Nani huyu?

Disclaimer: I’m not bashing on ESPN in general, just their member services.

Created an ESPN account a while ago for some forgot reason, but I needed to sign in today, so I was glad I already had one.  Well, I guess I accidentally chose 2009 as my birthday , so ESPN won’t let set up a Fantasy bracket for the World Cup this summer.  Design flaw one: don’t let people accidentally enter invalid data.   So I tried to edit my birthday, but my account is in some kind of ‘minor mode’ preventing me from changing my Date of Birth.  My DoB is ‘on file’ can’t be changed.  Design flaw two:  don’t prevent people from changing their data at least my ‘parent’ should be able to edit my dob.  Fine, I’ll just delete my account and start over.  Oh, you can’t delete an account you can only deactivate it.  Design flaw three: the user data belongs to the user, not the website.  Fine, deactivate, now I’ll create a new account.  ’That username is taken’.  Grrr, ok I’ll use my email address:

Due to privacy concerns, you may not want to use your full name or email address in your Member Name.

Wrong.  Try, due to privacy concerns we keep everything you give us private until you tell us other wise. Design flaw four: privacy is opt-out, not opt-in.  Screw you, I guess I’ll pick a new username just for your site that I’ll forget tomorrow:

We have detected that you are already signed in. Since you already have an ESPN.com user account, there is no need for you to register again. Please click here to return to the previous page.

Like hell there isn’t….arggg…fine, return me to the previous page:

We have detected that you are already signed in. Since you already have an ESPN.com user account, there is no need for you to register again. Please click here to return to the previous page.

Design flaw five: don’t have broken links.  Broken links? Are you serious? Bah, humbug, sign out, create new account, uncheck 6 boxes for receiving email from ESPN, done. Design flaw six: email spam newsletter SHOULD be opt-in not opt-out.

ESPN Member Services FTF!

So my buddy @jasongrlicky, coined a new tech phrase today.  Ready for it?…’Snowflake Bug’.  Every snowflake is unique, right? Well, what about those bugs that’s only occur for you and no one else?  You know, the kind of bugs that get responses worthy of a smack to the back of the head, “(me:) dude, I just can’t figure this bug out. (them:) well, it works for me. so…(me:) SMACK!!!”.  Those bugs are now call ‘Snowflake Bugs’.

Example:

I had a snowflake bug today.  Not so much for that fact that it can’t be reproduced by someone else, but rather because it never will.  It is therefore unique.  Special.  I use Fluid to create site specific browsers(ssb) for common web apps that I use.  Like Google Tasks or Facebook.  Well my facebook Fluid app kept loading myVidoop.com and stealing focus from the facebook signin form.  Very weird and annoying.  Well, once upon a time, I worked for myVidoop, and used their Safari password manager bookmarklet.  It works by adding an iframe to your page to talk to myVidoop.com.  This behavior was cached by Safari.  Fluid uses cached versions of safari pages to create ssb apps.  So long after I stopped using myVidoop, here it starts showing up on my Facebook login page.  Cleared my safari cache, recreated my Facebook fluid app.  All better.

If you’re not a web developer and you made this far into this post…you must really be bored.

I’m tired of websites making me jump through unnecessary security hoops and/or telling me something is more secure than it is.

When you sign up to pay your taxes on EFTPS.gov, they randomly generates a 8 digit password consisting of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers.  Sounds more secure than a password you or I would pick, doesn’t it?  It’s not.  After a few password resets I confirmed that the random 8 digits followed a pattern: uppercase, lowercase, uppercase, 3 numbers, lowercase, uppercase.  This pattern significantly reduces the number of combinations (k-multicombination for you math nerds) for their sudo-random password.

I would agree that this is a trivial matter over a negligible amount of security, especially considering Rainbow Tables, however it does little to instill confidence that the people I just gave my social security and bank account numbers know what their doing.  Don’t even get me started on the complete lack of confidence inspiring usability on their website.

Maybe I’m being too harsh.  Maybe missing my bus in the rain this morning is influencing the level of grace I exude today.  Or maybe someone was just too lazy to fix it.

Contacts, calendars, and now Tasks

Now that I have my contacts and calendar syncing to the cloud, the next step is a Todo list.  And I’ve finally settled on a todo list solution that works for me, my mac, and my mobile life style:  Google Tasks plus Fluid (PC users can use Google Chrome).  Google tasks is lightweight, simple, and mobile accessible.  Fluid creates stand-alone desktop apps from web site applications.

(more…)

So if you’re an iPhone user, you want contact and calendar syncing over-the-air, you don’t want to pay for Mobileme, and you think Microsoft Exchange server sucks, then you’re just like me and there’s a great solution out there for you: Google Sync.  It supports syncing (manual, fetch or push) contacts list and up to 5 calendars via an ActiveSync protocol.  Mail is coming soon (but you can still use IMAP or POP, so I’m content to wait).  Google Sync is currently in beta, but google betas are fairly stable, and you should have started backing up your data years ago so as to never be totally caught off guard again, so I wouldn’t worry too much.  I’ve been using Google Sync for several weeks now and I’m loving it.

Let’s say you would like to post some XML in a blog post about, for example, XML in a Django template.  There’s a great plugin called WP-Syntax that adds syntax highlighting to code samples in your blog.  Once installed, you can use some code like this in your templates:

<xml>Hello</xml>

Then switch over to HTML mode and wrap that code in a pre tag like this:

<pre lang="xml" escaped="true">
    <xml>Hello</xml>
</pre>

But there’s a small catch
(more…)

RT flyout in FCP 6

So the most common way to see unrendered playback in FCP is to enable Unlimited RT in the RT flyout. But sometimes the RT flyout is missing settings like Playback Video Quality, Playback Frame Rate, and most importantly Unlimited RT. So where did it go? The answer is pretty simple.

(more…)

Code should be readable.

Recently, I had to make some changes to some XML that had been written in a Django template.  To avoid the xml being rendered by the browser as HTML, the code had been manually escaped, thus making the code rather unreadable.

(more…)

If you’re not familiar with SXSW, it’s a an arts festival with film, music, and interactive arts.  Every year they release a BitTorrent of mp3s several hundred of the attending musicians.  Well, every year I listen to every single mp3 and pick out my favorites.  It usually takes about 3 months.   Here are just 10 of my favorites:

• “Shooting Star” by Air Traffic
• “Julianna” by Audyre Sessions
• “All Our Memories” by Edison Glass

(more…)

If you’re not familiar with SXSW, it’s a an arts festival with film, music, and interactive arts.  Every year they release a BitTorrent of mp3s several hundred of the attending musicians.  Well, every year I listen to every single mp3 and pick out my favorites.  It usually takes about 3 months.   Here are just 10 of my favorites:

• “To Let Myself Go” by Ane Brun
• “Bet You Never Thought” by Brighton, MA (is that really the band name?)
• “Journal Of A Narcoleptic” by Dan Mangan

(more…)