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. :-]

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.

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

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

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

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!

http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/getamac/2009/apple-mvp-elimination-us-20090512_480x272.mov

Awesome.

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…

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

Since then, I’ve come across a few negative comments about YAK on various forums — interestingly, in none of these cases has the poster actually contacted me. All too similar to the original troll.

The usual process, when there’s been a real issue with YAK, is that someone lets me know, I fix said issue (or otherwise try to resolve), and release a new version. So far, I’ve only been notified about one legitimate hole in the code (quickly fixed), and (at least, as far as I can recall) haven’t left any major flaws outstanding for great lengths of time. So I haven’t been enormously worried about the odd malcontent.

That said, I occasionally google to see what’s being said out there, and came across the following gem (from the aforementioned plugin developer).

If you want to throw up an image with a price in a page or a post then by all means use YAK. But if you want the real deal then [competing-plugin] is built on years of e-Commerce knowledge and has plenty of important features for people wanting to SELL Online – such as the ability to interface with many payment gateways, the ability to interface with shipping companies, and much much more

(Note: I’ve removed the name of the plugin because I’ve thus far tried to avoid actually naming the individual involved).

This was posted sometime after May last year, but I do feel the need to make a couple of comments, even though it’s almost a year old:

1. What’s your definition of important feature? Get a group of users together, and I guarantee they won’t come up with the same list.
2. YAK now supports a number of payment gateways (PayPal standard, PayPal Pro, Authorize.net and basic Google Checkout integration)
3. Okay, it doesn’t directly interface with shipping companies — but the shipping calculation is relatively flexible, and I’m always open to suggestions.
4. YAK as a project has now been actively (if intermittently) developed for 3 years. So I’d say it also fulfills the assertion: “built on years of e-Commerce knowledge”.

UPDATE: here’s another interesting comment (by someone called Mccormicky) which I came across after posting this:

Yak cart is another you might consider if you don’t mind repairing tables in mysql. I did it and I am no expert.
Yak is not that supported either-there isn’t even an onsite tutorial for setting it up and the readme contains nothing about where to put the hooks! I was amazed.

It looks like fairly obvious trolling, given that (at the time it was posted) there was certainly a basic tutorial for YAK setup, and at the time I don’t recall being contacted about any “table repair” problems. Weird.

British (shoe design [sic]) company, Jimmy Choo has told the north of Auckland gift seller website, Kookychoo.com, it must agree to give up its name by Tuesday, or face a lawsuit.

I have to admit, I find this kind of thing (the latter rather than the former), really annoying. Undoubtedly some kind of Freudian “David versus Goliath” kind of thing.

I have no problem with a company trying to protect its brand, but I have a big problem with the manner and terms by which they do so. In any case, let’s face it, the only reason one might associate the brand “Kookychoo” with “Jimmy Choo” is now because of this case.

Unless, of course, the work of “someone else” amounts to a half-meg schema file.

Now, my spider senses start tingling if I come across a single schema file that’s over a few 100 kilobytes, but Netbeans gets it’s knickers in a right proper twist if you try to generate sample xml from this epic monstrosity. 289MB generated before I managed to kill the process.

And oh, what an xml. I don’t think separation of concerns was a primary, secondary or even tertiary thought for whoever sat down with tool in hand to design this particular ‘standard’. If a simple type named ActionCommonDataTypeCodesEnumeration isn’t worrying enough, the fact that it contains terms such as Begin, Cancel, Complete, Create, Delete, Dispatch, Lookup, Initiate, Instruction, Information, PartialCancel, PartialComplete, Read, Request, Update, and so on, hurts the back of my brain.
Let’s not get started on PriceCommonData, UnitPriceCommonData, and the myriad other CommonDatas littered through the document. Ack. Aching brain.

Okay, yes, I’m not the target audience, and I haven’t paid the US$149 for the documentation, so I may be reading more into the schema than I probably should, but if I look at it through even slightly REST-tinted glasses, it frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Suffice it to say that I will probably not be using ARTS’ inventory.xsd for my, much simpler, requirements. I may indeed roll my own, but happy to entertain suggestions if someone has a better idea.

That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating

Worse yet, Word appears to no longer support Thai language — meaning it’s not fit-for-purpose for my wife either. Unfortunately, we left the Office 2003 disk in storage, back in NZ, so we can’t rollback to the version of Office that did support Thai language.

Exactly why is Office such a cash cow for Microsoft? Because of muppets like me, obviously.

Somewhat irritating, was the fact he claimed to have found connections between us. Quite how he managed to find a connection I don’t know — given that there were/are none — but more galling was the subsequent request that I post messages to that effect, on all the forums where this muppet had been posting. Needless to say, I was somewhat less than agreeable, and I suspect that my refusal cemented whatever paranoid delusions of persecution he had conjured.

I only bring this up now, because YAK has suddenly become the target of that self-same troll. Or at least, I’m guessing it’s the same twit (given the similarity of name). This time ridiculously claiming that my plugin has somehow opened a gaping security hole in WordPress’s administration panel. Laughable.

I suggest that rather than YAK causing the problem, it’ll be the fact that this individual has a few too many brain-cells short of a functional cranium, and that “password” is rather too simple an administration password.
On the positive side, it does hopefully prove that the troll has nothing to do with me, and is obviously a sad git with far too much spare time on his hands.

UPDATE: just to be thorough, I’ve double-checked some of the access points in YAK where there might’ve been potential for a security hole, and I can’t see anything that might compromise WP’s security. So I return to my earlier description of the poster: a muppet.

Transpose Red Elephant’s menu and chefs to the Thai Friends location and you’d have the perfect restaurant. As it is, I’d rather put up with the crappy view of Khyber Pass and the motorway, and enjoy the steamed snapper and flaming chicken.

Interestingly, I have yet to find a Thai restaurant in London which comes even close to Red Elephant. The closest would be (coincidentally) Blue Elephant in Fulham — but that has variety in its favour rather than quality.

I don’t think so. I’m attempting to follow the pragmatic creed of learning a new programming language a year (well, laziness will probably turn it into every 2 years, but that’s nothing to do with age), and I think my head is in a better place now, to do so, than it was 10 years ago. Certainly my mother doesn’t think age is any barrier — she started learning Spanish in her late 20s (I seem to recall), and began Italian well into her 50s.

I could probably come up with numerous other examples at a push.

So the fact that the British High Commission in Thailand has just rejected my sister-in-law’s student visa because of her age (early 30s) smacks of excuse, rather than legitimate reason (in which case, why didn’t they tell us the real reason for the rejection?)
Despite the fact we pre-paid for the course, provided evidence of income, accommodation, etc, etc, etc — all the masses of paperwork you need to provide when sponsoring a visa application — it appears that ageism is rife within the Home Office.

Disappointing.

First talk, good. Last talk, good. Stuff in between… meh.

Highlights of the evening: catching up with Ben. And, after 7 years, finally meeting Alan (the last talk!) in person…

…even if it was only for a few minutes.