Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog

I seem to have rather a lot of Random/Funny posts these days which are just collections of links. Possibly the separate category will be a good enough way of dividing these, but possibly I should consider Simon’s blogmarks approach.

But for now, have some links!

• Wise man takes neither food nor drink
• Do you know what Yahoo! do with your information?
• Anti-spam legislation appears to be a spammers wet dream
• This might explain why I couldn’t get to my site, even though El and others could yesterday
• Apparently there’s a type of therapy that uses E that proponents are trying to get legalised
• America is not a Christian state
• Caffeine level in the SEA “causes concern” — why people are so happy and awake when they go to the beach!
• An actual, serious investigation into The Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
• Robo-receptionist — do you think it gossips and organises the office lottery pool too?
• And finally … the Catapulting Santa game!! (Note: Flash)

The Vice-Chancellor for my university has been publicly advocating the move to greater tuition fees. Although I do understand that universities in the UK are underfunded at the moment and that this needs to be addressed, I find it completely at odds with the government’s apparent wish to get 50% of people into tertiary education.

I also disagree quite a lot with the sudden changes that are being proposed … in South Africa (where I grew up) parents know from when their kids are born that if they want them to go to university they need to save significant sums of money so that they can fund this. My parents realised early on that I would be bright enough and saved accordingly. Then the universities charged fees but also had a variety of scholarships, to deal with everyone from the very bright, the disadvantaged right the way through to the sports superstars of tomorrow.

What this move will mean is that anyone in the next ten years who wants to get a degree without ending up in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt (currently you leave a four year course in ?12 000 debt … and fees are set to triple!!) will need to be from a rich family. It is also likely to lead to further increases (once ?3.5k fees is the norm) and to price-differentiation between universities, the like of which you see in many other countries.

Although better funding will mean that universities can offer more facilities, employ more/better staff and so on, I imagine it will lead to much greater commercialisation as well. And I think the worst thing that can happen to academia is for it to become something run just like a business. What sort of escape will that be for all the academics?

I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I think I am starting to ramble/rant … maybe a comments war would be more appropriate.

Tuition fees were the top scandal in today’s Queen’s speech but a lot of the other reforms look eminently sensible … especially the civil partnerships which I have commented on before.

As Simon noted the other day learning CSS is still full of pitfalls, particularly if you don’t live, sleep, eat web development. Although my forays into the realm of separated content and presentation were fairly painless, even the limited number of inconsistencies I found (just looking on IE, Firebird and Mozilla) were still a bit of a knock. Luckily, however, Dave Shea with the help of the world is putting together a CSS Crib Sheet.

UPDATE: Great explanation about Margin Collapsing via the Crib Sheet mentioned above.

I also found this fantastic Flash animation about how the design process works. I found it very interesting and quite a good description of some of the things that go on in my mind when I’m trying to do creative work … although I wouldn’t extrapolate that to anyone else’s brain too readily

Despite the recent homophobic rudeness I’m still going to post about whatever I want to. And I’m glad to say that the proposed civil partnership bill in the UK appears likely to be part of the Queen’s Speech … so we might actually be able to get “married” some day soon

Also, from the first of December (so next Monday), workers in the UK will be protected by law from sexual orientation based descrimination in the workplace. It’s nice to know that I can’t be fired for being gay from next week … although to be completely fair, in my current company I cannot imagine this ever arising. They have a very progressive policy, which makes me happy to work for them. Suffice it to say, though, that some other places have been less than pioneering in this regard.

Well, it’s been a while — I’ve accumulated a fair number of links that definitely require blogging:

Been too vocal in the monthly Mob meetings recently? Been caught on camera trying to shoot a president? No fear, because soon you could have a whole new face to protect you. Will this be the end of the open coffins revolution?

Although I can see the point of this for people with serious disfigurement, I think many questions remain unanswered — like, how are the relatives going to react when they see their family member’s face on someone else? Also, if it ends up in the domain of cosmetic surgery (which I can so see happening) then what’s to stop criminals getting completely new faces to protect themselves? If this really happens, then Mary Carey may well be onto a winner in the form of cosmetic surgery tax.

Over in America, in what is possibly the best (and possibly the worst) step towards gay marriage, the state of Massachusetts has ruled that gay couples are legally entitled to marry, saying that barring it was “unconstitutional”. This is fantastic, but the potential conservative backlash, including Bush vowing to constitutionally make marriage defined as heterosexual could be a major step backward. And although I would love to believe that liberal Americans will not let this happen, he still managed to invade Iraq, so my confidence is not rock-solid.

Hello — these are the links I have found for Show & Tell today:

In other news, some guy’s mom found his blog (and yes, I know it’s satire )

So what did you bring to Show & Tell today?

I hate Joel Spolsky. First he talked about the perfect office he implemented for his software consulting company. An office that I want so much but am unlikely to ever be able to create or work in. And now, every time he reviews a book he makes me want that too. And I don’t have the cash for any of this!! *pouts*

All jokes aside, the book Joel is talking about this month looks an absolute jem. A collection of all the proven realities of software engineering .. what goes wrong, over and over again. And in case you’re one of those naive developers who thinks that corporations and development teams alike must have learnt these lessons by now … trust me, they haven’t. Despite Brooks’ best attempts people are still added to late projects (making them later), users are still not involved in development early enough and all other manner of stupid mistakes are still made, all the time.

It’s definitely made my Xmas list … if only I could make all the software developers and managers in the world read it as well!

This week Tom and KC were talking about standards and their usefulness in OK/Cancel. I found the entire discussion quite interesting and the essence — that standards should be useful and that sometimes the proliferation of different standards hinders this — rather important. Also, the comments that went with KC’s article included a discussion about the popularity of standards being just as important … I’m sure that Lotus Notes has some sort of standard for how the user accomplishes various things (I use it at work myself) but it just is so different from the more generic Windows-based standards that it seems contradictory, badly thought-out and almost completely unusable. I find it very amusing that they have not improved since the earlier releases in this regard, despite making it into the Interface Hall of Shame (with its own section!).

That standards should be comprehensible (as well as comprehensive), applicable and more than anything popular seems to be a common theme in the blogosphere at the moment. In A List Apart this week, Joe Clark is arguing along similar lines in an appeal to the web development community to help save the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines due for release in the near future by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

Although I am by no means an accessibility guru, I can see his point about the way that the document is written … if the usefulness of a standard is linked to how popular it is, then surely making the standard as easy to comprehend (and implement) is of great importance? Take for instance, the web standards issue. Whilst people can quite happily argue that web standards are extremely important, if we didn’t have any browsers even attempting to implement them, then wouldn’t the standard be worth very little more than the valid (X)HTML pages it was written on?

If the standards themselves are not easily comprehensible and implementable, then we as developers and designers are much more likely to depend exclusively on either tools (and however they happen to deal with standards-related issues) or just to follow various tutorials etc made available to us. Although sometimes this can be very effective and remarkably useful it is not an ideal situation that we have to wait for an army of interpreters to make standards themselves accessible to those who most need to use them … the people building the pages.

There was a brief issue that the comments forms (and indeed everything) were throwing up strange and nasty looking error messages. Basically my hosting company had done some updates and forgotten to reinstall some of the Perl modules that Movable Type needs to work correctly.

To their absolute credit, NeatHosting were absolutely fantastic and fixed the issue within an hour of my reporting it — as Nat remarked before, they are absolutely fantastic and like her, I would recommend them to anyone.

Anyone who wanted to comment before, please go back and do so Cheers, Neathosting!

More blogging as external memory …

Everyone else has probably already linked to this, but just to give it extra extra coverage: The Grinch Who Stole Linux.

I’ve been reading Rebel Code this past week and would highly recommend it to anyone. Even if you don’t like the idea of Linux, it shows remarkable insight into development models and their vagaries. Also very interesting (and ironic) that because of lawsuits at one point in the development of Linux, they purposefully chose to develop things from scratch.

Towers of Hanoi — no, not another programming exercise, just some guy proving that exchange commission is an evil evil thing.

Steve: Don’t Eat It! is possibly one of the most disturbing tales I’ve ever found. You really do read it wishing that he hadn’t tried the pickled pork rind and other interesting foodstuffs he managed to lay his hands on. Not sure where I picked this up.

Quite likely though, it is from the absolutely hilarious Mimi Smartypants. My favourite excerpt from the particular entry the link is to is:

“We have a new voicemail system at work and now it tells me that I can change my “personal options” by pressing 1. I can go to grad school, become a lesbian, go work at the paper-clip factory, or marry a swarthy Greek guy and settle down in the suburbs. All at the push of a button.”

Also, my friend Andy is holding a “Vote for your favourite cow” poll. To participate, click on this here banner thingey he has kindly supplied:

Martin also brought the following to my attention:
Fedex body parts package and Crocodile Hunter in Hong Kong

That’s about all the randomness I can muster for now … and our connection keeps dropping, which is apparently something to do with BT…

Well, I haven’t blogged since Sunday. This is because travel is a terrible, terrible thing. Now, normally I do my fair share of travelling. I live in Bath at the weekends and work in London, so have a room in a flat there for during the week. I spend 5 hours a week getting between Bath and London and about an hour a day making my way into work on my motorbike.

This week, though, I had to be at our other office, in Newcastle. So I got up at 4.30 on Monday morning, to take a taxi shortly afterwards, to get to Bristol and take the 7.20 flight to Newcastle. I despise short flights. Not that I like longer ones, mind, just that the most uncomfortable parts of a flight for me are those parts where we’re not at steady altitude … so taking off, achieving cruise altitude, descending and then landing. Which when you’re flying to Newcastle is all but the five minutes in the middle where there’s turbulence instead. It was all OK once I got there though.

Unfortunately, when I came back on Tuesday the fog across Britain had caused all the morning planes to be late, so my plane was delayed by two hours, getting me back home to Bath around 10.30pm, rather than the more civilized 8ish that I had planned. In the morning, the prospect of the early 3 hour train ride to the London office proved too much, so I’ve stayed in Bath since, working from home.

All this, along with the BBC whose programming seems to consist entirely of “make money out of property” shows these days, got me to thinking about the whole London thing and how evil it can be. Loads of people want high-paying jobs … which are mainly in London. They also don’t realise that if they get that high-paying job in London and don’t want to spend most of that pay on mortgage or rent, they’re going to need to either a)commute or b)live in a shithole.
(more…)

Well, I haven’t had the most productive of weekends, in blogging terms.

I have however, seen Matrix Revolutions (most enjoyable), helped Elmyra sort out some stuff for the redesign and restructuring of the Bath SciFi Website and read an awful lot of UserFriendly (another web comic. I might be dealing with a nascent addiction here).

We also made chocolate mousse after finding this fantastic recipe. Read it. Use it. Link to it (read the rant at the bottom about Google searches for chocolate mousse recipes, btw). It’s suitable for those on low carb (if you use properly dark chocolate and possibly replace the 4 tsp sugar with Splenda or whatever) and absolutely bloody gorgeous.

In other news, I seem destined to miss Neil Gaiman’s various signings this time round in the UK. I seem to be wandering off to many of the same areas of the country as him this week … but enough out of synch that my chances of attending a signing are slim –> none.

We will attempt to return to our regular schedule of tech talk that no one replies to sometime soon, but I am in Newcastle for the front part of the week on business, so possibly the chances aren’t too good. For the time being, have a look at Simon’s latest offering about “Full Page Zoom” which I found most interesting … and very possibly something I should implement for this site, because surely anyone with high res finds this site pretty hard to read…. *ponders*

PS This is one of the coolest things I found today (via BoingBoing and this was the best approximation we could get of me. Whaddaya think?

We went to see the latest Matrix movie today. Don’t worry, no spoilers — all I’ll say is that it wasn’t as good as it might have been, but it’s still very entertaining and well worth watching. Be warned that some scenes could be quite difficult for anyone with epileptic tendencies … and the cinema we went to definitely didn’t have good enough warning about this! The best part of the movie was actually extraneous to it — this article about Bill Gates and other tech billionaires buying up Warner Bros and everything surrounding the Matrix genre to redo the third film, to do it justice. It’s quality, go read it now.

Also, I lost quite a lot of productivity in the last couple of days to El Goonish Shive (which is why I haven’t posted in a day or so) … it’s very good and worth reading, but remember to put your life on hold!!

This Guide to Interpreting Friendster Photos also made me laugh quite a lot (courtesy of BoingBoing)

And I think this is more from the people who did that Jump London thing a while back. I haven’t downloaded all the movies yet, but if it is it’s definitely worth a look. Warning: Might make you feel bad if you’re living a “sedate” lifestyle

Now, last time I was presented with one of those “prove to me you’re a human, read this squiggly word in a graphic” tests when signing up for something, I have to admit I thought they were quite neat. It wasn’t until I was trying to explain to someone at work that tables were terrible for accessibility (if used as structural design elements, rather than for tabular data) because of the way screen readers tended to see them, that I realised how flawed this human verification method is for the blind. I was interested to notice that the W3C has also criticized the approach and quite pleased that this sort of news was even appearing … there seems to be all too little coverage in mainstream news, tech or no.

This week’s OK/Cancel also focuses on accessibility … whilst the comic focuses on possibly taking things a bit too far, the main article is a treasure trove of resources to investigate in order to make things more accessible. As Simon has long commented, accessibility isn’t that much more work, once you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately this site is probably a terrible example, as Movable Type really doesn’t produce the best markup in the world. And although I’m aware of some of the fundamental things that need to be sorted for various needs (e.g. resizable text, alt tags on images, not using tables for structure, etc, etc) I think I need to dedicate some more time to sorting things out. Possibly even take the plunge and follow Mark Pilgrim’s entire 30 Days to a More Accessible Blog series. But I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you … things are a bit manic at the moment.

Incidentally, there’s some great info on A Whole Lotta Nothing as well as Simon Willison’s Weblog about how to run multiple versions of IE on one Windows installation. I wonder if anyone’s put together a guide to getting all the browsers with any sort of market share set up on one computer (any platform) yet?

As Dan quite rightly commented, another problem with decommissioning is that the system is very seldom the original system that was built. It has been modified, expanded and abused into fitting tasks it was never designed for. So welcome to “Can of Worms” Pt II … how do we work, knowing that systems will be modifed etc and still achieve elegant decommissioning?

Well, the first problem revolves around the way that we expand systems. I think that it is fair to say that systems are seldom refactored as they aught to be. We expend an awful lot of resource in terms of time, people, effort and knowledge in understanding, specifying and building a system …. and then we don’t bother to maintain what doesn’t break. Is this sensible? No. Is it understandable? Yes. By the end of it all does anyone actually know how the whole thing works? Absolutely no way.

So we need a better approach to maintenance of systems, in terms of the system itself and — the second problem — the documentation that covers it. In the corporate realm this is seldom well done and I have to admit that I have not participated in enough open source development to know if things are different though. I know that Simon has long heralded wikis and the like as possible solutions to this sort of problem. Here I would agree — a wiki to which all members of a project could contribute would be the perfect way to keep the documentation for the system alive and useful … much more so than the zipped Word or PDF files that are their usual presentation method. Ask yourself: if you changed a system, would you bother to find the latest version of the (large, complex) Word doc and update it? I know I wouldn’t and I really believe in documentation like this.

If documentation were more accessible and more useful AND included details of decommissioning plans then those modify, maintaining and looking to abuse the system would all be better dealt with. Modifications would be documented and hopefully their decommissioning considered (possibly even planned?) as well. Maintenance could become less haphazard and hopefully follow more of a refactoring approach than what one of my colleague’s refers to as the “string and cellotape” approach. And possibly, those preparing to use the system for something it isn’t designed to do will realise this and consider other alternatives. Or a bit of redesign to reimplement the system, adding the new features, possibly even changing the purpose without resulting in a horrendous mish-mash of mysterious amendments and decisions.

Could this sort of thing catch on? Would it solve some of the problems? Or would the human desire to create rather than modify, to tear things down and start again rather than build on, overcome the need to keep existing systems going onwards and upwards?

I’m not exactly sure how I got to this today, but Rob’s site is really really amusing. I particularly enjoyed the (very detailed) descriptions of Halloween costumes and other incredible things he has made. My favourite, though, was definitely the Paparazzi costume!

My dad also texted me with details of this fantastic image of an iceberg breaking in two. It’s remarkably pretty, as well as fascinating. I must admit I don’t know enough Geography etc to know if this is a Bad Thing (TM) to be happening or not.

Also Neil Gaiman will be a guest at Penguicon which appears to be a cross between a LUG and a Scifi con. Pity it’s unlikely I’ll be able to go, but hey!

Also, yesterday I managed to get 62% on the Geek Test which makes me an Extreme Geek in the Top 10. I am somewhat perturbed by this … as many of my far geekier friends have scored much lower. Does it make me more of a geek to complain about the inaccuracy of the geek test?

And a more detailed look at the claims that cats make you mad via a parasite easily contracted by humans … as well as rats. Glad we keep good company

Oh and ooh ooh ooh someone please tell me if this is for real and this too [Warning: movie]. I really don’t know if they’re serious or not!!

The flip side of my comments from yesterday are definitely the other things that just haven’t changed and really should have done. Spookily I was thinking about this on the way into work this morning (just don’t get me started on how annoying actual cheques are and how internet banking really doesn’t go far enough, OK?) and then during the day Matt Haughey posted this rant about receipts still being paper and how he has to keep the paper copy of the extended warranty for 5 years, else it’s invalid. He has a number of very valid points … so much data is stored in various systems these days. We should really be able to deal with these issues without resorting to using little bits of paper to prove things happened. The problem, though, is one to which so many modern businesses will attest: much as we are great at getting things into systems, we are also very very bad on planning to get things out of them again.

I remember in my first year at uni, we had a lecture on the importance, in Software Engineering, of planning for the decommissioning of a system at the same time that you were designing it. I remember thinking at the time that this seemed a bit premature: Why would you worry about getting stuff out of a system when you were just building it? Surely you’d want to build the best possible system and then people would use it forever?

I think this sort of optimism is why so many people struggle on with bad (or just plain inappropriate) systems and companies pay consultant firms silly money for “integration of existing systems”. We simply don’t plan to stop using things. And yet, we do stop using things … they become outdated, the task they were designed for changes, the job becomes less of a priority. So eventually it will be replaced by something bigger, possibly better, definitely different. And the chances are that new system will not want to just chuck everything in the old system away … the data will very likely be needed and possibly a lot of the functionality.

Commenting code, designing for reuse, object-orientation … these are all steps along the way, but none of them do what we really need to do : design for taking the system apart when it is no longer useful … and not losing everything. Keeping the original developers around forever is not feasible, nor is being trapped into whatever technology you used before “just because”. So what’s the solution? How do we best start designing for decommissioning? After all, aren’t we the best people for it? We know exactly how the system we just built works!

Although this is mainly continuing along the RSI & Ergonomics discussion, Elly’s comments on the effect of playing too many games, or texting too much also touch on a wider issue. How much the communications revolution has changed everyday life. For years people have been telling us that technology will change everything, that the world will never be the same again. They’ve been talked about it like it would be this huge big bang that would suddenly transform everything around us. They were wrong .. it creeps up slowly and quietly.

I was reading Burman’s Shift! the other day and although I found it quite academic (read: boring) it did have an interesting core … the internet is a communications revolution that will change the whole paradigm of a range of sciences, from psychology to communications, in the style of the Copernican revolution. He follows the Kuhnian philosophy that paradigm shift is achieved by a creeping number of discrepancies forcing us to re-evaluate the way things are.

I wouldn’t have put it quite as drily (or taken as long to say it ::rolleyes::) but I agree. The changes, the discrepancies that will really change things have crept upon us. In the space of my lifetime things have changed a great deal. I have seen profound, abrupt, “big bang” change — the regime change in South Africa in 1994 — but this is much more subtle. Fundamental things have changed. Kids don’t play outside anymore. Your most important working implements are not your muscles, but your fingertips & your mind. You are probably just as likely to end up disabled, but not due to an accident at work … but due to work itself. Being able to type really is more important than being able to write (oh and how I wish the uni would realise that and let me type exams!!).

The list goes on and on and gets rather boring. But what really drove it home for me to day was that I found this article through the monthly newsletter I get from our home broadband supplier, Zen, and it didn’t surprise me. “That’s clever”, I thought, “turn pubs into internet cafes and just cover the keyboards in beerproof coating. Natural thing to do, pubs are the centre of rural communities anyway, right?” Then I remembered that the McDonalds in central Bath has done the same thing. And that those Centrino ads are really getting everywhere and soon the latest bad restaurant etiquette will not be talking loudly on your mobile phone, but hacking into the person checking their email at the next’s tables handheld device, tablet or maybe even laptop and playing porn loudly on it.

The dot coms may have gone bust, but the revolution has still happened … look around, it’s everywhere. My mom can use email. My grandparents have a cellphone and a phone capable of sending email. My dad keeps track of where his car is by marking it on his GPS when he parks. It’s happening all the time, all around … and I didn’t notice. Did you?

Follow Up: I found two interesting things today … one symptomatic of how things have changed :
We all need Knee Defenders these days, because we allow ourselves to be cramped like cattle on flights that take us thousands of miles in mere hours.

The other made me absolutely shudder as a biker, but seemed a wonderfully ingenious use of modern technology to the side of me that wasn’t screaming “No!! Not more chance of a slower more painful M4! And more points!!” — a completely refuted but still fascinating new speed camera scheme (Note: This is apparently a hoax. It’s still a cool (and at the same time horrifying) idea).

Found some great comedy (and apparently serious but still amusing or random) sites over the weekend:

• Album covers redone in Lego courtesy of BoingBoing
• Ridiculous MP anti-spam proposal that The Register have drenched in scorn
• Wiggling stereo images … interesting technique, amusing results!
• Serial Killer or Programming Language Inventor Quiz :: I got 6 out of 10!

Also found some more bits & pieces whilst doing some of the other bits of this site that I hadn’t gotten around to :

• Blogger Code
• And of course, good old Geek Code