The reviews are right, this game is the shit. It's been a while since I've actually said "Wow" out loud several times while playing a video game. A truly excellent game.

I recently wrote about LiveJournal's cookie-based authentication mechanism which makes it difficult for RSS aggregators to read "protected" LiveJournal feeds since the aggregator would have to "reuse steal cookies from your browser instead of using well defined HTTP authentication mechanisms".

My blog post and subsequent email to the LiveJournal development team resulted in the following response and discussion by the LiveJournal developer community as well as the following [excerpted] email response from Brad Fitzpatrick

We don't intend for aggregators to support our authentication system, and
we don't want it to be any sort of standard.  The fact that it works is
just an accident, really:  every page on our site is dynamic, and every
page knows who the remote user is, so when the RSS page queries the
recent entries for that user, the code which provides that is security
aware, and so doesn't provide things which it shouldn't.

Please tell people not to support our auth.  We don't want them to go
through that ugly hassle, and it might even change.  We don't consider it
a stable or supported interface at all.

Our intent is support HTTP Digest Auth in the future (but NOT basic auth)
specifically for RSS/Atom feed pages. 

I guess that clears things up. I'd like to thank the LiveJournal folks for promptly responding to my questions and clarifying the situation. Nice.

Chicken Little: In San Francisco, you never know what you're going to find when you knock on a car window -- but nothing prepared the cops for what they found the night of Nov. 3 down by Aquatic Park.

The window came down and there was a guy with a chicken sitting on his lap and a second chicken in a bag on the passenger seat.

"What's with the chickens?" the cop asked.

"I'm going to take them home and eat them,'' the driver replied.

"Lift up the chicken,'' the cop said.

The driver did -- and the next thing you know, the driver was in cuffs and the chickens were on their way to the humane society -- where (we kid you not) the hens were given a sexual battery exam by a vet the cops called in.

All we can say is, it's going to make for some very interesting testimony on the witness stand.

"But the killer will be the other evidence,'' a law enforcement source said. "A 15-ounce jar of Vaseline... with three feathers in it.''

[via Jamie Zawinski]

The Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines has a section on consistency which reads in part

Consistency

Consistency in the interface allows people to transfer their knowledge and skills from one application to any other... Ask yourself the following questions when thinking about consistency in your product.

Is your product consistent:

• Within itself?
  
• With earlier versions of your product?
  
• With Mac OS standards? For example, does your application use the reserved and recommended keyboard equivalents? (See “Keyboard Shortcuts”.)
  
• In its use of metaphors?
  
• With people’s expectations?.

Recently Torsten's been changing the user interface components used by RSS Bandit from the DotNetMagic library to the Tim Dawson's Windows Forms controls due to the fact that the former is no longer free as in beer. Given that we are changing the look and feel of the widgets Torsten thought this would also be a good time to rearrange some of the menu options and remove some of the toolbar buttons. I tend to disagree. User interface consistency between versions of an application is very important especially when you consider it messes with the muscle memoryof users of older versions of the application.

Torsten has posted screenshots of the new RSS Bandit UI and is asking for feedback. His questions are phrased differently than I'd ask. I'd ask if users want the user interface to be consistent with old versions of RSS Bandit or not? I'd also ask if users prefer that we keep the old DotNetMagic user interface or move to Tim Dawson's UI components?  

If you use RSS Bandit I'd appreciate your comments.

Robert Scoble writes

Lionel, in my comments: "the problem is that it's "common wisdom" that Microsoft has more than $40 billion in the bank, so your point doesn't *sound* true. "how can they talk about resource constraints with that kind of safe deposit""

This is a common misunderstanding. First of all. That cash isn't just given out willy nilly. It's NOT our money! It belongs to our investors. They want to see it spent properly. Translation: don't let Scoble spend it on whatever he wants!

In 1999, Fool.com published an article called 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management . One of the entries is entitled "Shrimps vs. Weenies" and is quoted below

7. "Shrimp vs. Weenies"

Even with its billions upon billions in cash, Microsoft is as frugal as Ebeneezer Scrooge. It's a company that buys canned weenies for food, not shrimp. Until last year, even Bill Gates and his second-in-command Steve Ballmer flew coach. (For scheduling reasons, the company purchased its first corporate jet.) Bucking the trend of most large, wealthy corporations, Microsoft remains in start-up mode where tight budgets are the rule. When you sit back and think about it, this frugality is less surprising and even explains how a company can come to accumulate such great hoards of cash.

This is probably the one of the most frustrating things to adjust to as a new hire at Microsoft; resource-strapped teams are the order of the day. There never seem to be enough devs to fix bugs and ship features or when there are there aren't enough testers to ensure that the code is up to snuff so you end up cutting the features anyway. Asking around about this leads to the realization that to many this is The Microsoft Way. I've heard all sorts of justifications for this behavior from the fact that it leads to managers making better hiring decisions since they never have as much headcount as they want so they don't waste it hiring people they aren't 100% sure will be good performers to statements like "it's always been this way". It's hard to argue with this logic given that this practice (and the others listed in the Fool.com article) have lead to one of the most successful companies in the world with more cash on hand than the annual budget of most third world nations.  

However every time we cut some feature because we don't have enough test resources or scrap an idea because we don't have anyone to code it up, I wonder if there's a better way...