Laughing Meme » yahoo

WOE “GeoPlanet”: HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable

Kellan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:36:25 +0000

Just putting a note here for the next time I’m working with the Yahoo! GeoPlanet APIs.

The conudrum: a HTTP GET on a given resource (http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/23511846?appid=$appid) works in the browser, and works with wget from the command line, but fails from within PHP with a 406 Not Acceptable.

The solution, append format=XML to the resource URL, because the service is blowing out its brains on a missing Accepts header.

And that folks is the magic of REST.

update 2008/12/04: quick scan of my referer logs suggests this is biting folks using lwp-simple and wget particularly hard.

Yahoo: Do What You’re Great At

Kellan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:08:07 +0000

“… snort news off the tits of more news.”

http://davenetics.com/2008/06/do-what-youre-great-at/

Yuiblog: Patterns for Designing a Reputation System

Kellan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:07:50 +0000

Excellent, pragmatic, Christopher Alexander style patterns for building online community. With really cute graphic.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/06/10/patterns-for-designing-a-reputation-system/

Better Javadoc results using “SearchMonkey”

Kellan — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:19:24 +0000

The docs on I found on Yahoo’s SearchMonkey were all arcane XSLT, and strange feed formats ne’er before seen on the Web. But this example from Sam shows how easy it can be – a couple of regexes, and a couple of lines of PHP.

http://www.javarants.com/2008/05/19/better-javadoc-results-using-searchmonkey/

Strange Viewings

Kellan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:15:21 +0000

I didn’t make it to the keynote to see our new CTO speak (meetings that morning), but it was very strange, bordering on deeply surreal to watch the video of it.

Interesting to see my “Flickr is the 2nd largest API ” meme work its way up the tree. I didn’t make that factoid up per se, and I’d probably stand behind it if pushed, but I did reason from very limited data. (also AWS screws up the story, is utility computing an API?)
Still haven’t quite adjusted to the transition of OAuth from being a personal project that the “Paranoids” (official title of Yahoo’s internal security experts) were angry at me for working on (against Yahoo policy for Yahoos to work on security related projects), to a the company wide standard, at least on paper.

Fire Eagle: Interesting Choices

Kellan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:14:29 +0000

Other folks are talking about and writing about the long germinating, launched in beta, location broker from Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Fire Eagle.

I wanted to call out just a couple of the cool, and non-intuitve decisions they made.

Is NOT a consumer brand

Fire Eagle is a service for building and sharing location data. Its the application built on top of it that you’ll interact with, unless you’re building stuff.

Fire Eagle does NOT manage the social graph

Its a service for sharing your data with friends (or services, or your toaster), but it doesn’t know who your friends are. The social graph has been outsource. Best example of a small piece loosely joined I’ve seen in a long time.

Cares about privacy and ease of use

Ninja privacy is built in. But you don’t have to care. The TOS requires developers to discuss how the data is used. And privacy levels are front and center. And from day one data is delete-able, and in fact data is flushed on a regular basis.

Built on OAuth

Yay!

Yahoo! OpenID Provider, Flickr and Delegation

Kellan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:03:50 +0000

The Yahoo OP is officially live today! Congrats to Shreyas and Allen for shepherding this for many months!

If you’re a Flickr user you can your photos URL (http://flickr.com/photos/yourname), or if you’re signing into a RP that supports XRDS, just use flickr.com.

You’ll also want to visit openid.yahoo.com, and click on “Get Started” and customize your OpenID identifier.

Personally I just use laughingmeme.org as my OpenID. I had to futz around a bit to figure out OpenID 2.0′s slightly different syntax, but if you view source on this blog you’ll now see in the header:

YSlow for Firefox.

Kellan — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:56:13 +0000

Super nice plugin to analyze performance pain points with specific suggestions and ranking.

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/08/web_two_point_slow.html

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — March 28, 2000: “Smile, You’re On Yahoo! Photos”

Kellan — Fri, 04 May 2007 06:46:12 +0000

Initial press release.

http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release497.html

it’s not you, it’s me

Kellan — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:30:26 +0000

“Pipes has all the ingredients of something that should really set me off. Pipes, filters, mashups, RSS, Atom, RDF (singing) these are a few of my favorite things! So, what gives? Iâ€™m genuinely worried that I’m sick, depressed, losing it, or otherwise replaced by a pod alien. Possibly all the above. … So, it’s not you, it’s me.” – Les – Thoughts on Pipes on the Web

Yeah, exactly that.

I’m a Puppeteer…: the yahoo event

Kellan — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 22:00:00 +0000

The blog of one of the hack day puppeteers.

http://imapuppeteer.blogspot.com/2006/09/yahoo-event.html

Hack Day: Hacking Caffeine

Kellan — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:48:00 +0000

I’ll be staying overnight next Friday, along with 500 or so our closest friends at open Hack Day.

If you’re coming, may I humbly suggest you do not place your caffeine needs at the tender mercies of Big Purple. Bring your own, bring some to share, you’ll be popular. (truth be told, they do that whole “soda” thing ok, but the coffee is beyond mention)

And if someone gives me a lift, I’d be happy to bring my Zojirushi, and Saeco

Upcoming.org is hiring.

Kellan — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 06:31:00 +0000

I’d apply for this job if I didn’t already have a job one row over.

http://upcoming.org/news/archives/2006/09/18/upcoming/

Who scheduled Scissor Sisters and Hack Day against each other?

Kellan — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 06:59:00 +0000

Note to self: build global event conflict resolution system. Alternate solution: go to the free event.

http://upcoming.org/metro/us/ca/sf?date=9%2F29%2F2006

Apparently the writers on the new Transformer movie are responding to questions on Y! Answers

Kellan — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 02:05:00 +0000

Or will be.

http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=transformers

Maybe you’ve seen me at a party recently, you asked “So how is Yahoo”, I said, “Silly”

Kellan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 07:41:00 +0000

This is the sort of thing I was talking about.

http://cavitate.net/flashpoint/2006/08/i_dont_know_why_but_i_just_cant_stop.html

mnot: Bringing Back the Link – With a Twist

Kellan — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:40:00 +0000

I’ve read through this twice, still sorting out the implications, but it sure sounds exciting.

http://www.mnot.net/blog/2006/06/22/link

All Purple

Kellan — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 01:50:00 +0000

Les is going to be joining del.icio.us here in the happy valley, while Hugo has left the W3C(!?!?!) to join as well.

(And soon, we’ll return to some non-Yahoo-centric blogging)

Lots of New Semi-Structured Data

Kellan — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:20:00 +0000

Showed up at Microformats party last night and promptly fell asleep in my drink (long day), but this is the real action. Andy and Y!Local have rolled out hCard, hCal, and hReview to all of Yahoo Local.

And Gordon has whipped up the first microformat -> to Y! bridge with Greasemonkey.

Nice.

May 22nd

Kellan — Sun, 07 May 2006 18:29:00 +0000

Starting May 22nd.

update [2006/5/23]: It was pointed out to me today that I was a bit opaque with this announcement. As of yesterday I’m working at Flickr out of the Santa Clara office, and living in San Francisco.

Btw you know you’ve arrived at a large company when a hundred people turn up for the weekly new hire orientation.