Category: Uncategorized

Oops! I meant “More on Databases” of course…

As I’ve mentioned, I deal a lot with database design done by morons, or at least people who somehow didn’t know what they were doing (not that I’m a database genius) but even the little things can bother me. I mean, if you’ve got a table named foo_header and it’s got 40+ fields, and another table named foo_detail and it’s got just 10 fields, doesn’t something seem wrong?

Where I come from, headers usually contain less data than the actual details of something. Maybe it’s just me…

We know that some folks can’t play well with others, but isn’t it refreshing to see that when smart people build things, they can work well with what other smart people build? (No, I’m not talking about myself here!)

Over at Upcoming.org they added a bunch of nice API’s recently, and there’s some news about how they are being used. Those Robot Co-op guys (who are behind 43 Things) detail it nicely in the aptly titled Building web services that play nicely with other web services.

This is where we see web services getting really interesting. When the web services start playing nicely with one another, you can begin to string them all together and build things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

It’s like that whole “do one thing, and do it really well” philosophy.

As for Upcoming.org integration, even our cohort over at Cambridge Lions has events listed, and our very own ocono.com is doing it too…

Is there no end to the web-interop madness? I hope not…

I should have a HandyTone 486 ATA sometime in the next week, which coincides well with the fact that I have a new phone number. In fact, I’ve got two new phone numbers, one is a SIP number, and the other is a virtual number, which means if you dial it, it’ll ring my SIP number…

So I hereby join the VoIP revolution. Not the Skype revolution mind you, as I really don’t wish to get locked into a single vendor with a proprietary format. I’ve got enough of that in my computing life already, thank you. I also didn’t want to join the Vonage $XX per month with locked hardware revolution, which might be fine for most people, but I’m a freak (and cheap) so it doesn’t work for me.

I’ll report back here on how things work using the HandyTone, my existing phones, and service through SIPphone.

Oh, if you’d like my new phone number(s), get in touch.

I’ve seen a few sites that try to “help” you find your way when you get lost… If you happen to request a page that does not exist, you get a 404 error, which means “Not Found.” The typical response (or at least I think it is) is to present this information to a user, and perhaps provide links to the home page of the site, or a sitemap, or a search box, or something of use, but I’ve seen sites that use a meta refresh to whisk you off to the home page after a few seconds. As the old saying goes “this is broken.”

The first problem is, I may never see this error in time. I often load pages into the background, into new tabs, and by the time I view the page, the message about not finding what I’m looking for, and being automatically redirected to the home page, is gone and I’m at the site’s root, and I don’t know why. Bad.

Bad number two, is that in some cases I can no longer see the URL of the page I requested. I’ve even seen a few sites that seem to redirect the 404 to a page that does not maintain the URL you requested, so you lose that information. I don’t care for that either.

(Don’t even get me started on sites that send you a 200 OK status code with a page that says 404 Not Found because that’s so backwards it makes my head hurt…)

(A good browser should allow you to disable the meta refresh “feature.”)