The best way to read the NY Times 

It's amazing how people keep trying to come up with better ways to read news by throwing lots of "new ideas" out there, ones that harken back to the way the news was read when it was printed on paper.

Imho there's a much much simpler way, that uses another ancient model that just happens to work better on today's computer screens -- the teletype.

And of course what I'm talking about, as always (I must sound like a broken record) is the River Of News.

And the NY TImes, because they have excellent RSS 2.0 support, makes it possible for a programmer like myself to cobble it together, which I have of course done.

http://nytimesriver.com/

As it says -- it works great on mobile devices, but I like it on desktops too.

It's plain and simple -- new stories come in on the top, old ones scroll off the bottom. Scan down with the scrollbar till you see something you like and click on the link. You already know how to use it.

Another day banging my head against OAuth 

I thought I had my signature-generating code right, I had it verified by two sources, but it still was being rejected by Twitter. I was looking for another service to test against, when Chris Messina posted a link to a wiki page that in turn pointed to three sites that verified signatures -- and I did a quick check, confident that my signature code would be validated, but it wasn't. They didn't agree. But, that implies that they don't agree with the first two sources I checked against. Which is really seriously troubling if I didn't make a mistake, which is why I'm going to very carefully check my work now. My notes follow, realtime.

1. First result, I tested it with the Google page, and their signature and mine do not agree. I'm going to see if the "signature base strings" agree. They don't. Now to see where they differ and why. They don't differ -- I made a mistake in the test script. Once I corrected it, my signature-generating code and Google's return the same string.

2. Tested against the Netflix page, and they agree as well. Of course had they not agreed then I suppose we'd all be fracked. (Speaking of which did you see BSG last night. I gotta watch that one again, for sure.)

So....

My next plan of attack is to try some other call with Twitter, maybe I happened to hit on the one API they haven't debugged with OAuth yet. And try another OAuth-compatible app to test against. Something simple, one that a lot of people have developed against. Not sure there are any yet. I'll keep you posted.