Yesterday I put some effort into it, and found a single post on the developer discussion forums that explained the situation. It turns out, if your script doesn’t return anything Facebook will call the script three times. If it does return something Facebook will only call it once.
What?
You mean if my script causes something to happen on the server and doesn’t need to return anything to the app… a totally reasonable scenario, Facebook will make the batshit insane decision of calling my script THREE TIMES?
This makes no sense, and as far as I can tell is not documented anywhere. Wow.
]]>I actually like reading newspapers. Once or twice a week I will relax at lunch and go through either the National Post or Globe and Mail. It gives me an opportunity to actually cogitate, as opposed to the web experience which, to me, is more frantic and random.
The point of this post, though, is how newspapers are trying to build online presences. Both of the mentioned newspapers have online versions with extra functionality, such as the ability for readers to write comments. This is very nice. Today I was looking at the Post’s website, and ran across a particularly ridiculous article that deserved to be commented on. I felt compelled to do so.
The first difficulty presented was the fact that I had to sign up to comment. This is an unfortunate necessity, as no accepted standard for universal online ID management has emerged, and they need a mechanism for filtering out the vi@gra comments. So, I filled in my info and submitted it. I then tried to comment, but discovered that I had to “upgrade” my account to be able to participate in discussions. This is a bit strange. I’m not quite sure what the point of an un-upgraded account is, as it doesn’t seem capable of doing anything. Anyway, I pressed the “upgrade” button, and discovered that I had to click on a link from an email that they sent me, to prove that my email address is correct. I clicked on the link, and the resulting website said “E-Mail Address Not Found.” So, I must confirm my email address to comment, but I can’t confirm my email address.
I suspect the problem is that the email address I gave them is a Gmail address with a “+” in it. Using a + in Gmail is a technique for filtering incoming email from places you’ve signed up. My suspicion is that the Post’s email address parser has trouble with the “+” character.
Anyway, the outcome was that I wasted 10 minutes, still can’t write comments on the article, have another email address floating around out there in their system, and have a little less respect for newspapers’ abilities to move beyond their current business model.
]]>Researchers have spent a huge amount of time studying how people actually drive cars. We have a very deep understanding of how to design cars from this perspective. But I have never heard of any research centered around the maintenance of cars. I think this is a very interesting problem. On one hand I want car maintenance to be so trivial that fixing any problem is like building a simple LEGO model. Everything goes where it seems it should, and clicks nicely into place. However there are a bunch of competing requirements. The car must remain affordable to build. It must be light enough to have reasonable gas mileage. It must be safe. So, can we design a car that can be maintained by anybody but maintains these properties?
I think the answer is yes. Taking my door as an example, the entire thing contains maybe 50 parts. That is not a high degree of complexity. Once the thing is apart it is not terribly difficult to figure out what does what. The difficulty lies mostly in actually getting it apart. The fasteners used are generally not friendly. To get the first body panel off one must tug at it, fearing the whole thing is going to tear apart, until the fastener finally lets go and pops out of its hole. Then there is a layer of vapor barrier glued on with the grossest sticky black stuff. Then there is the air bag that has to be treated gingerly, lest it blow up in your face. There are bolts that fit into little tabs that tend to break. Finally, during reassembly, there is waterproofing trim that is a freaking nightmare until one figures out that it needs to removed and fit on the floor panel, rather than trying to stick the door panel onto it while it sits on the door frame. All very confusing.
In short, I think a huge difference in maintainability could be made by improving fastener technology, and the way in which parts fit together. Taking the door panels off should be a pleasure. I should be able to lift a lever and have the things slide right off. The camera makers have figured this out. Sometimes I take the lens off my SLR and then put it right back on, just because it feels so nice. Why can’t cars be the same?
Looking beyond door maintenance to more standard car stuff, why do I have to stick my fingers into a dark and dirty hidden place and pull on a sharpish lever in order to raise the hood? I read somewhere that some non-insignificant fraction of drivers never lift their hood. I suspect they would be more likely to if lifting it was much easier. Also, when adding oil why do I have to open this bottle and then pour it into this smallish hole, potentially spilling it all over either the engine or myself? Oil is very unpleasant stuff. There should be a method for adding oil where the oil itself is never arcing through empty air, potentially making a mess.
A while ago I read about a team of average women who were recruited by a car maker to design a “woman’s car,” whatever that is. One of their answers was to make the hood impossible to open, except by a licensed mechanic. I think this is an example of the mistake of letting users design something. They designed what they thought they wanted, not what they actually wanted. And since they didn’t like opening the hood, their answer was to never do it. What they actually want, and what I want, and what I think everybody wants, is a car that lets me change pretty much any mechanical part (maybe stopping short of the powertrain itself), without getting dirty, pinching my fingers, or worrying about breaking anything. Maybe the women from the story won’t go so far as to do the maintenance I did this weekend, but maybe they will be able to open the hood and put some oil in. The point is that the difficulty level of every aspect of car maintenance, from adding oil to changing a bushing, can be made simpler.
As for my adventure with the window, it now opens and closes like it did when it was new. And I only stripped one bolt, and ended up with one mystery washer.
]]>I didn’t notice it at the time, but in light gray font at the bottom of the email are the words “Advertisers with self-managed signup accounts are subject to a $5 activation fee that will be deducted from the promotional credit.” This would turn out to be relevant later.
I went over the the Google adwords site and started puzzling through the signup process. It’s not very friendly, having some annoying “wizard” style elements that don’t let you perform operation “B” until you have performed unrelated operation “A”. But that isn’t the important part. After spending valuable time figuring out how stuff worked I ran into these words: “Your account will be charged a non-refundable CAD $10.00 activation fee upon continuing” and “The promotion code does not apply to the activation fee.”
Google lied to me twice over. They lied about the actual cost ($5 versus $10) and they lied about whether I could deduct the cost from the coupon. In the end I walked away without any free advertising and about 1/2 hour closer to death. Thanks for nothing, Google.
]]>Now, like many people, I have adopted online methods. I personally use www.ufile.ca. This is a surprisingly well-designed, user-friendly system. One can punch in the numbers from their various tax slips in any sort of order, and it will instantly provide you with an up-to-date result at any time. But, there is a hidden dark side to the ufile tax preparation approach.
Unfortunately, ufile might just be TOO easy to use. Recently in preparing my taxes I ran through my slips in no time, clicked through to the results page, and was happy to see that I had a modest refund owed me. Then I saw something odd. First, I hadn’t used any of my available education amount for the year. Second, the result page didn’t show any capital gain, whereas I expected to have one. After poking around I found my error. I had keyed in some digits wrong for one of my capital gain entries, and instead of claiming a $1.06 gain for the trade, I had claimed a $960,000 loss. This is a substantial error that explained the observed oddities. What scares me is that it was so easy to make this error, and simultaneously difficult to spot it once it had been made. If I had been doing my taxes by hand I would have definitely caught this, but since ufile is so easy, these kinds of errors are simple to make.
I suspect that, compared to the old days of paper returns, there are a large number of people who are making the kinds of mistakes I describe. It is too easy for a mis-key to result in 1 or 2 extra digits somewhere. But I think the problem can be addressed. What the ufile system needs is some kind of intelligent “Clippy” equivalent that will do a sanity check on your inputs. On my return, for example, it might look at the numbers in aggregate and ask me “Hi Garth! Say, you don’t seem like the kind of guy who would lose $960,000 in a money market fund. Are you sure this is right?” Or, in the case of another mistake that I caught, it would say “Hi Garth. I find it kind of strange that these two different trades have exactly the same numbers entered for ‘cost’ and ‘proceeds’. Are you sure you didn’t enter the wrong numbers in one of them?”
So, in conclusion, ufile and web tax preparation services in general are great. Their main problem is that they are TOO great, making simple errors easier to make and overlook. There needs to be a mechanism to address these kinds of errors.
]]>The first problem is Apple’s obsession with being ultra cutting edge. This started with the elimination of the floppy drive in the iMac, which was controversial but turned out to be prescient. That didn’t cause me problems, but other changes have. My new Macbook Pro, for example, only has a Firewire 800 port. This causes problems when my audio interface only has a Firewire 400 port, and the book store is out of adapters. I end up instead recording on a more ancient Mac and then having to copy the audio over to my new one. Tedious.
Then there are the video outputs. I had just started to get used to DVI, and then Apple came out with these mini-DVI things, or whatever they are called. I’m not even sure. There are even a couple other standards that they supported that I skipped over because they seem to change every year. A couple of weeks ago in a meeting a professor was unable to project because her new Macbook adapter was DVI-D and didn’t have analog out that could feed the projector.
From a developer’s perspective there is Apple’s bizarre choice of going with Objective C as the language of choice. At the time of this decision I don’t think I had ever actually met anybody who knew Objective C. I think the choice had something to do with their purchase of Be and rolling BeOS into OS X, but still, weird.
I still think Apple makes some of the best hardware and software out there. It is just a pain sometimes when you are hauled kicking and screaming into the future, when you just want to sit back and enjoy your Firewire 400 device for a few more years.
]]>And then I discover, shockingly, that Windows XP doesn’t know how to mount an .iso. I would think this was basic functionality, and it is functionality provided by a number of non-free third party software suites, but Windows doesn’t know about it. So, Microsoft is distributing a free trial version of its development software, trying to attract developers to its platform, and is distributing that software in a format that is nothing short of a gigantic pain in the butt.
Eventually I discovered that there is an unofficial, unsupported .iso mounter available from Microsoft. I imagine somebody internally sat there trying to install Visual Studio (or something similar) and thought “This is bullshit. Why the hell can’t Windows mount an .iso?” So they went and wrote a utility to do it.
And of course, on a totally different topic, Apple’s developer tools are entirely free.
Oh, and as I was writing this my Windows machine went to sleep, in the middle of importing a video from my video camera. Thanks Windows! I didn’t actually want that anyway! And the importing application crashed in the process (the second time in the last 1/2 hour). As Christian Bale would say: “you’re a fucking amateur, you know that?”
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