Both sides of the fence. Rafe Colburn:
I’m beginning to feel like every time I touch anything, I have planted the seeds for a future outage.
The more systems administration tasks I perform, the more I understand why systems administrators tend to hate programmers.
This day in particular, I take no particular pride in either one. Not my administrative abilities (can’t upload images to my own blog), or the pain I inflict on others with the software I build (bug fix coming up!). Though, I intentionally do administer my own stuff, it helps in designing code others would use.
And on that note: never underestimate sane defaults.
Live and learn. Interesting comments on Tim Bray’s mod_atom post, which I want to take out of the Atom context because they’re not specific to one particular format.
David Megginson on Namespaces in retrospect:
… in retrospect, we got too far in front of implementors’ requirements and delivered a spec to solve problems someone might have some day in the future, instead of problems people actually had at the time.
And:
I liked the final Namespace spec, even though it wasn’t what I had originally argued for, but when you have a spec that almost *everyone* ignores or gets wrong (XSLT and SOAP excepted), it might be time to acknowledge that the problem is the spec instead of the implementors.
Reinier Zwitserloot on XML as binary format:
That wasn’t the case, and as a result, we’ve got this mess. It’s unfortunate that 99% of all so-called ‘XML-based’ standards are actually not XML in the vox populi definition - doing whacky XML tricks like non-default namespaces, or user-defined entities, breaks everything.
You try, you learn, and next time around you do something else.
Yahoo 360, Reincarnate. I have to prefix this by saying, I do like random invites I get, a chance to explore. Some I stick with, some I don’t, can’t tell in advance,mostly it’s as logical as deciding to say like peanut butter or dislike S’mores. But Yahoo Mash and me seem to have started on the wrong foot.
On Facebook people send you friend invites. On Yahoo Mash, you’ve got to watch out for your friends!
What the e-mail says: Soandso started a profile for you on Mash! It’s good to be loved! ;)What it really means: Soandso took possession of your public identity. Is that ok with you? Of course not! So register to reclaim your online identity (and enjoy our ads)!
As a courtesy, Yahoo 360Mash creates a default profile that you can then reclaim:
What the profile says: This is you.
What it really says: This is you on drugs. You post hand drawn pictures of the worst kind. You write bad poetry, the likes of which not seen since 3rd grade.
Still, bad taste has never stopped anyone. This may be the most happening spot in town.
What I want to do next: Check Soandso’s profile and their network.
What I have to do next: “Claim your profile before wandering around on Mash!”
Maybe some other time.
Apropos, social networking rehab.
Yay to DRM. For some reason, iTunes decided I need to re-authorize an album before I can listen to it. I barely have any DRMed stuff, but a shuffle play of the library bumped into one of those. Anyway, re-authorize I did, and now that track is authorized on 2 out of 5 machines. I’m just wondering where is that other machine I’m supposed to own and authorized before? Maybe an iTunes bug?
And vendor lock-in. Speaking of no DRM, that’s because my primary machine runs Linux. It’s the one playing music the most, and syncs with the iPod. Turns out, that may not last for long. Though you can’t believe everything you read on the Web, and this link comes courtesy of BoingBoing which tends to favor the-sky-is-falling posts, if it happens to be true, it might signal the end of a love affair between me and the in-your-pocket Apple product line.
Apropos, the iFlop.
engtech
Assaf