I just came up with a good idea for dealing with documentation and I wanted to post about it. One application I’m working on is fairly complex but has no real documentation. Because want users to be able to contribute to the documentation, I decided to put it in a wiki. It occurred to me that since the pages in the application have (or at least should have) good titles, I could automatically link into the specific help page by constructing a wiki URL based on the page title. We happen to use Mediawiki, so I just included the following line in the top level layout file that wraps every page:

<% if @page_title %> Help <% end%>

If a page has @page_title set, I get a dynamically generated link to the appropriate documentation in the Wiki. (The code in the example works in a Ruby RHTML file.)

This week I’m busier than usual, so I’m giving NetNewsWire a bit of a rest. Yesterday was my first day of completely skipping the aggregator, and I was amazed at the overall productivity spike. (I also skipped a few other things I normally do.) This tells me that when I come back, I’m going to have to change my aggregator habits, perhaps not leaving it running all day and instead checking it once in the morning and once at night, or using some other schedule to manage how much time I burn keeping up with everything.

The other day over on Of Interest I linked to an <a href=”interesting post from an Adobe developer explaining why rolling out an Intel-native version of Photoshop is a lot of work. Today I visited the page again in order to get the URL to post somewhere, and happend to skim the comments. Some of the commenters had interesting things to say, but a lot of them just wanted to whine, accuse the guy wrote the post of incompetence, or accuse him of lying to cover up an Adobe scheme to wring more money out of customers. I love transparency and the idea that markets are a conversation, but it really sucks to have a conversation with jerks.

If people want to read interesting posts from vendors on weblogs, they should probably not flame them hairless whenever they actually do post something.

James Wolcott describes America:

One of the great paradoxes of our age is how the US can be so dimly complacent and so sharply fearful in the same breath. We’re in a constant state of sluggish agitation, worked up into a righteous state of indifference.

I’ve been looking at digital cameras (again) lately, and I’m a bit confused about the economics of the various classes of camera. It seems like one relatively new category is the super-zoom camera. There are several cameras in the $350-$400 range with 5 or 6 megapixel CCDs and good 12x zoom lenses. Examples include the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, the DMC-FZ5, and the DMC-FZ20. There’s also the Canon Powershot S1 IS and the Sony Cyber-shot H1.

These cameras have features that I generally associate with higher end SLRs, like image stabilization and fast lenses. Megapixel-wise, they’re in the same range as lower end DSLRs. The 12x optical zoom seems incredibly economical when compared to the replacement cost in SLR lenses.

What’s the catch? What do cameras like the Canon EOS 350D and Nikon D50 bring to the table that the super-zooms don’t? Is it that the sensors in the DSLRs work at higher ISO settings, whereas in the super-zooms, anything above ISO 100 is noisy?

I’ve not been all that interested in the latest setback for Windows Vista, mainly because I live in Mac world these days. My Windows PC, which I use for games and to run Eclipse, works perfectly well with Windows XP. Anyway, what I am interested in is the fact that immediately after admitting to the Vista delay, Microsoft put a new guy in charge of the Windows group. I know that they had to replace Jim Allchin before he retires, but the timing sure makes it look like they’re acknowledging that somebody screwed up. I’ll be keeping an eye on Mini-Microsoft to see what the rank and file think about all this.

Update: It just occurred to me that Microsoft was probably already planning this reshuffle (you don’t plan these kinds of big changes overnight) and that they announced the latest delay at this time so as to avoid making the new guys do it. The old leadership was responsible for the delay, so they had to announce it. The new leadership starts fresh out of the gate with a new, now more realistic date to hit.

One interesting debate that seems to crop up now and again is whether to provide full feeds or not. Shelley Powers offers partial feeds because she likes her site’s design and wants people to see it. I, on the other hand, would prefer people not to see mine, so I provide full feeds gladly. The main reason I provide full feeds is that I like it when other people do it. I would love to visit every Web site I read every day, but the convenience of RSS trumps the overall experience of visiting particular sites for me. And besides, I have NetNewsWire configured so that the page for an entry opens in a new tab in my browser every time I hit enter. For longer entries, I usually just do that and go read them on the site where they live.

In any case, I went for about a year without even looking at the log reports for this site. Traffic is just not something I obsess over (or even care about, judging from my behavior). So for me, it’s better just to inject my thoughts into the great stream of ideas and see what happens.

As it turns out, I did get a stats package up and running on the new server and started examining my stats a bit. I’ll post about the results later.

I just read that the terms of running Yahoo ads on your site include blocking non-US visitors to your pages to prevent them from seeing the ads. What’s the reason for this? I suspect that it’s clickthrough fraud. If the levels of fraud demand this sort of hamfisted approach, there’s a lot of trouble brewing in ad-land.

This morning I created a Web service for the identity management application that I have talked about a few times. We’re rolling out a new application and it needs to authenticate against our centralized user database. After a discussion with the developers who are working on the new application, we came up with a very basic spec for this single API call.

You submit a username, password, and application key (which is used to identify and authorize the calling application) via HTTP POST. If the authentication or application key are invalid, the application returns an HTTP status code of 401 (unauthorized). If the credentials are valid, it returns 200 (success) and an XML document containing the details of the user’s profile.

This is how I’ve been writing web services for the past couple of years, with the exception of taking advantage of HTTP status codes, that’s something new for me. I would have always said that I was writing REST Web services or at least REST-style Web services, but given recent debate, I’m no longer sure if I’m allowed to say that. It’s REST to me, but perhaps not to thee. I am certain that it works, and that it’s really easy to program against.

Have you ever noticed that people who are really good at their jobs tend to do them even when they’re not at work? I know that good graphic designers obsess over the design of every poorly designed thing that they see. What does a quality assurance engineer do? Find defects in everyday things, report them and make sure that they get fixed.