supersonic feet

Not quite but Derek Sivers, an early proponent of switching to Rails for large-scale websites, has written a post on his O’Reilly blog about why he just gave up on 2 years’ work in Rails on his CD Baby project to switch back to PHP.

It’s a very sensible article looking at the fact that Rails isn’t always the answer, much as it may pain us to admit, and that when PHP (or any other language) would actually be easier to use, we just should.

That said, I haven’t been tempted back to PHP for anything just yet

I’m a bit late on this, but the first draft of the OAuth spec has been published.

OAuth is (very roughly) an OpenID equivalent for applications - it lets a ‘consumer’ application (the standard example seems to be a printing service) contact a service provider (continuing the example, say flickr) to request information from one of the service provider’s users rather than the current trend of asking the user for their username and password then page-scraping.

It works similarly to OpenID, in that if I went to the printing service’s website and wanted to print some of my flickr photos, it would re-direct me back to flickr with a key for flickr. flickr itself would then ask me if I’m OK with it and, assuming I am, they send me back to the printer’s website along with a matching key for the printing service to then access my flickr photos.

If the big boys pick this up, it would hopefully lead to an end to the current method of requesting your username and password for another provider, which gives total access to the new website. The biggest current culprit is asking for your gmail/hotmail/yahoo login details to invite friends to a social network. It’s clearly something users want to be able to do (if explained clearly and not the spam approach adopted by quechup among others), but handing over your username and password to other 3rd-party sites is far from ideal as it gives them total control over your account. OAuth would limit them to specific actions, such as retrieving your photos or address book and prevent them from impersonating you.

Perhaps it’s better described as your valet key for the web.

Amazon just did a great thing - they surpassed my expectations of their customer service.

Unless you live under the proverbial rock (or just aren’t much of a geek), you’ll be aware that there’s a computer game by the name of Halo 3 coming out rather soon. Being a bit of a Halo fan-boy (I used to help run one of the big Halo fan sites, Haloplayers, now dormant) I had pre-ordered myself a copy of the Halo 3 Legendary Edition all the way back in March when it was first made available for pre-order. As the game is due for release in 11 days, I logged in to check that my pre-order was indeed still there and would arrive on time.

“Delivery estimate: 29 Nov 2007″

Uh oh.

This is a popular purchase (the game reportedly has over 1.5 million pre-orders and the Legendary Edition sold out the day it was made available for pre-order in most places), so I was quite worried by this estimate of a 2-month wait.

More out of hope than expectation, I filled in the customer contact form on Amazon’s site to ask if the estimate was correct. I’ve never actually needed to contact Amazon’s CS department, but being the big company it is, I wasn’t expecting great things.

A few hours later, I’ve had a reply apologising for the error and assuring me that the estimate will be fixed soon, but that the real estimate is much earlier than the 29th of November. I’m now a happier bunny.

They didn’t quite go as far as telling me what the ‘real’ estimate is, but the email did its job of reassuring me that it’ll be soon and I’m willing to wait a week and see what it is.

So, Amazon impressed me - they replied quickly (on a Saturday, too), were polite and answered my question first time. The rest of the email did get into a bit of a boilerplate grovelling letter asking me to understand that they do their best to ensure accuracy, blah, blah and they hope I’ll give them another chance. To be honest, I don’t think that bit was necessary in this instance, but it didn’t hurt.

Is it just me, or does Amazon need to at least add an account option to opt out of the nonsense spam leaflets they send with every purchase you make?

I just ordered a CD (the new Go! Team album, which is every kind of awesome) and got 3 ad leaflets along with the CD. They’re getting quite annoying and it’s just wasted paper. At least email spam only wastes your time and temper, not trees (though if both kinds could end, that’d be just spiffy).