Arjen Poutsma is dead-on with his WS-Duck Typing post:

• Don’t validate incoming messages!

• Use XPath!

• Don’t create stubs or skeletons!

Via Stefan Tilkov.

My wife has a visceral distaste for almost anything new Yahoo does with their interfaces. I work at Yahoo. I hear a lot about it.

When I showed her the shiny new Yahoo Mail interface, she feined interest but gave away her true feelings with her last question. “How do I go back to the old version?”

When Maps “upgraded” to the new flashy interface she was livid. Absolutely blood boiling livid. “It used to just work. I just want a map and directions, and it used to give me a map and directions. Now it takes forever and …”.

She’s switched to mapquest, will not even consider using Yahoo Maps.

I thought her unreasonable, perhaps old fashioned.

Then I got a Mac and tried the Camino browser. Camino is not officially supported by Yahoo Mail, so I got the good old Web 1.0 interface.

You know what? I like it. I like it a lot. They’ve added a few worthwhile ajaxy touches very seamlessly into the old interface, but otherwise it’s your basic Web 1.0 app. It loads fast, shows you your email, and just works.

I remember the days of browsing without having to worry about sites that would make my CPU go nuts and the fans kick on. Now practically ever other site brings my machine to its knees. And we’re talking a nice dual core MacBook Pro here.

So here’s to Web 1.0. Here’s to hoping fast and simple come back in style.

I started using Jott this morning and so far I like it. It’s a simple service – you call a toll free number, record a 15 second message, Jott transcribes it, and sends it to you in email as both an audio and a text file.

I thought it might be a useless service, but I’ve already used it twice this morning. Surprisingly the transcription worked in both cases. I like the fact that they send you the audio file as well. The transcription takes a while (maybe 15 minutes or so), but that might be because they’ve gotten a fair bit of coverage over the weekend and the service is overloaded.

I’m looking forward to seeing what APIs and integration services these guys end up offering. Could be a simple alternative to VoiceXML and services like TellMe.

My impressions of the MacBook Pro after 24 hours. This is my first Mac and I have virtually no previous experience with Mac or OS X.

The laptop itself: solid. Almost attractive; certainly nicer than the run-of-the-mill black plastic PCs.

Heavy. Much heavier than I had expected.

Hot! This thing gets quite hot. That’s not good at all.

No standard PCMCIA slot! This is almost a deal-killer; I use the verizon wireless card for nationwide internet access, so I need a PCMCIA slot. Need to look for a solution.

Slow! One of the reasons I got this was to enjoy the speed of the dual cores. I’m very surprised to see it so sluggish. Far too often it actually lags behind the key strokes. What’s going on here? There should be processor speed to spare. I haven’t seen windows do this in years.

Two fingers on the touchpad and the button to simulate right click? Are you kidding me? When are they going to drop the pretense and add a second button?

Camino? Camino?!? Why not firefox? Again seems a bit silly to me.

Lack of outlook calendar integration is a pain, but I can’t fault the Mac for that.

The screen is nice. The keyboard is nice.

Instant-on after suspend: very nice.

Getting used to OS X has been less painful than I had expected, although I still do lose my way here and there.

I guess I had already installed a lot of the nice features on windows (launcher, finder, etc), so I’m not seeing a lot of improvement.

Overall: Underwhelmed so far. Everybody tells me soon I’ll be in love and will never be able to go back. I await true love with baited breath.

I also have a brand new Vista laptop with similar specs here, so I’ll be able to do a compare and contrast soon.

I finally did it. I joined the evil empire. Crossed over to the dark side. A few hours ago I got myself … a brand new Apple MacBook Pro.

It is with trepidation and fear that I take this step.

Fear that in a week, maybe two, I’ll be one of them. I’ll be kneeling at the altar of Jobs, singing his eternal praises, hoping, in a deep, dark part of my heart, that he’ll take me backstage and show me just what he’s got under that turtleneck.

That I’ll join the legions of Apple fanboys.

So as I prepare to lose my innocence to Father Jobs, I let out this final rant.

…

I don’t get it. I just don’t get how self respecting geeks can fall so deeply, so blindly in love with Apple.

Apple is the definition of closed. The diametric opposite of open.

We are geeks. We take pride in choice. In independence. We rail against closed, proprietary systems.

And what does Apple give us? Systems that are as proprietary and closed as it can possibly make them.

The “Trusted Platform Module,” or TPM, is a computer chip embedded inside Intel-based Macs to prevent the Intel-based version of Mac OS X from running on non-Apple hardware.

They’re putting in chips into their computers to make sure you can’t run their OS on hardware they don’t sell you. Closed.

But they’re running BSD under OS X. Isn’t that cool? They took a unix base, made it significantly better, and kept the improvements to themselves. They didn’t share. They kept it Closed. Not true – Darwin is open source, as pointed out by the commenters.

But what about their apps? Closed.

The iPod is cool though. You have to admit that. Too bad it comes with its own proprietary DRM system. Closed.

How about that exciting new iPhone? Here’s Mr. Jobs on openness:

You don’t want your phone to be an open platform.

Sweet. Closed. Why would you want an open platform for a phone anyway? That would be … like … madness. And you sure don’t want any of those dirty open source guys getting their hands on it, they might actually do something innovative with it.

…

Apple is a closed, proprietary company. That’s fine. I don’t actually have much of a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is all the open source rah-rah cheerleaders so head-over-heels in love with Apple while hating Microsoft. It’s just hypocritical.

Have you talked to Mac guys? It’s a religion. Mac Can Do No Wrong. Mac Is the Savior.

Windows users? Except for the few nutcases, they’ll tell you, Windows sucks. This is broken, that’s broken, it’s a piece of crap. But it gets things done. Much less religion.

The Linux folks? Lots of religion there. But at least they’re following some sort of belief in a better world, instead of the glean of Jobs’ head poking out of his turtleneck.

…

And let me tell you one last thing while I’ve got you. You know those cool Apple ads? With the young, hip Mac and the old fat PC? Isn’t that cute? Well, guess what jack ass. Take a look in the mirror. Do you know which one you are?

Were you the cool, hip kid that everybody idolized? Or were you the loser geek that didn’t quite look right?

You don’t need an Apple to tell you you’re cool. Be a geek. Be proud.

Watched Pursuit of Happyness the other night. My wife summed it up beautifully: it’s an Indian movie. That is: it’s a monotone of bad, sad, down-on-your-luck, with a final redemeption.

This could’ve been a much better movie if they didn’t maintain the monotone. Throw in a couple of ups and downs. Have a twist or a curve.

Not a terrible movie, not a great movie.

The good folks at meebo have built a nice unified browser based instant messaging system that works with all of the major IM systems (Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and even Google for the 3 people that use that).

That’s great, and I use it on occasion. However, I’m much more interested in programmatic access to the IM world. Because, to quote myself, IM is the command line for the Web.

AOL is the most open of the major players out there. You can go to developer.aim.com and get yourself a copy of the sdk for building your own AIM client, creating a plug-in for the official AIM client, or even get Web based APIs for connecting to AIM.

That’s great too, and it’s actually motivated me to use AIM for the first time.

Yahoo and MSN are less open. You can get unofficial libraries for connecting to them, but those are a flaky – in fact, none of them have worked in my first attempt at playing with them.

Which brings me to my point: I’d like somebody to do the hard work of creating a unified interface to these messaging systems and give me a simple API. Preferably Web based so I can just hit a couple of URLs to get and send my messages. I’m not looking for video conferencing, voice, and all those other great things – I just want programmatic access to sending and receiving messages.

Note that Meebo has already done this – their client is browser based and talks to their back-end systems via some sort of Web based API.

Nice Meebo folks, please open your API and document it so I can use it. I supposed I could break out FireBug and reverse engineer it, but that would involve effort and pain. Note that I’m not talking about MeeboMe APIs; those are nice, but I need access to Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.

Another option is Jabber, but then I’d have to run my own server, or rely on third party servers maintained by others. The third party servers are generally unreliable from my experience; I walked down the list of servers that were supposed to be able to talk to Yahoo IM and none were actually working.

I don’t really understand the urge for the IM providers to keep their systems closed, but here’s to hoping somebody solves the problem for me and provides a simple, open, preferably Web based API for connecting to these systems. Meebo, I’m talking to you…

My laptop broke, leading to a visit to fatwallet, leading to the same old frustration with the lack of a notifier for specific new deals. I decided to finally put together a deal watcher.

I started with the python Universal Feed Reader, which makes it amazingly simple to deal with the fatwallet feed. Part way through I wondered if Pipes would make my life even easier.

Turns out it does. It’s really very easy to put together something as simple as this. All I had to do was fetch the feed and filter it based on my keywords. Two components, 3 minutes, and I’m done. The result is here.

It is pretty lame – it doesn’t take user input (I couldn’t figure out how to split the user input into multiple words and didn’t want to have multiple input fields). It doesn’t have any sort of storage to keep track of what you have and haven’t seen. It doesn’t actually notify you. It doesn’t parse the items to see what the rating is or to filter on it.

However, it is done, and it’s now one of my feeds in Google Reader. It’ll be interesting to see if it actually meets my needs. Sometimes pretty lame is good enough.