jr conlin's ink stained banana

It's sad how quickly i filled this card while shopping.

But the thing to remember is that when you win, you just lose your mind.

(Now i'm half tempted to turn this into a web-app.)

Developers are lazy folks (or at the best, strive to be lazy).

For them, solving a problem is avoiding work. There may be sizable effort required to get something built and running but the main reason they do it is so that they don't have to do something that requires even more effort. To win support for a given idea, you have to convince other folks that your method is also easier and faster than "the other one". Much like electricity and water, developers favor the path of least resistance.

i was kind of reminded of this fact while reading a post from Eran Hammer-Lahav about the death of OAuth. Having watched the OAuth list for a while, i find it kind of interesting that he is the one noting the protocols reported passing, but anyone who's dealt with the arcane dance involved with getting OAuth to work just right (or even understand the very limited problem it was meant to solve) will probably not be surprised by this proclamation.

OAuth is designed to handle the exchange of tokens between three (or four, depending on how you look at things) partners: The Customer, The Application and The Provider. A "token" (or two, again, depending on your point of view on this) merely ensures that the party you were talking to is still the party you're talking to, and that each party can terminate the connection at any time. That's it. That's all it's supposed to do. There's no exchange of information about any of these parties. There's no hard rule about security around the connection being made. Nothing else. To do this magical process, however, requires three separate tokens and associated secrets, a login screen, and a potentially complicated client based signature method. All of which can be completely baffling, which the spec doesn't really help solve. (On a personal note, i read the spec twice and still managed to screw up one portion of the new 1.0a version. Why 1.0a and not 1.1? That's a matter of discussion.)

i'll note that the other paths of least resistance are things like Facebook Connect, Google Login, Yahoo BBAuth, Microsoft Passport, and a host of others. These are generally easier to deal with for sites because you simply point someone at the login page and get a bunch of credential information back, including information about the user. Of course, the biggest issue with using these is that you'll have a handful of login and credential services, but since you can make the security "someone else's problem" you don't have to care as much. You also don't get to own your user's information and are at the whims of a fickle pantheon of user credential gods who may smite your service for any reason, but again, that's par for the course as far as most services are concerned.

Personally, for various paranoid reasons, i'd want to have an "Open Connect" suite of protocols that used OpenID for login, OAuth for credential exchange and Portable Contacts for automatic customer information fetches. Of course, the problem there is that we're dealing with three different protocols which don't always dovetail and may lead to an even uglier mess to actually implement. Which means that the resistance will be higher.

Which means that either it won't get done, or that i need to wait until the other ones become such a pain that someone else builds a better version.

Because that'd be the lazier thing to do.

Right, so to use Chrome ChromeOS, i need a GMail account, which can be removed/shutdown/deleted/made inaccessible at any time.

Apple's Quicktime (which is the delivery channel of choice for movie streams) is only available for Windows and MacOS.

YouTube will soon be shutting off "unlicensed" parties from their site.

The only ray of sunshine? The fact that soon the internet may be free of Fox News.

All of this is a quick reminder that quite often you have little say in what decisions you make, and that most decisions will not be made in your favor. Does make me wonder if Net Neutrality will really matter in the future if the servers we'd be pointing at are going to close up.

i think i'm somewhat low on the "fun" part of my life lately.

It's a busy time, and a lot is going on, but for various reasons, not a lot of joy seems to be creeping in from the edges. Building things generally makes me happy and there's quite a lot of things i need/want to build in the after hours. i'm even making some headway on them. The problem is that when i get home, i'm generally tired of thinking and not really up on the idea of spending effort working on things more complicated than clicking on links on reddit.

i'd mess around with new things, except that most of the "new stuff" really isn't that interesting. Take the Chrome OS, which is basically a bootable browser pointed toward Google. Uhm. Thanks? But i already have an iTouch. Sorry, but what's the major difference between this and a reasonably cheap laptop running Ubuntu? Oh, right! The fact that said laptop will most likely continue to work after my gmail account is hacked or i can't get an open 802.11n signal at 30,000 feet or eighty four miles east of Scranton.

Likewise, there's the new Budda Phone which looks promising, except for the fact that it's still freaking expensive ($600 unlocked, or close to $3000 on the 2 year plan, now with extra early termination pain), plus the ever elusive "better phone" just beyond the horizon. Plus, it's just a freaking phone, and it's not like your going to be able to easily tether it to your ChromeOS box when your outside Scranton anyway.

i'd write something for NaNoWriMo, but everything i tried so far has been beyond horrible. i'm half tempted to release 250 first pages and claim it as a collection of short stories. Plus, it's not like i've been writing terribly good posts here, so i've less confidence i'd put together something that wouldn't be used to torture future prisoners of war.

i think i need to do some random act of fun. Something random, possibly damaging, as well as something i may fear pictures appearing on the Internet. Something i will look back upon and try to come up with an alibi.

i'm not quite sure i know what it will be.

But i know it'll be fun.

Kent taught me something rather interesting today. Of course, he had no idea he was doing it at the time, nor did he have any idea what it was.

First, a bit of background. My new snazzy laptop features a somewhat unusual trackpad. It has a fairly large touch area, and a large single "button" beneath it. What makes it unusual is that it's multi-touch. It also features a few other tricks up it's sleeve, including the fact that you can "touch click" (tap your finger to right left click), swirl your finger around to "wheel" down the screen, and click the far right of the button area to "right click". i also have "momentum" and "flick" turned on, meaning that my mouse "drifts" after i swipe it around the screen. i love all of these features, but honestly, anyone who's used a non Mac based laptop should be familiar with the left/right bit of the button.

Kent, is a fairly recent Mac convert. He has several mac laptops and while still trying to suss out all the peculiarities of how to use them, is now reasonably fluent with the interface. For those not wholly familiar with Macs, i'll note that they tend to have a singular button (one generally hidden at the bottom of the track area), do not feature things like swirling finger scrolls or momentum. In fact, to do what most windows/linux folks are accustomed to with a right click, requires at least two fingers on a mac.

Honestly, i don't have a gripe about either nor do i feel that one is better than the other. (Ok, i think that "touch clicking" is a damn site better than "move the cursor, lift and click the hidden button", but that's me.)

What Kent taught me was just how important it is to not screw with a person's expectations of behavior. For him, the middle of the trackpad was the "left click" zone. The fact that it didn't do that, or even worse, performed a "right click" half of the time he tried to use it, meant that the interface was "broken". Much like how i feel that macs are inherently broken and hard to use because the interface is counter intuitive to the way that i've learned how to use a computer. This is actually even more borne out by Ubuntu, which offers both KDE (windows-like) and Gnome (mac-like) interfaces as the two most popular choices. (A few years ago, someone remarked that my window manager was broken because the app menu wasn't at the top of the screen.)

What's more, he came from using two button (even virtual ones) trackpads in the past, but has been recently conditioned to now think that behavior is wrong. i guess this is one of the reasons that i tend to not favor "new and innovative" interfaces. Yes, with some level of effort, i'll be able to work out what you want me to do, but unless the reward is high enough, i usually won't be bothered. Much how college professors incorrectly assume that their class is the only one giving out assignments, you can't assume that your interface is the only one someone will ever deal with.

If i can't change it to suite my needs, it's broken. If your app doesn't alllow me to remap keys to either VI mode or the standard Windows control set, you're broken. If i can't move a window to where i want it to go without triggering unexpected behaviors, (i'm looking at you Windows 7 drag and snap to resize a window craptastic interface), you're seriously broken. (Pro Tip: You can turn that insanely broken interface bug off)

Much like the old Maker adage, if you can't break it open, it's not yours, i follow the same rules about customizations.

Now, if only i could figure out a hot key to fix mac trackpads when i have to use one…