@ addresses for example. Irony.); people who had left the companies and email addresses in question behind; lots of people I didn't recognise at all; at least six of my own email addresses.

How many of you ever manage your Gmail address book? There's a bunch of features in there for doing so, but one of the selling points of Gmail is that you never need to manage anything - there's enough storage and enough processing power on the Google servers to keep everything, forever.

We're trapped in a half-way world where the computing power allows us to never delete or manually manage anything but the interfaces and mashups only really work if you do.

Picking up from my first attempt here's a more methodical approach. With somewhat more success this time.

Continue reading this Very True Thing

Mad cat based advertising on Facebook, again. This one is less strange and more just plain wrong. I presume that this is not the modelled by the same cat as the other day. Though if it is I can only presume that his "accident" was the other cats beating him up.

I'm ill. :-(

So only a short post today. Opera have released more data from their MAMA survey, including this gem:

MAMA used a MySQL SMALLINT data type (max. value: 65,535) to store the quantity of comments on a page. Surprisingly, in the most extreme cases this was not big enough. Only 1 URL was found to exceed this in MAMA's URL set [...] http://genforum.genealogy.com/ny/all.html. MAMA stored its maximum value of 65,535, but a live analysis showed 146,376 comments in a 9.2MB HTML file!

Authoring feature used	Criteria used to match	Quantity validating	Total quantity using technology	Percentage validating
IIS Web Server	Detection of "iis" string in HTTP header Server field	24,743	883,854	2.80%
Apache Web Server	Detection of "apache" string in HTTP header Server field	110,834	2,347,328	5.38%

"At this time, support for is available only when running on Windows with the latest Firefox browser or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater."

I find it quite hard to believe that the service will work okay in IE 5.0 (released in 1999!) but not in nine years newer browsers like Opera 9.5 and Safari 3.

Has it been tested at all in Opera?

Depending on the response I get I may reveal which site the original message came from.

Better late than never, what did I make of @media last week?

• Number of talks that included LOL Cats: 1½
• Number of talks that included Rick Rolling: 2
• Number of talks that included comedy graphs: 2
• Number of talks that included mention of Twitter being down all the time: I lost count, but at least 4

There are a few technical subjects (HTML 5, WAI ARIA, jQuery) that I hope to post more about later so here are a few impressions of each session:

Jeffrey Veen included some of my favourite charts in his talk (I have favourite charts/graphs/maps - what do you mean that you don't?). Indi Young made me think that every single project I'd ever worked on had been poorly planned. Drew McLellan says "everyone hates their CMS" and he's right. According to Stuart Langridge the fact that we use 410 responses on VisitLondon.com puts us in a very elite group. Nate Koechley explained why what I do is really very important. Richard Ishida baffled the audience with Unicode.

Good fun all round, roll on 2009.

Found this in some third party JavaScript I had to incorporate into a site.

var today = new Date();
today.setTime(today.getTime());

The two lines are exactly as written, one after the other within the same function. Can anyone tell me a situation in which the second line is not completely redundent?