Occasionally you make a decision that pays dividends later on. Recently I had the pleasure of such a decision. This is all hopelessly nerdy. Sorry if that’s not your thing.

At work we need to communicate with a 3rd-party vendor using their Business-to-Business API. Said vendor uses SOAP as their API transport including a large amount of WS-Security extensions. This is where you take a complex XML nightmare and start liberally applying public-key cryptography while smoking hard drugs.

I wrapped all this disaster inside a small web-service of my own that accepts JSON as the input, does all the SOAP heavy-lifting, then returns JSON. This by itself is a fantastic win although I managed to build on it further. My interface also logs the request & response to a CouchDB instance. Since the native language of data inside CouchDB is JSON, we have a very useful log of everything that went into and came out of the API. CouchDB is now acting as a reporting tool, audit trail, and cache.

chelfyn:

Advances in Medical Science…

chelfyn:

Advances in Medical Science…

And without a thought of the consequence
I gave in to my decadence
One slip, and down the hole we fall
It seems to take no time at all
A momentary lapse of reason

One Slip Lyrics - Pink Floyd

If you change “one-slip” to “1-click” it could be talking about Amazon

thahamburgler:

You Motherfucker You

thahamburgler:

You Motherfucker You

Morning milk (Taken with instagram)

Morning milk (Taken with instagram)

My son loves sitting at my desk & “working” by mashing the keyboard. I switched to the Mac OS X guest user so he couldn’t break anything I cared about.

Oops!

Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico and the worst US oil spill in history

“Notwithstanding” is my new favourite word. It’s magical!

My son Leo at 14 months

My son Leo at 14 months

The monotony of today will become the fond memory of tomorrow

Data Mining: How Companies Know Your Personal Information -- Printout -- TIME

(via Instapaper)