01 May 2002

Wed, 01 May 2002

Clueless in Dallas

These morons should go back to the printing press. From Dallas Morning News: "If you operate a Web site and wish to link to this Site, you may link only to the home page of the Site and not to any other page or subdomain of us."  [Scripting News] Then we've got Wired weighing in on the subject: 1. Site Barks About Deep Link (42.1 points). complaining about deep linking ... Segundo [( blogdex : recent )]


The real irony here is that by linking to the company's policy on deep linking, we are, in fact, in violation of the company's policy on deep linking. It follows then that it's not possible to know the company's policy on deep linking without following a deep link into the policy, unless that policy is clearly stated on the home page. Yikes.


Warning Will Robinson! Run-on sentence: Anyhow, my policy on linking goes like this: You can link to whatever you want on my site, no matter where it is, and I promise, to the best of my ability, not to break your links, because Jakob Nielsen told me so, and I know that Jakob Nielsen's smarter than anybody and everbody at the Dallas Morning News.

Posted at: 22:47 | permalink

Radio desktop website delete button fixed

I figured out what was breaking my Radio desktop website's delete button. I had an embedded button with a form post in the RSS feed. That embedded post seemed to break the post for the delete button. When I removed the button post from the RSS feed, the delete button started working again. Phew! There's definitely some QA work that needs to be done on the desktop website interface. It's become clear to me in the last few days that if you really hammer this thing, it breaks. I guess that's to be expected, but a good QA process with automated test tools and nightly unit and regression tests would help. Oh well, while all's not perfect in userland, at least Dave's admitting it now. Hopefully, a sense of humility emerges and real improvement follows.

Posted at: 20:36 | permalink

Radio macro error on prefs.txt solved

Caveat Emptor. Well, via some blackmagic and a post by Mark Woods, I managed to figure out what was wrong with my Radio putting up the macro error on prefs.txt when I tried to post a new entry. There was a stray double quote in one of my posts. That appears to be a problem with Radio's validation of the post, ie. I shouldn't be able to post garbage that's going to hork up the entire application. It was quite difficult to find because I had posted so much stuff in the last couple of days. It looks like it'll work for the time being but my delete buttons still aren't working. Not sure what the problem is there. I'm still going to investigate movable type though I don't think I'll get to it till the weekend. Sigh.

Posted at: 16:26 | permalink

Asynchronous web services

David A. Chappell: By 2006, more than 40 percent of the standard Web services traffic will be asynchronous.  [via Guido Casper] [via Sam Ruby]


Chappell's major conclusion: "In the end, the clear solution is a Web services deployment that's based largely on JMS, yet allows the ability to extend and blend SOAP-over-HTTP with SOAP-over-JMS." Not to beat a dead horse, but Electric's Glue has been running this way for a while. That is, offering easy startup in synchronous mode and full, integrated support for SOAP via JMS in asynchronous mode. My friend Anthony Hinxman, who teaches computer science at Portland State University, had mentioned the guaranteed delivery problem as a serious weakness in the early work that I did with SOAP and XML-RPC. I believe SOAP with JMS behind it answers all of his concerns in that regard.


One of the brilliant product design strategies employed by Glue is that it's so easy to get running out of the box and yet you can layer a lot of sophisticated technology on top of it, at your discretion. They leave the choice up to you, as it should be. If you need SSL and JMS, great, they're there. But if you don't, you don't have to pay the implementation cost required to support these additional features. And that's why I love Glue.

Posted at: 06:13 | permalink