Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Rechnungs Checker 1.0.13¶
460 words on earthlingsoft
Rechnungs Checker 1.0.13 has been released. This update started off with handling a small nuisance caused by the heroes at Deutsche Telekom: They managed to provide another link on their site to download itemised phone bills. And strangely the format for that file is subtly (as in some extra quotation marks) different from the usual file. With Deutsche Telekom’s web site being confusing enough as it is, I adjusted things so that this variant is handled all right.
But that alone didn’t really seem worth the hassle of making an update – particularly as it only affected people who didn’t have the steps for downloading the ‘correct’ file in muscle memory. And hence it was cool to get a request to support the itemised phone bill files generated for Skype Out calls as well. That wasn’t too much of a problem as far as reading the files was concerned. And they can now be used with Rechnungs Checker. However, other aspects such as the Basic Fee or VAT don’t really seem to be useful for Skype and they just have to set to zero for the time being.
While the Skype file format isn’t quite as predictable as the other file formats because the labels in the file depend on the user’s preferred language – of which Skype supports a long list – this format was pretty much the first one I saw that was a pleasure to read. By which I mean that unlike their colleagues at the traditional phone companies the Skype people encode their file as UTF-8 rather than leaving it for me figure out whether they really are using that strange Windows encoding, say. Being a global company certainly smartens people up in this respect.
The other news are that we are starting to transition our web pages to a new design. While I quite liked the old pages with both the German and English text on the same page – giving you a nice and narrow column for each – that solution wasn’t perfect (it even used a table because it was tabular in nature). So now there is a very simple new design with less text. If there’s one lesson that people try to teach me since 1996 then it is that people reading on the web prefer pages with less information on them. So here you go… a quicker read for you, less typing for me – everybody wins.
The fun thing about the new pages is that they try to automatically decide which language you prefer to read. As I started outlining yesterday, doing that turned out to be more tricky than it should be. But I think we managed to get this into working order now – even if it is not pretty to look at.
