Philip Jacob / Whirlycott

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Being modern

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 11:12 am
.!.

Op-Ed Guest Columnist – Notes From the Chairman – NYTimes.com
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“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”


Saturday, February 28, 2009

A brief analysis of social media spam

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 10:43 pm

A fun little post over on the StyleFeeder tech blog about social media spam.

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Sunday, January 25, 2009

Douglas Bader quote

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 4:44 pm

“Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.” from Douglas Bader on Wikipedia
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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Closed indeed

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 10:11 pm

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You can't possibly be serious

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 8:59 pm

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.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008

ID Selector terms of service

Filed under: Technology — Philip Jacob @ 10:55 pm

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. nexium candrug

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. tricor symptoms injectable hgh bodybuilding

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.

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[...]

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).


Monday, September 22, 2008

The Global Pool of Money

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 8:44 pm

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…

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Amazon finally launches a CDN

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 10:59 am

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. adrenomedullin colchicine foot pain while taking vytorin ringing of ears while taking prozac hgh investigation steroid

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