Just wanted to say that I started working at PublicEarth almost three weeks ago and I’m loving it. The people are great and smart and we’re making cool stuff. That being the case, everything else is going to slow way down, including Jetrecord and posting updates here and just about everywhere. Working in a startup and having a family, I’m just too busy and I learned a long time ago that it’s okay to say no.

Of course I will do what I can and when I have things to share, I’ll write them here. I just wanted to, you know, let you know. Although, sometimes just giving yourself permission to say no actually frees you up to do more than you thought you could so maybe I should just say, “We’ll see.”

Cheers. With apologies to Huey Lewis and the News.

The process was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Ruby tutorial on the Twitter API wiki and the documentation from the OAuth gem. No other gems were necessary, other than the dependencies of the OAuth gem. I’ve been using the Twitter4r gem to communicate replies and handle Jetrecord followers, but even that may be unnecessary in the future.

Some day I may post a more detailed writeup with code but I just wanted to report that it was possible.

Here’s one thing not covered in the tutorials which may trip you up but it’s worth getting into your app from the beginning. Make sure you include a workflow for revoking access. What happens if users cancel their accounts on your app or with Twitter or if they just want to revoke privileges from your app? In the world of data portability and transparency, it’s not enough to facilitate the setup process. You’ve got to make it easy to cancel, too.

Thankfully, Twitter makes it really easy on their end to revoke access. The burden is on us to match that ease of use.

Cheers!

I don’t know. But I’ve moved this site onto the premier level shared hosting and it’s much snappier. So, all good.

But somebody wake me up when there’s a robot that can build a human who can build a robot. Because that would finally get us somewhere.

Some time back I wrote a little ditty on how to pronounce MySQL. The article, having lived on a UW server during my tenure there, is now gone. The gist: It’s “My S-Q-L,” not “My Sequel.” Yes, that’s how it’s pronounced, even if they’re flexible about it.

• SQL = Sequel
• MSSQL = Sequel Server
• MySQL = My S-Q-L

Arbitrary? Yes. Truth? Yes.

Normally I don’t write about things like this because they get me into trouble and they tend to start the worst type of flame war: one that is based solely on preference. I love language and the pronunciation of language. My rules for pronunciation are fairly arbitrary but I like to adhere strictly to those rules. Does that make sense? I’m irrationally rational.

NASA = nă-sŭh
Tron = trŏn
Megatron = mĕh-gŭh-trŏn
JSON = Jason = jā-sŭn (not jā-sŏn)

Clear? It’s Jason, like the boy’s name, like -and-the-Argonauts.

Why? Because of the obvious similarity in spelling to the boy’s name and the ease of pronunciation that similarity affords. The “O” in JSON stands for Object. Fine. That’s still not a good enough reason for me to change the way I say it.

When possible, acronyms are created in such a way as to ease their pronunciation. Why? Because it makes them memorable, even catchy, which aids in their adoption. Remember the Ajax story? The reason why XMLHttpRequest became such a big hit all of a sudden in 2005–even though developers had been using it for quite some time–is because 1) Jesse James Garrett wrote about it and 2) he used a catchy name.

The name itself is arbitrary. There is no reason why this data format that we label JSON could not have been called JSOLDTF: JavaScript Object Literal Data Transfer Format.

So why didn’t Douglas Crockford call it that? Because it’s unpronounceable.

LASER is not pronounced lă-sēR, even though the A is “Amplification,” the S is “Stimulated,” the E is “Emission,” and the R is “Radiation.” It’s pronounced like ley-zer. Why? Because it sounds better.

Arbitrary? Yes. Truth? Yes.

Now, saying all of that, I promise not to correct you or make fun of you if you pronounce JSON like you’re trying to name a new Transformers character, even if you are Douglas Crockford. Just please don’t try to correct me, either, and everything will be yacht rock.

I’m already using it in Jetrecord for distance calculations on routes. Give it a go!