Life is grand

in the shadow of circular emotions
Originally uploaded by sherIZAN.

I just spent 30 minutes of my life trying to get OpenID to work on my domain. It seems a good idea but apart from the pre-installed LiveJournal base it is in the “needs rocket scientist skills to use” phase. Not exactly what Flickr needs to appease its Yahoo! hating users.

For my Colib.com project I want to use an “open identity” system. With so many Web 2.0 services popping up I don’t want Colib.com to force you to register a whole new ID on a whole new site. I must have used 50 registration forms in the last two weeks thanks to Web 2.0 betas/launches. Quite insane.

So what open identity system would you recommend? Colib will be a Ruby on Rails app though my hosting provider has PHP support too if needed.

Carine and I popped over to Greece yesterday and stayed the night.

Hah, I wish. This is Club Mykonos, a resort up the West Coast of South Africa styled, as the name suggests, after Mykonos in Greece.

Carine is studying there for a week and I drove her up. Now Club Myk is pretty famous amongst South Africans as not only is it Greek styled but it is also a dastardly casino. People seem to love casinos, god knows why.

I had never visited it before mainly due to a part of me being a bit of a snob about things like this. “Themed” resorts don’t exactly tickle my fancy. They bring to mind cheap plywood walls painted to look like the Seychelles/Tuscany/Hawaii/Greece with the ruder, more real grime beneath it. Fakely smiling stewards in themed costumes who flop into their fraying chairs at night in front of the telly and beat their wives for lack of a more fulfilled life. Paper umbrellas that turn to mush and fall into your Hawaiian drink.

You know, fake. Just plain old fake with no redeeming value. Themed resorts, how awful.

Well, Club Mykonos had me pining for the Santorini, the Naxos and the Paros that I visited a few years ago faster than you can say souvlaki! It is really quite decent. Lost amongst the narrow, white-washed walls of the resort I still knew it was fake but it was good enough that it felt good. When I walked out and saw Langebanne in the distance I didn’t feel cheated. I felt it was a nice place to spend a few days and that while it had a passing resemblance to Greece it didn’t go overboard and demand that you believe in it.

Maybe that is the key? Be themed but don’t treat your customers like children. Realise they know it isn’t the real thing and provide a solid under-structure to balance. Play with a bit of the magic that you are copying but don’t pretend you managed to steal its soul.

So I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t go into the casino and the place was quite deserted (middle of the week and winter is still in its death throes) which helped but even full the whole resort probably has a good feel to it.

I tried Plazo out awhile back but Trumba was simply better at the time. Things have changed though and now Plazo is not only a better tool but is also free to use. I’ll write more about Plazo latter but I just wanted to note that I asked Plazo if they would introduce an import feature and their reply was “in 1-2 weeks.” I have quite a bit of data in my Trumba account so an import feature in Plazo (from ICS or CSV format) is important. Hopefully that 1-2 weeks estimate is a firm one as my Trumba trial will be running out then.

BTW: Planzo and Trumba are online calendars.

The thrice-identified moravec skittered forward on silver-spider legs.

from Olympos by Dan Simmons.

I am no grammar expert but if that sentence had to have a dash surely it should have been between “spider” and “legs” and not “silver” and “spider”? The legs are those of a spider and happen to be silver. I don’t even see the need for a dash, there is no confusion to be seen as one would need for the use of a dash.

Right?

That is the NUnit interface showing a failed unit test of mine. The unit test was meant to fail as I had not yet implemented the class I was testing. First you fail your tests, then you write your code until the test passes. I am following the NUnit Get Started guide.

The grand thing is that I was unintentionally shown the value of this unit test even as I was following the guide. The first step in the guide makes you write a unit test that fails against the account class. The unit test runs various methods to withdraw and deposit funds with the final test being a balance check. At that stage your account class has only stub methods so withdrawing and depositing did nothing which meant balance checking returned erroneous values. The next step is to add just enough code to the methods so that the unit test will pass. So I followed the code they provided, compiled and ran the unit test. Only it failed, again. The guide clearly said it should pass at this stage.

So I went back to my account class and looked over the code. I spotted my mistake; I had balance += amount; in the Withdraw method instead of balance -= amount;.

Now if I had been doing this the old way with no unit tests I would not have spotted my mistake (because it all compiled fine and there were no runtime errors) until my client had come back and said “Buddy, when I withdraw, my balance goes up! What the hell is going on?”.

So wow, what a great illumination in my first 30 minutes of trying out test driven development.

I want to tag my tags. I want my tags to have meaning. I want tags to have types, to be distinct in what they are; A location, a person, a relationship, an animal, a plant. I want to add one tag which by already having been tagged adds further meaning to the item without having to type in superfluous tags.

When I view a jaguar tag I want to see cars, not cats.

Flickr helps in this regard by offering tag clusters. Through some powerful data-mining they differentiate the tag jaguar for cars from the tag jaguar for cats.

The problem there is that it is a computer system doing the data-mining, doing the figuring out. Sure, it is using the tag data you and your friends entered but the clustering logic is not yours. A big point of folksonomies is the folk bit. You entered the keywords. You made it work the way you wanted it to work. The keywords you entered are the keywords you are comfortable with, the ones you remember and are familiar with. Tag clustering works by including other peoples’ tags which brings along their methods of tagging, not yours.

A good deal of the time Flickr tag clustering works and works well. But when you want to be specific, when you want an unusual tag cluster, it fails. Try the orange cluster. Where is the fruit? I want to see photos of an orange, the fruit. I assume the reason for this is that in proportion to other uses of orange (colour, sunset, flower, M&Ms), fruit is not used much. If you try the oranges cluster though you do get fruit. Just a plural difference results in success or failure.

orange fruit or “tag the tag ‘orange’ with the tag ‘fruit’. Anytime I want items tagged with orange and I mean fruit, I can get them. orange colour. Anytime I want items tagged with orange and I mean the colour, I can get them.

fruit plant. Now we can infer that orange is a plant. Or can we? We can but inference would also tell us that orange is a colour. That is a problem caused by the cloud and non-unique nature of tags. In a hierarchical system the orange in plant => fruit => orange is unique and separate to the orange in colour => orange. In tag clouds, orange is just orange.

If tags are tagged though at least through a suitable interface we can refine the list implicitly. Currently we can’t, refining is done by data-mining and aggregating other peoples’ methods of tagging.

You might notice that a pseudo-hierarchical system comes into being when tags are tagged. That is fine, it is not against the nature of tags because while we can infer a hierarchy out of tagged tags we don’t hit the shortcomings of proper hierarchies. Remember the orange tag can still be a colour, a fruit or word that does not rhyme all without creating copies of orange as we would have to do in a hierarchical system.

Naturally we don’t want to make tagging complicated. Tagging is working in large part due to how easy it is to tag. In most systems you have a free-text field that you just go wild in. Enter as many or as few or as strange tags as you wish.

So any tagged-tag system would have to retain the freeform nature and remain easy.

Here are some simple tagged-tags I can think of:
Bob Geldorf musician
Jimmy White friend
Cape Town city
Edna bride
Morgan groom

Those are simple relationships. How about adding some notation to imply other relationships.

Location: Cape Town :in: South Africa
Part-of: cog * watch
Synonym: T.V. ~ television

Synonyms are a good example of where tagging can fall down. When tagging a television show do you use TV, T.V. or television? Half the folks use one, some use the other and the rest use something else. Even a single person will vary, one day using bicycle, the next day using bike and then back to bicycle. When they go back to find all items tagged with bike they miss the bicycle items. I do it all the time, I try not to and it is simple to remember T.V. vs. television but there are plenty of situations where it is not so simple to remember. “Do I use web or www to mark items like this?”

Recently in Flickr I stopped tagging all my photos with South Africa. I realised it was polluting the system to have photos tagged with that when the photo was of my New Balance shoes. I felt that I should only use South Africa on photos that were distinctively South African e.g. of Cape Town city or of a Zulu hut. But 5 years from now I may ask “Where did I take that photo of my New Balance shoes?” and without a South Africa tag I won’t remember.

I haven’t quite figured it out though; how I can tag my shoes photo with South Africa and not pollute actual photos of South Africa also tagged with South Africa. I think tagging tags can help there, but the implementation details are bedeviling.

Still, tagging of tags can offer us more meaning without sacrificing the good qualities of tagging. For now I have to tag this photo with woman, Carolyn and friend when all I should have to tag it with is Carolyn which is in turn tagged with woman and friend.

Microsoft Max is a bit of demo software for WinFX which has the potential to become a real product.

It is a pretty basic demo, slick but basic. What is interesting though is the notion that a single slide in your slide-show can consist of more than one photo.

Check it out above. I have a bunch of photos in my slide-show, 13 in total. But when you play the slide-show you are only shown 4 slides. This is because I have grouped some of the photos together onto one slide.

The grouping is dead easy, no fiddling with resizing, borders, margins and such; just drag photos from one slide to the other or into a new slide (e.g. Cinnamon in the last slide is a photo on its own.)

You can see a screenshot of one of the slides here.

The rest of Max is OK. You can create slide-shows to share with friends but they then need the Max software to view them so the scope is limited.

Note to self; Don’t name a table Formats (e.g. for storing RSS, Atom, OPML etc.) when creating a Ruby on Rails app. You will utter “doh” quietly when later on you try to, through a join, call feed.format.id. Format is a private method so you can’t have anything of yours named format.

Hmm so I need an alternative. ElFormats? Formatics? Formatts?

This little post is just for me. And everyone else who forgets the pluralisation rules of Ruby on Rails.

IT IS SINGULAR WHEN USING SCAFOLDING. ruby script/generate scafold Contact and NOT Contacts.

I wonder if I will remember. I always get it wrong.