Quotations - II

"The Kite Runner" had some beautiful words on innocence & lies -

"And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too."

"There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness."

Couldn't agree more. And there are of course people for whom it's "knowing" that matters the most - hold back their truth, give them half-truths, talk vague with them, or tell them you need not explain; and you have broken the most implicit understanding with them. And then there are of course times when a lie reveals more than the truth would have.

Quotations

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Many of us would have studied this in school - a remarkable poem with words rooted in a quiet sort of wisdom - one that idealizes without being blind - pointing out with distinct clarity what self-discipline, fair-play, & sporting an undaunted spirit is all about.

Reminds me of Atticus (To Kill a Mockingbird) putting things in perspective for his kids by teaching them that courage is not a man holding a gun. Or when he explains to them why he would have to go against social-norms by defending a (falsely-accused) black man - “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”.

What a clear stand! Perhaps this is the one thing that all men of conviction share - given a crisis, they can discern their true calling as clear as day - by giving themselves over to a set of sound personal convictions that drive their course through life.

Why does Facebook app registration require a real account?

Tried googling for any good rationale behind this, and didn't come up with any answers. A couple of months ago, I was implementing a cross-domain SSO solution with support for delegated social authentications. As of then, I was not on any of the social networking sites. I have a handful of good friends, and I do manage to touch base with them regularly – mostly, on a one-to-one basis. So, for my individual case, i haven't felt any real need for networking over social sites - as yet. Also, if you have the slightest introverted streak - you may tend to agree with me that online social chatter, on an extended basis - as is true of real world socializing too – can generally get a bit too demanding & noisy for comfort.

So, here I started with the naive assumption that i just had to create my dev profiles with these social providers – acquire my dev tokens & test my stuff on the respective test-beds with test users; before pointing to production urls. A little reading-up on the Facebook dev-site, & i realize that though short-lived test-users are supported for a registered application, you need a real profile to register your app in the first place!

Whereas a Twitter account (dummy) & app was quick to setup - no challenges thrown, no verifications asked for; with Facebook, it was altogether different! My first naive attempt on FB was to instinctively choose a username with the word "dev" in it - result was an outright rejection - no test user registrations allowed – which makes perfect sense, as you would want to keep your userbase clean and “real”. I had even tried creating a dummy account with human names - which got rejected as “fake” at the point of adding my app (their fake-detection is incredibly strong!).

So, created a genuine profile & jumped straight to the developer's section - to be thrown the next hurdle - an sms/credit-card based profile-verification. Went through that, and jumped back again to developer's section to add my app. That worked - for the time-being. Sometime later, i had switched back to my local dev environment – so, wanted to add my local app as well. That caused FB to challenge me to verify my profile all over again! Got myself verified again – and if I remember right, trying to add my second app again got me another lockout. With every challenge, the verification sms took longer to come – the delay had quickly shot up to a couple of hours! - probably some throttling policy in place there to limit your number of attempts. So, after a third-time verification, I decided to keep myself content with configuring just a single environment’s app under my profile.

I learnt from another developer (who is, of course, an active FB user too) - that he had faced no such issues while trying to add multiple applications. Perhaps the fact that i was a freshly registered user - with not even friends added! - my only activity being around adding apps - might have triggered a red-flag, causing frequent challenges to be thrown my way.

As a developer, the whole thing is clearly counter-intuitive - that i cannot be purely a developer solely interested in your API, without also being an end-user of your system. And not just simply a bonafide end-user whose identity needs to be ascertained once – if you must; but an active end-user at that! As developers, we integrate with a host of systems we may never even get a chance to use ourselves as a real end-user – we might be interested in just talking to a part of their exposed API. And we want to start talking - to get up & running - as quick as possible. We want to face real integration challenges, and not pointless hurdles.

Blog facelift

Thought of trying out Blogger's recent roll-out of "Dynamic-views", as a first step towards embracing HTML5!. :) Though i would certainly need to publish tonnes of posts before i even begin to get a feel of "infinite scrolling" or, dynamic/on-scroll loading of content on my blog; this does mark a humble beginning for me.

As for the look-'n-feel, i liked the "magazine-view" with the default black-&-white theme it comes with - kind of reminds you of one carefully preserved copy of some vintage b/w magazine.

For other fellow-bloggers planning to switch-over; here's a quick note on possible glitches to look out for -

While blogger's internal server-side stats (which is very basic anyway) continue to record page-views (both blog as well as individual posts); any third-party tracking-code needs to be reinstalled in order to work with the new template - with the exception of GA, which now comes integrated as an opt-in configuration, and works fine with dynamic-views. With StatCounter, the tracking-code is different for static and dynamic views, which i missed to note initially; but even after fixing it thereafter, am still waiting for the installed code to be detected by StatCounter - so, my stats are currently broken. The new code does show up in the source-view of my blog - so, that excludes the case of a delayed update being caused by caching of the template at the web-server level - i have already filed a ticket with their support-team on this & am waiting to hear back. So, am yet to clear some of my basic sanity tests & might need to tweak things further - and that includes testing of the new template on common mobile platforms/browsers as well (have tested it OK on Nokia/Opera Mini). Shall keep you posted on my findings & any fixes. I might just revert back to the old view (for the time-being) in case there are issues with the platform(s) involved that need fixing first.

Till then, happy browsing with HTML5! :)

P.S. - In case you are not happy with the present browsing experience; the older static template is still available by just appending ?v=0 to either the blog or, post url -

http://bidisha-gangopadhyay.blogspot.com/?v=0