The Lair

So, inbetween doing real work; I’m still tinkering around with Grapevine. There is a reasonable amount of “oh, ok. cool. I did this.” satisfaction (dare I say smugness) at having gotten it to a point where I can just leave it alone and it will (mostly) just work… Most fun, however, has been the weird and wonderful stuff I’ve had to do to make it actually work the way I want…

Some sites don’t have RSS feeds

Horrific, I know… but true. There have been various cost related arguments made elsewhere about the expense of an RSS feed. I saw a case being made here (can’t remember where I saw that link, but it was some local blogger). Extremely popular sites like Slashdot implement their own policies on how often an RSS feed can be updated by a client (Slashdot’s policy, original story is also worth a read). Even more interesting is the prediction made here that RSS would become mainstream in two years. The article was written in 2004. I think the prediction has come true, more or less… perhaps even sooner than the authors dared imagine…

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Much to my shock and horror, I got infected with a virus (more properly, a trojan) last week. Before you ask; no, I was being lame and didn’t have my antivirus enabled at the time. I deserved the punishment I had to endure. In my defence, this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often to me… I usually know better than to click dodgy attachments and so on. In fact, I never click on attachments from chain mail and rarely click on attachments otherwise unless I know I’m due to get one (from the author). Yes, I was running Windows on my notebook at the time. Now that I’ve established my credentials (bwahahaha) and told everyone (unconvincingly) about how rare this occurence really is – let me break out the sack cloth and ashes etc. Ok, I’m done repenting, let’s move on.

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The big buzzword that people tend to ignore (or talk about to excessive extents) is proper risk management. Well, it’s only been talked about since 1989 or so. One of the essential qualities of a risk management strategist, I find, is an appropriate amount of cynicism. “Oh, you say tool FizzyBang is going to solve all our problems in one fell swoop, do you? Can it drive me to and from work, give me massages to relieve tension headaches and make decent coffee too?”. Magic bullets usually aren’t, you see. After you’ve seen a few dozen purported magic bullets come and fizzle out, you know this whole magic bullet business is better saved for an adventure flick with a Waterworld-like special effects budget.

Not being overly cynical or anything, when I needed to write a tool that would grab and import several hundred megabytes of content generated by other people, I immediately started to feel a tension headache coming on. Yes, so the people who’d generated this content met with me, assured me that it was of excellent quality, that it would always be generated on Sunday night, there was no need to ask all those nasty probing questions about “what if you don’t have it available by Monday morning?”. Of course I didn’t believe them; but it seemed impolite to twitch a cynical eyebrow and make like the O RLY owl.

That was probably my lack of experience in being nasty to random strangers. I should have schooled myself by hanging out in a few IRC channels or something. I’d soon get over those inhibitions.

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