Oakwinter.com :: Code

I mean, seriously.

Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts:

1. Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.

2. Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

“From the same team that brought you Internet Explorer, it’s…Microsoft InternetWeb 2.0!” You know, I wish I had a monopoly to free me from the pressures of innovation, the need to be fresh and creative, secure in the knowledge that no matter what mediocre, uninteresting crap I pushed out, it would still be foisted upon millions against their will.

At least they admit they’re uncreative: “left to our own devices we would have called [it] ‘Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition,’ but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.” Maybe you should have asked those same folks whether a “Visual Mashup Creator” was even a good idea to begin with. My hunch: “um no”.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to work for these people. Popfly is the kind of product that happens when upper management says, “Hey, we have to show our shareholders that we’re doing this Web 2.0 thing they keep hearing about!” What a sad, sad little company.

Why do you crash all the time? You used to be so well-behaved, back in your 1.0.whatever days. Then you upgraded to 1.5 and you started segfaulting. Not every day, not even every week, but enough that it was a pain in the ass. Now, with the 2.0 branch, you crash every single goddamn day. Looking at the little TalkBack dialog that just popped up, you’ve crashed 10 times since I upgraded to 2.0.3 last week; I thought bug fix releases were supposed to, I don’t know, fix bugs.

Today you’ve segfaulted twice in two hours. This has got to stop.

Now I see that there’s a there’s a 3.0 release coming this year. New features are great fun to work on, I’m sure, and tracking down whatever bug keeps killing my browser sessions isn’t sexy, but seriously: how about putting in a little time to make the current release series stable? Please?

On Monday, Google announced that they were effectively end-of-lifing their SOAP API, back-dated to 5. December. “Announce” isn’t quite the right word, but English doesn’t have a verb for “posted a notice on the API’s site without any heads-up to developers”.

Since several of our applications at work depend on that SOAP API, this threw a bit of a wrench into our day. As a work-around, I spent yesterday coding up a SOAP server that allows applications that use the Google API to continue working. The tool acts as a gateway, translating SOAP calls into requests to Google’s web interface, scraping the result pages and packaging the search results back up into SOAP. It supports all doGetCachedPage(), doSpellingSuggestion() and doGoogleSearch() calls, though search results lack some of the data that the SOAP API provided. I used Net::Google for testing the gateway, and as far as I can tell everything works fine.

Most of my development time was spent wrestling first with SOAP::Lite, trying to figure out exactly what incantations I needed to get a bare-bones SOAP server working, then with the perl regexes needed to scrape the result pages (grrr…special cases…grrr). In the end, we had a releasable product within 24 hours of reading about the discontinuation of the API, so I’m pretty happy with myself, especially since I’d never done server-side SOAP stuff before.

We’ve released the current 0.1 version of code, with plans for a faster 0.2 soon.

From Foreign Policy:

India’s education ministry has decided to opt out of an MIT-inspired initiative to provide $100 laptops to school children across the developing world. Calling the plan “pedagogically suspect”, India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development determined that its money could be better spent on badly needed classrooms and teachers.

Good for India. Every time I see a Slashdot story about MIT Media Lab’s $100 laptop project, I cringe. The project’s director, Nicholas Negroponte, however, clearly believes the world is in such peachy shape that laptops for the developing world are the best use of this time and money.

The first sign that this was a bad idea should have been the design requirement that the laptop feature a crank to charge the battery. Why? Because the laptop is intended to be sent to places where there’s no electricity. Now, I would conclude that perhaps what these people need is electricity and other basic infrastructure. That’s not sexy, though, the sort of thing must be too mundane for MIT’s geniuses to spend their valuable time on.

In this Wired article, one of the laptop’s designers, Yves Béhar, answers such criticism:

Béhar thinks the laptop project is more pragmatic than his skeptics realize. “There’s a criticism that comes up,� he says. “I think it’s the stupidest argument: Send kids food, send them water.� These critics, he says, imagine all the developing world to be a famine-stricken village in Africa. “This is the typical ignorance of the West. There are different conditions in different places,� he says. “And there are a lot of places where kids are not starving, where kids want to learn more than anything else.�

Really? Let’s see what India’s Education Secretary said…

We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.

This is the typical ignorance of the Ivory Tower’s IT department, that what these kids really need is technology — in this case, a laptop. Let’s for a moment apply the same solution to the United States: is the solution to the problems with America’s education system to give each student a laptop? Will that make up for cronic underfunding? Will that hire better teachers? The Indians would rather spend the laptop money on making secondary education universal. That sounds like a real solution to a real problem.

I realise that fixing imaginary problems — like the lack of laptops — is a lot sexier than figuring out how to provide clean water and highways to Africa. I just keep hoping that someday, someone at MIT will wake up and pull the plug on this misguided techno-utopian farce.