It looks like the entire United Kingdom… or at least the percentage involved in property… needs Emergency Remedial Mathematics lessons.

The UK economy leaps out of recession, like a grasshopper trying to jump on Jupiter, triggering a mass hallucinatory episode amongst real estate agents whom, I can only guess, come to the incorrect conclusion that “0.1%” is somehow a fraction representing “1 percent”, and consequently re-list all their properties using a multiple of that figure.

Optimism abounds. :-]

Here’s a judge who has completely lost touch with reality:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6811239/Businessman-jailed-for-attacking-intruder—who-goes-free.html

Quote:

It’s difficult to believe that this outcome reflects the thinking of the public, or the interests of justice.

I would say not difficult… more like impossible.

So, cross the US back off the list of places I want to visit any time soon…

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932

Don’t know if he actually wrote it, but under the assumption he did, this is brilliant:

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2009/11/mandelson-censors-jeremy-clarkson.html

I was updating the SWFK project page with the total number of downloads (since I last updated it in March), and discovered that I’ve miscalculated the figure. I use awstats for my site, and usually just go through all the swfk-*.zip links for each month, using a calculator, to work out the sub-total, then add the downloads from the Google Code project page. However, this time I used a spreadsheet, and it appears as if I’ve previously missed a few thousand downloads. So while I thought the the grand total was around 16K, it looks like it’s actually in the region of 19K. Which is something like 18-20GB worth of data — a reasonably impressive figure, when I think about it.

Perhaps I’ll throw myself a party when I hit 20K…

I’ve noticed what seems to be a predilection, by those who write reviews of WordPress shopping cart plugins and themes, to stick YAK at the bottom of the list. Probably because the number of downloads is below the others. But the final result is something along the lines of:

WP-Ecommerce: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Shopp: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Eshop: feature, feature, feature, feature…
YAK: [gawd I'm tired of listing features... let's not bother with it any more... what can come up with instead... oh I know] it’s a simple plugin!

It’s getting old. Frankly.

So, this is an attempt to come up with a reasonably objective comparison of the shopping cart plugins for WordPress, without excluding the one at the end because someone-got-bored-before-they-finished-writing. You might be wondering how I can be objective when I develop one of those very plugins — well, we’ll see how I do, I guess.

I’m going to take a look at the major e-commerce plugins (not themes, because this probably should be an apples-to-apples comparison). First up, let’s bundle all those features together into one nice big list and see who does what… this might end up being a work-in-progress, because in some cases, it’s not immediately obvious whether the features are included. If I’ve missed something, let me know.

Hard to draw any real conclusions from this matrix — WP E-commerce probably leads in terms of features, but those features come with a (resource) cost. Shopp looks like it might come second (in terms of featureset), and certainly covers the most payment gateways, but it’s also a reasonable investment (particularly purchase of a developer license). Given it’s commercial-only, it’s impossible to know what performance or memory usage is like.

Given that no single plugin covers all the possible features, I guess it’s very much a case of identifying the things that are important to you, then choose the plugin which best covers that featureset.

…At least, until YAK2 comes out, because that will do everything.

That’s a joke by the way.

More to come later, and do let me know if I’m made some glaringly obvious omissions.

Update #1: Added number of downloads, and project links.

Update #2: Changes to eShop features, kindly provided by Rich.

Update #3: Added info on WP E-commerce product search.

Update #4: Added info on Shopp, provided by Jonathon.

Update #5: Added iDeal to wp-ecommerce, i18n to eshop.

Update #6: Added 2 new YAK features

So, I’ve just finished Batman: Arkham Asylum (almost twice), and currently playing GTA IV. Does anyone else wish that someone would take the Batman gameplay mechanics (and voice acting) and merge with a world the size of GTA?

Gotham City instead of Liberty City.

Imagine glide flight from the top of a skyscraper, rather than just a few storeys up on a gargoyle. Tracking criminals from building to building. Remote driving the Batcar or Batwing for a pickup. Using the “real” Batcave facilities to investigate crimes.

The possibilities are endless…

…and I want that game!

Apple shows Microsoft how to really do an “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” advert:

http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/getamac/2009/apple-mvp-elimination-us-20090512_480×272.mov

Awesome.

Trackback pointed out a somewhat less than complementary review of YAK.

I think the reviewer probably has a valid point in regard to user-friendliness, but otherwise hasn’t appeared to put a huge amount of thought into his review. In fact, it was negative enough that I feel the need to post a rebuttal both here and in a comment on his post. I don’t mind constructive criticism (as I said, I tend to agree on the user-friendliness front), but I’m less than impressed with criticism that’s based on a fundamental lack of research.

Here’s my comment (hopefully it doesn’t come across as too defensive…):

A question for you: did you happen to scroll down the YAK project page (here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/projects/yak-for-wordpress/)?

In the distant past, I was one of the editors of a (printed) technical journal in the US. Generally if we were reviewing a product, we’d contact the company in advance for review copies (giving them the opportunity to provide additional information if they wanted). In this case, and for any future reviews you decide to write, I believe you’d be better served contacting the developer (or developers) and give them that same opportunity. It is perhaps a better form of journalism not to rubbish a project or product without actually doing a little research in advance…

In regard to cross-resource transactions, I’m a member of the camp that wonders whether distributed transactions are strictly necessary in the REST/HTTP world; indeed I wonder whether they represent a design failure in modeling the granularity of your resources.

That said, we don’t live in a perfect world — and even if I can’t envisage why a properly designed RESTful application might require access to a distributed transaction, I can certainly envisage the environment where such an application might evolve. I’ve worked in a few of them. Places where interdepartmental barriers are as solid as the Great Wall; bastions of archaic technology where “one might provide a pseudo-RESTful interface, but one certainly won’t be re-architecting one’s legacy system in the buzzword language of the day”.

But, I think there’s a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in the JBossTS article “Transactional support for JAX RS based applications“:

Certainly it is worth pointing out that if a system cannot be made reliable then it can be of only limited utility. That said it is a worthwhile exercise to show how a REST based system can be made reliable.

Lack of distributed transactions would hardly seem to make a REST based system “unreliable” and, as a consequence, of “only limited utility”. Imagine a hotel booking facility — perhaps a booking resource, which internally might be constructed from a number of components, all governed (again internally) by transaction demarcation. Does the fact that the booking resource is coarse-grained and does not require an external transaction make it less reliable than a number of fine-grained resources which do? On the contrary. The latter sounds more like a WS-* api than a RESTful architecture, nothing to do with reliability.

So… hopefully it’s obvious I think it’s a bad idea. But if I were to write such an API, I think the 8-year old spec mentioned in the article falls short of the mark. Here’s my first-cut attempt at an alternative (which I still think falls a bit short of the mark, but is possibly an improvement):

<html>
<body>
	<dl>
		<dt>Transaction ID</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-id">12345a</dd>
		<dt>Status</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-status">ACTIVE</dd>
		<dt>Timeout</dt>
			<dd id="transaction-timeout">5000</dd>
	</dl>
	<ul id="participants">
		<li>
			<a href="/tc/12345a/participants/1">
				Participant 1
			</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="/tc/12345a/participants/2">
				Order
			</a>
		</li>
	<ul>
</body>
</html>

<html>
<title>Participant #2</title>
<body>
<dl>
    <dt>ID</dt>
        <dd>2</dd>
    <dt>Name</dt>
        <dd>Order</dd>
    <dt>URL</dt>
        <dd>
            <a href="http://internal.mydomain.com/someresource/123">Order</a>
        </dd>
</dl>
</body>
</html>

The resource identified by a participant URL will have the following semantics:

Basic usage might look something like the following:

POST /tc
Host: somedomain.com

timeout=5000

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

POST /res1?tx
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

<xml>some xml describing the resource</xml>

HTTP1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://internaldept1.somedomain.com/res1/100

PUT /res2/somename?tx
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

<xml>some xml describing the update,
perhaps including a reference to the previously
created resource</xml>

HTTP1.1 200 Ok
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://internaldept2.somedomain.com/res2/somename

POST /tc/10a23v991/participants
Host: somedomain.com

name=resource1&url=http://internaldept1.somedomain.com/res1/100

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991/participants/a01abgv21
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

POST /tc/10a23v991/participants
Host: somedomain.com

name=resource2&url=http://internaldept2.somedomain.com/res2/somename

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
Location: http://somedomain.com/tc/10a23v991/participants/a01abgv22
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

DELETE /tc/10a23v991?action=commit
Host: somedomain.com

HTTP/1.1 204 Committed and deleted
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:56 GMT
X-Powered-By: TransactionServer/0.1

PUT /res1/100/tx/a01abgv21
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

action=prepare

PUT /res2/somename/tx/a01abgv22
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

action=prepare

PUT /res1/100/tx/a01abgv21
Host: internaldept1.somedomain.com

action=commit

PUT /res2/somename/tx/a01abgv22
Host: internaldept2.somedomain.com

action=commit