Legends of the Sun Pig : Martin Sutherland's Blog

Got to get rid of some of these tabs

I've got 65 tabs open in Firefox right now. Five years from now, that will seem like a light sprinkling of web dust. Right now, it's excessive. Time to dump some links:

JavaScript

• Anonymous functions, parentheses, scoping, and closures: Peter Michaux - "An Important Pair of Parens." John Resig - "Using (function(){})()," a chapter from John's forthcoming book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja (courtesy of Ajaxian)
• Stoyan Stefanov - "Non-blocking JavaScript Downloads"
• Version 3 of the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is on the way. Breaking changes ahead - take note now.
• If you're using the Yahoo! CDN to serve up the YUI files for your project, make sure that you use the combo handler service to group the files into a single HTTP call.
• The conflict between the two camps trying to push JavaScript forward has been resolved. The result is "Harmony." Comments by John Resig, Douglas Crockford, Alex Russell, Brendan Eich.

CSS

• Are "variables" in CSS harmful? Bert Bos makes the argument, Alex Russell destroys it comprehensively.

Browsers

• 37Signals to phase out support for IE6. Given its industry position, 37Signals is a company that can get away with this move. For most of us, though, IE6 is still very much a painful reality. An announcement like this provides a hopeful glimpse of the future, but my own prediction is that after IE8 comes along IE7 will be dead and forgotten before IE6.
• Hallvord R. M. Steen - "A browser sniffing warning: The trouble with Acid3 and TinyMCE" (on dev.opera.com). Browser detection is bad. Hallvord describes the bug detection technique in this article. See also Hallvord's earlier article "Using capability detection", and PPK's "Object detection."
• Firefox 3.1 is going to run JavaScript much faster: "The birth of a faster monkey"

(With all the improvements going into JavaScript and browsers, client-side development is a great and interesting place to be right now, and the future is looking even better.)

User Experience

• Bill Scott - "Anti-pattern: animation gone wild"
• Jeff Patton - "12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment" part 1, part 2 (UIE)
• Lisa Herrod - "Deafness and the User Experience" (A List Apart)
• Ryan Singer (37Signals) - "Learning from bad UI."
• Mark Boulton - "Don't screw with conventions"

"Mainstream Users"

• Jeremy Zawodny - "The Truth about Web Navigation."
• Marshall Kirkpatrick - "Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?"
• Case study 1: What happens when you rank highly in Google for the phrase "Typing for Dollars." Read the comments following the article on the page.
• Case study 2: What happens when you rank highly for the phrase "cancel Google." Read the comments. (Surely some of them must be taking the piss.)

Software development, sexism therein

Note: this is one of my hot buttons. When it comes to gender equality, software development is struggling to come out of the dark ages. What's worse, though, is that with a few notable exceptions (see below) it isn't struggling very hard.

• Emma Jane Hogbin - "Form an orderly queue, ladies" (video presentation) (Also: notes)
• Alex Russell - "The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?"
• Charlie Stross - "Bechdel's Law," and "Bechdel test round-up." (Not software development, but related.)

Conferences

• Jeremy Keith liveblogged large chunks of the An Event Apart 08 conference in San Francisco last week. Awesome work.

Business

• Steve Yegge - "Done, and gets things smart." An alternative to Spolsky's "Smart, and gets things done."
• David Weiss - "Finishers Wanted"
• Matt Linderman (37Signals) - "Domenico DeMarco and pizza as art."

Travel

• Edward Hasbrouck (The Practical Nomad) - "Foreigners now need USA permission to leave their home countries." Over the last eight years, travel to the USA has become something to dread and fear, not to look forward to and enjoy.
• Skyscanner has just rolled out a new design and front-end architecture. Yes, I had a small hand in this. :-)

Phew.

1 year on

It was one year ago yesterday—Thursday 2nd August 2007—that we arrived here in Oostzaan.

I had taken the overnight ferry from Newcastle to Ijmuiden with a van full of our stuff. I was due to meet our landlord and the rental agent at 11:00, but the boat was delayed, there were roadworks and detours around the ferry terminal, and I got lost twice on the way. It was about 11:40 by the time I got to the house, apologetic and stressed. We took the tour of the house, noted meter readings, and the landlord explained the workings of the gas fire and the digital TV receiver. They gave me the keys, and left.

Abi and the kids, who had taken the plane from Edinburgh to Amsterdam that morning, showed up a little later, around 12:30. We briefly revelled in the sheer size of the house, and then started unpacking quickly, because I had to be back on the road again later that afternoon to catch the overnight ferry back to the UK. I was returning the van in Edinburgh around mid-day on Friday, and then jumping on a plane back to Amsterdam that evening.

That final round-trip might sound like a rush, but for me it was the exact opposite. The months leading up to the move had been a frenzy of work, packing, worry, and pressure. But when I drove off again on that Thursday afternoon, we had made it. All of the timing had worked out. Even if the ferry was delayed, or if I somehow missed my flight on the Friday, it didn't matter, because I only had me to deal with—no posessions, no nappy panics, no travel sickness.

There was a cinema on board the ship, but the only films that interested me were ones I had seen before. There was no TV in the cabin. I didn't have a laptop. I was on a boat in the middle of the North Sea, with nowhere to go, and even if I had wanted to do something, I couldn't have.

I didn't fancy a meal in the ship's restaurant, so I bought myself some sweets and some drinks, and retreated to my cabin. I had a book to read: World War Z by Max Brooks. So I lay there on my bed, munched M&Ms, listened to my iPod, and just read. I grew sleepy half-way through, dozed for a while, woke up and read some more. Finished it, and lay for a while contemplating just how damn good it was.

That is my happiest memory of 2007. 2007 sucked massively.

We knew it would be tough, moving abroad. In 2006, we had reached a local maximum in our lives. On the one hand, a local maximum is great, because life is good. The flip side, however, is that almost every move you make leads away from that maximum, which is scary as hell.

But we have taken that hit now, and we're climbing the up slope again. At the end of 2007, we sold our house in Edinburgh. In January, we made the decision to buy a house here in Oostzaan, and we started viewing properties. In March we signed a deal, and in the last week of June we set foot in a house of our own again. We even have curtains!

Now, exactly one year on, the annual village events that seemed magical and strange to us then are coming around again: the cycle race, the music festival, the kermis (fair). We've made friends. Next week, Alex and Fiona will be starting school again, only this time both of them will be at the same school, and this time they both know enough Dutch to speak to the teachers and their classmates. No more day care, no more specialist language tuition. Somewhere in there, Abi and I celebrated our 15-year wedding anniversary. (Crystal. Not much fanfare.)

It was a bad year. One of the worst. No denying that. And the last few weeks, trying to get settled into the house and a new routine, have been pretty tough.

But on the good days, I can let myself hope that we're back on our way to awesome.

Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

One and a half stars. More than just disappointing: actively bad.

I took two attempts to get through Rainbows End, and it took me a while after finishing it to figure out why I didn't like it: it doesn't deliver on its promises. In the prologue, European intelligence services have detected someone experimenting with a highly advanced and incredibly subtle form of mass mind-control. The opening chapter follows this up with a meeting between other intelligence agencies as they decide what action to take, and reveals some of the secrets behind the threat.

It's a great teaser opening...to a different book.

The rest of Rainbows End is a moderately interesting treatise on the future of education, learning, and knowledge management, fronted by an unlikeable protagonist, and ending with a fist-shaking "I would have got away with it if it hadn't been for you pesky kids" moment. The unlikeable protagonist mellows, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about love and understanding.

Not Vinge's finest hour.

Michael Marshall - The Intruders

Four stars. Recommended.

Although it is not immediately obvious, The Intruders is set in the same world as Marshall's Straw Men series—there's a tiny reference to the events at the end of Blood Of Angels, but it's easy to miss. The Straw Men don't play any part in this book; instead, there's an entirely different shadowy ancient organization pulling strings and manipulating events. Michael Marshall has always had a knack for evoking the unseen and the unsettling. If you like your thrillers with a dose of the supernatural thrown in, this will be up your street.

One of the things I liked most about The Intruders was the way Marshall ends the book: rather than leave you breathless with an explosive climax and an abrupt finale, he takes the time to explore the aftermath, and tie up some loose ends while unravelling certain others. There is something very finely judged about it, and it left me with a lasting sense of depth to the world just at the point when I was ready to leave it behind.

Humble coder

One of the reasons I often dislike Joel Spolsky's essays is because he makes me feel inferior for not having a Computer Science degree. He doesn't inspire me to become a better coder; he makes me feel bad that I'm not a better coder in the first place.

Likewise, Paul Graham's writings often concentrate on startups and the entrepreneurial spirit. Sometimes they're good; sometimes they have the exact same effect as Spolsky—to make me feel worthless because I haven't started my own company, and have no intention of doing so.

Rands, on the other hand, writes about management in an interesting and entertaining way, without making me feeling like a failure because I don't have a team of people working for me. Likewise, I find Jeff Atwood an inspirational writer: in his dedication to coding as a craft, he understands that one of the keys to being a good developer is a fundamental desire to become a better developer. In his latest article, he takes Paul Graham to task for his "you suck" attitude. Thanks, Jeff—I needed that.

I still use this quote from Lois McMaster Bujold as my personal motto:

"There is this, about being the sparring partner of the best swordsman in Caribastos. I always lost. But if I ever meet the third best swordsman in Caribastos, he's going to be in very deep trouble."

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that this attitude would give Paul Graham fits, but it would make Jeff Atwood smile. There's the difference.

Pay close attention

If you haven't seen it already, watch the following video--it's only about a minute long, and you'll find it amusing.

Then read this article by PZ Myers. Myers is a well-known scientist, blogger, and anti-creationism commentator.

"I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried ... but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird -- I was standing in line, hadn't even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn't going to cause any trouble."

The punchline is that his friend was allowed in to see the film. The friend was...Richard Dawkins.

So what does the video have in common with that story? They both show the problem with relying too heavily on blacklists. If you focus exclusively on one thing, you will miss whatever else may be right under your nose. (Think: old-fashioned spam filters, terrorist watch lists, screening for dangerous liquids on planes, etc.)

Computing and government

Probably because of some grave misdeed in her murky past, Abi is afflicted by a free subscription to "Computing", a technology magazine aimed at perpetuating ignorance amongst mid-level managers in large corporations and governmental organizations, and funded by the advertising of consultancy groups that thrive on said lack of knowledge. The only reason I ever give it a second glance before recycling it is the Dilbert cartoon on the back page, and even it is rarely funny any more.

But for some reason, I scanned the front page of the February 28 edition, and was struck by the awesome badness of the following lede:

The government is considering anti filesharing legislation as part of plans for the UK to become "the World's creative hub".

Wow. In an earlier age, the quote would have been:

The government is considering legislation to combat direct dialling as part of plans for the UK to become "the World's hub of telephone operators".

Or:

The government is considering legislation to combat budget airlines as part of plans for the UK to become "the World's hub of rail travel".

Or:

The government is considering legislation to combat manufacture of plastics and other composite materials as part of plans for the UK to become "the World's centre of iron and steel production".

You get the point. It's this kind of thinking that keeps the UK steadfastly on the road to compulsory identity cards. Sigh.

Update--Special contest! Write the funniest quote in the form:

The government is considering legislation to combat X as part of plans for the UK to become "the World's Y".

Winner gets a free hyperlink.