I do my own stunts

Yahoo RIP

My very best whishes for Stewart and Caterina, success on their new projects, whatever they might be.

Yok.. I mean, Microsoft may have fucked up with things, but some tragedies happens for a good reason, I am sure the future will be interesting =)

Sorry, your account has been disabled.

I got my Google account disabled this afternoon. :(

I don’t remember doing anything nearly close to a TOS violation, so I pretty much believe it was a mistake on their part. I have contacted their support and I have one open ticket with them to recover my access… the page say I should wait 24 hours, so I decided to write a blog post about single sign ons, Google, ourselves and other related things… I will use an unordered list since I don’t really want to connect the items in a way that makes textual sense:

• while disabled, emails sent to my account will bounce. that’s lame, knowing that an account can be errouneosly flagged for disabling, Google could at least keep the emails on your inbox for when you recover access.
• disable first, warn later. It would be nice to have a note about what kind of radar/algorythm was the responsible for the account shut down, and if this was something caused by me, a warning before I trigger the red light somewhere explaining that my account was doing something odd (if that was the case). Or a better message after the turn off, something like “your account was automatically disabled by the such and such bot. That way I could have a hint about if my account was turned off because virus suspicion, spam, crawling, piracy, porn, or whatever their bot believes I am guilt of (DISCLAIMER: I am not involved on any of the above activities just for the record)
• several important and unrelated services under a single authentication umbrella, or break one = break all. Google makes awesome web products, they are known for great reliability and quality even for their “beta” services, and more than that, their good software covers a very hybrid range of applications. Search, webmail, a full featured office suite, calendar, maps, personal webpages, blogs, code hosting, website analytics, ads publishing and managment, photo sharing, video sharing, social network, mailing list groups, web applications hosting, rss reader, shopping, translation, instant messaging, etc… We got used to them and we are naturally confident enough about their quality to rely more and more important pieces of our digital lives to the company, the problem is that if one of the services you use for whatever reason flags your account, you lose them all, it doesn’t matter if a photo from picasa was inappropriate, your appengine will go down, it doesn’t matter if your orkut got a virus, you will no longer be able to chat with your comrades, if your appengine hosted application because of a programmers mistake go crazy and explodes you might lose years of important email archives because of it, your youtube opinion video about a random company may be asked to be taken off and you can loose update access for a 5 years old personal blog and so on…  They should be independent services, even if the login is the same. More granularity on this one would definitely improve Google’s success and good netizen image :)
• Why don’t we backup? 1-we take things for granted, 2-we are lazy, 3-it is not always trivial to export your data from web services, 4-we don’t think about catastrophes and exit plans that much…
• on the bright side of the issue, I am happy to not be a google reader user :) Go Bloglines!!

Happy CSS Naked Day :)

Google joins the password anti-pattern bandwagon, and brag about it

Last entry on Google’s social network (Orkut) weblog is about a new contacts finding feature, not-surprisely it also uses the incredibly bad password anti-pattern we all hate so much for email accounts other than it’s own (Hotmail and AOL).

Yes, there is a text note saying that they don’t store your password, but that’s not the point. Even if people trust Google (or Ning, or Facebook, or Twitter or any of the guilty services currently spreading this awfull practice) their passwords from other places, it is an irresponsible thing to do. Web services, simply shouldnt teach people that is ok to give their credentials away to 3rd parties, let alone blog about it as if it was a good thing!

Orkut already suffers a lot with malicious users taking advantage of tech savvy people, and have been doing a great work in educating users that you should trust no one and be careful on where to click or log-in but this is a step backwards.

In Google’s defense, I must say that this move will certainly and undeniably bring then a lot of new activity and pageviews, resulted from the new connections. Making it easy to find your friends on a social network is not a bad thing. I am just saying that as the leading company on so many web areas, and having “do no evil”(they still use that?) as their motto they would help more in pressuring MS and AOL to make it easy for users to export their contacts list in a trusted manner, using OAuth or any other Flickr-style permissions granting solution for example, even csv file upload would have been better.

Shame on you, shame on us. Let’s fix this thing already. Please?

[UPDATE] MS now has a Contacts API too!

[UPDATE 2] Flickr got it right. 

A new blog is born

Let me start by saying that this is not the first blog post of my english blog, it is the 4th one, the three initial posts were made “offline” in a google docs document I was writing while I was coding my own blog publishing tool earlier this year, the first one, from Friday, January 4th 11:04PM titled:”Starting a blog in english part 1: motivation and naming process”, the second one from 12:20AM of the same day “Starting a blog in english part 2: blogging platform and host” and the third one: “Building my next blog part 1: the basics” without timestamp. My idea at the time was that I would have finished the basic bare-bones version of the tool quickly and then transfer the initial posts from google docs to the definitive home when finished, and it would have been a cool “live blogging” thing for that particular experience… anyways, for a series of combined reasons, I didnt finished that tool, and I didnt started my blog in English back then. I will not publish the initial posts here for now, but I may do it in the future…

Dont get me wrong, I still want to finish my little blog publishing tool, and use it as the main-golden-standard-ultimate choice for my English blog, as I believe currently there is no blogging tool on the market that fits my unique(bizarre) set of requirements/needs, but since I’ve been too busy with other stuff to catchup with the code for that project and so many important topics I want to rant about in English are passing through my eyes and my only output stream for that kind of opinions is the limited 140 twitter space, I decided to go with tumblr for now, since it is a pretty good simple and almost-there solution in terms of blogging tools, I really like it, it almost does the job :)

Oh, since this is my first blog post, maybe it is a good idea to introduce myself and explain a little the motivation for this blog… ok, let me try:

Well, my name is Fabricio Zuardi, (and you probably know that already by the description on the sidebar), I happen to have born in São Paulo, Brazil, country in which I also happened to have lived and spent most of my lifetime so far… but that’s not important I guess, anyways, I like machines and dogs, I also like and care about a handfull of humans such as my family and my friends, this blog is basically borning because of then (the humans) and to myself obviously, having a blog is a great way to have memory.

A little excerpt from my first unpublished blog post that describes more or less the same thing as above:

Since 5 years ago I maintain a personal blog in Portuguese (I have been born in São Paulo - Brazil), it is called I do my own stunts, I like the name and fits my personality, I could use the same name for the “English version”, specially because it is not a version of my Portuguese blog, it is an extension, it is not a different theme or anything, it is also a personal blog about nothing, but with rants in English, either to be read by friends that cannot speak my first language or just to make me feel like I am part of the relevant bit of the web (even though I am not).

I lived the past 18 months in the US, wonderfull country that I plan to return soon, the company that gave me that chance was Marc Andreessen’s Ning, a great platform to build and host web applications, I am back already and currently in the proccess of setting up my new home in the city of São Carlos, SP - Brazil and also a shared workspace with a friend who had his time in the sillicon valley as well, the idea is to bring some of that culture to this part of the globe, but this is another topic for future posts too…

I have a computer science degree, and my main ocupation is coding, besides that I don’t consider myself a programmer, I use the knowledge to help me test my ideas, produce stuff, and overall get along with the machines, but I am not clever enough for the hardcore stuff. What else?… Expect the regular stuff everybody enjoys arguing here like video-games, music, movies, politics, life and etc.

Oh and BTW, I hate Forest Whitaker.