uRandom

23 Oct 2004: Starting with PayPal

(discuss)
(cf. #5, #4, #3, #2) We've been looking at online payments at work recently - it's not as straight-forward as you might think. Paypal would be the obvious "easy" choice, but it looks very amatueurish, and also needs a lot of work. Better options seem to cost a fortune.
There seems to be a gap between "I want to sell postcards online" and "I'm the size of Amazon.com". So I've set up a PayPal account, and we'll see what happens if anyone chooses to buy the shell scripting tutorial which is available online here. It's not clear to me how I can confirm (without various browser requirements) that the customer has paid for the thing. That would seem to me, to be the first thing to fix before taking such a project online. PayPal are a big player, though, so I'm sure it's all been thought through. I'll see how it works here, then see if it's worth considering for real projects.

2 Oct 2004: Why I dumped Internet Explorer (C|Net News.Com)

Worth reading for both IE and non-IE users. He summarises:

Maybe this only marks a brief interruption in [Microsoft]'s unparalleled dominance. Microsoft surely remains the odds-on favorite, but I have a hunch more and more computer Web surfers have become as fed up as I am with the status quo.