It's possible for a library to return an error to indicate that a file is not found when you try and open a non-existent file. Then it's possible for a function that calls the open file function to decide whether that error should be translated into an exception i.e. should that file being missing break out of the current execution? There's no race condition there.
I don't think anyone reasonably expects a library to know the context of the file being opened and its importance in the logic of the rest of the program.
Seems to me like this has the potential to be something I'd pay for, but confusingly the article focuses on MIME, when the real problem you seem to be solving is providing a more usable abstraction over the complexity of sending email in general.
Having wanted a service to send emails to customers recently, I hit upon a distinct lack (or apparent lack at least) of services that allowed me to do this. While this should sound ridiculous, sending email reliably is a hard thing to do these days.
Yes, this blog post was meant to be the first in a series that described the new features of the new API release. Best way to see all of the capabilities is to look through the user manual and API reference.
I should have qualified that by saying that there were a lack of services that suited our particular needs. We ended up concluding pretty quickly that for our purposes services like Mailchimp would have been prohibitively expensive. Also, we weren't particularly interested in running a campaign oriented service, which seem to be what Mailchimp and most of the services on your list are for. I don't remember seeing Sendgrid though. That might be what we were looking for, a simple API for sending mails that aren't tied to campaigns, but which provide the template niceness of services like Mailchimp.
MailChimp also provides a great API and they even have an extended API (http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/sts/1.0/) on top of Amazon SES that doesn't cost you anything extra (you just pay for SES).
I strongly recommend listening for the full effect, but here is a rough translation for those who cannot. My apologies on likely misspelling the lady's name. The grammar tries to reflect her speed/pauses/etc:
Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we will be again disconnected from mobile phone calls. So I wanted everyone to know, in case we don't get .. in case you don't get any feedback from what's happening tomorrow .. and I didn't want anyone to worry about us.
They did this before ... the only difference is the last time when they did this I was completely freaked out I was so scared they are going to shoot us all and nobody would know about it. This time, I am not scared at all. I see that this .. like I wanna tell them bring it on! - we are excited we are happy we are going to be at Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge and we are going to do our march and do our protest .. and Mubarak is going -- out -- <cry of relief/excitement> Be with us! byebye
I understand that. Just from reading your comment I didn't know whether you were referring to the dead language, a nonexistent one, or the dialect...I'll go sit with the rest of the pedants ;)
Arabic has variants. Each Arabic country speaks a different variant, many words are changed. For example, in Tunisia, a good number of our daily used words are from French.
But that language is only used in public; books and newspapers uses the original language.
No, for English and French (the one I know), someone who understands the original language, can figure out most of the spoken language. However, for the variant of Arabic they can fail. My mother told me that in Kuwait native sellers turn to the original Arabic in order to be understood.
Do you really need the word "hack" in the slogan? Seems like it would confuse the majority of people who may be unaware of its meaning in that context?
"Short-cut to the Ultimate Body" seems sufficient.
I lived in Germany for a bit. While there I really wanted to learn to speak German properly, but when I first arrived my spoken German was pretty awful. Since many Germans speak English pretty well and could evidently tell from the way I was pronouncing things that I was an English speaker they would often switch to speaking English with me mid-conversation. This annoyed me because I'd gone to a lot of effort to move there, was trying my best to learn the language, and this was clearly hindering my efforts.
So I came up with a plan. Whenever a conversation would switch to English in this way I'd lay on a really thick accent, use lots of slang and idiomatic phrases, and generally try and make things difficult for the other person to understand. The result was often that the other person would look puzzled and the conversation would switch back to German. Eventually I learned how to pronounce things in a way that didn't immediately betray me as a foreigner, but this trick helped a good bit in the beginning.
A friend of mine is from Ireland and went to a Scandinavian country. Same story there: people would switch to English as soon as they found out that she's from Ireland. Her trick: "Sorry, I come from the Gaeltacht. My first language is Gaeilge."
I was mistaken for being American a lot. I'm pretty sure it was the default nationality to guess when they couldn't place an accent. Good to hear it wasn't just happening to me though ;)
I have the same thing here in Canada where people switch to French while I want the conversation to stay in English. I just say "Désolé je ne parle pas francais"(sorry I don't speak french) practiced to sound like broken french.
Good work. Just one issue I noticed is that when I searched for "the fridge" in Google only one of your pages turned up and it was a broken link that served a default Apache 404 page (www.frid.ge/php/login.php). There was nothing else in the results that clearly stood out as the right page.
I don't think anyone reasonably expects a library to know the context of the file being opened and its importance in the logic of the rest of the program.