I need to stop the complaining
Since my last eBay post, I’ve finally found an option which seems to stop most of the bad people from being able to bid on my items. Since then I’ve been able to sell 3 or 4 things without incident (including my camera). I’ve also noticed they’ve created a new streamlined version of their seller form, which is a welcome addition. Of course, I still needed to use the older form so I could make sure those options I just mentioned were set. The issue with simpler interfaces is you never know what the default settings are going to be.
But in general, I’ve looked back at my blog and found a few posts of me just complaining about whatever corporate entity was ticking me off at the moment. I’m going to stop that (even though they are bastards :-P) and start just posting normal, hopefully helpful blog entries. I’ve always said I’d like to post simple code snippets and helpful factoids like that. Time to start. Um, soon.
eBay May Collapse Under Its Own Weight
I recently tried to sell a camera on eBay. Twice.
Both times it was removed after it closed. Both times I received an email that stated:
The results of the following listing(s) have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner’s authorization:
OK, I get that. Someone got phished and that means the winning bid was invalid, not to mention outlandish (in this case, over 2x the value of the camera). But they pull the entire listing and if you try to go to it, it’s ‘invalid’. At the very least, I should be able to see my own listing after the fact so I could at least try selling the item to one of the other legitimate buyers. But nope. Instead now that item doesn’t come up which has the added side-effect of making me look bad, when in fact I did nothing wrong except try to sell my camera. (more…)
More DOM Fun
As per my last post, I’ve been working up a storm to redo our Konfabulator DOM. We did in fact end up coming up with a whole new way of exposing our objects into JavaScript. It’s so much nicer than anything we had in the past, though it does involve the use of a custom tool to help us generate the glue. But the end result is absolutely great. We’re able to whip up classes in no time now. Too bad we’re whipping up the same classes we had and not new ones 
At the same time, I’ve been fixing layering issues in our code. Too much lower level stuff knew about too much higher level stuff. Some people seem to think this is OK. I however do not.
I’ve been finding that as I progress in my coding life, I’ve become more and more of a purist. I think most of my design purity stems from my life at Apple, to be honest. We had to completely re-layer most of our stuff for the transition to Mac OS X (it was part of the whole design). This and many other things have stuck with me as I’ve moved on from there. I like abstractions and the ability to separate pieces of code so that I can mix and match them later (and invariably, the need will arise). I’ve been developing various tenets and axioms as I go which perhaps someday I can compile and put up here.
Bringing the original Konfabulator hair tangle into this new, clean architecture has been a long time coming. But once complete, it can be used for far more than just Widgets in theory. And it can be used in far more scenarios than just embedded inside Yahoo! Widgets. That’s why you design layered and pure from the beginning: flexibility.
Messenger for the Web
So if you haven’t seen recently, Yahoo! now has a version of Messenger that runs in a web browser. I’m actually running it in another tab as I write this. I can’t figure out if this is genius or insanity yet, but I’m leaning towards the latter.
The plus side is simple: server-side history (which I hope works on the client version too), and the ability to IM from anywhere without having to install software. It’s perfect for interweb kiosks, etc.
But damn, it’s a web page and that makes it… oh I don’t know… large. And now, I have a messaging pending, so the tab is displaying the message like a marquee, scrolling across. Annoying. It should just probably change into a different title that indicates there’s a message unread.
The jury’s still out on this one. It definitely will be useful at times, no doubt, but I don’t know if it’s what I want to run 100% of the time.
It’s been a while…
I’ve been away from blogville lately, and it’s not from lack of caring. I’ve been incredibly busy on our imminent Yahoo! Widgets 4 release. It’s going to be pretty kick-ass if I do say so myself. Does it do everything I’d like it to? No. Will it in the future? You betcha!
But this post isn’t about that. Or anything much really. Just a sign that I’m still here. I was actually just looking through the Flickr ‘Interestingness’ photos on their site, and I have to say, there are some amazing pictures on there. I mean, I have a really good camera and all, but it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the eye. Some pictures on there just stop me in my tracks. Amazing.
If you don’t know Flickr by now, you really should.
Vista on MacBook Pro II
I now have Vista running a bit better on my MacBook Pro. But the journey was long and arduous and fraught with peril.
I didn’t actually set out to get everything working better. In fact, all I really wanted was a slightly larger partition. I was running out of room since I only had made the partition 15GB to start with. I thought resizing it would be easy. After all, there’s a built-in “Complete PC Backup” and restore in Vista. “Sweet! This will be cake!” I said foolishly. I should actually point out that I first tried to use iPartition to just resize things, but it wouldn’t hear of it. So down the backup/restore route I went. (more…)
I’m Turning Green
Lately I’ve been trying to do what I can to help out with this whole global warming thing. For one, I’ve just got myself a new Prius. This car is awesome. Not only is the technology of the car very cool, but the tech inside the car is quite nice too. It has the best nav system I’ve ever used by far. It makes the one in my other car look pretty sad (but I’ll live with it since that car does 0-60 in under 50% the time of the Prius). (more…)
Vista on MacBook Pro
Yeah, that’s right. I am actually writing this blog entry in IE7 running on Vista on my MacBook Pro. I’m running under BootCamp. I had also created a Vista environment in Parallels, but seeing that I only have 1G of RAM it was a little pokey at times considering I was trying to compile code I have to say though that Parallels runs very well otherwise. Very respectable. But I wanted Aero glass and window effects and I wasn’t getting that there. So off to BootCamp I went.
(more…)
New Kitchen
For those that know me, I’ve been engaged in redoing our kitchen for a while now. It was supposed to be something we did right after we got the house. Fast-forward to 3 years later and it’s now finally done. It is awesome, make no mistake. It’s the kind of kitchen that makes me say “F*#$ YEAH!” every time I go into it. Or look at it. Or think about it. Well, you get the idea. (more…)
