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!

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.

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.

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.

Here’s how some configurations will look when you’re done:

Gmail Google Tasks

iPhone Google Tasks

What you’ll need

• A Gmail account
• Fluid

How to make it work

You can create a fluid app using the following URL to mimic Google Tasks as it appears in Gmail:

http://mail.google.com/tasks/ig?up_ShowTips=false&lang=en&country=us&.lang=en&.country=us&synd=ig&libs=I6gXJQFzsCg/lib/libcore.js,MJLTofH-Kpk/lib/libsetprefs.js&extern_js=/extern_js/f/CgJlbhICdXMrMAo4ACwrMBI4ACwrMBM4ACw/UpcjQ5pVgbs.js&view=home

Or you can create a fluid app using the following URL to mimic Google Tasks for mobile devices:

http://www.google.com/m#tasks

http://mail.google.com/tasks/iphone

If you choose the later, you’ll need to set your User Agent to that of an iPhone, Gphone or other mobile device.  Here’s the latest iPhone User Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20

What you might want

Once you’ve got a Google Tasks fluid app, you should consider the following fluid preferences:

• Application icon: Google Tasks Fluid
• Window Style: Chromeless (None)
• Window Opacity: ~90%
• Windows are draggable from anywhere: checked
• Hide Status Bar (not a preference. see View menu)
• Hide Tool Bar (also in the View menu)

Now all I gotta do is watch Slumdog millionaire and I’ll be on my way.

<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

If you switch back and forth between HTML and Visual mode, you’ll lose that ‘escaped=”true”‘ attribute (probably a bug). Then you’ll end up with double escaped code on you page like this:

<xml>Hello</xml>

Solution?

• Only work in HTML mode, so your code doesn’t get escaped in the first place (Then you won’t need the escaped=”true” attribute either. I think you can even disable Visual mode).
• Write you post in Visual mode, then switch HTML mode, add your pre tags with escaped=”true” attribute, and then don’t switch back to Visual mode (that’s how I wrote this post).

I don’t like either solution, but I prefer the second.

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.

So, the RT flyout only shows settings that are compatible with the sequence you’re editing, so if you can’t see ‘Unlimited RT’, then you need to change your sequence settings.  Right click the sequence in Browser and select settings.  I usually use the ‘Load Sequence Preset…’ dialog to reset to a set of compatible settings.

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.

Sorry, no views

The various documentation templates were being rendered using direct_to_template so I couldn’t move the XML to a view and let Django’s autoescaping take over.  Besides, the XML is legitamately part of the static content of the page and shouldn’t be in the view.

Custom filters can be very misleading

So I decided to write a custom filter to escape the XML as needed.  But I kept running into this error:

‘my_filter’ is not a valid tag library: Could not load template library from django.templatetags.doc_code, No module named my_filter

Which made me think I had a path issue, or a misplaced file, or a missing __init__.py.  But all my initial guesses checked out.  Turns out that django spits out a ‘No module’ error when there are errors in the filter code.  Very misleading.

Now it’s looking good

So the final result is a django  template that looks like this:

<p>Here's some XML:</p>
{% filter xmldoc %}
<children>
    <child>Koes</child>
    <child>Chris</child>
</children>
{% endfilter %}

And the custom filter looks like this:

from django.template import Library
from django.template.defaultfilters import stringfilter
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape
 
register = Library()
 
@register.filter
@stringfilter
def xmldoc(value):
    return escape(value).strip()
xmldoc.is_safe = True

Now the XML is readable to the users and the developers.

My sources

• Django custom filters
• I was missing an import in my filter

• “Shooting Star” by Air Traffic
• “Julianna” by Audyre Sessions
• “All Our Memories” by Edison Glass
• “Wine Red” by The Hush Sound
• “Cinderella (Has Nothing On You)” by Birds of Wales
• “Pluto” by Clare & The Reasons
• “westport” by Joshua Morrison
• “Golden Train” by Justin Nozuka
• “Pull Me Out Alive” by Kaki King
• “Summer Romance” by The Redwalls

Also check out my SXSW 2007 Picks

• “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
• “Etienne D’Aout” by Malajube
• “99%” by “The Mooney Suzuki
• “Much Farther To Go” by Rosie Thomas
• “I Believe In Your Victory” by This Will Destroy You
• “Moving to New York” by The WOMBATS
• “Laundry And Dishes” by Adrienne Pierce
• “Find What You Get There” by Bang Gang

Also check out my SXSW 2006 Picks