Pro audio folks, you have to have a look at this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/High-Five-from-Neve-API-GML-UREI-SSL-studio-/250728757939?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a60993ab3#ht_580wt_883
Thanks to Myles on the Turtlerock forums.
Has anyone noticed how ebay is getting worse?
I can't illustrate all of my complaints as I didn't think to take screenshots of the old ebay. Some of my complaints may not apply to ebay in the US or the UK or other territories. But, wherever you are in the world, it seems they just can't resist fiddling with it.
It started probably over a year ago when, upon logging in, the user was invited to try the new ebay or opt out. I took one look and opted out. I suppose it was inevitable that it was a fait accompli, that the decision had already been made.
Once the new ebay was imposed on users, the first thing I noticed was the sidebar that gives you various search options. Instead of displaying the various options with checkboxes, clicking on any one of them now blots out the centre of the page with a panel displaying all the options. When these are selected, the page with those options in the search is then loaded. Now a new page would have been loaded in the old ebay, but it didn't involve doing an uber-cool AJAX thing to show the options; rather, they were already there.
This is just one way that the new ebay forces more page loads on its users. One would have thought that any online business whose servers must come under a big load would be trying to reduce data transfers, but hey, what do I know?
Now, I don't want to wade through a lot of stuff I've seen before. If it was of interest, I'd put it in my Watch List and look at it there. So I always choose to sort items by "Newly listed". The old ebay would remember my search settings between sessions. The new ebay always chooses "Best Match" on the first search of the session—I have to do an extra page load to get "Newly listed".
I'm not sure if the old ebay did this, but the new one does and it sure is annoying. I like to search international listings, so I start in my chosen category (Pro Audio) by searching for something which almost never shows up in local listings... something like "calrec". Usually, the local search returns 0 and ebay helpfully notes that a number of items are availble internationally. So far, so good.
Then I load those international listings and search for whatever I want. Under the search textbox are suggestions: over time, ebay remembers what I've searched for "after" the current search and displays links to those searches. At this point, these are things that I'm looking for from anywhere in the world. But these links do not load international listings; when clicked they load only local listings. I've just been searching international listings and there's a good chance that I'd want to continue doing that. So what's the point of those links? Just more useless crap slowing down the loading of the page.
The latest problem is that ebay does not always load my Watch List. Upon logging, one is presented with a Summary page which includes a list of the ten auctions on my Watch List due to end the soonest. Selecting to look at the Watch List (proper) loads a list of 25 or 50 (or whatever I have previously chosen). That's fine.
Now I regularly review my list and delete items that are either too expensive or which, for some reason or other, I have decided would be frivolous or unnecessary purchases. So I page through and delete those. But after two or three deletions, instead of returning me to the same page of the Watch List (as ebay used to), ebay is now returning to the Summary Page. So now I have to regularly page through my Watch List to get back to where I was.
If you look at View Source in your browser, you'll notice that you don't see the current page nicely marked up with HTML or XHTML. No, just the bare bones of the page are marked up and there is a crap-load of Javascript loading everything else. Well, if you're relying on Javscript to do all the heavy lifting on the client side, ebay, why the hell are you forcing me to endure so many complete page loads rather partial ones that any decent Javascript programmer can pull off with 5 minutes of coding?
Bring the old ebay back.
Last year I got a computer for free, courtesy of a computer lab upgrade at work. The arrival of the dual G5 prompted me to postpone the purchase of a Macbook Pro. I still want to go there, but one of the older ones with two Firewire ports and an ExpressCard slot, to make a schmokin' portable recording system (just snared another 16-channel converter).
When I got the G5 I pulled the drives out of my old G4 and put them in. They worked straight away.
Those are 120GB drives because there was some issue about G4s not being able to handle anything larger as an internal drive (or so I read at the time). I decided to partition them and set up RAID 1 sets for each partition. Recently, OSX informed me that the system partition has less than 1GB left. How did that happen? Once upon a time, 25GB was huge!
It's all those photos and Lou's music collection. (I must use iPhotoDiet again!)
Our old Sony 17" CRT monitor ($800 in 1999) has been dying a lot too. The screen fades to black, and then may or may not come back some time later. So we bit the bullet during the weekend and went to a computer store. Just $224 later, I had a 19" widescreen, 2 500GB hard drives and little SATA-to-ATA/Molex adaptors.
Well, I thought I'd just partition the disks and then clone them using CarbonCopyCloner. The problem is that the G5 has only two drive bays. There are third-party solutions to that, but the one still has to power the extra drives. I don't want more than two drives in the machine, but if I'm going to clone the existing ones I need to temporarily have four powered and connected.
Well, connecting wasn't a problem. I have an old SATA RAID card from the G4 which handles the data connection. The problem is how to power them.
One of those third-party solutions relies on the use of the older IDE power connections found on some SATA drives. In the G5, a drive in one of the drive bays can be powered from the SATA power connection (in fact, that's the only way). But if it has an IDE power connector, at least one of those third party solutions can be powered off that. It must be parallelled to the SATA power connector.
So I thought, great! I could do that. And if worse comes to worse I can use the old G4 to power the extra drives.
Well, of course, the new drives don't come with IDE power connectors. Almost none do these days. But the computer shop has IDE to SATA power adaptors. The only problem is that the IDE power connectors on the old drives are male, and so is the connector on each adaptor.
I ended up putting the SATA RAID card in the G5 and removing another PCI slot backplane to run the SATA cables out the back because I wanted to close the G5's case. The fans go psycho when the plastic shield is removed (don't know why, but as a red LED comes on I assume it's intentional). I pulled the G4 along side (remember it has no hard drives in it since I moved them to the G5) and powered the new drives off its hard drive power loom using the power adaptor cables.
The I had to frig around with Disk Utility to partition the drives and configure them as RAIDs (here's a tip: partition both drives the same, and then create the RAIDs). The second partition wouldn't be RAID-ed for some unknown reason until I went to the fifth partition and worked my way backwards!
Take a close look at the address bar...
