Starting yesterday, my Pidgin stopped connecting to Yahoo!’s messenger service (MSN kept working). Being lazy, I’ve just changed the scs.msg.yahoo.com host to 66.163.181.166 in the user profile panel – the first solution I’ve came across on Google – and it started working again. For another day or so.

But today, it stopped working again and I couldn’t get it working again. So I’ve used Meebo to go online and ask others if their YM! clients worked, if they’ve also encountered this problem, and, most important, what did they do to fix it. And – thanks to Radu – I’ve found out the root of this problem: Yahoo! changed the specifications of its im protocol. Fortunately, the Pidgin guys don’t waste time and the problem can be solved by upgrading to Pidgin 2.5.7.

Details here and here.

Today I had to choose between Google’s and Yahoo’s Maps APIs. As I’m quite a Google fan, I first checked out its maps API. Very disappointing. It seems that the API was designed by some marketing guy or a janitor. I know, tough accusation. And I haven’t even code one page with Google’s API. What makes me say that? Well, it all ended when I started reading their Terms and Conditions. It seems that all Google Maps API key are domain dependent (only work for a specified domain). And this sucks.

There are 4 traditional stages in software development: development, integration, staging and production. Usually, all these stages take place of different machines that have different domains and/or subdomains. This means that you need a Google API key for each stage. It means that you’ll need at least 3 different API keys just to get to the part where you’re testing the application. But if the developers use different virtual hosts for the project, the number of required APIs increase exponentially. I know that API keys are free, but time isn’t and it’s quite annoying to have to register for a new API key everytime you set up a demo version of the project on a new subdomain.

With Yahoo on the other hand, you only need one API key. And it works. A word of advice: if you need a map API, go with Yahoo! I did…