Entries for December 2007
December 14, 2007 at 1:55PM Amazon’s SimpleDB is something of a disappointment
Don’t get me wrong, SimpleDB [via] is quite a good idea, and I especially like the idea of eventual consistency, but my problem is with the interface.
If you’re going to advertise something as having a REST interface, you can’t just tunnel RPC over GET or POST. That ain’t REST. They screwed up the “REST” interface for it exactly the same way as they screwed up the one for SQS and FPS. In fact, I’d even say it was the same developer or team who wrote them.
So I’d ask the Amazon developers to get a clue and learn how to do it right before spreading misinformation about REST. Also, if they’re going to tunnel RPC over HTTP, could they at least do it with POST?
The killing thing about it is there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever they couldn’t have done thing right. After all, the RPC interface almost has a uniform interface (though they’ve screwed the proverbial pooch on that a bit), and would map perfectly well on to HTTP’s uniform interface, and expose domain lists, domains, and items as resources.
It’s a lost opportunity to do something really cool.
Update (December 17th): While some of us were out doing Christmas shopping, other people were fixing the sucker’s interface (Subscribed!) [via]. If Amazon have any sense, they’ll throw out the current “REST” interface and adopt one like this.
Update (after I read my mail): Just been reading REST-discuss. Here’s another suggested mapping [via] that’d work just fine. Of course, all that matters is that the content types are the same for the various representations, and that the same set of operations can be performed on the resources. The URL mapping doesn’t matter after that except as an aesthetic issue.
December 14, 2007 at 3:14PM Saso: Type-A Jitters
December 23, 2007 at 3:30AM I hate heisinbugs
Heisinbugs. I hate them. Here’s an example of one I encountered, and at this point I’m seriously wondering if I might have been hallucinating the whole thing.
I’ve had problems building the gnome-system-tools port since it was upgraded to 2.20. Each time I’d try to build it, I’d be confronted with a syntax error. Now that I’m back home, I though I’d give it another try. First I built it as normal to make sure it was still breaking, and then, for a laugh, I decided to install GCC 4.1 (3.4 is the system compiler on FreeBSD 6.2) and build it with that instead. My theory was that the reason why it got though the ports freeze unchanged might have been that 6.3 and 7.0 might be using GCC 4.1 now. So I submitted a PR.
Between then and now, the only thing that I’ve done to my machine is check my LOCALBASE to see if it contained anything it shouldn’t (such as old files that ought to have been deleted between upgrades but didn’t), one of which were from old copy of autoconf259 that was left over from the Autoconf cleanup back in September.
I’m now wishing I could revert that just to make sure I didn’t just make a stupid mistake or if the Autoconf cleanup managed to leave behind some nasty crap behind.
The thing is, it’s now building just fine with GCC 3.4, and I can’t figure out if the problem was with the old copy of Autoconf that was still hanging around (pretty likely) or whether installing GCC 4.1 somehow tweaked some of the headers and automagically fixed the problem, or something else. All I know is that between then and now -I../../src/common suddenly started appearing.
If the old copy of Autoconf was the problem, I’ve no idea why building it with GCC 4.1 would have ‘fixed’ it, or if not, why now that the old copy of Autoconf 2.59 is gone, it works just fine.
So here’s me left feeling like a tit having wasted a FreeBSD dev’s time. Now I’m a little afraid to report a problem I had building audio/musicpd, which was fixed by modifying two patches in the avahi-app port, specifically patch-avahi-client.pc.in and patch-avahi-core.pc.in to include -lintl in the Libs: lines. I think I’m going to let somebody else duplicate and report that particular issue...
Update: It seems there was a bug, but I’d forgotten that I’d uninstalled GNU Smalltalk too between the builds. Ok, feeling a little better about myself now. It’s a GNOME bug, so it’s been reported on the GNOME bugzilla. And given that, I’ve been emboldened to report the Avahi/MusicPd bug.
Update (Dec 25th, 00:04): Fixed anyway! Between me reporting it and now, the avahi-app bug was reported by pointyhat, and fixed. My report still hasn’t been touched though, which in fairness isn’t all that surprising given that it’s Christmas.
Update (Jan 14th): Still no activity. I’ve emailed bug-followup to see if I can get the PR closed, not that it matters much.
December 28, 2007 at 12:40AM BlogPing 1.5 Released
I committed BlogPing 1.5 to the projects SVN repository ealier today and released the latest version. BlogPing is the code behind the Irish Weblog Ping Proxy. BlogPing is much like Ping-o-Matic, and is useful for people who either use blog software not capable of pinging blog aggregation/search services, or for creating specialised variants on the idea, the Irish Weblog Ping Proxy being an example.
December 28, 2007 at 3:30AM I’m too old for this...
It’s 3:30 in the morning, and I’m just after demolishing a selection box. Getting a sugar headache...
December 28, 2007 at 6:01AM Lijit
I’ve added the Lijit search widgit to the site in the hopes that it’ll be a bit better than the crappy Technorati one I’ve been using so far. I really can’t be bothered building search functionality into the weblog myself, especially when somebody else can possibly do a better job.
So far my feelings are a little mixed. I picked up a lot of stuff just fine, but missed by the <link/> tag pointing to my blogroll/subscriptions. It also, for some reason, refuses to index my linklog, though as I added that after I’d signed up, it might just be queued or something.
Let’s see how it goes.
Update: Well, it appears to have indexed my linklog. How well, I’m not sure. It’s not terribly critical anyway; I’ve been thinking of merging it into my blogging software for quite a while anyway. Still not picking up my blogroll though.
Update (Jan 3rd): I’m doubly impressed with Lijit. Not only does it seem to be a pretty decent blog search engine, but they take the time to talk to their users, which is a huge bonus.
I think the core issue I had with Lijit is a UI one. It has a great UI for adding sites, feeds, and blogrolls during the initial signup, but when you’re adding them after you’re signed up, it’s hard to know if something went wrong, or if the added site/feed/blogroll simply hasn’t been processed yet. It ought to indicate that it’s been queued for processing later. Still, this is a rather minor nit, and I have to say I’m very happy with it so far.
December 31, 2007 at 4:40AM Radiohead cover New Order’s “Ceremony”
I’d the original in my head all day, so I though I’d throw this up:
Update (June 19th, 2008): Oh, I should be smacked around! I got the same of the song wrong, which is bad considering I’m a New Order fan...
