jr conlin's ink stained banana

Ever since college (some mumble decades ago), i've been "jrconlin" online. Oh, sure, i've dallied with various aliases at some point, including "technoatheist" and "saladbarbarian", but by-and-large, i've been "jrconlin".

Well, except at the new job, where i'm now "jconlin". So, i've spent the past few months regularly mistyping my login only to go and pull the 'r' out. i'm not really sure why, but it annoys me.

In a weird bit of disjointed synchronicity i was listening to a podcast that talked about names, how important they are to people, how you should remember folks names (need to remember to do that more) and how people do things like be more attracted to people who share elements of their own name. (Which might explain Jerry Lee Lewis' dating profile, or not)

That's kind of when it hit me. Not having the 'r' in the name is a lot like someone forcing you to consistently mispronounce your name.

For a thankful lack of a longer explanation, my first name has two components, loosely bound by a hyphen, "John-Reid" (Grayhound Chronicle Fans (either of you) might note that's where the lead characters last name came from.) Thanks to years of Catholic Education and a general lack of sainted individuals bearing both "John" and "Reid", this was generally truncated by blue draped, yardstick wielding nunjas as "John". The equivalent of calling the current President of the United States "Bar" or the most notable Doctor of physics and author of A Brief History of Time as "Ste".

Either of which would probably result in you getting a swirly, and in the latter case, it would be at the hands of giant robots.

Sadly, i can't really change corporate policy, and even if i did, it would be the same result. My first name starts with "J". i don't have a middle name, therefore, my login would remain "jconlin".

You know the worst thing? Lately, i've had to start inserting an "r" into some of my logins.

There's an old joke about how everyone knows the jokes, so they just shout out numbers. Lately, i'm feeling more like numbers.

One of the things i try and do is avoid repeating myself here. So, when i have an idea for a blog post, i do a search. Usually, i then remember that i already did one on that topic. Sometimes, i'll find out i've done more than one.

i'm tempted to just recycle posts here. Just add some randomizer that picks some old topic and adds it to the top of the page as a rerun.

At least it's better than grousing about how much crap i've already written.

There's a valuable rule about API programming that i've just made up. Eat Your Own Dogfood.

Ok, someone else may have come up with that one before, but it's still a damn good rule.

The reason that it's a good rule is because you don't really know if something works or is even important unless you're using it as a critical element in your site. Ideally, you'd have an interface that's platform or language agnostic so that you could slap what-have-you on top and make things run. (This is an eminently solved problem first introduces with Model/View/Controller, but greatly improved in the past three decades.) You're also a lot less likely to do something like drop something important or generally muck with bits you shouldn't. You'll know this because suddenly your stuff doesn't work anymore.

Because that could happen, you do things like test it. A lot. And make sure that things don't go away or change suddenly.

It's also really helpful because as the primary consumers of your own API, you learn the things that you really, really need, and the bits you don't need to spend months optimizing. You'll also have a deep understanding of the needs of your new developers as well as your own needs and how to balance them out. You'll understand how to be secure and can do things like move to a distributed architecture without having to completely redesign everything from scratch.

In other words, it makes sense on a tremendous number of levels.

Still, i'm always a little sad when i find folks that don't do something like that.

But that's no where near the level of grumpiness i reserve for folks that do it wrong.

My apologies for generally geeking out lately, but yeah, this is another post that's geared toward the nerds.

One of the hallmarks of good code and design is making something that doesn't look like it was that hard to make.

One of the problems with doing that is that nobody really understands what an incredible pain in the ass it was to build.

Recently, i've been messing around with is a Javascript tool to let folks easily put a Netflix movie widget onto a page. The idea being that they could run this page anywhere and magic would ensue. As of last Saturday, i managed to do just that.

You enter in a title, it autocompletes from a list of candidates and lets you pick from three or so movies that match what you're looking for. You can then cut and paste the widget code into your blog/webpage of choice and Viola! you've got a widget.

Like i said, it works the way you'd expect and does what it should.

What you don't know is what a pain in the ass this was to build.

The first problem is that Netflix requires OAuth in order to browse the catalog. That means that every request needs to be signed, which means that i have to have every argument that will be passed in a form that can be signed in Javascript. That means hacking into YUI in order to intercept the data fetch call right before it's sent.

Oh yeah, then there's the fun issue that every single browser prevents you from doing "third party" requests. In other words, if you're not talking to the site that served up your HTML, you ain't gonna get jack. Fortunately, there are ways to get around that, and YUI provides a nice AutoComplete library that uses a generic DataSource that can be tied to a script node. (A rather long, complicated way of saying "Hey look! A Loophole!"). Of course, that means that i have to use Netflix's less than official / not really fleshed out / ok, it's broken JSON interface, which, sadly, means i have to proxy the OAuth call through my site so that i can properly wrap the results with a callback function. As a slight benefit, i can embed my own appId and secret into that callback meaning that all the effort in figuring out and implementing the OAuth signing process was kinda wasted.

That said, i was able to take advantage of a request for a brand new, semi-hidden option for the Javascript Widget, "load-now" which allows me to invoke the code immediately instead of waiting for page load. Thus the reason that the widget you see is live and testable.

Even worse? This will probably never really see the light of day more than just be a demo of what can be done. Once things are fully working on the back end, i may put up a more official version, but by then, i'm betting it'll be far simpler to roll out.

Granted, this has made working on a Netflix WordPress plug in easier, but that's another post.

i could care less if i'm on IE8's shit list.

For those of you that don't know what i'm talking about (in other words, a good 99% of you), Microsoft's latest Browser (Internet Explorer 8) is keeping a list of sites that it thinks aren't coded to their standard. It's making this determination by having sites vouch for whether or not they are coded correctly by saying so, rather than, say, seeing if the site generates errors when displayed.

i don't care because 15% of my current visitors use IE7. i expect that number to probably stay there. And if i wind up on IE 8's "incompatible" list, it means that my sites are rendered according to some of the rules that the current IE7 follows. This, to quote the discoverer of the quark, is not a big thing.

Much like any other device or tool, if a browser fails to provide a consistently satisfactory level of service, folks will stop using it. This is definitely true when there's any number of alternates available to them for free. i'm also willing to say that it's nearly impossible for a web using individual to locate one of my sites and not know that there are alternates to Internet Explorer. i am deep in the darker regions of the web and various portal sites like Yahoo!, Google and Apple are all providing their own alternates in an attempt to wrest control of the internet's last 12 inches. (Heck, most folks have ipods and the current version of iTunes is bloated up with Safari.)

This kind of reminds me of being threatened by my second grade teacher that my actions will be recorded into my permanent record. Once those words had meaning. Forty or so years later… quite a bit less so.