Am I the only person who resents having to pay for SMS when I’m already paying for unlimited data?

[digg-reddit-me]My erlang library ScUtil has been public at the ScUtil page for some time now.  Recently, I’ve been working on documenting it.  It’s about half documented in its current state.

Here’s the prototype ScUtil documentation.  I’m open to commentary.

THIS IS ONLY HALF WRITTEN.  I have been sitting on this post, waiting for the mood to finish it, for months; because EEP18 is now being treated as a likely implement, I am immediately publishing the half-written version, because it exposes many (though not all) of the serious, irreconcilable problems with EEP18.

On the mailing list, people are actively trying to bring Erlang up to snuff with regards to web standards.  One of the more unfortunate choices being discussed is JSON as a data notation.  JSON, unfortunately, does not actually map to Erlang in a useful way.  Joe Armstrong has gone as far as to suggest BIFs, which are decidedly unrealistic as well as unnecessary.  My goal is to create a JSON handling library.  However, the mailing list is beginning to put momentum behind an alternative proposal which is currently presented in BIF form.

This post explains why my approach is different.  Many of the issues herein are discussed by the tabled EEP (EEP 18, “JSON BIFs” by Rickard O’Keefe), but some are not, and some of these issues are accepted when I believe they should not be.  It is my position that EEP 18 is unacceptably dangerous.  I will explain why.

Read the rest…

[digg-reddit-me]My good friend Jeff happened to mention offhand his knowledge of a document I’ve been looking for for quite some time now.  I’m sharing it with my readers in case they’re looking for something similar.

Let me be forward: I cannot stand the various Objective C books I’ve tried.  They all want to teach me to be a programmer.  I’m already there.  I just want a book like Stroustrup.  The PragProg book is awful: the first several chapters are about Mac development tools, like I give a damn.  Everything’s through interface wizards.  It’s nauseating.

Jeff heard mein painz0rz, and turned me on to From C++ to Objective-C.  It isn’t perfect: it’s not super comprehensive, and it’s translated from a different native language (French), which leaves a few passages cumbersome.  However, as one can tell from reading the intro, the author of the document, much like me, found little to love in the state of Objective C documentation, and wanted to write something for people who were already well established.

Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not.

My boss Ryan wants the engineers at Kayako to start being more transparent on what they’re working on on the company blog.  So, uh, I’m writing there.  Yay.  Just thought I’d let my traffic know; the content I put there will be solely about SupportSuite stuff, since that’s what I work on, but some of it is sorta interesting.

My boss’ boss, Varun, is letting me open source some of the work I’m doing at Kayako.  I’m not supposed to talk about the interesting three until they’re ready for release, but I can tell you that a JavaScript ISO8601 implementation is among them, and that they’re all going to be MIT licensed, no GPL contamination.

More news as I get my butt in gear and finish the libraries in question.  But, yay Varun!

So, I’m not really sure what to do here.

There’s this host.  I’m not going to name them, because it isn’t clear to me whether it’s ethical to do so.  Four times in the last year, I’ve caught their engineers telling customers who are shared with my employer complete horseshit.  They’ve blamed their servers being compromised on our application without a lick of evidence (which turned out to be their own fault after basic inspection), they’ve made absurd claims about our policies, and now they’re making claims that we don’t support MS Exchange, which is of course completely false.

What’s worse, when their engineers get caught being completely full of crap, the company’s response is to isolate those engineers from explaining the claims they made, and instead they’ve been going to my company’s CEO, trying to get me in trouble for telling our shared client to be careful about the advice received from their engineers, despite knowing perfectly well that the advice being handed out by their engineers (particularly during commercially motivated server takeover) was dangerously incorrect.

So I’m not really sure what to do.  Do I go public with the names and claims of the individuals involved?  Do I just choke on the rage and be silent?  I tried going to their bosses; their bosses’ response was to try to get me fired from my own job.

How do my readers suggest that I handle such an improbably unethical hosting company?

I am setting my prediction in stone.  I predict a 57% electoral college win for Obama, and 43% to McCain.  At the time of this writing, no results are in for any state.

It’s finally done!    And, thank god, “concepts” are officially in.