Rinsefirst

I don\’t know why I\’m talking about this topic. It seems rather lame, but I thought I would give a run at it today.

Shipping rates are overly difficult to calculate. They depend on destination, weight, sometimes size of box, sometimes contents of box. For this reason, I have never tried to do it by hand. I\’ve always used a computer.

That\’s all fine and dandy, but now, imagine your building a website and you need to be able to calculate these rates realtime. Fun… And honestly, both FEDEX and UPS give you tools to do this.

Now personally, I\’m a bigger fan of Fedex, mainly because their tracking system is a little more user friendly. However, UPS has never really given me any issues, other than I hate their tracking system. But what\’s surprising is how different their backends are for people who run websites. And in that battle, UPS wins hands down.

UPS using a simple post and get request, similiar to what fedex does, but all you have to do is register and your done. It doesn\’t allow you to place packages in the system, or anything of that nature… Just allows you to get rates. I\’m sure they have a system for putting items into the UPS system, but I don\’t need to do that… I just need to get rates.

Fedex however, has the whole system all in one. Meaning, I have to deal with the code to handle creating and shipping a package if I want to get rates. I also have to get \"approved\" by Fedex (which I think I might have accidently found a way around). Either way, They also aren\’t using a form of XML that I like to read.

That all said, I like simple. I like clean. Why can\’t Fedex have UPS\’s backend. Why can\’t UPS have fedex\’s front end. I tell ya… I\’ll just wait til Google gets in the package tracking and delivery business (and you bet they will, google maps, wanting to be able to track and record the movement of everything on earth… I tell ya).

I\’ve decided to give IE Beta 2 a run on my computer. At first glance, I wasn\’t very happy with it, but so far, things are good. Almost all of our sites check out in it, it seems to be handling CSS at least as well as, if not better, than the previous version of IE. The interface isn\’t to bad, I can see where Microsoft is going, and it comes down to one very simple principle:

\"Making the simple complex is easy. Making the complex simple, awesomely simple, now THAT is genius.\" - Charles Mingus

Basically, Microsoft has stopped trying to do more, and instead, has tried getting it to be a simple interace. I think they have a ways to go, but it\’s better than it was.

Speaking of things that are just genius (aka, simple). Google has done it again, this time with the stock market. If you haven\’t seen this yet:

finance.google.com

Be sure to play around with the chart, and the officers. Quite impressive. Quite simple. Quite Google. All this happening at the exact same time that Windows delays Vista to 2007.

What to do… What to do…

I was hoping to keep you updated with my Tetris status. Sadly, the Nintendo leaderboard has been broken for the past week, so I have not be able to tell you where I\’m at… Needless to say, I am not number 1 in the world at the moment… At best, I\’m number 2. I can beat the guy that is number 1, but he beats me more… Practice I guess.. Cool guy though.

So really, what I\’m writing about today is something I put together for sunfox (and maybe oxwaf if we can switch out the engine at some point) that allows for more robust xml parsing of what we call blueprints.

Blueprints are XML documents in Oxwaf that determine what gets put on the page. They are designed to be fast and allow you to use the same layout over and over again without having to recode everything over and over again. The version in Oxwaf had a problem though. XML is a very picky language. If you get a parsing error, not only does it let you know, but it stops processing the document all together.

When something like this happened in Oxwaf, the whole page would blow up and it would most likely say \"Could not get content document\" or give some other parse message. For a development site, this is ok, but for a production site, you can\’t have this happen.

Our style in the past has always been to prevent those errors from coming up by not coding anything that could make it possible. However, time and time again, someone always finds a way to get one of those errors to pop up. Whether it be by using some strange unicode character, or using missing a closing tag. The problem isn\’t that the computer doesn\’t know what to do in that case, it\’s that the computer refuses to parse anything after it, or remember what it did before that, meaning: No page.

The new parser though solves this problem. Instead of giving up, it trys again, but before trying again, it removes the tag that is bad, and all it\’s contents. It\’s not perfect yet, but it\’s better than what we had. This way, instead of getting a content error message and not doing anything, it will at least do what it can with the good stuff, and \"skip over\" the bad stuff.

Pretty cool if you ask me. So as long as the bad stuff isn\’t your entire page, you\’ll get something. Not much more I can say about that.

After 125+ games of tetris in 24 hours, I’m now World Rank 3, and first place in my division. However, I’m getting very mentally unstable… I can’t… Stop… Playing…

So I just played my first game of regular Tetris on the Nintendo DS. I haven\’t discovered a true marathon mode yet, but the one they ahve built in goes to 200 lines… and I have to admit, it\’s the fastest I think I\’ve ever seen a block drop in tetris. Crazy fast… So fast, I\’m not even sure how I was staying alive.

Needless to say, that\’s all I had to mention on the game so far. More will come in the following few days I\’m sure.

I\’m beginning the process of not only redesigning, but redefining what this site is. It will continue to be my playground, but for various reasons, I want to take some of my upcoming ideas and build them apart from this site. Both for usability reasons, as well as focus.

For that reason, I have a feeling that rinsefirst will become more like a portal to what I do, than it is now. I feel like it will become the joint effort of my various efforts. I feel like… it will probably stay exactly how it is now, and you probably won\’t even notice :-).

In either case, I have like 3 blogs I want to start, and I think Rinsefirst will become the combination of these three blogs, plus one more. Why? Because really, the three spin offs are directly tied to what I talk about here already. So basically, you won\’t even notice the difference.

New look and feel is coming down the road with more features than it needs as well, but it\’s coming. Dan pointed out a usability thing with my last design hopeful (of having a 100% height and width design) so I\’ve decided to go back to a more basic layout, with more features. If all works well, it should be kind of fun to play with while you read.

Well, I\’m still playing catchup after the monday (and now thursday) snow.