First the language. What makes PHP, as a language, awesome is also what makes it horrible to work with, which is that it’s not really a language, but rather a giant plugin architecture for exposing lower level libraries in a high level fashion. Most of the language that developers use are, in fact, thin wrappers around popular C functions (curl, mysql, gd, etc.). Most of the time these libraries’ functions are simply exposed as-is. Anyone who’s coded curl in C will feel right at home while using curl from PHP. The problem with this is it leads to wildly inconsistent API’s.

Another touchy problem with the language is actually a byproduct of the way PHP, the core language, is managed. It’s, essentially, designed by committee. Anyone who’s ever tried to design a large scale anything knows how problematic this can be. The second problem with this approach is that nobody from on high is setting any kind of recognizable standards. PEAR has its standards and PHP has its standards, while everyone else codes however they damn well please. This leads to SPL classes being more Java style, while PEAR classes look a lot different (e.g. ArrayObject vs. HTTP_Request2).

The ultimate problem of this committee approach is that, before a feature can be integrated, the whole committee has to be on board. This is especially true for core language functionality. For instance, PHP just recently got anonymous functions and short-hand array slicing. Don’t get me started on namespaces in PHP.

I know quite a few core PHP coders personally and, from what I understand, they have a number of problems when evolving PHP. Besides the committee issues and the fact that extensions are coded by a few thousand different people, there’s the fact that PHP is installed on just about every machine on the planet so backwards incompatible changes wreak havoc on code everywhere.

At the end of the day I was tired of PHP’s inconsistent language syntax and waiting for more modern language features. Enter Python.

Python’s approach to creating a language is about as completely opposite as you can get from PHP. First, and foremost, Python is lead by Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum. The result is that the language’s development takes its cues from a single person with a consistent longterm vision of how things should be. Guido and the core Python coders set standards, via PEP’s, on everything from how common interfaces (e.g. DB’s) should work to coding standards (the infamous PEP8). Furthermore, practices Guido thinks are poor coding practices are simply not supported at the language level (e.g. there is no ++ operator nor can you do assignment in comparison operators).

The byproduct of this is that it permeates throughout the Python community. Due to the fact that Python has significant whitespace, combined with PEP8, you’d be hard pressed to find Python code that looks and feels drastically different between various projects.

But, overall, the thing I like most about Python is it explicitness. When you open a file in Python you know precisely what code is affecting that file. How many times I got burned by spaghetti require/include code I can’t tell you so this is a welcome addition.

On top of all of this Python has evolved significantly with regards to systems-level features. Want a daemon? Sure, just do import daemon \ daemon.daemonize(). Want threading? Sure, it’s all there. How about CLI option parsing? Just do from optparse import OptionParser.

Another thing I love about Python, is a religious adherence to KISS. You want namespaces? Fine the name of the file is the namespace. You want modules? Fine just replace / with . along with an __init__.py file and you’re good to go. Would you like to rename that function to something else? Fine just do new_func = old_func.

Finally, a stark difference between PHP and Python is that Guido, essentially, treats the developers as adults while PHP puts significant effort into protecting developers from themselves (I’m looking at you safe_mode). My favorite quote from Guido, while commenting on why Python doesn’t enforce private/protected/public variables was, “Hey, we’re all consenting adults here.” In addition to this, as my friend and Python hacker Mike Malone puts it, is that you can mangle whatever you want in Python. For instance, at runtime you can automatically extend class Foo from class Bar by doing Foo.__bases__ += Bar (Tip: This is especially handy for extending Django’s base User functionality). Much like UNIX, Python gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself, but at least hanging yourself is an option.

Overall, I’m really enjoying my decision to switch over and recommend you check out Python for your next project.

A couple of months ago we released Chess Wars, which allows you to play your Facebook friends via Facebook Connect on your iPhone. When it was released we found a few show stopping bugs that neither us nor Apple found which kept new users from playing the game. Whoops. We pushed 1.1 a few weeks later only to find that there were problems for other new users. Again none of this was caught by us or Apple. As they say, shit happens. We quickly put together a release and submitted it to Apple about 6 weeks ago.

Silence.

Finally, after weeks of waiting I did what I’d tried hard to avoid at all cost; I contacted the friends I knew at Apple who told me to email the submitters. Canned response.

So here, like so many other iPhone developers, we sit getting ass raped on 1-star reviews, which will haunt our application forever, and no recourse. None. Nobody at Apple will respond to us. My friends at Apple can’t do anything. I can’t respond to the 1-star reviews.

To our users affected by this, I’m truly sorry. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about your horrible user experience and, as a developer who loves his users, nothing pains me more.

To Apple, please kindly extend the world class customer service I’m so accustomed to as an Apple fanboy to your developers.

UPDATE: A lot of the feedback around this post has centered around us getting what we deserved for shipping buggy code. I should mention we have about 50 beta testers and over 200 unit tests for this specific application so it’s not like we’re not testing. The two bugs were show stoppers for cases we didn’t think to test, but nonetheless affect most of our new users.

Secondly, we did hear back from Apple. They said they were rejecting the application because our in-game chat looked too much like Apple’s SMS application. I’ve asked if we changed our chat bubbles to look like Facebooks if we’d be allowed in. Our contact at Apple is going to be getting back to me soon.

What pisses me off most about this, and what I conveyed to our contact at Apple, was that it took a widely publicized profanity laced blog post to get their attention. I asked, specifically, why it took weeks to get such a simple response of “Hey, change the chat and we’re good.” back. To Apple’s credit they said I deserved an answer to that question and are looking into it.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with Apple while I was writing this blog post and they told me, no joke, that the chat bubbles are, in fact, trademarked. Furthermore, they suggested I could, among other suggestions make them “less shiny.”

I wonder if they consider Facebook to be infringing on their trademark.

• Toilets in Europe and the UK have two flush mechanisms. One is a small button with a single dot on it and the second, larger button, has two dots on it. I find this to be an extremely simple and elegant solution to conserving water.
• Speaking of toilets, have you ever crapped on a Japanese toilet?! Holy. Shit. Besides my Googler friends, who have been happily crapping on space age Japanese toilets for years, we’ve all been missing out. Seat warmers, bidets, music, automatic lids, and freaking medical sensors! I mean, why don’t they just add laser beams?
• Public restrooms in Europe, the UK, and Japan have fully enclosed small rooms for their toilets. There’s absolutely no cracks or open air around you. Total privacy while taking a crap in public. Pure genius.
• Showers in every place I’ve been to in Europe and many in the UK have two knobs, as you’d expect, but they do totally different things. One knob is temperature (many have the actual temperature numbers on them) and the other is pressure. Never fumble around adjusting hot and cold until you get it just right!
• In Thailand their plumbing systems weren’t made for flushing toilet paper and such so they have a small spray hose (think of the sprayer by your sink attached to a wall by the toilet). Toilet paper is merely used to dry off your clean bottom. I got used to this method pretty quickly and much prefer it over toilet paper.

If I ever do build my own home or renovate another bathroom I’ll be including all of these in my bathroom as I think they really do make the perfect bathroom all together.

Chess Wars allows you to play your Facebook friends in chess using Facebook Connect. Here’s a list of features for Chess Wars:

• No signup process. Simply log in with your Facebook account using Facebook Connect.
• Play against your Facebook friends! Send challenges and invite your friends to play against you.
• Works over WiFi, EDGE, or 3G. Play using your iPhone or iPod Touch.
• A little rusty at Chess? Don’t worry it highlights potential moves when you select a piece.
• Play and keep track of dozens of games with our simple inbox. Games are organized by game state (e.g. My Turn, Their Turn, New Challenges, etc.).
• Our in-game chat system allows you to taunt your friends easily. Everyone loves rubbing a good move in!
• Get notified on Facebook when a friend makes a move or sends you a chat message.
• Scroll back through move history easily.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us with your issues. We’ve got a lot of plans for next versions and will be releasing checkers and reversi next.

What makes this so frustrating is that there is absolutely no way to find out what your artist name is. It’s not shown in any of the certificates nor it’s not shown in iTunes Connect. Sure, your copyright holder, company name, etc. are all viewable, but that very important artist name, which your application actually gets listed under? Nope.

Luckily, I didn’t have to contact Apple through normal channels, which I hear takes 4 – 6 weeks to get a change done, but I did find plenty of things to be annoyed about.

• You cannot preview your application in the App Store without actually publishing it into the App Store.
• Your artist name is not listed anywhere in iTunes Connect so you cannot verify any changes.
• You cannot view the status of a case number anywhere. You have no way of passively viewing the status of your case. You have to email them to find out if it’s closed or not.

Apple could easily fix all of these with very little effort. In fact, they offer a preview of what your applications will look like when you sign up, but not after you’ve submitted apps. I’d like to see three things:

• The list of your applications in iTunes Connect should be switched to look exactly like they would be listed in iTunes.
• In the applications overview it should show the artist name (even if I’m not allowed to edit it I should at least be able to see it).
• Allow me to see a simple overview of any pending cases I have. Just something like a case number, when it was opened, and status (e.g. “In Review”, “Not Assigned”, “Waiting on Developer”, “Closed”).

Add this to the long list of things Apple should fix in iTunes Connect and the App Store for developers.

“If he wants to protest, let him protest but find a different way to do it,” Deschane said.

I have to give him credit for fitting so much ignorance into such a short sentence. First off, the courts have ruled over and over again that the American flag can be desecrated as a form of protest. Second off, you don’t get to choose how people protest your own decisions (as long as they’re doing so legally).

I really hope the ACLU takes a picture of this idiot as he’s writing a fat check to Vito Congine for stealing his property, trespassing and violating his civil rights. MMmmmm … Crow.

I recently purchased an iPhone 3G for my upcoming trip to Europe with the express purpose of SIM unlocking it. Moving forward this will be my travel phone. When I get back I plan on purchasing an iPhone 3GS to use here in the US. Specifically, I ended up doing the following:

1. Jailbreaking the phone with redsn0w.
2. Doing a SIM unlock with ultrasn0w.
3. Enabling the tethering option.
4. Entering the appropriate settings for MMS.

Jailbreaking

The very first thing you need to do is install redsn0w. This was exceptionally easy to do. If you don’t have the IPSW file you need check out this post for download links for both the iPhone and iPhone 3G. Please note that none of this works on the newly released iPhone 3GS.

Gotcha: One thing I will note here is that I had problems updating Cydia. After rooting around a bit I found out that installing both Cydia and Icy can cause problems so don’t check the Icy box when running redsn0w. Interestingly enough, when I did another jailbreak with redsn0w, without checking Icy, it left Icy installed and fixed my Cydia problems.

SIM Unlock

The SIM unlock was super easy. You can find a great overview here. all  The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Load up Cydia
2. Add http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com as a source.
3. Update your sources.
4. Search for ultrasn0w.
5. Install ultrasn0w.
6. Reboot.

Tethering

All you have to do for tethering is go to http://help.benm.at/help.php and follow the instructions. This will enable the tethering menu under Settings > General > Network. After that pair your phone and your computer go to the Bluetooth menu on your computer go down to your iPhone 3G’s name and select “Connect to Network”. After this your iPhone should have a blue notification at the top indicating that tethering is on and working.

After I got tethering working speed tests were showing 1065 kbps downstream and about 200 kbps upstream. To me, it felt a bit snappier than my Verizon EVDO. Since I have a MiFi I don’t plan on using this often, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

MMS

Supposedly everything I need to have MMS working is enabled on my iPhone, but I can’t seem to actually send or receive an MMS. I assume there’s something I need to enable on my iPhone’s plan, but there was something curious about this that I’ll mention for others who have to edit their Cellular Data Network settings.

Gotcha: Mine was missing! I had no option under Settings > General > Network for Cellular Data Network. Getting this enabled was, without a doubt, a major pain in the ass. I’ll try and outline how I got it all working. PLEASE NOTE THIS IS FOR ADVANCED NERDS ONLY!

1. Go into Cydia and enable OpenSSH.
2. Find your IP address in your WiFi settings.
3. $ ssh root@196.168.0.22 (Where 192.168.0.22 is the IP address found in Step #2. Use alpine as the password)
4. $ scp root@192.168.1.135:"/System/Library/Carrier\ Bundles/ATT_US.bundle/carrier.plist" ~/Documents/
5. You should now have a carrier.plist file in your Documents folder. Create a backup of this in case you break anything.
6. Open it with Property List Editor (Which apparently only comes with XCode as it’s in Developer > Applications > Utilities).
7. Under Root add a new sibling called AllowEDGEEditing with a Class of Boolean and set it to True.
8. Under Root add a new sibling called IsMMSUserEditable with a Class of Boolean and set it to True. (You can check out a screenshot of what mine looked like here).
9. Save your changes with File > Save.
10. $ scp ~/Documents/carrier.plist root@192.168.1.135:"/System/Library/Carrier\ Bundles/ATT_US.bundle/carrier.plist"
11. Go to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network and edit your MMS settings according to http://help.benm.at/help.php.

Despite all of this I can’t seem to receive any MMS from friends nor do I see any MMS features exposed in the iPhone OS 3.0 UI at all. If anyone has any insights into this please let me know. I included this portion, mainly, to help anyone else with a missing Cellular Data Network panel.

UPDATE: Evidently, there’s an application in Cydia named APN Editing that will enable this for you without having to do crazy hacking.

Conclusion

That’s about it. My phone now works on any carrier, has VIM and a terminal application, supports OpenSSH, allows me to tether my MacBook Pro to it and, theoretically, allows MMS. This should make my Europe trip a lot more palatable. The following is a list of links I used to piece together this post and my iPhone hacks:

• http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/f201/70576-3.htm
• http://help.benm.at/help.php
• http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/17/enable-tethering-in-iphone-30/
• http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/126908912/redsn0w-in-june
• http://www.simonblog.com/2009/06/23/ultrasn0w-is-just-released-to-unlock-iphone-3g-on-iphone-os-3-0/

For the last few years some of my most respected friends and colleagues have been busy building the social web. Blaine Cook, Eran Hammer-Lahav, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Dave Morin, Luke Shephard and many, many others have been working tirelessly on the nuts and bolts of what we’re calling Social Platforms (or the Social Web). The nuts and bolts are things like OAuth, OpenID, Activity Streams, LRDD, XRD, etc. and various providers (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Six Apart, etc.) are enthusiastically implementing these common technologies.

The problem is that the tools for users to adequately manage their data on these social platforms are, at best, in their infant stages. The engineers that have been building these nuts and bolts, as we engineers often do, have focused mostly on security and technology rather than on best practices, social norms, or how these technologies will change or disrupt human communication.

I think it’s about time we thought about those best practices and social norms. So, here goes, an initial SWAG at what a Social Platform Bill of Rights might look like to the three parties involved (to use the OAuth adjectives, we have Users, Providers and Consumers).

Providers

As a provider you’re #1 job is to protect the user. Nobody knows your users better than you and those users have placed a lot of faith and trust in your hands. As a social platform provider you agree to the following terms.

1. You will provide users with the ability to completely block an application. This means more than simply not allowing them to use that user’s data. It means that application will cease to exist as far as that user is concerned.
2. Provide users with the ability to group their connections and alter settings based on which group a connection is in (e.g. Nobody from my “Work” group can see tweets that include the #bingedrinking hash tag).
3. You will allow users to mute another user’s activity while still maintaining the connection.
4. You will actively police consumers of your users’ data. Set precedence with your consumers and enforce them in your APIs and the tools you give to users.
5. You will provide fine grain control over exactly what a consumer may or may not do with a user’s data. Furthermore, you will present the user with said options when they grant a consumer access to the user’s data.
6. You will provider a clear and simple way for both consumers and users to privately contact you.
7. Don’t be a douchebag.

Consumers (Application Developers)

As a consumer or application developers, you are in the precarious position of having to enhance a user’s experience without upsetting the user, their friends, and the provider. The majority of the burden for being an upstanding citizen on the Social Web falls on your shoulders. As a social platform consumer you agree to the following terms.

1. Never create relationships between two users without explicit permission from the user initiating the relationship.
2. All automatic communications sent from your application must be opt-in or confirmed by the user after each action (e.g. Facebook Connect requires a user click “Publish” to confirm publishing to the feed).
3. Do not build applications that encourage and/or trick users into spamming their friends and followers.
4. Allow non-users of your application to opt-out of communications originating from your application without having to install said application.
5. Invitations from one user to another user to use or join your application must not be sent automatically nor should mass invitations be the default option. Make the user choose, carefully, which friends to invite to the service.
6. Use the messaging frameworks provided by the providers. Do not require or use a user’s email address. Furthermore, do not ever send unsolicited messages.
7. Do not enable automatic communications after a user has signed up.
8. If your application spans multiple social platforms, users must be able to manage and control their data and settings from a single location (e.g. A user’s settings work the same on both Facebook and MySpace).
9. Be up front about what data you plan on using, how you plan on using it and to whom you plan on sharing that data with. This text must be stated in clear, non-legalese, concise written form.
10. You will provide a clear and simple way for users and providers to privately contact you.
11. Don’t be a douchebag.

Users

Without you this entire thing would fall into itself in a gigantic implosion. Despite what any provider or consumer says, the data you publish on the web is yours, which means it’s also, at the end of the day, up to you to protect it. As a social web user you agree to the following terms.

1. Never give write permissions to an unknown consumer.
2. Be cognizant of how an application will affect your friends and followers.
3. Never send a mass invite to your friends to use a consumer’s applications.
4. Do not use one service solely for the purpose of broadcasting posts/activities from another service. Cross posting is bad for the internets (An exception being aggregation sites, such as FriendFeed).
5. Don’t be a douchebag.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we’ve really messed up lots of things by bringing real life social norms to the web. The web had its own social norms, which often clash with real life social norms, before we did this. The result is going to include growing pains like sheep tossing, #spymaster, and Foursquare’s horrible decision to turn on automatic tweets after 2.5 months without even so much as notifying their users.

We’ll get it right, eventually. Until then we all need to start thinking about how we affect other people with our actions online, just like real life.

Also, interesting to note how, as is so often in real life, it comes down to not being a douchebag for all this to work just fine.

I’ve started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam. This isn’t because I hate my friends, it’s because I have no other recourse to stop this application’s abusive behavior. So what makes this so abusive? The game gives money and income boosts the more you tweet out about the game. Turning off said notifications can greatly reduce your chances in the game. Basically, it was engineered from the ground up to promote spammy behavior.

The real issue is that Twitter still hasn’t given us the tools to manage this stuff. I can’t block specific hash tags, I can’t mute friends without unfollowing them, I can’t block out tweets sent by certain applications, etc. These are all things I’m able to do on Facebook, with good reason.

So what do we do for now?

• If you’re playing this game, stop right this fucking second.
• Report anyone using the game to @spam and unfollow them.
• Report @playspymaster to @spam.
• Twitter must give its users tools to manage their streams.
  • Add the ability to block certain hash tags from your stream.
  • Add the ability to temporarily mute people you follow without unfollowing them.
  • Add the ability block any tweet sent by a specific application. This would require a fundamental, but arguably imperative, change to the way the API works so I doubt it’d happen anytime soon.

I know how hard it is for Twitter right now. I’m friends with two of their engineers and one former engineer. It’s not easy scaling sites on the web and even harder to scale real time applications like Twitter, but the tipping point is upon us. We need these tools ASAP.

So what’s next? Well, I’m spending July couch surfing through Europe, working on a few side projects, putting together a small conference on scaling and generally taking things easy. I’ll also be continuing to annoy the coders at Digg as an advisor moving forward.

It’s hard to put into words what my time at Digg means to me. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with many of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds and they’ve been gracious enough to not only give me a chance to prove myself, but also impart some of their knowledge to me. For that I’ll be forever grateful and indebted.

Thankfully, Kevin accepts beer as payment.