Ask Threepio, an entry to the OMGWTF2 contest.

Ask Threepio won the Lipstick on a Pig prize!

I have hosted a demonstration on azure at

http://ask-threepio.azurewebsites.net/

The basic idea for Ask Threepio came from my wife, who suggested (when I had explained the idea behind the contest to her) that I babelfish the whisper game with the result being used to determine the outcome of the program. Ask Threepio was born from the discussion that followed.

The basic structure of Ask Threepio is fairly straightforward. When the user asks C-3P0 a text question, that question is filtered through each of Google Translate's languages, one to the other, then back into english. A hashcode is computed from the result; if it's even the answer is "Yes", and if it's odd the answer is "No". To ensure users don't get the same answer every time they ask a question, the order of language-to-language translation is randomized, although the results are always translated back to english.

Ask Threepio is a modern, HTML5 application, and works well with up-to-date versions of the following major browsers: IE 10, Chrome, and Firefox. I have not tested on Safari/Mac or on Opera, but they should work rather well. I have also not tested for mobile extensively; although the app itself will function on an iPad, the jukebox is buggy due to audio-autoplay restrictions and the lack hovering in a touch interface.

Let's be honest -- the WTF here isn't very WTF. I'm shooting for the Lipstick on a Pig prize. As such, my development has been almost entirely user-centric.

The code to translate through Google Translate took barely a few hours to complete. The hardest part was getting around my lack of a Google API key. Why would I do that? Well, I wanted to fire off about 70 translations per user decision request, and a developer key is limited to, what, a hundred per day? That would hardly do for testing, now would it? I also planned to cloud host this, so I didn't want any old person sucking up translations, did I? So, it had to be a screen-scrape or nothing. That turned out to be easier than I thought -- as long as I have a session cookie from Google, I can hit their unpublished API all day long and they don't seem to care. I'll probably get a Cease and Desist at some point, but for now it works.

I would have done all the translation logic client-side if I could have figured out a way to get around cross-domain origin policies. Unfortunately, Google is a stickler there. Instead, I was forced to use a server-side technology; I chose ASP.NET MVC 4 because I am not yet an expert with Node.js and wanted to spend as little time on the translation part as possible. C# is my quick and easy language, so there you go.

The UI, on the other hand, consumed all of my time. I had two projects planned for this contest, and I'm left with less than a week to finish the second one. I doubt I'll get that one done, but I'll give it a college try. I spent many days annoying my wife with late hours while tweaking styles and animations. When I started to put the jukebox in, she threw her hands up in frustration -- why bother? I'm tired, come to bed, etc.

The UI uses the extremely lightweight Vanilla.js library for all animations and XHR/AJAX calls, and the extremely powerful Knockout.js library for dynamic data binding. With the exception of the starry background image (which I stole from starlogs.net and the Threepio & Friend images (which I stole from all over the net), there are no images in this UI. No images for rounded corners or custom text. Nada. All layout and animation is accomplished via strict HTML5 and CSS3; the logo is a custom font that I stole from a font repository. It's very important to me that I mention this -- IMO far too many designers start in photoshop and cut up fuzzy images, then get upset when they can't get things pixel-perfect exact across all browsers or surprised that text in an image looks funky. You can accomplish a crap-ton with HTML/CSS these days, and this UI is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Finally, because I'm intending to host this in the cloud for the contest, I have cheated and used Github Pages as a CDN for my static binaries. I'm doing this because Github Pages doesn't seem to care about bandwidth -- they don't provide me with any sort of reporting on the subject and haven't complained yet -- but Microsoft Azure absolutely does, and the jukebox sucks up my alloted bandwidth very, very fast. Yes, Github Pages isn't exactly performant, but this is about being cheap, not about being fast. Oddly, I couldn't do that with the fonts I'm using. IE 10 complains about cross-domain origins on fonts, although Chrome and Firefox don't care. That's actually a good thing, and good on IE for doing it right.

Ok, I can't think of anything else that's important so I'll sign off.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the app.