"How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters"

A kindred spirit at Google, Joshua Bloch, delivers a Google Tech Talk: How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters. If any part of my Programmers Hate Programmers anti-hypothesis resonated with you, you'll appreciate his presentation with its much greater detail.

The Lost Tank of Brownsville

I visited the Bamberger Ranch again on Saturday. Generous folks that they are, the Bambergers allowed me the use of the guest quarters once again, so I could drive down in the middle of the night when the roads are free of traffic, get some sleep, then go out and take photos whenever I regain consciousness. If I happen to be present around lunch time, they usually throw in a sandwich and related hospitality. It's a helluva deal.

With the summer heat settling itself in nicely, I did notice one odd thing about this arrangement, however: the guest quarters aren't air conditioned. OK, I already knew that, and I've been through Austin summers without air conditioning in years past (long past, thankfully), so the idea of life without chilled air isn't utterly absurd to me. What made the absence of air conditioning stand-out this time was the fact that I kept hearing the air conditioner in their office kicking-in just outside the open window I was trying to sleep under. Like it was taunting me. It's not hard to understand that an office would need air conditioning. What had me stumped as I lay there in the too-still night air was why one would spend the money to air-condition 80% of a building, but not the other 20% of it. The guest quarters, you see, are part of the same building as the office. Maybe the architecture of the structure contains the explanation, or maybe it's a test. Knowing David Bamberger, it could be a test. If so, I passed this time, but summer is just getting started. If they keep extending their hospitality to me, I may have to donate a fan to the ranch. It'd be a bargain at twice the price, of course.

I was lucky enough to get a free lunch with my visit (and they say there's no such thing), along with pleasant conversation with David, Margaret, her daughter Margie, and various friends. Afterward, Margaret and co. went off for a swim, which I foolishly declined in the name of photographic necessity. I talked with David a bit about some of the areas of the ranch that I'd already visited, and asked him about other noteworthy places. He picked-out two on a map of the ranch; one was an earthen-dammed tank in the "Brownsville" region of the ranch, the other an overlook in the "airstrip" section (so-named because a small aircraft once landed there to the detriment of all concerned). I headed out for the tank, figuring I'd have plenty of time for airstrip afterward.

As far as I know, that tank in the Brownsville section, like several other tanks on the ranch, has no name. I hereby rectify that situation by dubbing it the "lost tank of Brownsville." I take David at his word that he built it out there, somewhere, but I spent hours carefully going back and forth on hot, dusty gravel roads—roads that I'd been warned had eaten trucks which, from the sound of 'em, could have comfortably carried mine in their glove compartments—and carefully picking my way on foot through fields of rocks to descend, with still greater care, into the valleys below to look for that tank, and I never did find it. It's not even a big area of the ranch, but it's very slow going on foot, and bears only an eccentric similarity to the maps, at least if you don't already know where you're going. On the plus side, I did stumble upon a few spots of photographic interest in the valleys I explored, and shot a few panoramas, clouds permitting. I also found where they keep all of their chiggers and was able to give them a good feeding. (Note to the afflicted: doctors can prescribe anti-itch lotions far superior to the over-the-counter rubbish. Believe me.)

By the time I'd given up my search for the lost tank, there was no hope of getting to Airstrip, at the far other end of the ranch, before sunset, so that was that. That'll give me something to do on a future visit; not that I felt I was in any danger of running out of material out there.

Anyway, I'm months behind in assembling panoramas, so I don't have any panos, new or old, to show, but this trip did produce some readily displayed conventional photographs, which I hereby include below for your amusement and possible edification. (And if anyone can identify that dragonfly or the unidentified plants, I hope they'll edify me.)

Monarda citriadora (Purple Horsemint) near Madrone Lake.

Danaus gilippus (Queen) butterfly on Eupatorium greggii (Greg's Blue Mistflower) near Madrone Lake.

Odocoileus virginianus (White-tailed deer) among grass and wildflowers. The wildflowers are primarily Zexmenia hispida (Zexmenia).

Unknown dragonfly on unknown plant at the edge of the thistle field near the windmill.

Papilio glaucus (Tiger swallowtail) feeding from the flower of an unknown variety of thistle in the thistle field near the windmill.

An icon of rural America, an Aermotor 702 windmill, the only windmill left on the ranch, stands just to one side of the highest point on the ranch. Remarkably, the 702 was in continuous production from 1933 until at least 1981. (It may still be in production; the company's history page is not entirely clear on that point.) I've been saying that I needed to shoot a panorama with one of these in it for so long that a friend had suggested that I carry an inflatable model of one, so that I could add rural color to any scene.

My first entry in the Jay Lake Artifacta Americana photo contest.

Rana berlanderi (Rio Grande leopard frog), probably female, at the windmill pool.

Rana berlanderi (Rio Grande leopard frog), probably male, at the windmill pool.

For reasons best known to themselves, these frogs not only come out at the height of the afternoon heat, but regard a photographer standing twelve feet away as a threat from which they have to retreat, while accepting as harmless that same photographer crawling on his elbows and belly at a mere five feet. I suspect that this species likes to humiliate its prey before moving in for the kill. I was probably lucky to escape with my life.

Qwicap 1.4b9 Released

Qwicap version 1.4b9 was released on May 31. It includes the minor enhancements of the unannounced beta 7 and 8 releases (logging in Qwicap.reportException, and more informative exception messages from the MutableMarkup class, respectively). The work on beta 9 is of a whole 'nother order, hence this announcement.

Last Friday, after lunch, I was looking forward to a quiet afternoon, and was reading my usual collection of computing-related web sites when I arrived at Elliot Rusty Harold's blog, Cafe au Lait. As usual there was a lot of material there, and, also as usual, I wasn't even going to try to deal with it all; I was just there for the quote of the day, which turned out to be about character set support in various web application development systems. And it included a harmless looking little link attached to the word "Unicode" (just like that one, in fact). I clicked the innocent word and that was the end of my peaceful Friday afternoon. The link was to Joel Spolsky's 2003 article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). If you haven't read it, consider it recommended. If you're in a hurry, just read the bit at the end about the problems faced by web browsers when they need to interpret the bytes of a web page. That gives you the flavor of many of the problems posed by character set handling. And they're fairly obvious problems, if you happen to think about them. Unfortunately, I hadn't.

I wasn't exactly unaware of character set issues (I sorted out EBCDIC to ASCII translation issues back in the days of the IBM 3033 and the original IBM PC - issues that had IBM's support engineers embarassed and stumped), and I've been a big fan of Unicode, but while reading that I article I quickly realized that I'd failed to grasp just how significant character set issues are, or can be, to everyday software development. Specifically, in the case of Qwicap, I realized that I'd ignored character set issues when I wrote Qwicap's XML engine. I knew that, having emerged from Reader objects, the characters in memory were Unicode (sort of) and I'd just left my concern at that, without thinking about the encoding of the source materials that went into those Reader objects. I'd also neglected an issue associated with transmitting web pages to clients: They were always sent as UTF-8, regardless of what the document markup called-for. (In a way, that's OK because a character set specification in the HTTP "Content-Type" header, which Qwicap was in the habit of supplying, takes precedence over any specification in the markup, but it's both rude and confusing to ignore the document author's wishes as expressed by their markup.)

So, seeing all of those basic oversights at once was quite a kick in the teeth (self-inflicted, no less). And, of course, one of the great things about open source development is that you have the opportunity to make big, embarassing mistakes in public. On the bright side, if I knew how difficult it was going to be to develop Qwicap when I started, I might have come to my senses and found something less painful to occupy my time, like hitting myself in the head with blunt objects. So, since I still think Qwicap is a good idea, and I yet cling to the hope that it'll find a niche for itself beyond the bounds of my worthy employer, The University of Texas at Austin, (and for all I know, perhaps it already has) maybe it's just as well that I didn't fully appreciate what I was getting myself into when I first had this idea.

Anyway, with the release of version 1.4b9, Qwicap is now character-set aware, and I can take some comfort from the facts that (1) nobody but me ever noticed this problem in Qwicap, and (2) there are vastly more popular web application development schemes that still neglect character set issues. In the latter case, though they were absurdly late in coming, the fixes in 1.4b9 do become one more feather in Qwicap's hat. Of course, I still feel plenty stupid.