Philip Jacob / Whirlycott

Interesting, but perl 5 is dying because nobody created a good way for folks to build web applications with perl. CGI scripts? No, sorry. mod_perl? Died an ugly death somewhere between Apache 1.x and the new MPMs in Apache 2.x. All the interesting frameworks (i.e. Mason, embperl) depended on mod_perl. Those are all basically dying of upstream dehydration.

There’s no technical reason that a conceptual equivalent of Perl on Rails couldn’t have been created years ago. But the innovation shifted outside of the Perl community and those still left were too busy figuring out what was going on with perl 6 to help people figure out how to put a perl-based website together. And don’t get me started about threading.

Perl once was the duct tape of the Internet, but those days are long gone. It’s too hard to connect Perl to a scalable website anymore, so it’s pretty much over until someone can figure out how to change that. It doesn’t hold up next to the options available in PHP or modern Java… not by a long shot.

Perl still has all the good stuff: CPAN and the wildly rich collection of modules comes to mind. But I’m not sure that this can save Perl as a platform.

Sidenote: it’s a crying shame that all that great code in CPAN will end up being rewritten over the coming years. What a waste of time and effort. Just another reason why a multi-language VM is such an important part of a long term strategy.

I wanted to futz around with Django tonight, so I figured I’d update my installed version with the latest release, but I didn’t count on having to deal with crap like this in order to get the python MySQL driver working on the current version of OS/X. I’d understand if I was trying to install a Teradata driver for SBCL on an ancient version of DG/UX, but this is a bit ridiculous.

Every now and then, I get it into my head that I’m going to release OpenID support on StyleFeeder. In fact, I have the code mostly written, but there’s always some nit-picky aspect that doesn’t work as well as I want it to, so I leave the code aside and get on with my life.

Some time ago, I came across ID Selector from JanRain, one of a few important companies in the identity space. They have a little javascripty/css thingy that you can put on your site to help users choose from a list of popular OpenID providers and then type in their username. It’s neat and it sure beats typing in URLs.

One thing that you get to do as the founder of a venture funded startup is sign contacts. Woo, fun! Every time I sign up for something online now, I can’t help but read The Fine Print. So it was with great dismay that I read the TOS for ID Selector (see below for some delicious excerpts). The punchline is this: I can’t think of a better way to discourage people from using this cute little snip of javascript that any competent programmer could put together without material effort.

These terms of service, dear reader, are stupid because they are in nobody’s best interest. Site operators should have freedom to adjust the behavior of the widget code as necessary. JanRain should be focused on OpenID adoption, not trying to control their rights for the UI component.

Consistent behavior of the ID Selector across websites is important to ensure that users get what they expect on each usage. If you want an example of a model that works reasonably well this regard, look no further than the feed icons and the guidelines for their use that Mozilla put forth. Open. Easy. Flexible.

The identity space is moving slowly enough without unnecessary impediments like this.

But I don’t like to whine without proposing some solutions, so here’s where I’m going to stop and wait to see what happens:

1. JanRain - please change your TOS to relax these unnecessary restrictions
2. Also: release a standalone version of the ID Selector under some kind of an open license (or dual license) so sites that don’t want to have your code loaded in at runtime don’t have to
3. If JanRain won’t do #2, I’m hereby offering on behalf of StyleFeeder, Inc. to fund someone to create a standalone ID Selector that will be released under better terms. Contact me if you want to be that person.

Some fun excerpts from the ID Selector TOS. No, I am not kidding.

3. Ownership rights. The IDSelector is owned by us and our licensors. The IDSelector is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and treaties. We and our licensors reserve all rights not specifically granted to you. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any aspect of IDSelector . You may not modify, adapt, or create derivative works from the IDSelector . Do not remove proprietary notices. Do not help any one else to do any of the things prohibited in this paragraph.

[...]

6. Your responsibilities. You must use the IDSelector web site to obtain an IDSelector tool and/or code located at idselector.com. You may not copy code from another web site to use the IDSelector.

[...]

7. Your rights to use the IDSelector . We offer you the following rights to use IDSelector provided that you continue to comply with the terms of this agreement. You may not remove, distort or alter any element of the IDSelector (including the HTML and JavaScript code).

I remember listening to this TAL show while driving in my car earlier in the summer. The Global Pool of Money seems like something that our politicians should have been listening to for years, but I’d have been happy if they had started paying attention to this mess before, well…

That only took 21 months since I asked them nicely. What I don’t like about what I’ve read so far is that they are not using a lazy-loading proxy (ala Akamai, EdgeCast, Panther) and are instead opting for S3 as the content origin. That sucks, because it basically means that you have to do something in order to get your content onto their network. With a lazy-loading proxy, you just tell your CDN provider to effectively make static.whatever.com a mirror of www.whatever.com. It’s much simpler.

I was walking through the electronic turnstile onto the T the other day and noticed a partially obscured Microsoft Visual C++ runtime error dialog box on the screen!

I think this is the fifth blog post that I’ve written today.  Seriously.  Just a quick pointer to an article on Xconomy that I wrote this morning about Amazon’s new Elastic Block service.