E-COMmon Sense

Canadian banks are rapidly moving towards image-based cheque clearing. That means that cheques will no longer be physically shipped around the country during the clearing process; instead, a digital image of the front and back of the cheque will be sent instead. This has many advantages, as the Canadian Payments Association points out in their report Cheque Imaging in Canada: An Idea Whose Time has Come. What they are careful not to say is that most of those advantages translate into reduced costs.

RBC Royal Bank is Canada's largest bank, and has been agressively moving toward cheque imaging. This saves them money. But they're making their customers pay to save them that money!

Continue reading "Install Money Saving Technology, then Charge Your Customers More" »

Gotta rant for a moment: Why are we seeing a resurgence in the use of fixed-width webpages?! I've been using a 1280x1024 screen since 1993 and thought the days of a big margin down both sides -- or, worse yet, a big margin down the right side -- were long gone. Yet ctv.ca, redhat.com, cibc.com, and way too many blog sites are using only one-third to one-half of the screen. And when my eyes are tired and I zoom the font size (Ctrl+Mouse Wheel), I end up with two or three words per line!

I agree that whitespace can be an effective design tool, but there's a limit. If you're going to design a page with generous margins down both sides, at least size the middle portion in em units so that when I zoom the text size the line length increases too. Tip of the day: you can size your images in ems as well, so that zoming the text zooms the graphics

Of course, sometime after I wrote this, I switched to the "Kubrick" theme for the blog -- and ended up with a narrow web layout. D'oh!

I use Voice-Over-IP for my phone service. That means that my residential phone calls travel over the Internet. My Internet provider is Rogers Cable; my VOIP provider is Vonage.

Rogers has just started to offer residential phone service using VOIP over their private network -- but they just don't get it. The whole point of VOIP is cost reduction; by [a] taking advantage of the economies of scale provided by the Internet and [b] offloading some of the service details to the consumer, the cost of phone service is dramatically reduced.

Continue reading "Rogers Just Doesn't Get It" »

The music industry is definitely changing, and (as usual) change is producing conflict. In this case, the conflict is between the music industry, which has for a hundred years sold an information product on physical media and is struggling to find its relevance in a virtual environment, and those who live in that virtual environment and consider the traditional music industry as irrelevant as their physical media.

This debate is complex and will take years to resolve. I have been proud of the balance that Canada has struck between providers' and users' rights in many copyright matters (especially when compared with the DMCA situation south of the border), but am very concerned that the recently-announced copyright reform initiatives swing the balance of power to the providers' side.

But putting the debate aside, I find it bizarre and intensely aggravating that the Canadian music industry continues to imply that copying music for your own use is illegal or immoral.

Continue reading "It's not Illegal if the Law Says You Can Do It" »

A web URI is a terrible thing to waste.

Over and over I see companies doing crazy things with their URIs!...

Continue reading "Usable URIs" »