RasterWeb!

We were working on an application that dealt with dates, and in the database, I asked what we should use for the expiration date, and someone suggested some time in the year 2050.

I wish I could laugh at that, or think it’s a good idea, but it worries me. I mean, this seems to presume a few things:

• We won’t be around, so it’ll be someone else’s problem
• The code won’t be running by then and will have been replaced

The first one bothered me because I don’t really like to leave problems behind for other people to deal with. I mean, that’s what happened last time right? I’m sure the guys writing code in the 1970’s were like “Hey man, this code won’t be around by the year 2000, so just use 2 digits to store the year! Groovy!” or something like that… But I’m here to say that I did fix code that broke in the year 2000, and it wasn’t fun…

The second one bothered me because it’s sad to think that the code we work on today will probablty be useless in a few years. In fact, within 5 years I’m sure people will be complaining about how crappy it is, and keep asing when it can all be moved to a new system. I say that because I’ve seen it happen before, and that’s how we got here in the first place…

You just can’t win, can you? Oh well, I suppose we won’t have to worry about it after 2038…

I finally upgraded the old Quicksilver. Sure, it used to run at 733 MHz but after discussing with Mr. Barrett the merits of upgrade cards, I choose the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4 1.6 GHz.

We’ve now got a somewhat respectable G4 Mac. This was much cheaper than a new/replacement Mac (which I can’t afford anyway) and since the Intel-based Macs will probably be out by mid-2006, why bother replacing it now? Not to mention the fact that it’s got 1.5 Gig of ram, a DVD drive, multiple hard drives, a second video card, and an extra USB card…

Any downsides? Well, the install was not simple. Luckly, I had stumbled upon a nice write-up recently, so it wasn’t a total nightmare. (I did take about a dozen attempts though, involving putting the card it, taking it out, messing with the open firmware, and installing software…) In the end, I think it was well worth it.

I’ve been playing with Odeo this week, and I must say, there are some nice features to play with. But, as usual… I find bugs…

Mainly with the RSS feeds. Now, in recent talks with Dave Slusher about AmigoFish, we talked about the problem of outputting invalid RSS feeds, and since AmigoFish sort of re-purposes/re-publishes data from existing feeds, it can be quite difficult to clean everything and output valid XML. (Also, I believe AmigoFish is a one-man operation.) But Odeo, aren’t they a (somewhat) big company with many employees and funding and all of that?

I told Dave I’d cut him a little slack on invalid RSS. With Odeo, I submitted a bug report. To be fair, the Odeo feed was valid, but with warnings. The classic “Apple iTunes DTDs/dtds” warning: The prefix “itunes” generally uses the namespace “http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd”

I’m hoping Odeo can fix this as quick as the guys at Upcoming.org/Yahoo! did. Which brings me to my next point… I’m starting to think I should just freelance myself out to Web 2.0 companies as a service that will test, break, validate, suggest fixes, etc. for their sites. Even the big guys constantly screw things up. Why?

Whew, if things ain’t confusing… I just got a phone call from George, they guy behind podkeyword.com. He was quite upset about the accusations made about him and his service, which I first mentioned here.

My suggestion to him was to publish his side of the story, and he now has.

I’m still not 100% sure about a few things. I don’t get why podkeyword sends a 200 OK response and the content of the original RSS feed rather than a 302 Found which would redirect to the real location of the original feed.

Anyway, when people get all up in arms about things that happen on the Internet, they should use the Internet to hash it out if possible, so hopefully if George has a story that is totally different than Erik’s we can get all the facts, details, and what not, and try to figure things out without becoming a lynch mob too quickly…

I’m going to stay somewhat neutral for now, since I’ve had contact with Erik and George, and it seems they are both talking about lawyers, and that’s something I sure don’t want to get involved in.