Which is kind of, wow. Huge changes in both of those periods, but it feels to me that the years from 1945 - 1978 were more significant. Perhaps that's because I wasn't around to experience the changes first-hand; things I have seen and events I have watched myself seem more ordinary than events I've only read about in historical records.

But I suppose that when Alex and Fiona are my age, and compare the period 1978 - 2012 to the decades they will have lived through, they will think that those years were more significant: the fall of the Soviet Union, the unification of Europe, the dawn of the internet and instant, universal access to information.

Interesting times. I wonder what comes next?

Further reading:

• Charlie Stross - World building 301: some projections
• Charlie Stross - World building 302: psychology, beliefs, and other times
• Charlie Stross - World building 404: The unknown unknowns

Google recommends using HTTP 503 "Service Unavailable" status codes. The 503 code indicates that the service (or page, or site) is temporarily unavailable, but that it is expected back again soon. This is better than using the 404 (not found), 302 ( moved temporarily), or 301 (moved permanently) codes, because it tells web crawlers that they should just come back and try again later.

If your site is running on Apache, and is allowed to use mod_rewrite, you can set up a site-wide 503 page with the following steps:

1. Create an HTML page called 503.html, and upload it in the root of your site. This is just a normal HTML page - no special code needed. Here's an example: 503_sopa.html
2. If you don't already have an .htaccess file for your site, create one (it also goes in the root of your site). If you do already have one, add the following code to the top of the file, but read the notes before you do so:

# =====================
# SOPA Blackout 
# =====================

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# Set a custom error document for 503 errors
ErrorDocument 503 /503_sopa.html

# Cause all requests (except images) to generate a 503 error,
# which will produce the custom 503 error document
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^111\.111\.111\.111$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !robots\.txt$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [L,R=503]
</IfModule>

Important notes on this snippet:

• The "REMOTE_HOST" line contains an IP address that will be excluded from the blackout rules. Change the IP address listed (111.111.111.111) to your own. This will allow you to keep using your site (and its back-end features, like Movable Type or Wordpress), but everyone else will just see the 503 page. If you want to preserve access to your site from multiple IP addresses, you can add multiple REMOTE_HOST lines.
• The first "REQUEST_URI" line contains exceptions for image files. If you want to serve up an image as part of your 503 file, you need this line, otherwise images will return 503 errors as well. If you don't need an image, or if you are using images hosted elsewhere, you can remove this line.
• The second "REQUEST_URI" line ensures that the file robots.txt on your site will be served up normally, without a 503 error.

When you want to restore access to your site, simply remove the code from your .htaccess file, and you'll be back to normal again.

Update: Matthew Batchelder has a nifty update that uses mod_rewrite date conditions to automatically switch on the 503 redirect rule on 18th January 2011: Preparing a Site for SOPA Blackout with .htaccess

My iTunes library is organized accordingly. When I download a new album, I create a new playlist for it, using the year in which I bought it, the band name, and album title (e.g. "2011 AberfeldySomewhere To Jump From"). I add metadata to the comments to keep track of where I got it from, and the exact date on which I added it (e.g. "sunpig:acquired=20110206;sunpig:source=emusic.com"). Finally, I use iTunes' star ratings to rate individual tracks. Slightly obsessive, but I like the way it gives me a view of what I was listening to in a given year. (iTunes doesn't track listens by date--I wish it did--but I'm guessing that at least 80% of my listens happen in a 6-month period after initial acquisition.)

According to my library, I bought 76 albums in 2011. (For comparison: 2005 = 87, 2006 = 71, 2007 = 81, 2008 = 73, 2009 = 59, 2010 = 57.) Of those 76, there were 20 that I had played all the way through at last 10 times at the end of the year. (Technically: I have listened to each individual track on the album at least 10 times, but that's a good enough metric for me.) Here's the list, sorted alphabetically by artist.

• Aberfeldy - Somewhere To Jump From

  Another delightful album from Aberfeldy. Light melodic pop drifting from humorous to melancholy with practiced ease. I've never come across an album with closing credits before. They're quirky and uniquely fitting. Don't you go changing.

• Battles - Gloss Drop

  More accessible, and more consistent than their first album Mirrored. A fantastic mix of experimental rhythms and furious driving beats. Video: "My Machines" feat. Gary Numan.

• Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

  I was disappointed at first that there wasn't anything on the album quite as catchy as the lead single "Make Some Noise," but it definitely grew on me. Fun and funky.

• Bibio - Mind Bokeh

  One of my favourite tracks of the whole year is "Anything New", which is distilled summer in a crystal goblet. A couple of other up-tempo moments punctuate a chilled-out ambient soundscape.

• Big Moves - In the Beginning

  My favourite band discovery of the year. Big Moves are an indie band from Los Angeles. This album has a playful yet very precise sound that reminds me a lot of the Long Blondes - especially singer Jess Imme's vocals on "Brontosaurus" - but with a generous helping of jazzy meanderings ("Blue Rose"). Video: "Stegosaurus".

• Big Moves - Lanterns EP

  One bored afternoon in October I was browsing Last.fm for some new music recommendations. Big Moves came up, I followed the link to Youtube, and watched the video for "Groundbreaking Studies". Then I watched it again. And again. And again. How can a song this good still only have less than 2000 views on it? The song is lush, energetic, and exuberant. The band takes the jazzy indie rock style they displayed on In The Beginning and turns it up to 11. It's awesome. The rest of the EP is fantastic as well.

• Cee Lo Green - The Lady Killer

  Of all the albums in this list, this is the only one I don't listen to any more. I loved it at the start of the year, but now it bores me.

• Dananananaykroyd - There Is A Way

  Just amazing, as I have mentioned before. Video: "Muscle Memory"

• Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

  Great solid rock. The Foo Fighters on top form. The video for "Walk" is a neat spoof of Falling Down.

• Friendly Fires - Pala

  I loved Friendly Fires' first album, and Pala is a great follow-up. Steamy and smooth tropical dance sounds. After seeing their performance at T In The Park on the BBC, I was really looking forward to catching them live at Melkweg in December, but they had to cancel. Sad Panda. Weird video: "Hurting"

• Frightened Rabbit - The Winter Of Mixed Drinks

  I somehow missed out on Frightened Rabbit's second album The Midnight Organ Fight, so my baseline was their debut, Sings The Greys, which is a fairly subdued, moody affair. They have taken that moody, slightly folky feel, and turned up the power. This album is exultantly alive with anthems like "The Loneliness And The Scream" and "Living In Colour". These guys are now on my "must-see-live" list.

• Grand State Valley University New Music Ensemble - Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians

  I went through a bit of a Steve Reich phase in the spring, after noticing the World Minimal Music Festival just after it was over. Must not make that mistake again next year. The GSVU version of Music for 18 Musicians is crisp and clear and glorious. Trailer video.

• Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

  Vast, sprawling, lush. Classic Mogwai.

• Sky Larkin - Kaleide

  Last.fm recommended Sky Larkin to me based on similarity to Dananananaykroyd. I didn't see at at first, because their vocal styles are so radically different, but the rest of their music shares a lot of common themes: heavy rock-infused pop, with unorthodox song structures. Kaleide is a rich and complex album, and my favourite tracks have shifted around a lot since I started listening to it. For now, I've settled on liking "ATM" most of all.

• The Decemberists - The King Is Dead

  Unlike the myth-tinged unity of their previous album The Hazards of Love, The King is Dead is "just" a collection of songs. A great collection of beautiful songs, from the peppy REM-ish "Calamity Song" to the sparse, haunting simplicity of "June Hymn." I caught them live in Paradiso in March, and they were fantastic. Take any opportunity you get to see them.

• The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar

  I wasn't sure if this album should count for 2011, because it includes most of the same songs as their EP A Balloon Called Moaning, which I listened to a lot in 2010. But it's too good to leave out. Muscular yet dreamy rock, somewhat reminiscent of Ladytron, but all guitars and no synths. Surprise moment: when I came across their anthem "Cradle" backing a trailer for the new Ratchet & Clank game.

• Tom Waits - Bad As Me

  Brilliant, as always. Video: "Satisfied".

• Underworld - Barking

  Attaching the word "mature" to techno feels wrong, but that's what Barking is: practiced, polished, and highly accomplished. Underworld are mainstream now. I still love the album, but it occasionally makes me feel old. Video: "Bird 1".

• United Fruit - Fault Lines

  I grabbed this because United Fruit were playing support for Dananananaykroyd on their Glasgow gig in October, and it turns out to be an effective hard rock album. They're good live, too.

• Zoey van Goey - The Cage Was Unlocked All Along

  Interesting that this list starts with Aberfeldy, and ends with Zoey van Goey, because their musical styles are quite similar. Sweet, airy, and melodic pop with excursions into the hauntingly melancholic. Video: "We Don't Have That Kind Of Bread".

Notable omission: Aidan Moffat + The Best Ofs - How To Get To Heaven From Scotland. I love this album, and it would have had a higher play count if I'd bought it earlier in the year.

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.

...

12. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
13. It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.

Stage 14 is not a rejection, but rather "Buy this book" — the point at which the publishing house decides to put the book into production.

The reason this list is on my mind is because I have recently read two self-published ebooks that are probably 13s, specifically Twenty Palaces by Harry Connolly, and A Real Piece of Work by Chris Orcutt.

The interesting thing about stage 13 books is that they are good enough be published, and importantly: good enough that a certain number of readers would enjoy them, and pay cash money for the privilege. If an author knows that their book is at stage 13, it may make sense for them to self-publish and try to reach that audience directly. Here are some reasons that can stop a book from being published, but that would not stop me from buying it:

• Books in a series I enjoy that has not sold as well as the publisher hoped it would. (E.g. Twenty Palaces)
• Books of a genre and type that home in on my taste like a guided missile, but where the author hasn't yet convinced a publisher to take the financial risk of launching the series. (E.g. A Real Piece of Work)
• Books that have been published before, but are now out of print, and whose rights have reverted to the author. (What was popular in the 1970s might not be mass-marketable any more.)

As a reader, I like the idea of these stage 13 books being available for purchase, in the same way that I like artists releasing music directly on soundcloud or bandcamp instead of (or as well as) through a major label album publishing deal. (My favourite examples right now: Slimes and Big Moves.) Just looking at it on a purely numerical basis, the fact that authors are willing to put stage 13 books on the market directly means that there are more books available that I might really like.

For the record, I don't think that all authors should publish this way, and I don't think that in the future all authors will self-publish. Authors write. They don't necessarily do editing, artwork, typesetting (yes, ebooks do improve with proper typography), marketing, sales support, or any of the other numerous things that come into play when you start to sell books in volume. Right now, publishers act as a one-stop shop for all these services, and I'm sure they will continue to do so. I don't know exactly what the future of publishing holds, but I imagine that the shift towards ebooks will create scope for new ventures: smaller-scale niche publishing houses, writer's collectives, and blue-sky innovative startups.

Of course, if authors can put stage 13 books on the market, then what's to stop them from sticking any old slush into an ePub and calling it silver? How do I know if a self-published ebook is a 13 that a publisher regretfully declined, or if it's the laughing-stock of every editor in the business? Amazon doesn't require you to have purchased an item before you can review it; most people can convince friends and family to drop a couple of 5-star reviews on them. But market distortion like that is hard to keep up in the long run. I think that in the end a little bit of general-purpose bullshit detection will help me steer clear of the worst dross, just as reviews, blogs, and word-of-mouth will steer me towards the best stuff. Which sounds pretty much like how I find most of my books already.

So although self-publishing holds benefits for me as a reader, whether it's a good thing for authors is an entirely different matter. Self-publishing is going to enable a much deeper long tail of books in print than we have right now. This does not mean that we will all read more lesser-known works, and fewer bestsellers. The "recommendation problem," described in great depth by Paul Lamere in his article "Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo" applies to books as well as music. I reckon that self-publishing will bring fame and fortune to a lucky few, but only the satisfaction of craftsmanship itself to the vast majority. As with any lottery, one should beware of selection and confirmation bias.

So if writing is a hobby for an author, and a previously rejected novel can be enjoyed by a couple of hundred readers around the world, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Does it sap the author's ambition to strive for something greater, or does it bring them hard-earned satisfaction? Does it diminish the popularity of a well-loved full-time writer who sells books by the tens of thousands? Does wider availability of "good" reduce the reading public's appetite for "great"?

Personally, I don't come to the end of a good book and think, "There! My work here is done." The end of a good book leaves me hungry for more. That's really what makes me happy: more of what I like. I'm inclined to think that self-published ebooks work in my favour here.

The only problem with DIN is the default at sign (@), which looks like ass.

Fortunately, DIN comes with a set of alternate glyphs built in, which you can access through OpenType's stylistic alternates feature. One of those alternate glyphs is a version of the at sign that actually looks like an at sign rather than a half-melted "id" ligature.

You can usually select OpenType stylistic alternates from the advanced font options dialog of your graphics or word processing program. In Pixelmator for OS X, for example, you open up the fonts dialog, click on the tools button, select the "Typography" option, and then choose an alternative stylistic set in the Typography dialog. In Word 2011, you open up the fonts dialog by selecting "Font..." from Format menu; stylistic sets are shown in the "Advanced typography" section of the Advanced tab.

Unfortunately, although CSS3 includes a font-variant-alternates property with which you can select alternate glyphs, there aren't any browsers that support this yet. Bummer. So if you want to use DIN on the web, you're either stuck with the ass-at, or you have to use a workaround.

One way is to wrap at signs in a <span>, so you can set their style explicitly, as suggested by Dan Cedarholm in his article Use the Best Available Ampersand.

monkey<span class="awesomat">@</span>example.com

But Drew McLellan's article Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range in this year's 24 Ways advent calendar suggests an intriguing potential alternative. The concept is that the @font-face rule allows you to select which unicode characters the webfont will be used for by setting the unicode-range property. Single out the ampersand (U+0026) or the at sign (U+0040) for special treatment, and Bob's your uncle.

The difference is that for awesompersands you are trying to add a font for a single character, whereas for DIN awesomats, I want to remove font styling for a single character. The unicode-range property obliges nicely here, because it accepts multiple ranges:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'dinregular';
  url('font/DINWeb.woff') format('woff');
  unicode-range:U+0-3F,U+41-10FFFF; /* Everything but the @ */
}

Browsers that don't handle unicode-range will ignore it, and fall back to showing DIN for all characters, even the @. Which is fine.

In terms of typography, however, the drawback of this technique is that the plain font to be used for the U+40 unicode character may have a different x-height than the DIN of the surrounding text, so the at sign may look out of place — too large or too small. And the @font-face rule doesn't allow a font-size property inside it, so you can't tweak the font sizes to match each other. Hmm.

On balance, I think I'll stick to wrapping my DIN at signs in a <span> until font-variant-alternates appears, but it's a nifty technique to be aware of.

I used to like the occasional piece of horror and slipstream, but until this summer I had no great desire to read urban fantasy. My probably unfair impression of the field was: vampires, werewolves, and woo. Real life is so full of superstition and pseudo-scientific claptrap that my appetite for the paranormal in fiction is diminished by association.

The notable exceptions to my genre-bound reading habits tend to come about as a result of a personal recommendation, or a favourite author trying something different. For example, I'll read anything Lois McMaster Bujold writes: her Chalion and Sharing Knife series are fantasy, and I love them. My friend Julian suggested Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift series to me, and I enjoyed the heck out of A Madness of Angels. And I simply adore Charlie Stross's Laundry series, which are a kind of Lovecraftian tongue-in-cheek (sometimes) spy thriller crossover. Ish.

It was on Charlie's blog that I first came across Harry Connolly. Harry was writing some guest posts while Charlie was away earlier this year, and I particularly liked his thoughts on "High and Low Thrillers"

Me, I write low thrillers. The setting is generally commonplace and localized, most of the characters are regular folks, and the plot is played out through the exercise of personal agency rather than cultural or organizational power. In fact, one of the most persistent criticisms of my books has been that they don't have a high thriller insider's view of the Twenty Palace Society.

Charlie's recommendation that "if you like my Laundry stories there is a good chance you'll find Harry's Twenty Palaces yarns agreeable" was good enough for me, and Harry's first book, Child of Fire found its way into my shopping basket in time for the summer holidays.

Although my reaction upon finishing the book was, "Great! Want more!" my first impressions were mixed, because I came to the book with skewed expectations. Thinking that it was going to be like the Laundry books, I was expecting more humour. Thinking of other hard-boiled low thrillers I like, I was expecting Ray Lilly, the protagonist, to be more confident and self-assured. Both expectations were wrong.

Ray Lilly is tough, but he's not cocky. He's one step above hired muscle, but he's not a thug. At the start of the book, it is very clear that he is not top dog in the situation. He is out of his depth. His boss Annalise Powliss can kick his ass, and he knows it. He doesn't have the endearing haplessness of Bob Howard in the Laundry. He's not a private eye who cracks wise to cover up a sensitive nature or a tortured soul. Ray has seen and done things that scare the shit out of him. He doesn't want to help save the world; he just doesn't know what else he can do any more.

It takes a while for these expectations to settle in, and judging from Harry's comments, maybe they don't for everyone:

"The folks who believed that nothing happened in the first third of Child of Fire confused me at first, until I realized that, until Ray and Annalise identify the villain they’ll be chasing, the plot question for the book was “What the hell is going on?” For some reason, a sizeable segment of the readership doesn’t recognize that as legitimate narrative. That’s surprising and interesting to me."

Ray is low on the totem pole of an organization called the "Twenty Palaces Society". The Society exists to limit who has access to magic, because magic is really dangerous. People who wield it sometimes mistakenly think that they can control the creatures they summon from the Empty Spaces. The Society calls those creatures predators, because they want little more than to cross over into our world and enslave, eat, or simply kill all life on the planet.

Annalise Powliss is a peer in the Society, and her job is to go around and stomp on magic — hard. She doesn't use a cute Men In Black neuralizer device to erase people's memories; she just kills them and takes their spell books. Ray is her Wooden Man, a role he first thinks of as subordinate, but which he later comes to understand is much closer to decoy, or simply bait.

As I mentioned earlier: there is no wise-cracking here, no jocular camaraderie. The job they do and the things they see take a terrible toll on them. This is a dark book, not a buddy movie. But despite the Lovecraftian terrors, disturbing twists, and grisly scenes, I would call it a grim thriller rather than a horror novel. This is perhaps what sets it apart from Charlie Stross's Laundry books: their sometimes cheerful British attitude towards the end of the world belies a peculiar flavour of despair that does flag them as horror.

At the end of Child of Fire, I was completely drawn in to the world, and wanted to read more. Fortunately the second book in the series, Game of Cages was already in print, and the third, Circle of Enemies was due out at the end of August, so I didn't have long to wait for my next fix.

Both books are cracking good reads, as much in terms of the self-contained stories they tell as in what they reveal about Ray and Annalise, and the dangerous world they inhabit. The ghost knife that Ray wields turns out to be much more intriguing than just a tool and a weapon. Ray himself turns out to be much more capable than the typical Wooden Man. And the secretive Twenty Palaces Society itself turns out to be more fallible and less powerful than the world perhaps needs it to be. As tantalizing hooks for future plots go, it would be hard to beat the discovery Ray makes at the end of Circle of Enemies. I love finding new series, and this was a winner.

Or so I thought, until I saw a tweet that led me back to Harry Connolly's blog, where he had posted an entry titled "It’s Official: The Twenty Palaces Series Has Been Cancelled (long)" on 14th October. Damn it.

There are no guarantees in writing. You work like crazy on a story that means a lot to you, and when you send it out into the world where it’s met with scorn, or indifference, or casual contempt. There are no guarantees that X will be a great story or that Y number of readers will fall all over it and spread the word. I know as well as anyone that no one owes me anything.

First Dananananaykroyd breaking up, then the Twenty Palaces series being cancelled. Noooooooo!

As Harry describes it, he got excellent support from his publisher, but the market just didn't respond. The books got good reviews, and have gathered a loyal set of followers, but in the end not enough people bought them. I feel a kind of selfish disappointment that there won't be any more books in the series, but just as George R.R. Martin is not my bitch, neither is Harry Connolly. All I can say is that he has gained an admirer in me, and I'll be looking forward to anything he writes in the future.

The bright point at the end of this tale is that I do still have one more Ray Lilly story to savour. Just yesterday, Harry self-published Twenty Palaces, a prequel story to the whole series, in which Ray meets Annalise, creates his ghost knife, and sees a predator for the first time:

When Ray Lilly was 13 years old, a handgun accident landed his best friend, Jon Burrows, in a wheelchair and turned Ray into a runaway and petty criminal. Fifteen years later, Ray returns home after a stint in prison; he’s determined to go straight, but he knows he can’t do that without making peace with his old friend.

What Ray doesn’t expect is to discover that Jon has just received a mysterious cure–not only is he out of his wheelchair, he seems stronger and faster than… well, pretty much anyone. Worse, his cure has drawn all sorts of unwanted attention: the media are camped out on his block, the police are investigating him for insurance fraud, and weird shadowy figures have begun to draw closer, figures who clearly do not mean to do Jon any good.

Can Ray atone for the biggest mistake of his life by protecting his oldest and best friend? What’s more, should he?

I bought it ($4.99) as soon as I saw the blog post. What I didn't realize until I got the PDF is that this "story" runs to a novel-length 268 pages. I'd been expecting something much shorter. As a fan of a cancelled series, that's not just good value; it's priceless.

First-time visitors to the mobile website should see a splash screen inviting them to download our App. They should also have an option that allows them to proceed to the mobile website.

This is symptomatic of another bad, but regrettably common practice: building your native app before you build your mobile website.

The impulse to put a splash screen in place is driven by a variety of factors and assumptions, not all of them correct (and not all of them openly acknowledged):

• The native app has a prettier UI than the website. Users like pretty. Therefore it will drive more engagement, and more conversions.
• The native app goes on a user's home screen, therefore they will see it regularly, and use it more often than the web.
• A user might prefer a native app, and they might not know that we have one.
• If we get lots of downloads, we will rank highly in the App Store, which is good for marketing and will lead to even more downloads.
• We just spent a lot of money building a native app! If someone just uses the website instead, then all that money and effort was wasted!

Here are the counter-arguments:

• It's a barrier to user engagement. A user has to click through the splash screen to get to where they were trying to go in the first place. If you know about purchase or marketing funnels, you know that every screen is another step in the funnel. You never gain users as you step through the funnel, you only ever lose them. The splash screen is a valuable opportunity for you to lose customers.
• The idea that someone who goes to the effort of downloading your app will become a more engaged user is questionable. You should also consider the possibility that they will get distracted or just give up during the process of a) being redirected to the App Store, b) reading the app description, c) acquiring the app, d) downloading & installing the app, e) launching the app, f) figuring out how to navigate your app to get to the point you led them away from in the first place.
• The request is usually to provide a splash screen for first-time users. If there is any category of users who should never be presented with an extra hurdle it's first-time users. If they are visiting your site for the first time, then they almost by definition don't know enough about your product or service to decide whether they want to carry on using it, or download an app for it. In the desktop web world, you may have come across sites that show a popup asking you to take part in a survey about the site. How do I know if I want to do that before I have experienced the site itself?
• It's disrespectful. If a user has arrived at your website using a web browser, very likely by following a link from another website, then maybe they were trying to use their web browser to use your website. Extend your users the courtesy of considering that they might actually know what they're doing. Putting up a splash screen is like McDonalds putting a bouncer on the door, and telling customers who just parked their car and want to enter the restaurant that they should use the drive-through instead.

Basically, a mobile splash screen, no matter how pretty your designer has made it, is annoying and needy. You are placing your own desires above your user's. Don't do it.

"But how will people find out about our wonderful native app then?!" I hear you cry. There may indeed be cases where users can do things in your native app that they can't do on your website. (Push notifications, for example.) Some people prefer to use apps than websites. For frequent-use, highly-interactive services, a native app may be a faster, lower-friction option than a website. Fortunately there are plenty of less intrusive ways to let your web customers know about it:

• Show a notification bar at the top of the page. You can leave it visible until a user dismisses it, or until they have viewed N pages, or some other criterion. But it shouldn't obscure the page, or require explicit action before the user can carry on interacting with the page.
• The page footer, traditionally a place people look for additional information, can carry a link to the native app.
• If your site involves some kind of sign up process, you can tell people about your app options at the end of the sign-up process, or in a welcome email. Signed-up users have indicated a clear level of engagement with your product or service; this is a good time to entice them further. Read Jared Spool's 2002 article about "Seducible Moments."
• If your site carries advertising, consider injecting ads for your own native app into your ad stream.

But above all, don't rely on a native app to be the only way a user with a small-screen device can interact with your business. You'll literally be turning away customers.

I remember being unsure about There Is A Way when I first listened to it, even though that seems inconceivable now: it is nothing short of brilliant. Like Hey Everyone, the first thing that strikes you are the screamed vocals. Underlying the back-and-forth yelling, though, are a set of songs that are intricately melodic and cleverly structured. The energy the band brings is more under control, with fewer tracks like "Infinity Milk" and "Some Dresses" that bounce off off the furniture in all directions like a hyperactive toddler. But when they do let themselves go, they positively soar. The climactic "Make A Fist" that closes the album is exhausting and ecstatic: an orgasm of a track.

But seeing them live was something else entirely. On 19th July, they played the small upstairs room at Paradiso in Amsterdam, and I have never seen anything like it. It was far from a capacity crowd, and I was right up at the front. They opened with "Reboot" from the new album, which has an instrumental intro lasting about a minute and a half. During the intro, the two singers John and Callum jumped down off the stage and mingled through the bemused audience giving hugs, and treating us all like best friends they hadn't seen for years. And when they were done, they hauled themselves back up onto stage and belted out one of the best live sets I have ever seen.

Dananananaykroyd have two settings: off, and FUCK YEAH! The energy they put out was amazing. There is no barrier between the audience and the stage at Paradiso, and throughout the set they continued to jump in and out of the crowd for particularly animated screaming duels ("The Greater The Symbol And The Hash") and guitar solos, or because they just felt like it. They looked like they were having a great time, and even though the audience was pretty small and relatively timid, they just kept on firing at top volume and top speed. And then there was the Wall Of Cuddles...

The Wall Of Cuddles is what Dananananayroyd does instead of a metal Wall of Death. About half-way through "Some Dresses" they split up the crowd into two halves, and explain how on the count of four both sides should run headlong into each other and...cuddle as many strangers as they can. Because this happens at the end of the gig, everyone is all nice and sweaty and happy and ready go go along with whatever weird instructions they get. I still saw some tentative looks and "er, really?" expressions, but I certainly rushed into it with abandon.

After it was over, I emerged into the Amsterdam evening, my ears ringing, a huge grin on my face, aware that I had just experienced something really special.

I wanted more.

I knew they were playing some more dates in the UK at the end of their tour, and I had been wondering if I could justify a trip across to see them. My rule of live music is, "Never miss an opportunity to see your favourite band, because you never know when they will split up, or die." Cases in point:

• Back in 2003 my brother Scott and I took a trip across the Atlantic to see Toad The Wet Sprocket in Boston when they did a small reunion tour. We had never seen them while we they were still together, and it was too good an opportunity to miss. Turns out Toad are semi-back-together again now, and still gig regularly, but I couldn't have known that back then.
• I saw the Tragically Hip at Paradiso in November of 2009. While we're on the subject of great live acts: The Hip are amazing. So good that I went to see them again the very next week. I was across on Scotland on business anyway; they were playing the Garage in Glasgow; I couldn't pass it by. Who knows when they'll be back in Europe again?

But when I learned that Dananananaykroyd were splitting up my need became much greater. Now I knew this was going to be my last chance. So I booked two tickets to see them in Glasgow, the cheapest flights I could find (hello, Skyscanner), a twin room at the Holiday Inn Express, and convinced Scott that it would be a great idea for him to come through to Glasgow for a night out.

And oh boy was it worth it.

The cheapest flights were crazy early. Abi kindly drove me to Schiphol at 05:30 on the morning of Saturday 29th October so that I could catch the 07:05 to Glasgow. The plane arrived in Glasgow at 07:30, and I was in town by about 08:30, well before anything interesting was open. I nursed a hot chocolate in a Starbucks for an hour or so, and checked cinema listings to see if there were any interesting matinees. No luck, so I decided to take a bit of a walk instead. I wandered down to the Science Centre and back again, then stuck my head in a few music shops to see if I could find some musicians' earplugs -- on the recommendation of Mr Grapefruitmoon. After traipsing round Merchant City and down Argyll Street, I finally found some at Biggars on Sauchiehall Street. Then met up with my parents for a late lunch before heading over to the hotel.

It's not very rock 'n roll, but after I had checked in and Scott had joined me a short while later, what we both really wanted to do was...have a nap.

So we were thoroughly refreshed for the gig, of course! We got the the ABC quite early, around 19:15 or so, and the place was dead quiet. We had a beer, and I went a bit mad on merch, buying three T-shirts for myself and a small pink (sabbath) girly one for Fiona. (Can you blame me? Last chance!) United Fruit came on at about 19:45 and played a blinding little set from their new album Fault Lines. Here's a tip: this is another band you should go and see. They're good.

I had tried out the earplugs during United Fruit, but they damped the sound a bit too much, and I wanted to positively bathe in the noise of the main event, so I left them out. We positioned ourselves close to the stage, but not quite on the front lines. This evening they kicked off with "E Numbers"...and David's guitar promptly broke. John and Callum kept up some banter while they got things sorted out, and they carried on with a wild and wonderful hour-long set:

1. E Numbers
2. Reboot
3. All Us Authors
4. Hey Everyone + Watch This
5. The Greater Than Symbol & The Hash
6. Think And Feel
7. Muscle Memory
8. Black Wax
9. Time Capsule
10. Infinity Milk
11. Pink Sabbath
12. (encore) Some Dresses

It's hard to say how this compared to the gig at Paradiso. The crowd, being out in support for a local band, was more energetic and appreciative. The band seemed less rehearsed, looser, more frantic. And knowing what to expect, and knowing that I was in a group of like-minded fans who were all there for a historic final gig, I took part in the Wall Of Cuddles with more gusto than my first time. I was hugging people all over the place.

And then it was over. The band left the stage, the lights came on. As I looked round, I saw that the venue was maybe half full, no more. Dananananaykroyd have received so many plaudits, have been praised to the skies as one of Britain's best live bands, but they didn't sell out their farewell home town concert. I wish I could have been cloned, so I could have appreciated them twice. I'm so glad I went.

It wasn't even 22:00 when we left the venue, so Scott & I did what any right-thinking pair of brothers does in Glasgow on a Saturday night: we had a burger at McDonalds, and hit a pub. Our next move was a little less orthodox (a late-night showing of The Ides Of March at the Cineworld on Renfrew Street), but at least we weren't in bed before midnight. Pure dead radge.

Back on an early flight the next morning. Scott was going to give me a life to the airport, so we were downstairs at reception at just before 07:00 to get me there for my 08:15 flight. As we were checking out, Scott asked the receptionist if she could validate his parking. He had parked his car at Buchanan Galleries the evening before.

"Oh," said the receptionist, "They don't actually open until 9 o'clock on a Sunday..."

Taxiiii!

You want to listen to music while you're at home. So you go out and buy a cheap radio with a power cord. You take it home, plug it in, and listen to some music.

But what if there's a power cut, or if you want to listen to music while you're away from home? You go out and buy a new radio, this one with a battery compartment. You can plug it in when you're at home, and use batteries when there is no other power available.

But what if there's no radio signal, or there's interference, or none of the radio stations are playing music you want to listen to? So you go out and buy a new radio, this one with a battery compartment and a cassette recorder, so you can record your favourite music when it is available, and listen to it on those occasions when you happen to be in the middle of the Sahara with no power and no signal.

Note that the device you have ended up with is more complex, bigger, heavier, and more expensive than the one you started with. Is this a trade-off you're happy with?

It's 2011

You want to take your web site offline? Yes you can. But understand that you're going to end up with something more complex (harder to design, build, and test) and more expensive than a web site that assumes and relies on a network connection. Do you need that? Are your users constantly complaining that they can't use your site when they're in on their yacht in the middle of the Atlantic with no 3G? Is this a trade-off you're happy with?

Footnotes

• The analogy is wobbly because you don't actually need a power supply at all to make a radio receiver. The power is there for amplification.

• This stuff won't stay hard and expensive forever. The libraries for building (and browsers for consuming) sites that work offline will get better.

• No points for being the first to say, "Daddy, what's a cassette recorder?"

The global economy is at a crossroad that demands a decision - whom will our leaders defend? One choice is to defend bondholders - existing owners of mismanaged banks, unserviceable peripheral European debt, and lenders who misallocated capital by reaching for yield and fees by making mortgage loans to anyone with a pulse. Defending bondholders will require forced austerity in government spending of already depressed economies, continued monetary distortions, and the use of public funds to recapitalize poor stewards of capital. It will do nothing for job creation, foreclosure reduction, or economic recovery.

The alternative is to defend the public by focusing on the reduction of unserviceable debt burdens by restructuring mortgages and peripheral sovereign debt, recognizing that most financial institutions have more than enough shareholder capital and debt to their own bondholders to absorb losses without hurting customers or counterparties - but also recognizing that properly restructuring debt will wipe out many existing holders of mismanaged financials and will require a transfer of ownership and recapitalization by better stewards. That alternative also requires fiscal policy that couples the willingness to accept larger deficits in the near term with significant changes in the trajectory of long-term spending.

Basically: to whom are the politicians most beholden? To their corporate backers, who give them the money to get elected, or to the voters who actually do the electing? In Western Europe, things haven't got bad enough yet to tip the balance towards the latter, but we're heading that way at a steady pace. The financial sector has to be shackled.

Charlie Stross uses the turbulence of the forthcoming decade as part of the background for one of his characters in Rule 34. The following paragraphs brilliantly capture the potential for some ultimate good coming out of this cascade of crises:

Dorothy's job is an odd one: catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large. After Enron collapsed--while you were still in secondary school--the Americans passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, accounting regulations for catching corporate malfeasance. But all they were looking for was accounting irregularities: symptoms of maladministration. The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn't admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.

Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistics and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsources production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder--but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiralling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.

The European Parliament responded by focussing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damn well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted, and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged--those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour. And as for the newly nationalized supermarket monopolies, a flourishing future as government-owned logistics hubs beckoned. After all, with no post offices, high street banks, or independent general stores, who else could do the job?

.test {
    background-image:url(/images/sprites/app-icons-20110901.png);
}

to

.test {
    background-image:url(/images/sprites/app-icons-20110909.png);
}

By changing the name of the file, I can guarantee that as soon as a browser gets the new CSS, there is no risk of it re-using an old version of the sprite file from cache. This works great on static sites that are updated rarely, and on sites where you haven't gone to the trouble of implementing a more sophisticated system of (image) asset fingerprinting.

Rails 3.1 comes with fingerprinting baked in as part the new asset pipeline. Unfortunately, the asset pipelining breaks in the presence of my manual fingerprinting efforts. Rails refuses to serve up an image asset whose file name ends in a dash followed by more than 6 digits:

• /app/assets/images/app-icons-2011.png is fine
• /app/assets/images/app-icons-201109.png is fine
• /app/assets/images/app-icons-2011090.png doesn't work
• /app/assets/images/app-icons-20110909.png doesn't work

The error reported is a straightforward Routing Error:

No route matches [GET] "/assets/app-icons-20110909.png"

So code like this in a stylesheet will not work:

/* application.css.erb */
.test {
    background-image:url(<%= asset_path 'sprites/app-icons-20110909.png' %>);
}

(Also, running bundle exec rake assets:precompile will not generate a matching MD5 fingerprinted image under /public for the affected file.)

I haven't gone into the source code to find out exactly where this happening (I think this all goes on under the hood in Sprockets rather than in Rails itself) but as the old joke goes, the solution is pretty simple:

Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this!

Well, stop doing that, then.

If you're doing Rails 3.1, just let it take care of the fingerprinting, and everything will be fine.

Further reading:

• Steve Souders: Revving Filenames: don’t use querystring
• Google Page Speed: Optimize Caching (Section: "Use fingerprinting to dynamically enable caching.")

Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

When you sit in a live theater, you cannot do a close-up, pan shot, zoom, dissolve or other effect that are common in movies today. Early silent films parked the camera in one position and mimicked a theater experience. This is a general systems principle that the new technology will first mimic the previous technology before it finds its own voice.

The mobile web has two immediate genetic parents: mobile apps and the desktop web. When a mobile website can tries to follow in the footsteps of either parent too closely, it feels wrong. Encountering a mobile website that locks your vertical viewport size and forces you to use a custom scrolling algorithm is just uncanny-valley weird; whereas a site full of great content and links that doesn't enjoy the full depth and richness of the "main" site feels unsatisfying.

Remember, though, that we haven't been using magnetic tape as a mainstream storage medium for databases for some time now, but the idioms are still ingrained. The "classic" web has been around for a scant 20 years, and is still evolving. Mobile apps, as introduced by the iPhone, are only 3 years old

The mobile web's parents are a teen and a toddler. Is it any wonder that it hasn't found its own feet yet? Right now, it's an ugly duckling inside a cocoon. Some onlookers may expect to see it emerge as a swan or a butterfly, but I'm betting on something much more interesting and strange.

And then there's "Last Post" over at Cockpit Conversation (via Sylvia on Making Light), which is another tale of someone losing access to their Gmail and blog (hosted by Google) because of a date of birth issue.

People blogging about these particular problems are the visible tip of the iceberg. There must be thousands of other people who are running up against the same issues. And unfortunately, unless you know someone inside Google, the only way to ask them for help with some really scary problems is to post in an open forum. (And seriously, if you're not a computer geek with the knowledge to figure it out, losing access to your email can be terrifying.)

Despite all the people posting on that forum about date of birth problems preventing them from accessing their accounts, so far Google's best official response there seems to be "Google is aware that mistaken dob entries have precluded some users from entering the Google+ Project in it's initial field trial."

For a company whose motto is "don't be evil," and that is filled with engineers driven to make the internet a better place not just for Google users, but for all of us, this kind of hands-off take-it-or-leave-it approach is...disappointing.

For reference (because people have been asking), we haven't heard anything from Google about our own particular situation, either formally or through back channels. As many people have pointed out, we could use the account recovery process to claim that we made an error, and enter a fake date of birth that shows Alex is over 13. But this is the only circumstance in which Google allows you to change the date of birth in your profile. Once it is in there, it is in there for good, and there would be no way for Alex to reset it once he is old enough. This may be problematic if he decides wants to keep using this particular Google account in the future.