I do not want a book called "The Ghost Brigades", but someone thought I did, for a minute. Those of you following this via my Blendix activity page will know what I mean.
One of the interesting things about working on Blendix is that we get to see all the ways in which other services export bad data. Amazon is particularly weird about it, though. As we were testing our code we saw a variety of bits of bad data intermittently published, some of which were fusions of the names of random products, some of which were actual products that had nothing to do with the user in question. I'm a little sad that my first bogus entry was a real product, though. Some of the incorrect entries we saw during testing were pretty hilarious.
Has anyone else out there used to using Amazon's various APIs to pull wishlist data and seen similar results? Is there any way to work around it, or to recognize the bogus data? Advice is welcome.
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19 hours ago
5 comments:
I've actually read The Ghost Brigades. Very good Heinlein-ish military sf.
WOAH. My bad, different Ghost Brigades. I read the one by John Scalzi, that review is clearly of a different book.
Safari? Can I at least try to see the page?
The best part is if I spoof the user agent, the page appears to load just fine, at least when compared to a Gecko engine'd browser.
This is our most-reported bug, by far. We know about it and we're going to be working on it soon. (Happily, more of our target users use Safari than IE by a wide margin.) 99% of the relevant code is open source, though - the issue there is with Athena. Please feel free to download Nevow and see if it works with the most recent WebKit, and submit a patch which adjusts the version comparisons accordingly. I am willing to bet that it doesn't, though, and that Athena has a bunch more issues. With your user-agent hacked, were you able to log in, create people, view blips, or get updates on your dashboard?
It doesn't even work on FF3 yet; we haven't had any resources to devote to portability so far.
Unfortunately, user-agent hack only works *in-browser*. The dashboard stuff, AFAIK, won't use it. And I don't use that anyway :)
I didn't try too much else, actually. I'll check back in occasionally and see what I can do. I didn't mean to repeat the bug, and was commenting more on the complete abolition of browser usage. IMNSHO, it's better to let browsers through after a warning about bugs, than prohibit them from working entirely.
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