soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Ok, this is not serious, it contains high quantities of fine web developer fun. Please do not read it if you don't feel that geekly ironic…

I was trying to update my e-mail address at lastminute when I was treated to a series of consecutive WTF, each one being even more astounding than the previous one. And I wanted to share it with you so we all can enjoy this product of engineering.

As web developer, I expected to find an option for logging in first, and then changing my account details. But not, you choose first "Your account" and then you click on "Manage your personal and site details". Yeah it looks good (but weird). Anyway, when I click on the second link I get to a page like this:

Please note that I had to manually add the input box for current email address, since it wasn't added by the system. Seems they like us to practise the trendy Do-It-Yourself hobby.

The problem is that I can't paint input boxes in the browser, so when I entered my new email addresses, the system gave me this error:

I must confess that I was kind of waiting for this error to appear. It's like, you know, when you want to delete something in Windows and it asks you each time "Are you sure you want to send the file to the recycle bin?".

So I had the hope that the missing input field would appear now, magicly! because they would fix their error of not showing my input field from the beginning. But there's more fun to come!

I tried going back to the first screen and chose the option for checking my Purchase History, as I thought: that one is asking me for my password, so maybe once I check my Purchase History, it will show me an input field because I will be logged in. So I entered my email and password, and…
Tadaaaaaaa!

The best error message I've seen in a long time!

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters.

Come in, I'm sure you are counting the minutes till you can use it in your own application. You're secretly desiring to find a good place to trigger this error. Maybe when there are not enough products in stock? When an operation has completed successfully? Just about completing transfers in a banking application? That one looks like a cool new home for this error. Let's read it again:

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters.

It's so delicious, so obscure for us the illiterate users, and I'm sure the IT guys know very well what it means. When a user fills in a support ticket with the subject "I'm getting an unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters", they have good laughs. HAH! he's getting The Error! He's fucked! HA! HAHA! =))

But let's not get distracted with this tremendous load of fun. I forgot to tell that the pink circle with an exclamation mark actually is BLINKING. So that it actually shows like this:

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters

That looks quite cool but I think it would have improved a lot if everything had been blinking.
So as I saw that there was no way of changing my email from there I just thought: let's go back to the form with the missing input field and let's find out what's going on there.

There's an embedded javascript in the very page, being triggered when the form is submitted. Also, as I guessed, the input for my current email address it's in the form, but it is hidden, as the web developer toolbar's "Forms - Display form details" function (and a view to the page's source) will quickly demonstrate:

There are also a couple of "textfeild" which look very funny too. Extremely funny, indeed!

But again, let's not get distracted with the fun! We can directly input the value of the current login (i.e. my current email address), now that Firefox shows us the hidden fields.

That's cool! With filling this and my new desired e-mail address, I just get to this confirmation page:

So it looks like I changed it! Maybe not, because I didn't fill in all the fields. When I get the next e-mail with stupid travel offers, I'll tell you.
Actually this serves for another purpose, apart of giving tons of fun, which is to remind everybody that javascript validations are baaaad. As you see, they are easy to forge and break even more easily.

And now let's find a place for The Error!!

Yesterday after work was quite funny. Following british habits, almost everybody in the office went to a near pub for some drinks. That's quite interesting since that way you can learn what everybody else in the office is doing, or what do they do outside office hours, etc.

Then somebody asked me: You must be a linux expert, no?

Me? God, I wish I was! It seems that Ubuntu it's so easy that you look like an expert, hehe, that's really funny. Then I was asked why I was using it, if I wasn't really an expert on it, instead of using windows, and I must recognize it's quite complicated to explain.

In my previous jobs I could just use windows. It wasn't really a problem until I got my powerbook. Then I started feeling windows more and more clumsy - and annoying. But I still had to stick with it, since there was no opportunity to switch to mac or linux. One day I asked about installing ubuntu in one of the computers and there were two answers:

1. linux is just for servers (and only red hat enterprise linux)
2. how can someone install a linux distribution with such an ugly name? (ubuntu)

Obviously I got discouraged and just thought: ok, but you don't know what you're losing. Some time after we replaced a pirate copy of windows XP with ubuntu at our home server, and I quite liked that new version. I thought: if it wasn't because I have MacOsX… I would install linux in my powerbook!
And somehow on the other hand I got aware of the goodness of using open source products. Now this is really hard to explain, as it may sound like a divine message or something, but the main reason is the data:

One day you don't care about open source or anything and consider the same freeware and open source. Next day (after the message came) you realise that you want to keep your data with you - and for that, you need to use programs which only use standard file formats, or open source software. So that if you change your program, your data keeps being usable.

I somehow got the final nudge when I switched from Apple's Mail.app to Thunderbird. I don't know why, I started feeling bad about using Apple's Mail. I thought: and what if I bought another computer and it's not a mac and I want to copy my email data, what am I going to do? The horror!

I discovered that although Mail.app used an standard mbox format at the beginning, they changed it so that the files could be indexed by the Spotlight. So what happened? It was not standard anymore, and I was quite lucky that some good soul had written an script for converting between Mail 2 format and the standard mbox one.
Since then I got more and more interested in this kind of software. I know it may sound a bit ridiculous if you come from the commercial background that most of us live in, but the ubuntu philosophy -providing software freely- really hit me. The idea of not being tied to any company may sound quite utopical but I believe it's good to have utopies in mind.

And then (coming back to the topic) when new computers came to the office, they had a preinstalled windows XP. I asked if I could install linux on my computer and when they told of course! I was like W-O-H-!

Since then I've been using it continuously, and can't stop being surprised every day with the good achievements and goals it has reached. I also have become aware of how many money do companies spend stupidly in things like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows and all of that. I mean, companies could save lots of money if they could just buy bare computers with no operating system installed at all, and install only whatever they needed. Specially, computers for developers: I have a fully equipped computer for the price of 0. Just do some maths!

There are also other aspects even more complicated to explain, mainly that using free software is like making an payment to the developers. Paying with recognition, honours, and even bug reports, to be honest. I believe any decent programmer should be happy with people contributing to the software in any manner, as it means that they care about the product. So somehow there's like an spontaneous collaboration, which I personally find very interesting. (Let alone project donations, that I also have made, but that's another topic)

As you can see, the reasons for using linux are many and subjective, and most of them fall quite quickly in the personal beliefs area, being very easy to start evangelising and trying to force everybody to go linux. I do not think that it is the way, since as I said once, I got very dissapointed with linux zealots in the past. So when I have the opportunity to explain my opinions I do it happily, with the hope that it serves more people to understand this personal attitude (and maybe join it as well).

I have noticed an increased number of articles with the only aim of being featured at a big site and getting traffic to them (and thus people clicking in their banners). Usually the titles match one of the following patterns:

• Top (number) (things | for doing something). Examples: top 10 tips for becoming a better programmer, top 15 things you should do before 30, top 5 programming languages… etc.
  These pages are usually poor in actual content, mainly being a rushed compilation of some items for the selected theme. Most of the times, the recommendations are outdated, like for example, tips for object oriented php using php4 syntax (when php5 is way better and that's what everybody willing to do OOP with php should learn).
• (Apple | Microsoft | whatever big company) + (DRM's | Sueing each other | Open source | Market shares). Examples: Apple wins 10% market share, Microsoft creates open source license…
  Usually these articles are simple copy & paste from slashdot or theregister and do not add any depth to the topic. Also they tend to appear in a page bloated with ads, where 10% of the page is the actual content and the rest is pure useless crap (specially when the crap is targeted at customers from an specific country).
• (PHP / Python / Ruby On Rails / CSS / etc) tutorial for beginners. Examples are obvious. These articles are just a rewriting of the first chapter of the official documentation, sometimes they go further and simply copy and paste it. No added value. Crap.
• Let's talk about (something). Examples: What is Ubuntu? The real history of Ubuntu. The GPL. What is the cathedral and the bazaar?
  These are usually taken from wikipedia, making use of the open license it has, but without giving any credit back. Anyone which just happens to read the article, might attribute the authorship of it to the blog owner, and not to whoever wrote it at wikipedia. Apart from being stupid, this is a shame. People who do this should be condemned to public disconnection from internet for life!

Basically this brings me to one conclusion: when you become very specialized in one field, these communities become useless. They might be interesting for casual internet users, but not for "professional" ones. I personally find more useful content in del.icio.us than in digg & co, as it's easier to filter with the tags and all that.

Here you have my latest production!

All of it for approximately £10 (plus the time for preparing it of course). It's been extremely fun to look for the ingredients in Chinatown shops, I can't stop being surprised with all the weird ingredients which they sell there - and I wish I could read those languages!

It's amazing how much does the rice increase its volume when cooked for this (we have eaten like 1/3 of the total!).

Also, maybe because of being from Valencia and having heard lots of times "do not let the rice get too inflated, do not let the rice get sticky" I still feel sometimes a bit guilty when preparing this inflated sticky rice. But well, I'm trying to convince my brain that this is not rice for a paella.

Thanks once again to Shifter for showing us the beauty of rice rolls :)

Oh and if you still need more japanese-themed productions, trace has just captured xplsv's tokyo in HD264 which is the closest thing to watching the demo in real time. Awww!! those bubbles, those clouds, the robot, the elevators, the city… :')

We did a quick visit to NetAudio London on Friday; it was also the first time I went to Angel, and it's way posher than I thought (I was kind of expecting a devastated party area with lots of alternative artists and Bansky-was-here or Mind-you-this-is-not-a-Bansky everywhere, like Old Street).

And after that and some well-deserved eight hours of sleep, came an intensive week-end with xplsv.tv - but we are still not finished with it. I thought we were going to advance more but I was wrong.
So far, most of the work I've done is focused on the motion management. Apart from refactoring lots of code, I have fixed a couple of little bugs, some serious ones, and also added some little enhacements which I believe every artist in xplsv.tv will love when we move these changes to the live server, as they increase the usability of the motion management area.

It's been really delicious to replace all the "rude error messages with an exclamation mark at the end" with something a bit more human and nicer. By the way, I still don't understand why did I enter all the messages like that, and I don't understand either why most of the non-english native speakers tend to write errors messages in that very manner. To my disgust, I have noticed it repeatedly these last months; maybe it has to do with the fact that (luckily) my english level has improved (or that I think).
Some examples:

• You must enter the title of the motion! becomes Please enter a title for the motion
• You must be the creator of the work! becomes Please confirm you're allowed to publish the motion here

Obviously if you're an artist in xplsv.tv and have any suggestion, you're more than welcome. (I could put funnier messages, like Hey dude, do not forget the title! but I am trying to be serious :D ).

I also experienced one of the joys of refactoring: things work better with less lines of code. I love that.
Meanwhile, mr.doob was working in the motiongraphics TV, and he made live a new version of the tv. Now you can resize it to suit your tastes - and this has made him feel the desperate urge to encode again the videos so that they have a better resolution. And if you like the new TV, do not forget to vote for it at digg! (yeah, let's do a bit of self-promotion, just for once ;) )