Scripting News

Still fumbling around with Flickr

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:48:10 GMT

After spending most of yesterday trying to understand what was going wrong with the Flickr API, I decided to look in a different direction and tested the uploading code, and it didn't work either, so I posted a note on the yws-flickr mail list, hoping that someone else would have an idea how to proceed. A few minutes later John Watson posted a suggestion. I haven't tried his workaround yet, but I will, probably after lunch.

Don Park is having the same problem with his Flickr app.

Finally, we (seem to have) solved the problem. Thanks to Don and John for their help. Here's a screen shot of the routine that implements the technique we're all using. Basically it now takes more time for the data to move around on the Flickr side. Is this breakage? Hard to say -- it is communication software, so you have to be prepared for latency and packets getting dropped. It did used to work. So it's both breakage and more robustness was required on our side. It just shows how sensitive these systems can be, and of course that they used a fancier method for security, that is safer, but also more fragile. There are always tradeoffs, that's one of the constants of computer system design.

Berkeley hills path on a sunny November afternoon

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:00:39 GMT

More breakage in the Flickr API?

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:43:19 GMT

A few days ago I reported here that some code that built on the Flickr API that had worked properly for months had broken. It turned out that the people at Yahoo had fixed a bug in the way the API worked. They were permitting anyone to download all sizes of a picture, when (they believed) this should only be available to the creator of the picture. My code didn't try to sign the user in (there was no need to), so all of a sudden I was getting mysterious errors from my code saying that it couldn't locate an object called "Original." It took some time to trace it down, and by searching on the net for other people who were having the same problem, and figure out how it related to my code.

When I got to the bottom of the fix, figured out what they changed, and remembered how my code worked, it was easy to fix. But these were hours that I should have spent fixing other bugs, or creating new features for my users.

I put it behind me until it happened again, today. Some code that had worked for a long time is now broken. I spent most of today trying to understand, again, what a token is and a frob and how they relate. I have to admit, that when I first implemented this code I didn't really understand what they these things are, but I fumbled around until the code worked and moved on. But now I'm back to where I was, and wondering whether there's any point in trying to fix this problem. How long before something else breaks?

Right now I have a very small number of users, and most of them are not affected by these breaks. But what happens when there are more users, or something changes that breaks more of them. They're not going to be so understanding, I'm not going to be able to pass the buck. I'm going to be wrong, if that should happen, for choosing to build on Flickr. Is this really a position that Flickr wants to put us in??

I'm familiar with the thinking that one should fix problems in the code behind an API, that when you discover a bug it's just like a bug in normal software. The first time I made a change in Frontier that broke developers (including myself, btw) I understood why you have to live with the bugs once people have built on your API. To this day there are bugs in Frontier, lovingly preserved. If they were fixed, it would cause an unknown and therefore unacceptable amount of breakage.

I build on top of a lot of web apps, not just Flickr, and so far all has been good, until this round of breakage. It's a warning to everyone to live with your bugs. If you really must fix them, come up with new entry-points that work the way you think they should, or employ optional parameters. No matter what, breakage is not acceptable, not like this.

And also, if you're going to be in the business of breaking developers, get very very good at communicating, and explaining carefully what the change is, that way when we're down, we have a chance of picking up the pieces quickly. I don't have any idea where to go to see a log of changes made behind the Flickr API. Not saying there isn't such a place, it just needs to be more obvious where it is.

Here's what I know about today's problem. When I call flickr.auth.getToken with a frob returned by flickr.auth.getFrob, I get error code 108: Invalid frob. "The specified frob does not exist or has already been used."

I don't know where to go from here. I'm just sending back to Flickr something they sent me. As I said above, this has been working for months. Of course I've tried searching for others who have had the problem, but I still don't know where to go. Any help would be appreciated, of course.

Android

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:01:07 GMT

Just watched the video demo of Android, it looks good.

I downloaded the SDK and have no idea what to do with it. I'm not a Java programmer.

I think the guy nailed it up front. I'm not going to be able to really figure out what if anything I can do with this product until I have one in my hands, and that's going to take a while for them to get to.

Showing me the guts of the development platform first is putting the cart before the horse. I lack the motivation. And any product I work on is going to be coded, at this level, by someone else.

I appreciate the emails I've been getting from Google people, I want to like your product, and the demo really does look good.

PS: I've long felt that platform vendors should pay developers, now that I've heard the pitch first-hand, I think I'd like it to be more subtle. How about giving real money to developers based on the number of users they draw to the platform? That might feel a little better.

To Paul Boutin re Davos

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 04:40:29 GMT

Just read your snarky bit about Mike's invite to Davos, but it's still a great deal even if you're not speaking. Much of Davos is done unconference style, the lunches and dinners are basically roundtables with about 30 to 50 people at the table and the conversation is structured by a discussion leader, usually someone who's expert in an area, an economist or an astronaut, or an indigenous person who lives in a rainforest being destroyed by drug companies (and the drug company's CEO is probably there too). The conversations are generally very interesting, and often heated. Going to Davos with a white badge is not only an honor, but it's a great deal of fun, and educational. There's no doubt Mike will have a great time, and his reports will likely be interesting reads. It's definitely worth being envious of!

Is Leopard-on-Vaio real or just a stupid pet trick?

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 04:31:32 GMT

I've heard that people have been able to run Leopard on non-Apple hardware. When I travel it feels silly to lug a 20-pound laptop with me. If Apple sold something in a Sony Vaio form, I probably would buy it within minutes. Why wait? So here's the question. Is Leopard on non-Apple hardware a serious enough idea to make it worth: 1. Buying a Vaio for this purpose. 2. Risking taking it to Europe and leaving the MacBook Pro home.

Making a happy developer house

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:36:43 GMT

My first essays were mostly about development platforms, the Internet, and how its open and easy protocols were routing around the messes created by alliances between the various tech leaders of the day. One of those pieces, Platform is Chinese Household, drew the analogy between platforms and ancient Chinese families. A successful platform, I theorized, was like a plural marriage. One husband, many wives. One platform vendor, many developers.

If you look at the successful platforms, most of them were completely open to anyone who wanted to make products for them. The best platforms were so open that people used the products to develop other products. You could do that on the Apple II, the IBM PC. Then came the Internet, where the duality was incredible. The Internet was an essential development tool, already, before any users came along. On the other hand, the most unsuccessful platforms have been the ones that were exclusive clubs, where only some people could develop. Sometimes they start exclusive and then become open, I'm thinking of the Macintosh, where I was lucky enough to be one of the insiders in 1983 who were seeded with development units. It was very good for recruiting, and it created a lot of buzz for us when it shipped, but the Mac didn't really blossom until 1986, after it had been openly available as a dev platform for two years. So I still don't know of a single example of an exclusive platform that worked. Yet companies still try to launch them, ignoring history, and hoping that they can control who gets to make their platform a winner.

Some examples of spectacular losers that were closed at birth: General Magic's MagicCap and Steve Jobs's NeXT. And today we have the iPhone, which is totally a closed box, with a very exclusive developer proposition. I had hoped that Google's phone platform, which was announced last week, would be the antidote for iPhone, but they are being exclusive about who they will let develop for it. I had hoped they would zig to Apple's zag, and would be completely open. Yet there are rumors that there are 50,000 gPhones out there with developers. I promise you, I don't have one. If I get one a year from now, I'm going to be less enthusiastic about trying to prove my ideas on their platform than I would be if I were among the first to get my hands on one.

In 1994 I suggested that developer relations is a mating ritual, if so, giving flowers to 50,000 developers and leaving the rest of us to wonder why we don't get a chance, is not good love-making. Same with OpenSocial. Their campfires and marshmallows show that they understand that love is an important part of making a platform happen, but who was invited to their slumber party, and who wasn't? I think at this point in the evolution of their platform business, they would do better to if they were more open and inclusive -- save the parties for celebrating the birth of the babies, the products the developers create. Spread the seed far and wide, or don't spread it at all. I think that's the lesson of the Internet, of Apple and IBM, and General Magic and NeXT.

Happy 11/11/07

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 17:43:58 GMT

Today is eleven eleven oh seven.

A date of alliteration. (Or is it assonance? Consonance?)

Just say it out loud. It's fun!

Yo Valleywag

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:04:41 GMT

Kind of amazing this pic hasn't shown up on Valleywag, given their obsession with Scoble.

Creative Commons -- attribution, share-alike license.

Sore Wii arm

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:20:38 GMT

I love Wii bowling.

My arm and shoulder are sore.

There must be good exercise games for the Wii.

Got any recommendations?

Davos Envy

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:18:55 GMT

I noted that Mike Arrington is going to Davos this year. I know another blogger who got an invite (not sure if he wants me to say). Now I wish I was a little less fame-averse. I had a great time in Davos in 2000. I'd love to go again. Oh well.

The official answer: I wouldn't go if they invited me. If you believe that, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Cheap!

Fandom on Facebook

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:10:58 GMT

I became a fan of the NY Times on Facebook.

This is very interesting!

I should have a fan page for Scripting News.

Wonder how to do?

I took their news quiz, got all the answers right. They said I guessed, but I didn't, I knew all the answers.

Truth be told you don't have to read the Times to know these things. I got the answers from watching Countdown a couple of nights this week.

Another great picture of Marc Canter, sleeping

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:24:07 GMT

Taken in the summer of 1998, in Trieste.

Here's another, a classic, also in Italy.

My Wii is back

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:24:14 GMT

And it works!

I've played tennis, baseball and bowling.

It's great.

My favorite so far is bowling.

Something broke in FlickrLand?

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:03:21 GMT

The docs are scarce and the community is scattered, so it's hard to tell what may have changed or why. With that caveat...

This API call used to return a variety of sizes for each picture in my account, including the only one I wanted (for backup purposes) the "original" size.

But all of a sudden, yesterday or the day before, it stopped returning it. I swear I didn't change anything in my code. Hunting through Google I see various bug reports, but nothing that quite looks like this one.

Update: The consensus is that the user has to be authenticated to get the Original size picture. This must be a new policy. I'll be able to test it a little later. In the meantime, my Wii arrived.

Good morning campers!

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:41:19 GMT

I'm your Uncle Ernie and

I welcome you to Tommy's Holiday Camp. Puh.

The camp wif the difference.

Never mind the weather.

When you gum to Tommy's.

The holiday's fo'evuh!

Haha!

NakedJen says goodbye to Santa Cruz

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:07:49 GMT

This is what blogging is all about.

A platform for a person to tell their story.

NJ (NakedJen) is a NBB (Natural Born Blogger).

Why most conferences suck

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:54:47 GMT

I had lunch yesterday with Steve Gillmor. It had been too long. We talked about many things, including the fact that neither of us were going to many conferences this year. I think I've only been to three so far, maybe four. I've had the opportunity to go to dozens. But they're all the same, you spend the first half-day saying hello, then have a couple of good conversations, then you run out of things to do.

This morning after a bit of processing, it struck me -- don't know why I didn't see this before, but the problem with most conferences is that except for the people putting it on, we don't have enough to do.

So once the first hellos are over we settle in with our laptops and do what we do when we have nothing to do at home or the office -- we browse around the web, answer emails and IMs, and otherwise look for something interesting or new.

Therefore the challenge, if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times. Hopefully things that involve other people or the venue, if not, what's the point of going somewhere to do this stuff?

PS: Paolo describes an alternative to conferences.

What to do at LeWeb3?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:24:52 GMT

Another thing that led me to the conclusion about conferences is that I'm going to do something interesting at LeWeb3 in Paris, with the permission and support of Loic, who runs the conference (and who is interviewing me on stage).

In the past Loic has projected an IRC backchannel, and from time to time pictures taken at the show (most famously a picture of Marc Canter sleeping), but this time Loic has given me something to do that I find truly inspiring. My job is to help get a flow of interesting pictures from the community to appear on the big screen on stage, and (if I can convince him to do this) a few screens scattered around the venue.

The first thought is to include pictures that were taken at the event itself, and of course we should use many of those, but I'd like to make it broader, to include people and places that are on the network defined by the conference. If it's like last year, there will be people tuned in from all around the world, and wouldn't it be great if we had a way to not only pull in their ideas (and we could do this better, btw) but also their imagery? It would give it a much richer world-wide feel.

One of the exciting opportunities for tech industry conferences is to find new ways to use networking on a world-wide level.

If you want, you can start uploading to Flickr pictures you think belong on stage.

Please use this tag: PreLeWeb3.

We might as well start talking about it now!

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Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:13:04 GMT

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