James Andrews

I am in Toronto International Airport. In the wing that contains flights heading to the US. My flight is at 6:40PM EST, and I am departing for Boston. I am writing this blog entry in Textmate a simple text editor for the Macintosh operating system OS X. Why am I mentioning this? Well you would think that with access to Wireless internet, I’d be able to just up and connect to the internet open my blogging software and go go go go go… That however is not the case.

I sit down at my gate, and find the wireless access point I need to connect too. Boingo uses special software; for unknown reasons, the allow you to log into they system. My computer is new, and this is my first trip to an airport with it so I go ahead and download the software. I don’t travel enough to warrant hthe $12/month charge, so I use Boingo’s as-you-go which is $10CAN. The problem, there doesn’t seem to be a way to charge me for the service. I’m logged in. AIM is working, but the web browser isn’t. Was I charged for the access or not? I have internet yet I don’t have internet, and I am really confused. I think maybe I am charged for internet, but something is wrong with DNS so I manually change my DNS IP to GTE’s public server. No change, so I change it back. I log out of Boingo’s application and log back in. Still nothing. I am frustrated. Maybe my account hasn’t charged a credit card, so I create a new account. Finally a connection. I send a Facebook message, browse a couple quick websites, and then suddenly. Nothing. Gone. WTF. I go through the sequence again, even going as far as rebooting my computer. Nothing.

It ends in futility, and me calling Boingo for a refund. Where does Boingo go wrong. First is this “application”. Why do I need to run their stupid little app in order to connect wirelessly. I go to coffee shop after coffee shop, just create an account, and pay for the service. When I return, I log into the account, and pay for the service. I fly Airtran, and I create an account and have internet as I fly, using the same kind of interface that the coffee shop uses. Boingo tries to make things easier with a little application, but instead they fail.

I give Boingo 0 of 5 wifi bars.

Please fix the problems so I can not be bored during a 3-4hr lay over…..

One of my goals is to be able to advertise my Blog over Facebook. The most popular of the Facebook wordpress plugins is “WordBook”. I have it installed and indeed when I publish a blog post it shows up as a “recent action” link on my profile page. Not exactly what I want to happen. and survey says [X] I want to be able to have it show up in my new feed. No problem I say. I can hack anything ANYTHING, ok well maybe not anything, but I can hack PHP until my heart is content, or until I hit a brick wall I can do nothing about. I backed up my copy of WordBook, and started poking around the code. Once I figured out where it was calling Facebook’s client library, I saw what call it was making. Should be simple right? and survey says [X][X]. In order to post a link to your feed, which is what I was trying to do, you need to call facebook.links.set(…) which is not part of the current php library that facebook has published. No biggie. I understand what the library is doing, so I make a function similar to the one above but with only the attributes I need. It calls facebook, and survey says [X][X][X]. See in order to call facebook.links.set the user has to have granted the Wordbook application running on facebook access to a new kind of permission. Since the Wordbook developer has not done any work on his end to include this new feature I am how do we say. Shit out of luck.