Posted in authentication, best-practices, customer-relations, identity, privacy/secrecy/security at 11:35 am by Josh Peters
Today I got a phone call from someone claiming to be VW Credit (and she very well may have been a rep. but read on). She told me that my June payment never happened and that she needed a checking account # and bank routing # to make a payment (she didn’t sound nearly as demanding or immediate as that sentence reads, by the way). I eventually refused to give her this information based on some of the answers to what should be simple questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in web, xml at 10:16 pm by Josh Peters
I’ve been reading a lot on RDF lately in an effort to better understand how to keep from creating a brand-new resource format that no-one else will ever use for any web projects I work on for my job. During the research I’ve noticed a useful feature of XML (actually, it’s an SGML feature that is thankfully carried over to XML).
DOCTYPE declarations can be used to create your own entities! This in and of itself doesn’t sound like much, but a creative XML developer can use this to create abbreviations for commonly used bits of information.
For the CSS developer working on a style-sheet for an XHTML page, you can declare &ForegroundColor; to be “#ddaa00″ (if you like that sort of color) and instead of typing “#ddaa00″ several dozen times you can just use &ForegroundColor; instead. Later, when your boss decides that “#ddaa33″ is a more-appropriate shade of orange you only have to change it in one place.
But wait, there’s more (and there’s also a down-side which sucks big time …)
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in flamebait, politics/government at 2:43 pm by Josh Peters
This past weekend there was a religious discussion that I tried to duck out on as best I could. No, it didn’t concern Jesus or any religion of that sort; I’m talking about politics here 
My wife’s grandpa was talking at length about issues with this country’s immigration policy (disclaimer: he avidly listens to AM talk radio). Today at work I had a brief discussion of a similar topic with a co-worker (disclaimer: the co-worker was advocating something said by Bill O’Reilly).
Mr. O’Reilly lays out the following plan:
- build a big fence to keep
Mexicans unwanted illegal aliens out
“That would effectively close the border to smugglers of humans and drugs.”
Uh huh, whatever. You can’t stop drugs from coming in with a wall; there’s too much money to be had to keep drugs from coming into the country somehow (read: bribing this much-touted border patrol).
- Illegals must register themselves with DHS. This isn’t a bad idea, it’ll just never work (more on this later).
- Change laws so that corporations will be liable if they employ illegals. This only requires a huge alteration of existing law practices and naturally sets up a centralized employment database that is way too scary to even consider. Everyone in the workforce (that is, the legal, above the table workforce) would have to go through some level of background check that would make such a system totally implausible due to the manpower involved, take away rights from states and set up a scenario for even more discrimination of reforming criminals. Strike 3.
The registration idea isn’t such a bad idea, there’s just one major flaw to fix: you can’t force people to register themselves without benefit. Microsoft is forcing Windows users to use their “Genuine Advantage” by denying them important software updates if they aren’t registered (or even registered several times over). However, in the non-cyber world you cannot simply force your will upon people and make them obey. There has to be incentive for registering yourself with the DHS. Here’s where I’ll take plenty of heat: you can’t use threats to get outlaws to do what you want. If we already were deporting 80% of illegal immigrants the threat of being hunted down and being more punished might work, but then again there wouldn’t be a debate if America was already 80% efficient w.r.t. illegal immigrants.
I’m not talking rewardings here, or even amnesty. I hesitate even offering any ideas up because an idea can easily take the focus off of a good principle, and I think my principle is a really good one. Offer illegal aliens something they want in exchange for registering themselves with the DHS. You cannot punish or threaten to punish individuals who are already eluding the law to the degree that illegal immigrants seem to be doing. Only by offering something desired can they be lured into lawful behavior. And the bill currently in the Senate isn’t the best compromise: too much money and too long of a wait to risk becoming legitimate. Something simpler, easier, and more worthwhile is needed to win over the hearts of current illegal immigrants.
Permalink
Posted in lawsuits at 10:29 am by Josh Peters
Well, Major League Baseball has officially gone off the deep end. Apparently fantasy baseball is a bad thing in their eyes, because the players don’t make money for the use of their names.
I hope this goes to trial because fantasy baseball has been around for a long time and if this is a trademark issue the players’ union may just lose this one.
Permalink
Posted in apple/mac/ipod, programming, web at 5:50 pm by Josh Peters
Well, today Apple announced Safari for Windows. There’s a lot of surprise on the web regarding this, and a lot of folks seem confused as to why they would do such a thing. It’s not about iTunes, nor is it about getting people to switch; it’s all about the iPhone.
Today at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference Steve Jobs also announced that the iPhone will not have a traditional SDK. The iPhone will use web 2.0 technologies instead. He continued and announced that the iPhone uses a “real” version of Safari (instead of a toned-down version as some predicted earlier). Now Apple really wants to start courting developers for the iPhone and the quickest way to do so is to release Safari as a Windows application. Everyone who targets Safari for Windows should (unless Apple screwed up) be 100% sure their app will work on the iPhone, plain and simple.
Permalink
Posted in PSA, blogtech at 10:20 pm by Josh Peters
Hopefully nobody noticed anything, but I’ve nearly finished migrating to Dreamhost. I forgot to export my existing Wordpress install, so I had to do some SQL export/import magic, but I think everything’s back okay.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in best-practices, blogtech, programming, web at 8:34 pm by Josh Peters
I’ve changed my mind about REST needing WADL. Joe Gregorio puts it best when he explains that the strength of REST lies in its dependence on MIME types (or XML Media Types if you’re not down with Internet mail lingo).
Here’s what really swayed me:
Q: But APP has a Service Document, and if APP needs a Service Document, doesn’t that imply that other RESTful services need something similar?
A: Other RESTful services, like OpenSearch, may need their own service description doc, but they should have their own separate mime-type, so consumers know what they “mean”.
The idea of MIME defining meaning and nothing else is what really has made the web work so far. I suspect that not depending on MIME will just lead to even more content sniffing, which is the biggest pet peeve of mine in Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer in general.
It’s better to depend on MIME types and consider broken content to be a bug that should be reported (not something worked around).
In other news I’m really looking forward to the delivery of my copy of REST Web Services
Permalink
Posted in programming, web at 10:37 am by Josh Peters
Sorry Aristotle but I think history tells me that REST needs a WADL-equivalent.
The Atom Publishing Protocol is a great example of a REST application being defined by something other than HTML forms. Why shouldn’t APP have a contract that defines it written in a machine-grokkable language?
APP can’t be the only REST application for publishing, can it? If there is a need to update resources there ought to be a way to communicate this to machines in a general way. APP is great but I doubt if it will suffice for all future needs of CRUDing resources on the web.
But I’m not sure if WADL is the answer either.
Permalink
