Global Spin: Tech

Gee! (your app smells terrific)

The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That's why I love Gee!, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.

Gee (I'm going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail's Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders' addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that's not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can choose to ignore it until something newer comes in.

That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I've had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.

a flaw in the AJAX model?

I've been using GMail a lot lately. I've shunted my public-facing e-mail address through it, and the spam filtering has been surprisingly effective. I'm also interested in the AJAXy goodness they've implemented, which gets around some of the interface headaches inherent in Webmail.

Unfortunately, I've noticed something disturbing when using GMail in the same context as a traditional mail reader. It doesn't seem to respond well to multi-tasking. Specifically, if I try to fire-and-forget something (like "Archive these three messages") and switch to another window or tab, GMail stops acting on my request and gets stuck on "Loading..." or similar.

So, is this a symptom of the J in AJAX causing trouble? Is Firefox stopping the Javascript flow when I switch windows, or is some important object no longer available to GMail? Or is GMail not handling some common environment change that occurs when the window is out of focus? Either way, it's a caveat to be considered when trying to replace desktop apps with AJAX Web apps.

back in the saddle again

It's good to be back on CPAN. It's been over a year since Apache::PSP went 1.0, and I haven't had much chance to come up with publicly-useful Perl modules since then. That's why it felt really good to post the EVDB::API module for work.

It's a spiffed-up version of a module Chuck (our CTO) wrote for internal use, but the fact that it's out there now makes it even cooler. (Well, that and the API it actually uses.) I'm actually starting to get excited in that "hey, someone's actually going to use this" sort of way.

If you're interested and have a Perl install laying around, try this:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install EVDB::API'
...and let me know what happens.

technorati hath failed me

...or at least annoyed me today.

I'm new to this Web 2.0 thing, but I've been getting up to speed over the last few weeks. To do so, I got hooked into Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati among others. More on all that later.

I've also been a bit busy at work, too, so I wasn't able to get back to Technorati for a week or two. When I did this morning, I found that (like usual) I'd forgotten the username and password I'd used. The usual suspects didn't do the trick, so I popped my e-mail address into the Forgot Password link like a good little user and proceeded to Gmail to get enlightened.

That's when it all started going wrong.

The e-mail I received wasn't very informative, but I assumed it wouldn't need to be because it consisted mainly of a "reset password" link back to Technorati. However, following that link took about 16 years (or the Web equivalent, 20 seconds), so I started to get nervous. When the page finally appeared, it was as sparse as the e-mail had been, just a pair of "new password" boxes. This wasn't exactly the rich user experience one would hope for in an interface as important as "Change Password".

Still, I wasn't being prevented from proceeding... yet. I typed in my usual "Web-type services that I only use infrequently" password twice, clicked Submit, and... um, what the hell is that? A longish hex value at the top of the page and the same two entry boxes again. I'm not sure what "0bd64a720b489766fe0289775021a7da" means to Technorati, but to me it means they goofed. Even worse, re-trying my newly-updated password put me right back where I started, with "Forgot Password" my only avenue.

Just to recap the issues here:

• The Forgot Password e-mail is being sent to a) users in need or b) users who are under identity attack. Provide more information in that e-mail, like "your Technorati username is blah" or at least "if you didn't request this e-mail, no action is required to prevent your password from changing."

• Say it with me, "Web users only wait 8 seconds before assuming there's a problem."

• The Change Password page should also list, at minimum, the username being changed. If I can request the change knowing only my e-mail address, then the odds are that I'd benefit from learning the username.

• If you're going to fail, fail with informative error messages. That hex value was probably either a debug message or a missed internal connection, but I can't honestly believe that I did anything so unusual that it couldn't be caught by a unit test or use case.

In fairness, the Forgot Password page provided an e-mail link to handle cases like mine. Hopefully they'll know what happened.

Hello, World!

If you can read this, then it means the creation of the new Tech sub-blog is complete. It's alive! fiendish cackle