jr conlin's ink stained banana

For a little over a month now, every Friday evening, my neighbors and i collect on our respective front yards for a "Happy Hour". There's beer, wine, snacks, plenty of seating and laughs.

Every Friday afternoon, people drive or walk by, occasionally glance our way, and continue on. Nobody is ever curious enough to want to stop by.

Granted, we started out doing this because we wanted to meet more of the folks who we happen to share this part of San Jose with, and we've all been fairly surprised by the lack of response. Some claim different cultures, others snobbery, still others have their reason. Personally, i think it's just that folks have forgotten how to be friendly.

When was the last time you struck up a conversation with someone in an elevator, or in line at the store? It could be something simple like, "Ooh, i don't think i ever tried that brand of cereal. Is it any good?" or even about the weather. You're only going to be in contact with that person for a few seconds, why not try and make them smile?

Thing is, we don't. We're all generally on cellphones or plugged into iPods or otherwise diligently trying to avoid contact with our fellow humans. We strive to be utterly oblivious to what exists outside of the small bubble we feel safe in, and that's leading to a lot of crap that folks aren't going to know how to deal with. If there was a major incident in your area (earthquake, volcano, tornado, airplane crash in your backyard, etc), who could you count on helping you? Who would know to look for all the members of your family? Who might have food and water and be willing to share for a few days? Reverse the situation and can you honestly say that if said bad thing happened to the house half a block away, would you be able to do the same?

i'm friendly with the folks in my neighborhood for pretty much selfish reasons. i want to be able to use them as a backup should anything horrible happen here. To pay for that selfish goal, i try to take measures to answer as many of those questions as i can about them. Heck, it even helps me figure out how to ration accordingly by figuring out who on the block are assholes who i shouldn't deal with. "Wow, your Hummer is out of gas? That's too bad. Well, you can probably use the battery from it to charge your iPhone at least. Maybe you can call out for a pizza then."

i guess this all fits in with how folks just don't want to be responsible anymore, but that's another rant entirely.

Allow me to continue to point out the blindingly obvious. Whoever creates the simplest interface wins.

This is a point that kind of struck home with me sometime this morning. i was going over the Open Auth specification, and the older Open Auth Specification where i discovered that you simply pass the Consumer Key in a crypted, signed manner back to the authenticating site before you can access the data. Where do you get the Consumer Key? Well, first you need to get an access token, which is preceeded by a authorization request, which begins with an unauthorized request. Granted, the initial request is made to a given server which will contain a redirect to the XRDS server information which is a documented and reflective set of instructions in XML which describe where to get the additional elements you'll need to construct where to ask for that unauthorized request. Of course, once one goes through that multiple hand off process, involving several redirects, a presumed level of caching and one can only hope several sacrificial chicken offerings performed by hastily constructed LEGO kits, you discover something rather key.

Even though you've now gotten the individual to log in, you still don't know anything about them.

That part, as noted in the specification, is left as an exercise for the implementor.

Now, while i appreciate the level of effort that has gone into this design and construct, and i certainly do want to know that there's near universal agreement that having something that's both open and secure isn't easy, i just want a way to have folks log in and not have to retype a dozen points of data.

This is one of the big reasons that things like YUI, Gears and Python generally wins as far as geeks are concerned. They work like cars. i don't have to know the proper combustion ratio and timing required to drive a piston nor do i have to understand the effective torque levels required in order to rotate a series of gears about a common axle if i want to go get a gallon of milk. i just get in the car, perform a few simple initialization functions and i'm off. i don't have to think about what all is going on.

It's one of the reasons i always chuckle whenever i hear the old saw about how Linux is like a chair, they give you the raw materials to make the most comfortable chair you've ever sat in, provided you do the work of assembly. i don't want to learn carpentry, metallurgy and upholstery, i just want to sit and get some work done.

Yes, i've looked at using the various libraries for the various languages. They each suck in their own special ways, and it's not really the fault of the author, since they just spent a good portion of their lives trying to weed their way through arcane theoretical constructs and LEGO filled chicken entrails.

As it is, i've kinda blown a day messing on something that should have been a quick bit of work. Ah well, i guess i'll just use another time honored computer science technique and just abstract out that part. Perhaps, when i need to actually implement it, someone else will have created a simpler wrapper.

Otherwise, i get the stinking suspicion that person will be me.

Since when did web technology become a daytime drama series anyway?

One of the sick pass-times i have is to read the comments on blogs like TechCrunch. Oddly, they remind me of the sorts of fan discussions one sees around various soap operas as folks jump to insane conclusions based on the same level of facts and research one sees at creationist museums. The other amazing fact is that the astounding ignorance on display makes me giggle my fool head off.

Look, folks on TechCrunch who will never, ever read this post, i'll make it blindingly simple for you: You don't have all the information. Hell, you don't even have 1% of the information. You know those folks you laugh at for falling for Nigerian Billion Dollar email scams? Yeah, that's about where you are in relation to this. What's more, you aren't going to get "the whole story" because you don't need to know it any more than you need to know the sort of hydro-dynamic pressures involved in processing the milk you pour on your cereal. Most of their days aren't spent doing anything more glamorous than sitting in a room trying to hear what the folks on the other side of the speakerphone are saying, putting together or taking apart powerpoint presentations, or slapping together bits of code to do something interesting. Feel free to fantasize about the romance of the insurance adjustment industry compared to what most of the days are like.

While they are definite role models to some of us that are lucky to have known them, these folks aren't celebrities. They get to have private lives, and if they share any insight into what they're doing, it's up to them.

Perhaps that's the secret to getting high readership. Set up a bunch of fake pseudo companies that sell email based kitty litter and talk endlessly about how they're going to be destroyed by Apple's latest iPoop handheld only to fight off against the evil intentions of Google's new Open Source gBox Surprise 2.0 beta.

"Next week on As The Diode Fluxes: Will Prashant finally give into his temptations and drink the extra mountain dew that's in the fridge? Will Micah find his true happiness in a palate that doesn't include #CE834A or will Shelley dash his dreams by asking for yet another design mock up by Tuesday?"

Glad i got over crap like that when i graduated high school.

i have to wonder at what point marriages will fail because the husband forgot to friend the wife?

Web 2.4 seems to be increasingly minutia based. Consider that folks use Twitter to tell folks of various activities, thoughts, and bowel movements they may be having at any particular moment, which can be bad enough. Then we get to the various aggregation sites like MyBlogLog and FriendFeed that collect up what tracks you've listened to, comments you've posted, and well, everything else you've done online short of the number of times you clicked on the iPhone ad hoping that the price has dropped again this week (and the only reason that's not included is because nobody made a feed of that yet).

One wonders about the level of digital noise we're creating. i'm just as culpable as anyone else is. i mean, sure, i might be interested in photos you've recently posted up to Flickr, passingly interested in the stuff you've added to delicious, and not really interested in the fact that you have Afternoon Delight on endless loop at last.fm.

i know that there's some effort being made to filter the noise and produce a more clean level of… mindless personal minutia that can be combined together with other elements of social trivia to further emphasize how my a person's life is, but in an era where there are guidelines in reducing the amount of interpersonal communication, one has to wonder at what point this all fits in.

i suppose that in the general maturation of the web we've passed the three-year-old "So-and- so-and- so-and then the monkey? he grew real big? and then he- then he- then he jumped up and down REALLY fast and - and - and that's how i think of major political parties and the major technical companies backing them? and then - and then…" to the point where we're all 13 year old girls with iPhones who like totally have got to tell Suzy and Bobbi and Jamie and Steve the fact that they so totally love that new SproutCore thing that they heard Billie and Julie and Mikey were totally into.

Me? i like to think that i'm living ahead of the curb in the later stages of the Interweb 36.9. The one where i stand out front of my website and scream at you kids to stay off my LAN.

i have to admit, i'm nearly tempted to get one of the new iPhones. Nearly. Then reality hits me.

Why? Well, not because of any of the new features. Yeah 3G is faster (duh), and a built in A-GPS is kinda nice. The camera is crap, and the MP3 storage is retarded, but then this is an iPod and how else would Steve sell Macs to the minions?

No, what makes this device actually intriguing to me is the iPhone 2.0 API kit. In theory, i as a developer have the ability to code up anything that Apple can. This means that should i want to put Java, Opera, OpenSSH or any other such product on the device, it's conceivable that i could, even if Apple doesn't want me to. Personally, i don't buy the whole load of crap that "background applications require too much battery power" since Palm managed to do that with proper thread handling and low power polling states, and you can't say that Palm devices sucked batteries dry in minutes like WinCE devices did. (i'm also reminded of one of the very first popular plugins for the old box Mac, Switcher, which allowed you to run multiple apps because Apple swore you couldn't.)

Mind you, i'm still reserving judgment. Mostly because of things like "Yeah, the new phone is $200, provided you lock into a 2 year contract, don't want to upgrade in that time, and have to activate the thing in the store." (i don't want it as a phone. i'd want it as a portable device. How much does it cost without the lock in?) Plus with Apple's penchant to not disclose everything, i'm waiting for folks far smarter than me to bypass Apple's "helpfulness" and make something actually usable.

i'd almost be tempted to get an iTouch, well, except that it's missing stuff it shouldn't be (mic, speaker) and since it's the obvious red-headed step child (seriously, i know it's not a phone. i know it's significantly cheaper than an iPhone. But constantly charging iTouch folks for upgrades and features is just being a dick.), i'm pretty sure that it's going to be the next generation Newton.

Like many things of Cupertino's origin, the nearly get it right. Oh well, at least i didn't spend $500 for a now discontinued and obsolete device less than a year ago. (That'd be the 4GB iPhone v1)

Granted, i could have used the "rebate" check to buy it's replacement, though.