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the problem with going back to nature, down to the earth or whatever you call it

2011-05-30T18:55:00.003+01:00

I have just finished reading A handmade life by William Coperthwaite and while its central message of living a simple, non-violent life and co-operating with others is very commendable and laudable it is totally impractical.

Everyone in the first world cannot live on remote small holdings in the wilderness, living off the land and chopping our own firewood every day like the author. There are some exceptions like Neil Ansell in his book Deep Country. The plain fact is even in North America there is not enough space for everyone to live their lives like that. In Europe and especially overcrowded Britain there is definately not enough space.

The only people who can afford to buy enough land (apart from people who inherit it) are people who have made their money elsewhere from either employment, entreprenurship or pure blind luck. They can afford to grow their own fruit and vegetables, raise chickens and livestock, keep bees, bake their own bread and learn craft skills. They are rich in both money and time.

Most people in the developed world would probably enjoy quite a few aspects of this lifestyle. There is enough advertising of it in books like I have mentioned, on tv by people like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the uk (there must be simillar people elsewhere) and other forms of media.

How does someone living in a council flat in a city working for minimum wage with children to feed live this sort of life? Yes there are things such as allotments (in the uk at least, community gardens and the like but these are still not available to all. They cannot afford "artisan" made clothes, food or furnishings. They cannot afford to make them themselves and in any case have to work long hours to provide for their families. These people are poor in both time and money.

Even comparatively better off people like myself cannot afford to live such a lifestyle. I earn comfortably above the average wage and we are lucky to have a flat to live in provided by my wifes job so we have few outgoings really. We still would struggle to find the money to buy a small holding, especially in todays economic climate. Even if we did find somewhere we would not have the time to work at a "normal" job to be able to afford to absorb the running costs of the small holding such as buying tools, livestock etc.

Of course we can do what we can when we can. We can use what time and cash we have to try and live a better life and we do that. We garden, we try to shop responsibly and locally, we recycle, we only buy clothes when we need to replace worn out items.

Some may say that this is the point. Everyone does what they can in their own way. This is of course commendable. I firmly believe that it is elitist and also self defeating in some respect. Perhaps the difficulty in actually trying to live the good life puts people off. Perhaps there is a revolution needed in finance, access to the land and skills but that is not going to happen. All the current finacial crisis has done is made the rich richer as the poor have bailed them out. They can live the good life one way or another if it is on a small holding or a mansion.

I would love to own a small holding in South Somerset where I was born and raised along with generations of my ancestors. Realistically the only way I can do this in the short term at least is to win the lottery.

why did I never think of this

2011-04-26T19:58:00.003+01:00

Its a common problem. You have something like a definition list and you want to float the elements instead of displaying vertically down the page. That normally works fine for a 2 column layout where the dt is on the left and the dd on the right. Just add a "clear: left" to the dt. But what if you want to float all the elements so they just flow, and to make it extra hard the elements can be any width and the dt must always be next to the dd on the same "line".

JQuery to the rescue! first of all I created the following html structure

<dl class="content">
    <dt class="foo">Key</dt>
    <dd class="foo">Value</dt>
    <dt class="bar">Key</dt>
    <dt class="bar">Value</dt>
</dl>

Next came the following JQuery

$('.content_context dt').each(function() {
     $(this).css('clear', 'none');
     dtOffset = $(this).offset();   
     ddOffset = $('dd.' + this.className).offset();
     if (ddOffset.top != dtOffset.top) {
        $(this).css('clear', 'left');
    }
});

All this does is loop through the dt's in the list and check if their vertical offset is the same as the dd with the same classname. If its different (e.g. they are on different "lines" it adds a "clear: left" to the dt forcing it to be on the same "line" as the dd. Easy really.

sometimes you really do need the right tool for the job

2011-02-17T13:41:00.002Z

For quite a while now I have been trying to write a novel. Its more like a collection of short stories that kind of link together and cross over all around a common theme. Up to now I have basically been using a mixture of Evernote for research, a remote SVN for versioning and a remote project hosted at Projectlocker.com for cloud based svn and backup and of course vim as an editor.

Then recently I have been using JDarkroom to cut out the distractions of twitter, blogs, email, IM etc. (Pulling the network connection on your pc also works too)

The problem is that everything is becoming very complex with the novel. At the last count there are a dozen or so major locations and around 30 or so "major" characters, some of which turn up in several locations. None of it is strictly linear in terms of time either. Think a bit like Catch-22 but with no central Yossarian character to hang everything and everyone on.

Basically its got too complex to keep in my head and a bunch of text files. Then there is all the research for various things ranging from survival techniques to artificial intelligence. (the latter is a lot easier to make up than the former). After a lot of head scratching I remembered something about a program called Scrivener but I had remembered that it was Mac only. Now there is a windows version (beta only but hey) and I have had a good play with it. I think its perfect for what I need. I can arrange and re-arrange things in its outliner, store all the research in one spot and even set up the editor like JDarkroom. Now to import all my current stuff to it and add the project to SVN although it does versioning itself too the remote backup is good of course.

Hopefully this will be a big help for me. I am running out of steam a bit with the novel and I think this will enable me to get a good picture of what is going on in different threads of the story and help me tie up loose ends.

the big problem with globalization

2011-02-01T21:23:00.002Z

Is that there are simply not enough resources to give every goat herder in something-stan the lifestyle of a Southern Californian, even some cheap white trash redneck or minor drug dealer in South Central LA. Once you have seen a couple of tv shows with people driving around in flash cars, drinking and eating all they want with guns, girls and blah blah blah.

The reverse is true. Very few people in the first world will willingly give up all the trappings of modern life. Many of us fantasize about giving it all up and living the good life off grid on a small holding surrounded by our animals and knitting our own yogurt. The nearest we get is buying some organic fruit and veg once in a while in a huge supermarket.

So what is to be done? There are the techno utopians who say that fusion power, renewables, new technology X will come along and save us all. Others believe in things like transition towns where we will all become middle class liberals living in quaint rural market towns working from home as middle managers or doing small cottage industries like picture framing or making little doodads from recycled bits of stuff and taking the bus everywhere.

Then there are of course the cynics who say its all gone to hell already and we are all doomed. Better watch a few Mad Max videos for handy tips and head for the hills with a few of your good buddies and lots of guns and wait for the hordes of starving refugees to turn up.

A great illustration of this was Bruce Parry's new show. It contrasted two First Nations tribes in Canada. The first lived in a very remote part of the Yukon. They still live a lifestyle thats very much in touch with nature, hunting caribou, duck and other game for their main source of food and living in small communities. The other tribe live in the middle of the Athabasca Tar Sands region and have made a small fortune for themselves with a plant hire and contracting buisness. Their chief is now the CEO of a multimillion dollar industry and can pay every man, woman and child in the tribe 10,000 dollars per year as a dividend. They now want to cut out the middleman entirely and go into the oil extraction business themselves.

Who can blame them for doing that. I am sure if the elders of the first tribe were told they were, literally, sitting on a gold mine things would change in short order.

The problem is there are not enough gold mines to go around...

edc and me

2011-01-19T19:48:00.004Z

Its only recently I have come across the whole idea of EDC though in some ways I have been aware of it for years. I always have had pockets full of stuff. Keys, wallet, leatherman or some other sort of knife, phone, headphones, bottle opener (always carry a bottle opener) and quite often various bits of cord or things. I always tend to wear trousers with lots of pockets.

At the same time I often carry around my "toolkit" for work. That consists of an inordinate number of different pens and pencils, 960 grid system sketching paper, plain A3 paper, tracing paper, a moleskine or three plus a thumb drive or two. To be on the safe side a usb cable or two and some batteries.

Then there is the medication I have to take at intervals through the day for my diabetes, inhaler for my asthma, indigestion and allergy tablets, blood pressure and cholesterol medication. Thats quite a lot to carry around in your pockets.

I was using my semi-hardshell nike id daysac for carrying a lot of stuff around in (including my laptop as well quite often). Now I am going to the gym again there is not enough room in my daysac for the gym kit and the other stuff. So now I have bought a B.O.B. (or bail out bag to you and me). To be specific its a 5.11 Tactical bag. Ok I am not likely to use the front pockets for the 5.56 magazines they are intended for but on the whole its pretty useful.

For a start its not too big. It wont hold a A4 sized object without folding it up. Its definitely too small for my laptop (though you could probably get a netbook, ipad, kindle etc in it).

The downside is its not too big. Its too small for a water bottle to fit inside. The response to this is to include MOLLE webbing for other pouches to be attached to it. There is webbing on both ends of the bag, on the shoulder strap and on one inside side.

That got me thinking. The ammo pouches cannot be removed from the bag. Wouldnt it be better to make a possibly slightly larger basic bag with MOLLE webbing on 3 sides then allow the purchasers to buy the pouches etc they want to suit their needs. I am sure that this would be great for the original military purpose of the bag. A user could trade 5.56 mag pouches for grenade pouches or a holster for a handgun for instance. You could even attach a 6x10 utility pouch then add other pouches to that.

The same could be said for civilian users of the bag. They would have a great deal more flexibility. I would take off one of the magazine pouches and add a water bottle pouch and probably swap the other two mag pouches for small utility or grenade pouches which would be more useful and add a dump pouch to one end and a first aid kit pouch to the other and add a pouch to hold my phone to the strap.

Still my EDC list has expanded to include a small adjustable spanner, small screwdriver with a selection of bits, a roll of duct tape with the cardboard core removed and then squashed flat, some soft rubber garden tie (very useful for quickly lashing stuff), several karibiners, a small first aid kit, a torch, lots more pens and pencils and all the medication I need (which is quite a lot)

I want to add a decent knife or rescue tool a better torch and a few other things... getting there though.

things have changed

2010-12-11T15:49:00.002Z

A few years ago I used to dream of winning the lottery and setting up my dream computer work room. It would have a top of the line mac pro to work on with as many big monitors as possible and all the software I needed. There would be a linux server or two plus a windows machine and a few laptops scattered around. I would spend my days tinkering with stuff in html, css, javascript and php and not really do anything productive.

Over the last few years I have taken up gardening and also learned a great deal about other skills. Now my lottery dream is a big purpose built workshop. It would have a forge and blacksmithing area with an anvil, swage block, workbench with a leg vice, moulding cone, power hacksaw, MIG welder and gas axe at one end. In the middle there would be a woodworking area with table saw, mitre saw, router table planer/thicknesser, workbench, bandsaw and a sanding machine for a start. At the far end there would be a more open area for assembly of larger articles and also painting and finishing. There would be air lines for die grinders, cut off tools, impact wrenchs and the like running everywhere.

It would open up into the garage at one end with a workshop bit for tinkering with cars too and the other end would pass through to a greenhouse. There would have to be storeage space for tools and stock steel and wood too.

I think this represents a change in priorities for me. I still make my living pushing electrons around on websites but I think I get far greater personal satifaction out of making things with my hands. The thought of repairing or refurbishing some old furniture or making my own out of scrap wood and steel is far more appealing than creating a web-site.

I have just had one thought. I reckon it better be a euro-millions win. The workshop would cost at least 20 times as much as the computer room.

This means a lot to me

2010-12-09T13:20:00.002Z

When Rae and I started our garden here at the school my father gave me some of his fathers old tools to use so we wouldn't have to buy new ones. All sound environmental stuff to of re-using old things instead of throwing them away though he wasn't thinking like that at the time. I think he thought that we would never really do anything with the garden and it wouldn't matter anyway. He was a bit wrong there. Take a look at the story of the garden so far.

Using my grandfathers tools means a lot to me though. I wrote about it a while ago and took some pics. My grandfather was a great gardener. When I was young between my father and grandfather we had 2 big gardens, 2 allotments and another small patch of land we rented. We were almost self sufficient in terms of veg at least and sold on surplus cabbage etc. Not because it was a trendy thing to do but because that is the way it was always done.

Anyway, back to the point. A while ago Rae decided that she wanted to move a forsythia bush that was one of the first things we planted. It had grown massively and was crowding out the flowerbed. Rae being Rae tried to shift it on her own when I was at work one day and somehow managed it but snapped the handle of the big fork in the process. Damn and blast.

Then I had a word with my Blacksmithing tutor and he said I could fix it as part of a lesson.

You can see the results on flickr here I had to put the fork in the fire to burn out the end of the wood still inside it then punch out the rivets that were left. We then heated the fork up again before putting the new handle, that way the metal would contract down onto the handle as it cooled. We didn't have a drill handy on the course as the pillar drill was broken so I made the rivets to secure the handle from some scrap steel and had to take everything home half finished.

Today I took the fork round to my parents and drilled out the holes for the rivets and then cold forged the rivets into place and finally tapped down the edges of the steel really tightly to the wooden handle to make sure no rust can form behind them.

We found a makers name stamped into the steel and the tutor could look it up in a book with all the tool patterns. It turns out that the fork is at least 80 years old and was made by one of the best companies of the day. Its really high quality steel that has been tempered in the forge to give it enormous strength. Its quite unusual anyway as its got five tines instead of four.

Leaving aside the important environmental stuff about reusing and recycling it means a huge amount to me to be able to use my grandfathers tools and even more to be able to repair them just like he would have done in his day. I hope some of his skill and experience is in them and rubs off to me.

My first bit of blacksmithing

2010-11-17T12:46:00.001Z

ran out of time on this one
Originally uploaded by Rob 'n' Rae.

Years ago when I worked at Cannington College I used to help sort out rooms etc for the guys doing weekend blacksmithing courses. I used to go up to to the forge to give out room keys and the like. It always fascinated me to see them working hammering away on the hot metal.

At the time I couldn't really do much about it and I more or less forgot it. Then I saw the mastercrafts program on the bbc and thought I would really like to do something.

A quick bit of googling later and I found a course at a Kingston Maurward College with a really good Tutor.

Yesterday evening was the start of the course and I really enjoyed it. A few little blisters and sore hands but its really therapeutic to bash red hot steel into shape. The only problem is I get blinded by the light of the forge and can only see a big purple blob for a few seconds when I should be hammering away.

I think its going to be a good hobby if not a new job. 5 years of training is a bit much when your 40 and need to be fit for the job. If I won the lottery I would be buying a forge to go in my dream workshop / secret underground lair.

had a wonderful day today

2010-04-18T19:54:00.003+01:00

Started off with a long lie in, which is always good. Then got down to work in the garden for the rest of the day.

I mowed the lawn, planted beans and herbs amongst other things. Weeded out a lot of stuff thats sneaking in again. Sorted out the soaker hose. Finally sorted out the wormery too which is never a good job.

It was so peaceful. Maybe the lack of air traffic helps, certainly a couple of microlights flying over made what seemed like the same ammount of noise as a Eurofighter normally does.

I was thinking that if I ever get rich thats how I would be leading my life. Pottering in a garden and enjoying myself. Then I came upstairs and decided to watch a documentary on James Lovelock. He put it all into perspective when he said that people say he is only so pessimistic because he is 90 years old. His reply is that he might live to see some of the chaos he predicts if he lives until he is 100.

Then I watched a program with a guy traveling across Bangladesh seeing mega cities in Dakar and farm land being eroded by increased river flow in front of his face.

Time to have a good think about all of this stuff.

I would love to be a green motorist

2010-04-02T11:39:00.002+01:00

I live in a small cottage in the country. For some reason I don't want to move. I work as a web developer. Nearly all the jobs at my level are in major cities, normally London. Surprisingly working for home is not really an option for the vast majority of these jobs.

That means I spend 2 1/2 to 3 hours a day in my car driving to and from work. I drive a Renault Clio 1.3 Diesel which gets around 50 mpg most of the time (apparently the version with the turbo and intercooler is faster but somehow more economical but far to expensive). I try to drive carefully. Change up quickly, leave it in a higher gear while decelerating, cruising instead of rushing, keeping the car maintained etc.

I earn a good wage and could buy a very nice car indeed, sometimes it would be handy to have more space or a bit more comfort. But we stick with the clio as its cheap to run, cheerful and perfectly adequate.

What really annoys me are comments like this on the guardians site. As soon as someone mentions any ways of saving money on your driving costs the first comment is "get a bike". I live 60 miles from my place of work, 10 miles from a decent supermarket or any decent shops. We have 4 buses a day come through the village. To get to work on public transport would take me about 4 hours each way and still involve about 4 miles of walking. My wife and I work long hours between us so its hard to be around when tescos or whoever deliver. We do grow our own veg to some extent but we cant do it all.

If I lived in Islington and could walk, bike or take the public transport to work I would. But there is no way in the world I would want to live in a city.

So we do our best. We have to drive a car to do anything though. We so all we can to minimise the impact we have on the environment when we use it though.

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2010-04-02T11:27:00.001+01:00

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So I had an idea.....

2010-01-14T20:24:00.001Z

A while ago I saw a BBC show with Monty Don travelling the globe looking at gardens around the world. He visited Cuba to look at the fantastic urban farms and community gardens there which are going a long way to helping feed the people of Havanna in a way they can afford.

Then I read a few things about the urban farmers and community gardeners in Detroit and Todmorton where wastland is being turned into gardens to feed the residents. I guess watching people like Hugh Fearnsley Wittingstall, epecially his landshare intitive and Carol Klien on tv and reading their books have helped too. Definately having our own garden helped immensley.

The problems with gardening are various. One, its hard work at least at the start and at peak times of the year too. Two, you either have too much stuff or not enough. Three, economies of scale come into it, bigger gardens are cheaper to run especially for things like compost etc. Four, you cant always be in your garden when you should be to water, plant or harvest. If you could share these problems it would be good. Trade time, resources and money for quality produce.

I got to thinking. What might work would be a sort of co-op. You sign up to the scheme and say you will donate x ammount of land, y ammount of time and z ammount of money. This is a sliding scale for all three. If you can donate enough of any of one out of three you get the others free. So people with a large enough ammount of land dont pay or spend time. If you have no land and put in enough time you would get the benefit with no other outlay. Simple cash donation get rewards too in the form of the produce as in buying fruit and veg from a shop.

The intial investments of time, land and cash get put into a pool. Landowners get first pick of what gets grown on their land but have to accept that stuff will be grown that they don't necessarily want themselves. Cash gets spent buying tools, seeds and other materials. The land gets coverted into efficient fruit and veg plots by people volunteering their time. Things like compost, tools, seeds, transport etc can be done from a central location.

These then get maintained by the volunteers and harvested etc. Each landowner can take what they like from their own plot but only enough for themselves and their family etc. All surplus produce gets first redistributed amongst other people in the co-op so the people who are time rich get their free produce and the people who invest money get the produce they paid for. Anything left after that is sold on the open market. Profits are returned to the scheme for new tools, seeds etc.

The system has to be kept small in scale. The key to it is how much time is required to invest to get a unit of produce. In effect a wage for the volunteers. It has to be set at a level that encourages people to invest time and not money unless it soon becomes easier to go to the supermarket to get produce than through the scheme. There would have to be limits on the ammount of land, time and cash one person could put into the scheme though this may vary locally.

I guess to get this off the ground you would need to speak to someone with far more knowledge of economics than me. Then get some advertizing done. Then get digging.

Towards a more unified way of developing sites

2009-12-12T15:15:00.002Z

The division between designers and developers has existed almost from the birth of the printed word. Technologies have been produced to make information more rich and interesting from more complex layouts, pictures, and now video, sound and all kinds of interaction.

There is always some form of either a technological development being exploited by designers or a technology being developed to meet a design based need. In most cases it is likely to be a combination of the two.

The problem lies that designers and developers do not always see eye to eye on many levels. There is often a level of resentment in the relationship between the two. Developers view designers as head in the clouds types with no idea of how things get really done. Designers view developers as stick in the mud types resistant to change. They both talk about teamwork, Agile methodologies and co-operation but often the creation of a site ends up as a basically two stage process. The designers create a plan of how they want the site to look and work and hand it over to the developers. Then they may double check things at the end of the project or iteration etc.

This is just a waterfall process by another name. The designers "hand over" their wireframes etc to the developers and say "get on with it". They might have used Agile to develop the wireframes and the developers might use Agile to make the actual site but there is still a massive discontinuity between the two parts of the work.

Often the designers and developers are in separate teams and entirely separated in different offices etc. Even in my current job the designers are at one end of the office and developers are in the other end. Often the designers can be in a separate company to the developers.

I personally believe having worked as both a designer and a developer in different roles that close communication between designers and developers is vital. Communication is all about the exchange of ideas and more communication means more ideas. Maybe not better ideas but there are still more ideas than there were.

Designers and developers should be involved at every stage of the entire process of creating a site from its conception right through to its on-going use by real people. Database developers need can help plan the basic functions of the site. It will make their job of developing a schema easier and they might well be able to say "if you want it to do XYZ to make things easier" and create something entirely new that the designers had no idea could happen. That is only one example. The opposite of course can happen as well. A designer can come up with a requirement that a developer would have never have thought of.

At the moment the process is one way. Designers design and developers develop. When either group crosses the boundaries into the others territory then conflict occurs. There needs to be a breaking down of barriers to some extent. Of course there have to be specialists. Its crazy to expect a graphic designer to be a DBA as well.

Processes like SCRUM and Agile help with this to some extent as they should get people working together. However this does not always work for the reasons outlined above.

I think that there are enough similarities between different roles to implement a sort of eXtreme Programing technique combining developers and designers. This is based in part on my experience several years ago. I was working for a small college as a web developer working with a designer to create all kinds of material based around HTML content.

We quite often worked on interface elements of a project at least as an XP team. I would be working in Dreamweaver, Photoshop or the like with the designer sat in the "co-pilots" chair and between us we came up with a solution for a problem. At the time it could be hell and led to some quite spectacular arguments and I am not advocating this exact approach but it is a good starting point for a discussion.

What I am proposing is a kind of buddy system. There is enough common ground between several types of jobs in both the design and development fields to make this work. For instance a information architect designing the high level specifications for the site could work alongside a database developer who models how the site is represented in a database. They are both concerned with how the site is organised and that gives them common ground.

The obvious team up wit the UX and front end developer working closely with each other. The developer can advise the designer on what is possible but the designer can come up with new ideas that the developer might have missed.

The problem lies with who to team back end developers with. They are not a natural fit with graphic designers. They may have to be involved with some aspects of UI development but they often avoid this sort of work. There seems to be more correlation between the sorts of structures and organizations that an information architect creates and object orientated design than anything else. Taxonomies, Labelling schemes and metadata all have their place in the object orientated world.

Some other functions a site may be expected to have may be very interdisciplinary. Search for example will involve aspects of information architecture, user experience design, front end development, back end development and database design. If any one of these is omitted the function is likely to be less useful to the end users.

A personal example is a good way to illustrate this. Recently I was asked to provide a series of wireframes and other UX documents to a recruitment company for a site that its candidates could use to look for positions, clients could use to look for candidates and its consultants can use to match candidates with vacancies. By co-incidence the first real commercial website I produced was for a different recruitment company nearly 10 years ago now. Back then I looked at the companies paper based forms and processes to create a database schema to store the information they used and built the site from the back to the front so to speak. This time round I evaluated the companies existing site and interviewed its staff and also some candidates and clients about the site to conduct a basic usability study and expose some new features that would be useful on the site. These data were then turned into personas, sitemaps, wireframes and other documents which were turned over to the clients developers to implement.

Essentially the same process took part this time round as 10 years ago however. The difference in the two is 10 years ago I was more of a developer and understood more about databases that information architecture and user experience design. Now I understand far more about the design side of creating a site than the back end development of a site, certainly I know more about usability than SQL now. What occurred in both cases was that I modeled the users needs and requirements. I just used two totally different methods to do so. However this time round I could apply the knowledge I gained 10 years ago when designing a database to model a recruitment company to my current design problem.

The key area of the site as with many others is search. Candidates want to find jobs, consultants want to find clients for candidates and vice versa. Clients want to see a good pool of candidates. All of this when you get down to the real nitty gritty is a well designed and executed database schema and set of queries to interrogate it. However it is down to the user experience designer and information architect to make the search as easy to use as possible. No one wants to type in SQL queries to get their data out. (apart from real DB geeks) Users demand power and flexibility. They want to choose from a small list of options and sprinkle a few keywords to find their dream job. It shouldn't take long and it shouldn't be difficult.

This is where good design comes in. Both the DBA and IA have to accurately model the users needs. They are both using different forms of design to achieve that end. The DBA has to work out a schema that is both accessible in terms of the ease in constructing SQL queries to interrogate the data within it and also usable in terms being performant in returning data quickly. The IA/UX designer has to model the users needs into in effect a web form that generates the SQL queries that the DBA uses to interrogate the database. This has to be accessible in terms of ease of use and performant in terms of enabling a user to get the results they requested.

Its not implausible that the IA/UX designer may model some user behaviour that the DBA had not thought of. Similarly the DBA may be able to spot and model some user behaviour that the IA missed. What is often overlooked is that when two experts work together on a common problem from different angles they are able to collaborate to gain insights that they would not otherwise have come up with independently. It might be possible to discover a new way of requesting data that might have been overlooked. A unique selling point perhaps or certainly a competitive advantage. If the "designers design then hand it over to the developers" model was followed in this case they this synergistic process would be missed out on.

Teamwork is the core to all of this. Maybe not the extremes of XP or lesser peaks of Agile but good communication and the sharing of ideas and concepts cannot be a bad thing. When people share they create something they would not be able to do individually.

This is both inspiring and though provoking

2009-11-14T11:55:00.003Z

I came across Leagh Buley's presentation on Being a UX Team of One the other day. I have to say I watched more or less every minute of the video and followed the slides too.

Leah seems to have experienced some of the same problems I have come across when working as the "Front End Developer / UX guy" and has some great ideas for overcoming them. So often someone has come up to me and said "can you come up with a page to do XYZ?" and I go away and think for a bit and come up with one design solution. In the bad old days I would have started coding straight away. Now I can write html and css quickly but not that quickly.

Then I got into using graphics packages to create high fidelity mock ups before I started coding. Almost the old slice-n-dice photoshop table layout days all over again. Of course I obsessed over details and didn't come up with a coherent design.

I was never that keen on sketching UI with a pen and paper. Mainly because I am really bad at drawing I think. It brought back bad memories of sitting in an art class aged about 13 with no idea what I was doing there. Then I joined I ♥ wireframes on flickr. Yes there are some very beautiful wireframes created in graphics packages but the most interesting ones (IMHO) are sketched.

Leah definitely is a big fan of sketching and I think am now converted. The main thing I got out of Leah's section on sketching was that you "brainstorm, a lot". Produce many ideas and mix and match. Let them evolve. Don't limit yourself. I think I might have frustrated my co-workers quite a bit in the past by coming up with one design and "evolving" it without really asking or telling them. Evolving the design on paper stops this sort of problem.

As an aside from all this there must be something wrong with computer based UI design in general if it limits this sort of creative process or other similar creative activities.

The next stage of working as a team of one is a bit contradictory. Basically don't be a team of one. Assemble an ad hoc team around you. Basically get some help from your co-workers. This isn't really a team of one thing if you ask me but there you go. I can see the point that your co-workers will put their oar in anyway so why not get their input. From personal experience I think this can go one of two ways. Either they will tell you to sod off and stop asking you to do your job for you. Or they will jump in with tons of unhelpful suggestions that stop you working that way.

I guess the trick is to fall between these two extremes and get coders to help you constructively. Leah and Adaptive Path have a range of techniques like sketchboards, open design sessions and the like. One of my favourite ideas is to decorate your workspace with your work in progress to get people looking at your work and commenting on it - hopefully constructively. The idea of passing someone who is commenting on your work a pen and saying. "Draw your idea then." is great.

The final section is a bit ass about face I think. I would be coming up with design principles at the start not the end. If I had to for instance come up with a set of designs for a hotel's site I would try and figure out the design principles at the start and then use them as a filter for ideas right from the start rather than at the end. Though that could mean rejecting ideas that don't fit the preconceived ideas which is a bad thing. So maybe this isn't a bad idea after all.

Watching the video and googling around the subject has really made me think. I can definitely improve my process for coming up with a design from this. I might not agree with all of it but hey that is bound to happen.

UX isnt just for the big boys

2009-10-24T16:41:00.002+01:00

Recently I have been looking at a lot of relatively small scale web development companies. They produce a whole bunch of sites for small and medium scale businesses. They all seem to view UX as a either part of the graphic design of a site or an unnecessary luxury that they can not afford.

I would personally argue it is something that they cannot afford to be without. It adds an extra selling point to their pitches at clients. It might require explaining a few extra things at the same time but at least it should give their potential clients something to latch on to compared to all the other competing agencies. Its not a unique selling point but at least its a different selling point.

Small agencies seem obsessed with graphic design and SEO. Its almost as if nothing else matters to them or their clients. I would argue that they often fail to meet their clients expectations because they don't consider the user experience. Getting things like e-commerce right is not a matter of fitting things into a CMS/e-commerce system that comes off the shelf. Its a complicated process that needs tailoring to individual sites customers needs. Its in areas like where UX comes and has a huge potential to make a difference to the clients bottom line and the agencies chances of getting more business.

If a small 10 or 12 person agency had one UX person working for them I would personally be prepared to bet that they can pull ahead of their rivals as it would give them a competitive edge. UX is not for the big boys. It gives the little people the chance to compete by giving them more tools to work with.

I still use my grandfathers tools

2009-08-31T16:00:00.001+01:00

I still use my grandfathers tools
Originally uploaded by Rob 'n' Rae.

This picture means so much to me. Every time I use one of these tools I get a sense of the past and also responsibility to keep them in good condition for many more years of use.

on line identities

2009-07-06T10:38:00.002+01:00

I just realised its very easy to find me on line. I nearly always use "rob_cornelius" as my username, unless its already taken or the site I am signing up with wont allow underscores in user names. So I am rob_cornelius on hotmail rob.cornelius on google mail, rob_cornelius on del.icio.us, robCornelius on digg, rob_cornelius on steam games even. etc. etc. etc.

Now hardly anyone uses their real name on line, especially for things like games where everyone else is called Psk0killa or something similar. I think sub-consciously I must have decided that its hard enough to find anyone on line if you are not searching facebook or something like that. I don't mind admitting I am who I am so I use my own name.

Zero configuration wireless networking the easy way

2009-05-28T21:17:00.002+01:00

For some reason since the staffroom was re-decorated the wireless signal in the study has become too faint for the little wireless dongle to pick up. So.... I bought an extender relay sort of thing. It was a nightmare to set up. Basically if you read the box you plug it in and press the auto-configure button on the side and that's it. Rubbish. Don't bother with the set up disk either as that is even worse. It crashes regularly and doesn't work at all. Get on the net and find the real instructions.

Then if you put it in the living room where it can get a good signal the main pc in the study still wont get a good enough signal. So... put the wireless extender in the study. Now it cuts in an out with its link to the main access point.

So now I got a more powerful wireless dongle with a proper aerial for the main pc. That let me move the extender back to the living room for a better signal. Even better I put it on the far side of the living room so I can now get a wireless signal in bed. Working from bed.... maybe ;)

Some things look easy on paper

2009-05-14T20:10:00.002+01:00

I have spent the best part of a week working on a drag and drop interaction for the site I am working on. It was one of those things that look relatively easy but turned out to be a nightmare.

The set up was in theory simple. Two <ul>'s containing <li>'s you can drag and drop around both within the lists and from one list to another. Not that hard you might think. The added spice was that the UX guys wanted a swapping sort of thing as you drag the <li> around. As you move over another <li> you see a sort of swapping animation. Not just on drop on dragging over every element.

That complicates matters somewhat. Especially when you drag from one list to another and drop. Does that mean you are adding to the second list or swapping the two around? Well it works that if you drag and drop on top of an element in the second list you swap, if you drop it between elements or at the bottom of the list you add to it.

Then what happens when you completely empty a list? That means invisible placeholders being created and destroyed as you need them. All kinds of complicated stuff.

Lots of work in the end to add about 30 lines of code to Evans original code (which didnt have to worry about empty lists and stuff). The thing about once a year in my ten year career as a web developer I get asked to do drag and drop interactions (thank you macromedia/adobe for saying its easy to do with Dreamweaver and Flash) and none of them work that well.

Drag and drop for web based applications always seems to me to be one of those bells and whistles that managers/ux people like but actually baffles many users. Its also a bitch to get working properly for the developer so I never think its worth the effort.

the wierdest IE7 bug I have ever seen

2009-05-06T21:19:00.002+01:00

Sadly I dont have a demo of this available right now... will see what I can do.

I had a simple task in work today a whole bunch of checkboxes and their labels on the screen. Clicking on some of the checkboxes causes others to be disabled thanks to some nifty javascript. Nice and simple.

However I was asked to find a way to make the disabled elements look "more disabled" as it can be hard to spot the greyed checkbox on the dark background of the site.

As the checkbox was immediately followed by its label I quickly came up with:

input[disabled=disabled] + label { color: grey }

To quickly change the labels of disabled boxes only using CSS. Works great in Firefox. Clicked on a checkbox in IE7 (dont have to worry about IE6 - Hurray) and nothing happens... Then I move the mouse and magically the labels change colour!

I spent quite some time playing with it and that is definitely what is happening.You can see the checkboxes become disabled but the labels don't change colour until you move the mouse. I have googled for ages and can't find anything on it at all. Might try a static test page rather than the rather complex html js and css that there is there now.

I guess that I could fake a mouse event to fire off after the checkboxes get disabled but its easier to change the labels style at the same time as the disabling in the first place.

Why for the love of all things nice and fluffy why?

its gardening time again

2009-04-29T20:20:00.002+01:00

If you take a look at our flickr photostream you can see we are back into the swing of gardening again.

Last year was a bit hectic with moving house, bad weather, cricket and lots of visitors so we did really get as much out of the garden as we could have done. This year, weather permitting, we should be able to enjoy it and enjoy the fruits of our labours.

So far in the veggie patch there are:

Salad leaves of various sorts
Rocket
Chard
Perpetual Spinach
Spring Onions
Sweetcorn
Spuds
Squash
Carrots
Radish
Peas
Garlic
Beans
Courgettes

The soft fruit list isnt bad:

Strawberries
Raspberries
Blueberries
Blackcurrants

In the greenhouses there are:

Tomatoes
Sweet Peppers
Chilli Peppers
Cucumbers
Ginger
Lemon Grass

Then for herbs we have:

Thyme, 3 or 4 sorts
Coriander
Basil
Mint
Oregano
Marjoram
Chives
Sage

So all in all not a bad crop if it all works out.

The flower garden is coming on great guns too. We have planted about 1800 bulbs or so over the last 2 years and a good percentage of them seem to be ok. The tulips are looking great and the aliums will be out soon too. Hopefully this year some of the perennials we grew from seed will be doing better. Hollyhocks and stuff like that. Also this year we have decided to have a real go at the "patio" area with hanging baskets and containers all over the place. Watch this space and flickr for more.

The best thing about the gardening is its totally relaxing. Even when I am working hard digging or something like that I feel totally relaxed. Its also having a sense of that its ours. Living in the school takes that away from us to some extent. We know the flat isn't really ours no matter what we do to it but no one wanted our garden before we started and no one thought it was possible to do anything with it. We have turned it from a patch of head high weeds to a "little oasis" as Sarah was saying the other day. There is no finer pleasure than looking at something beautiful and saying "I made that" apart perhaps from eating a great meal that you have cooked yourself made with ingredients you have grown yourself.

things have moved on since I was a lad

2009-04-25T15:24:00.002+01:00

I just downloaded some pretty fractal generator for my nice big quad core maxed out box. Its blindingly quick. Even full screen at maximum resolution it takes about 1/4 of a second to draw the entire screen.

When me and my brother had an amiga back in the late 80s we used to wait hours for it to render an 800x600 mandlebrot set or even leave it running overnight.

Of course thats nothing. I have worked with several people who started on paper tape or punched cards. And to top it all one guy who used to come in and help out with the computers when I was a field ecologist for the Somerset Wildlife Trust used to actually work at Bletchly Park.

How to filter out a lot of the crud that pollutes google search

2009-03-27T13:09:00.002Z

Don't search on google itself. Search on something like del.icio.us instead. That way you are searching only sites that other people have found interesting or important enough to bookmark.

Hopefully this should filter out a lot of the useless adwords paid results, "price comparison" sites, scam sites, lolcats, porn and other annoyances for you and generate you more relevant search results automatically.

This should be a huge resource for yahoo, who own del.icio.us but I guess they want to get their advertising revenue so they are not going to push it.

designing for localization

2009-03-25T21:31:00.002Z

I am working on a large site currently. One of the design requirements is that the site is easily localized as versions of it will be in use in various countries.

JSP/Java is very good at doing that sort of thing but its very important to plan carefully. Every single piece of text needs to be configurable. J2EE does this by using resource bundles. Everything is a key/value pair in a .properties file and <fmt:message> tags insert the text into the jsp. Then when a user comes to the site and their browser is set to a different locale the J2EE wizardry grabs the text from the right .properties file and the user sees the language they want.

That's the theory. And to be fair it works quite well. The trick is to plan in the localization from the start. You can't bolt it on at the end. You cant use an <input type="image"> tag to have a pretty looking button as that would mean the text would be in an image file and not localizable. So instead wrap a <button> tag with a <div> tag. The <button> tag displays the text in a nice localized way and the <div> has a pretty background image with no text.

Of course it can all come crashing down around your ears. For reasons best known to themselves the German language wont use one syllable when half a dozen will do. So your button will have the right text but it will overflow the background image. There is no real way around this though. The only thing to do is test, test and test again.

doing my bit for the internet

2009-03-07T09:50:00.002Z

I set up a flickr group a while ago for the staff at the school where I live to share pics of the school. We don't post pictures of the children for fairly obvious reasons. I set the group up so you had to ask to join just in case.

Then the other day I had an email saying some random person on flickr wanted to join the group. I checked out their profile and they had no pics at all. I checked out their groups and they had obviously searched for every group on flickr with "school" in the name and joined all the groups they could.

Very, very odd indeed. I mentioned it to Rae and we decided this was worth doing something about. I reported the person to flickr's abuse system and they "are no longer active on flickr". Good.

Oh I have yet another new job. I am now contractor scum working for Qualcomm!

Its been a very busy few months

2008-08-26T13:05:00.003+01:00

Since Easter I have changed jobs twice and moved house complete with redecorating the new place from top to bottom. Not to forget looking after Joshua and Oliver for quite a while while Julian and Heather packed ready to go to Canada. Some of the changes are detailed in a Previous post

Lets just say the job with Patersons didn't work out and was very frustrating. Then one day Rae was on MSN and said she had seen a web development job in the local paper. She said it was for a company called Lightcurve and the contact name was a guy called Stuart Lee. Well I went to school with Stuart and after an interview and a phone interview with one of their partner companies in Dublin I got the job.

Giving my notice in to Patersons was definitely a good day. Even if I had a raging hangover from drinking the best part of a bottle of champagne to celebrate getting the job. It probably turned out for the best as they were laying off people as I left.

I finished with Patersons on the 31st of July on a Thursday. Had the Friday off and met up with Neil, Sarah and the twins then and then started work on the Monday.

The new has been pretty cool. 20 minutes to drive to work is nice. A converted barn with air con instead of a tin shed to work in is nice. Not drowning in paperwork is nice. Not having 4 hour meetings at least once a week to report on "progress" is nice. Having a decent pc with two monitors instead of a laptop to work on is nice. Being able to get up at 8am, have a shower and still get into work with plenty of time is even better.

The decorating wasn't too bad. To be honest Rae did most of the painting. I painted a few ceilings and undercoated one room and she did the rest. Best thing in the world ever was the roller on the telescopic pole. It makes thing a lot easier. We spent yesterday putting up shelves and stuff. Tonight its pictures. Rae is busy making curtains too. We still don't have the lightwell sorted out but that can wait.

It was great to have the boys over too. Again Rae did most of the hard work as I was working. They can be a handful so again she did really well. I know Oliver will love his toolbelt we bought him for his birthday. He will be demolishing the furniture in Canada with any luck.

Lets hope things settle down for a while at least.

taking it slow

2008-07-28T12:49:00.002+01:00

We had a very slow weekend. Though come to think on it there was quite a lot of driving around and even the odd bit of shopping. Perhaps it just felt slow due to being incredibly relaxed for a lot of it.

Saturday was a quick trip to Yeovil in the morning then off to Warminster for Rae's Uncle David and Aunt Wendys 25 wedding anniversary . Lots of sitting around in the sun drinking (non-alcoholic for me of course) and chattting. Then over to Kellys for a barbecue the highlight of which was seeing Kelly turn her grandfathers head into a large ice gem with some spray cream. Oh and 2 1/2 pints of Pimms was very nice too...

Late start on the Sunday too then off to Dorchester to pick up a bookcase Rae bought on ebay for the new flat. Back home via Tescos and B&Q to get some odd bits and bobs. Then the rest of the day was spent floating in the pool, relaxing in the garden and watching a hot air balloon launch from one of the school fields. Oh and cooking some very nice ribs on the barbecue. We stayed out in the garden until it got dark and it was great. Just read the paper, chatted and relaxed.

Next weekend we have Neil, Sarah and the twins visiting on Friday then Julian, Heather, Joshua and Oliver arriving on Saturday for a few days before they go back to Canada. I don't think we will have much time to sit in the garden and relax then.

sometimes you cant see the wood for the trees

2008-06-03T11:57:00.002+01:00

The cyberpunks in Toxia have been looking at setting up a centralized database of information for some time. As I have a few skills in this area I was looking into it for them.

For some reason I couldn't think straight and was playing with all kinds of strange and exotic toys like RDF triplestore databases and the like. Then last night it hit me. A wiki is perfect.

What really annoys me is that I have used wikis extensively in the past both professionally and personally. Why the hell didn't I realise that the solution was so simple?

Its been a while

2008-05-28T19:57:00.003+01:00

But I am back.

One of the main reasons I have been away is that I have a new job. No more being the webmonkey in the corner at ingenta. I am now the slightly more senior webmonkey in the middle of the room at Patersons.

Ingenta made the very generous offer of "move to Oxford to work, no extra pay and no chance of working from home or take redundancy". Let me see now.... I could barely afford to work for ingenta despite having hardly any bills when I was in Bath. So... "I will take the redundancy please".

So after a bit of gardening leave and a few very annoying interviews and experiences with recruitment agencies I am now working for Patersons developing material for their websites and internal tools.

It's been interesting so far with a lot of new systems to learn. Hopefully some of the experience I gained at ingenta will be useful too.

Of course the other thing to talk about is the garden. The gardening leave did come in handy and its looking really good. Had some great rocket out of it the other day as a first crop from the veggies and some of the other stuff wont be far behind. The flowers were great this spring too. Well last year it was basically bare earth in the spring but this year we had tulips, daffodils, crocus, anemones and aliums in profusion. The tuilps were especially showy but I really like the aliums they almost look like fireworks bursting. Hopefully we will have some more food to eat soon. I reckon either pea shoots, radishes, lettuce or maybe swiss chard will be ready in a week or so. Possibly even spring onions.

We have been using our ingenuity too. I bought a little drip feed irrigation system from Tescos for a tenner and use that to water most of the containers. Then we noticed a length of hosepipe that had been lying around for ages. No one wanted it so I stabbed lots of holes in it and its now laid out on the veggie bed as a soaker hose. I can do most of the watering whilst sat on the new bench or better yet laying in the hammock I got Rae for her birthday.

Freecycle really came up trumps too. I got about 1/2 a ton of gravel for free to go along the bottom of the garden so we dont get muddy going to the new greenhouse and the wormery. Then Rae picked up a 3 tier planter thing and some hanging baskets the other day.

The other big bit of news is that we are moving house. Without leaving the building though. Hopefully in the middle of August we will be moving into another flat in the school. Its bigger and also more private. No more living next door to a bunch of screaming schoolgirls. Rae already has plans for decorating and has sent off for about 100 colour samples, or so it seems. The interesting thing is it actually has a lightwell in the middle. Nick and Karen dont use it for much but we are going to use it for houseplants and bringing on early plants for the garden.

Well thats quite enough of all that for now.

When to use programmatic constructs to get around browser failings.

2008-02-19T18:38:00.003Z

Often when I am developing a page there are things I could add to styling of the page to increase its accessibility or graphic design. Simple things such as highlighting the first paragraph of a section by changing its color or font weight. These can add immensely to the visual impression of a page with little additional work.

In theory that is. CSS provides a simple pseudo-class for the above example :first-child. IE6 doesnt implement it. Now I am left with two realistic alternatives. Either don't include that styling element and reduce the functionality of the design or work out a way to programmatically replicate that functionality in a way that IE6 can understand.

In the :first-child example its might be possible to achieve this if for instance the text for each paragraph is being individually pulled out of a database and looped through in a templating system to create the mark up. All that is necessary is to check if it is the first iteration of the loop and add a class attribute to the <p> tag which will hook into CSS to add the styling.

This is not always possible though. Perhaps the entire text for the page is stored en masse in your CMS system and its inserted into the mark up monolithically. You now cannot add in that class to find the first paragraph using your templating language.

Ok then, now what. Javascript to the rescue. You can run a bit of javascript as the page loads which selects the <div> tag representing the section, loop through its children, test to see if each child element in the DOM is a <p> tag and if its the first child. Thats messy, complex to write and error prone.

So, more javascript to the rescue. If you use a Javascript library such as jQuery which uses CSS selectors to attach actions or functions to elements in the DOM it becomes easy.

$('document').ready(function(){
 $('div.section p:first-child').addClass('emphasis');
});

does all the hard work for you.

Of course jQuery code runs perfectly well in IE6 so now you can use CSS selectors which never implemented them in the first place. There is the overhead of loading jQuery (or the library of your choice) but that is offset by caching and the like.

jQuery and its cousins do not just enable developers to create more interactive and engaging user interfaces they also enable designers to create more attractive and therefore engaging designs that will work in a wider range of browsers than ever before.

got my shiny new laptop

2008-02-11T19:49:00.000Z

After a bit of negotiation with the insurers my nice shiny new Acer 5520 arrived today. Its only the base model so no kill em all graphics card but its looking good so far.

The main thing that you notice apart from the wierd curved keyboard is how quiet it is. My old laptop was forever spinning up fans and stuff even under minimal load in windows. This one barely makes a noise no matter what I do to it.

Its also a little smaller and a lot lighter than the old one. The power supply is tiny too.

I have spent the evening installing stuff while waiting for the windows updates to come down. One thing thats coming off asap is Norton Antivirus which is as bad as having a virus in the first place. All I need now is CS3 and the stuff to connect to work and I am done I think.

Today is my lucky day

2008-02-07T13:05:00.000Z

I bought a kit kat today that had no wafer in it. Chocolate all the way through! Yum!

I found a use for AJAX on a site!

2008-01-29T12:04:00.000Z

I was ordering some seeds for the garden last night. Both of the suppliers websites I was on had a very handy feature. They had a page which assumed that you had a copy of the print catalog in front of you and therefore had the various product codes etc. On the page was a simple form with around 12 input boxes for entering product codes and the quantity for each one.

This was incredibly speedy, no searching through long listings of varieties of carrots etc to click on the right link. A really good example of integrating traditional paper based systems and e-commerce.

But the one thing it lacked was any immediate feedback on the product code you typed in for each input box. You had to wait until you pressed "add to cart" and check the contents of your cart very carefully to see if you had made a typo entering in your product codes.

With a little bit of ajax you could check the product code when the box looses focus and return a little bit of text or even a picture to show what that code relates to. Less errors, more feedback and better interaction.

Starting to like javascript again

2008-01-16T19:10:00.000Z

It used to be "javascript is evil, its only used to make bells and whistles that dont do anything useful".

I would jump through all kinds of hoops to avoid using javascript where it would have been very useful. I never really liked javascript coding anyway. It was always so repetitive with document.getElementById all over the place and lots of browser sniffing to get things right.

Then AJAX started making things even more complicated... and to be honest I don't see the point of most AJAX based sites. A lot of them use AJAX for the sake of it just like the javascript bells and whistles of old.

Early AJAX code was a complete mess too. Even more browser sniffing to be done and lots of complicated stuff to consider and code for. Along came javascript libraries that promise to take care of a lot of this stuff. I still didn't like a lot of them as they tried to force their own syntax which didn't always make a lot of sense. Some of them are like prototype / scriptalicious are tied to other frameworks etc fairly tightly. Others concentrate on silly interface widgets I never see anyone seriously use.

Now I have discovered JQuery and really like it. I like how you use css selectors to choose what to work with... I love how you can chain things together and I love how its possible to do AJAX and AHAH code with a single function. The onReady functionality instead of onLoad is fantasitic

I had to write a load of javascript today and it was a breeze. Select the element you want with CSS, attach a load of actions to it and impress some one in under 5 minutes.

the new cat is setting in nicely

2007-11-19T12:16:00.000Z

We acquired a new kitten last week. Her name is Millie though personally I think she should be called "special" as in "my mummy says I am special". Basically for it to be any more dumb it would have to be a rock. It walks into things that are there and spends ages apparently looking at stuff no one else can see.

On the plus side of things it has found loads of little things we lost around the flat. Also it produced a tennis ball from somewhere. No idea where though.

This post fulfills a prophecy of mine some time ago that all I would be able to write about would be kittens in this blog.

Halting State

2007-10-30T12:42:00.000Z

I have been on holiday for the last couple of weeks and one of the books I read was Charles Stross' Halting State. I am a big fan of his work and books like Acclerando and Glasshouse are some of my favourites of recent years.

Halting State is one of the few books I have read recently that I couldn't put down. I read it in two sessions interrupted only by sleeping. I really liked the way that it took things that are out there in the real world and different virtual worlds and blended them all together with a bit of speculative spice to create something believable.

At times it was a bit too current mentioning events in Real Life and even Second Life that have happened very recently as part of the historical background to the storyline. I personally think this will make the book date really quickly but there you go. On the other hand its whole idea of being able to transfer an avatar from one virtual world to another is a hot topic right now. IBM and others are said to be working on a "standard" to describe and avatar.

The characterization was the weak point for me. There were the usual "office" stereotypes of the geek, accountant with hidden depths, bastard CEO, moronic marketeer etc. and the spies were straight from central casting too.

The plot rattles along though twisting and turning as it goes. There are some things you can spot a mile off such as "I wonder when that characters real life sword fighting experience will come in handy". There was a sort of red herring for this but it was obvious that this would be used at a climatic moment. Having said that some of the plot twists come right out of the blue and are really clever. No spoilers though.

I know I have pointed out quite a few flaws with this book but I really liked it. It was even better to get to buy it in Canada well ahead of its uk release too.

This is weird

2007-10-03T18:03:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine started a blog when he started out traveling in Australia a while ago. I added it to my bloglines to keep an eye on it. Ross eventually didn't bother updating it but I also forgot to delete it from my blogroll in bloglines.

Today its now called "secured visa". Its at the same blogspot address and everything and is the worst sort of spam blog.

I don't think Ross is up to creating a bunch of spammy links so I guess somehow or another his blog has been compromised. Its here here if you want to get bombarded by the usual crap that fills up your inbox

An early open source success story

2007-09-19T19:47:00.000+01:00

Thee was an item on the bbc tonight about a collection of Chippendale furniture that has been saved for the nation. One bookcase was reckoned to be worth about 4 million quid at the very least.

What interested me though was that Chippendale published a pattern book so anyone could use his designs. You can see it at Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture. This was open source furniture making.

Chippendales business model was to let anyone make copies of his work. That meant that anyone could see how his furniture looked. His very high end "consultancy" service for very rich clients meant they got the very best quality goods from his own workshops and also a great deal of advice on how to maximize their potential in the clients (stately) homes.

This isn't too dissimilar to a company like Red Hat today. Let anyone download Fedora Core and have all the fun of setting things up and optimizing things themselves or pay for the full on Red Hat release but get some consultants from Red Hat helping you make things work smoothly.

And the whole idea of open source is meant to be novel and unique... try telling that to an 18th Century cabinet maker (who also incidentally made a lot of money).

Travelling by train

2007-09-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

I actually like traveling by train, perhaps because I don't many chances to actually do it.

However the reality is often disappointing. Take my trip yesterday. The outward leg of the journey was great. Not too crowded, 1 easy connection to make, nice clean trains, even the bacon roll for breakfast wasn't that bad. I even thought at one point I wouldn't mind making a trip like this once a week or so.

The return trip was a nightmare. The taxi to the station took ages to show up. Thats more might fault though for not booking it far enough in advance. I got a train for the first part of the journey with no problem. Then the when I got off I was greeted with a message saying the next connecting train was canceled as there were not enough drivers. Bugger. Sit on the station for an hour waiting for the next one. Of course thats rammed solid as its a commuter train and its now rush hour and its got twice as many people as normal. I sit next to some polish girl and get elbowed in the ribs every time she turns the page of her book.

The next connection is a mere 10 minutes late. This is good as its normally a sprint across the station to make it affair. I get a seat and its in the quiet carriage which isn't too busy.

From now on the trip should be a doddle. Just remember to wake up in time to get off. Oh no. Some chav gets on and sits behind me somewhere and gets out his phone. He then proceeds to have a big shouting argument with however he is phoning. Lots of swearing too. Eventually this stops and a bloke opposite him says. "Excuse me this is the quite carriage, and you shouldn't be talking like that on the phone in public anyway". The chav now lays into this poor bloke "You can't tell me what to fucking do" etc etc etc. He then starts threatening the poor bloke so myself and several others come to his aid. Eventually the guard turns up and to a polite round of applause throws him off the train at the next station into the waiting arms of the police.

Eventually I get home two and a quarter hours late, pissed off, fed up and vowing to drive everywhere from now on. Its a typical train experience for me. No matter what you personally do to make things go well events conspire against you.

The worst part of the rugby at the weekend

2007-09-17T08:33:00.000+01:00

It was all god awful but the very, very worst part of it was when Jason Robinson finally got quick ball in a bit of space and his hamstring went.

The South Africans realised what happened and just stood over him and made no attempt to get the ball. Our late arriving, brain-dead pack saw it as an ideal opportunity for a pick up and drive over the top of the injured Robinson. Then they managed to once again drop it and had to be told by the ref that Robinson was injured. I bet it did Robinson's hamstring the power of good having the forwards "rumble" all over it too.

Rubbish all round.

are the augmenting people just more subtle immersionist?

2007-09-10T12:41:00.000+01:00

I was reading a New York Times overview article about SL yesterday and it made a big point of the incredibly materialistic lifestyle of many avatars. It mentioned bling and McMansions and how everyone wants to "fulfill the American Dream in SL".

You could look at it that the people living the virtual American dream are playing a role playing game whilst doing their shopping, dancing and chatting. The rules are not as defined and no one gets hurt, status is not defined by XP or Level but is definitely there in following the latest trends and being first to have the "hot new look".

Its still playing out a role. You role playing identity enables you to, "wear the most fashionable clothes, have the perfect, beautiful body and live in a wonderful mansion."

Its ultimately the same as some one who wants to be a half human - half fox creature and live in a magical forest. The difference is what you want to wear and where you like to live, not vast cultural differences. The difference is the way the same escapist fantasy is expressed as opposed to a radical difference between cultures.

So perhaps we are not immersionist or augmentors but just plain old escapists

which comes first

2007-09-03T13:16:00.001+01:00

The html or the css?

For a change I am currently working on a lot of box-fresh new designs rather than extending existing stuff. There are lots of very detailed design in psd or jpg form for me to convert into nice semantic html/css.

Its been interesting working out the best way to create the semantic meaning of content in html and then convert that into a working layout using css. Starting from scratch means I have complete control but also means a lot more to work out.

Is writing science fiction futile?

2007-08-31T08:04:00.000+01:00

I was talking with Rae last night about Sci-fi in general. Rae isn't a sci-fi fan at all but is quite curious about some of the weird and wonderful books I read.

I mentioned that every older sci-fi book that tried to predict the future we are living in now turns out to be comprehensively wrong as the author doesn't know that technology X is coming along which changes everything.

From Jules Verne through the golden age of Asimov and Clarke to the modern day cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks sci-fi authors have tried to write books set 50 years in the future (The millennium was always a good date too). Jules Verne's astronauts traveled to the moon in a giant artillery shell as he didn't predict the advances in rockets. Clarke wrote stories of spaceships flitting across the void with hardly any communications between them and William Gibson wrote about cyberspace but didn't know mobile phones would revolutionize communications.

As I see it there are 3 routes open to a modern sci-fi author.

Complete fantasy. Make up anything you like. Lets face it more or less anything might happen so why not make up stuff. Telepathy, faster than light travel, Gods walking the earth as Neil Gamain writes in American Gods and Anansi Boys.
Set your book more or less in the present or only a very short time ahead. William Gibson and Neal Stephenson have used this well in books like Spook Country and Cryptonomicon.
Try and predict the future like those that have gone before you. Something like Bruce Sterlings later books such as Heavy Weather and Distraction.

Where sci-fi is really good is when it uses the future to tell us important things about the present. Asimov's I Robot stories told us about the human condition using a robot to explain what it is like to be human. Neuromancer tells us about the breakdown of society in the face of mega-corporations and how the fringes of a society are its most interesting parts.

Writers like Charles Stross who believe in the singularity and transhumanisim have an even harder task. They believe the future is totally and utterly unpredictable past a given point but they still try to write about it but not in terms of complete fantasy. At the same time Stross' imaginings of more or less immortal transhuman beings living in facilities orbiting distant brown dwarf stars in the distant future can provide insights into our current lives and condition.

I have always loved sci-fi ever since I used to get all the books with yellow covers from the mobile library when I was about 13 (Gollcanz' Masters of Sci Fi series of reprints always had bright yellow covers, you could judge a book by its cover back then). Sci-fi makes important points that "serious literature" often misses as it dismisses sci-fi as "genre fiction" and lumps it together with crime novels and romantic fiction etc. Crime novels have been "rehabilitated" to some extent in the last few years. Its time to come out of the shadows for serious sci-fi.

the bugs and nasties fight back

2007-08-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

The caterpillars decimated the broccoli. I was just saying to Rae that they looked ready to eat and 2 days later there was virtually nothing left of them. Now blight has killed the tomatoes just as they were starting to bear fruit too.

Still its our only real disasters and there wasnt much we could do about them without using lots of chemicals.

Cute SL vs the grimy underbelly

2007-08-21T09:18:00.000+01:00

So much of what I read about second life shows the side the lindens want the world to see. Smart well dressed AVs going to well organised and planned events run by corporations or at least with some level of corporate sponsorship. Even the more "out there" SL sexuality blogs are generally fairly tame and as far as a I can see discuss what sexy underwear is available out there.

I would argue that most of the creativity in SL is actually in the areas that the Lindens dont want the world to see. Roleplay sims, sex sims, all the nasty seedy underbelly basically. This is often where real innovation comes from. Who cares if someone has found a new way to make a shirt and tie look more realistic? That doesnt really add anything to the world. New ways of animating avs, weapons, scripts etc are far more technically advanced and are being developed every day in more "adult" or violent areas.

The level of individual creativity is much higher too in RP or Adult areas. It takes a lot of effort to Role Play effectively to the benefit of your fellow RPers. The corporate, sanitized side of SL reduces the world to walking around window shopping and chatting to other drones.

I would argue that a lot of people come to second life to escape the corporate, consumer society. They want to do things in SL they could never do in RL. If thats being a hooker, changing sex, changing species, or blasting a vampire in the face at point blank range with a shotgun, or anything else, SL lets them do that.

I would even be willing to bet that most of the people who create accounts and leave after a while are the people who never get to explore the more "unusual" areas of second life. The sanitized, "friendly", corporate areas are DULL. Its that which makes many people loose interest.

P.S. I hear through the grapevine that some other people I work with are setting up stuff in SL. If I even end up going to a "meeting" in SL for work I will be turning up in a full cyborg AV and carrying at least one weapon ;)

And a very good time was had by all

2007-08-13T09:59:00.000+01:00

Sunday was the Barrington Cricket Club Twenty20 competition and it went rather well indeed. The threatened rain never materialized. The sun shone and grown men made fools of themselves on a cricket field.

The Barrington Oak team beat the Duke of York in the warm up game. One of the Shepton batsmen was heard to enquire if anyone had a defibrillator handy when he returned from his innnings.

The main even was the annual battle between the young bucks and the increasingly crocked old ones. Sad to say us old ones actually lost this year, mainly due to our sportsmanship in making a game of it in the first place. Jess brought on Stevie and myself to chuck a couple of overs worth of pies at them to help things out. Then when I took an absolutely magnificent catch after Duncan top edged a Wellman delivery that came down with snow on it it went up so high we graciously called it an above waist height no ball meaning they had one ball left to get one run which they just managed to do.

The best bit about it was we made around £800 on the day which more or less pays for the second eleven running cost for the entire of next season.

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the garden

2007-08-09T08:43:00.000+01:00

Cabbage white caterpillars attack the broccoli!

I spent a lovely 10 minutes picking them off and squishing them yesterday evening.

its all coming up roses

2007-08-08T08:26:00.000+01:00

Except we didn't plant roses but if we had they would have come up.

The garden transforms itself every day. The flowers are going mad. Big pink things have appeared everywhere. We dug out some of the annuals that have gone over and replaced them with perennials and thats looking good.

The veggie garden is going great too. We have had carrots, lettuce, 2 sorts of onions, spinach, rocket, courgettes, peas and beans so far. The broccoli is nearly ready. The herbs are fantastic with the parsley, basil, mint and oregano standing out right now. We should have more coriander soon too.

The path area is looking great. The thyme is spreading nicely after looking sorry for itself to start with. (its great in cous cous too) The forget-me-nots will be great next year too.

The lawn has a few weeds in it but I am going to dig them out soon but apart from that its looking great.

The tomatoes and peppers are looking good too. We have tiny little peppers and tomatoes forming on the plants so it wont be long before we get to eat them too.

My favourite are the sunflowers. They must be getting up to around 8 or 9 feet tall. I had to construct a system of guy lines to stabilize the canes they are growing up. All from a little tiny seed.

Either gardening is very easy indeed or we have a natural talent.

semantic HTML is hard to do

2007-08-03T12:32:00.000+01:00

I am working on a rather complicated form for a new project at the moment. Its a search form basically but there are a few more options than the google front page. There are all kinds of faceted search features on there which require a lot of form controls.

I have got the basic layout working (in FF at least) using just <fieldset> tags instead of <div> tags. <ul> tags provide lists of form controls and there are <legend> and <label> tags everywhere. Everything is semantic and accessible. I even carefully chose the id and class attributes of the elements to add even more meaning.

Now I have the achieve the layout required. Now I have to add in empty <div> tags to create nice borders and curved corners. Straight away there has to be a compromise and loss of semantic meaning. Ok so a <div> doesn't really have any semantics attached to it but when it wraps other tags there is an implication that it is "superior" to them.

I just cant wait for CSS3 when I can attach images to borders and corners.

another way of making SL more newbie friendly

2007-07-31T18:54:00.000+01:00

I was chatting in toxia with a few people the other day. We were privately making fun of a very obvious newbie on the other side of the street. They stood out a mile in their jeans, t-shirt and bad hair.

We were talking about how bad newbies look in general, particularly and especially furry newbies when someone floated the idea of LL supplying better avatars for free when you sign up. It wouldn't take a lot of effort to provide some avatars that look a lot better for newbies to choose from. Realistic body shapes and skin for a start. Better clothes and attachments. You could have a furry or two that dont look like cheap dressing up outfits, a goth, a mecha or cyborg all kinds of stuff. Make them copyable and modifiable and things would look a lot more interesting in places like the Shelter.

Then again the first thing most people spend money on is new av and clothes which generates lots of money for the Lindens....

Toxian City Blues

2007-07-16T08:28:00.000+01:00

Once again I found myself in Toxian city at the weekend, mainly on Sunday. Two things always strike me about the place. The first is the atmosphere of course. I think they really have managed to capture the dystopian, cyberpunk look for architecture pretty well.

The second is the way people generally fight there. Its just like a school yard. Someone calls someone else out and the just blaze away at one another. This might be fine for personal disputes but as far as I can see its the same for war between the rival factions.

If I was running a faction I would be ambushing my rivals in carefully planned set ups. Sure I would go into the Haven or where ever and call them out but make sure I had my footsoldiers on the roofs opposite with sniper rifles and heavy weapons. The moment they get out of the door hit them with all you got. No quarter asked or given.

So its not the "honourable" thing to do. Toxia is a shit hole. Rats don't have honour. Any of the main groups who took this advice would be running the place in a couple of weeks even if the others tried to band against them. All it takes is a little planning and skill.

Of course it would ruin the whole set up long term. The continual squabbles are a big part of the atmosphere (the distant gunfire helps a lot) and of course it actually gives you something to role play. Though it might be fun to try an organise a resistance against one dominant group. Ambushing and picking off their members etc.

just another day in Toxian City

2007-07-09T12:30:00.000+01:00

Well the shit hit the fan in a big way. Or rather rising lava deep underground met loads of barrels of hiExplosives / toxic waste causing them to detonate randomly. Toxic ash is falling from the sky making everyone unwell and building up in the streets.

Toxia got shittier than ever in other words.

The hospital seems a fairly safe place to be. I hear the church and the pit are too. What gets me is that everyone seems to huddle in the safe places and rack up the experience points for doing so. There might be a way of working out the details of whats going on and coming up with a solution. If things are still bad when I next log in I will try and get some like minded people together to see what we can come up with. Perhaps there is a pattern to the explosions at the least. There might even be a way of diverting the lava.

I never really got into role playing games before

2007-07-03T12:09:00.000+01:00

I always avoided table top games like D&D or Warhammer before decent computer RPGs came out. I never got into their equivalents like Diabolo or WoW on the pc either. I was never one for the old school type of adventure pc games either, apart from the Monkey Island games.

I have spent the last few days in SL in Toxian City (Sloog Link here). Its certainly interesting...

I created my character as nominally human though following an accident I have been extensively cybernetically rebuilt. New spine, neck, skull, arms and legs though I retain a human brain and I am approximately 56% organic.

Did I mention guns? Toxia is full of very tooled up people. Most go for sidearms or bladed weapons. I either go for a 12-gauge pump action or a 40mm fully auto grenade launcher depending on my mood. Of course unlike most of the rest of SL you get to actually use the guns too. I haven't killed anyone yet in Toxia. I came close to shooting an annoying moron whoring/begging for money or experience points. As I had my grenade launcher and it was indoors it wouldn't have worked really and I would have killed most of the other people there in the crossfire. I need to get some pistols for close in work when I have the grenade launcher as my main weapon. I fancy a pair of sawn off 12-gauges instead of the usual 9mms.

Just when I was getting bored with SL a bit something new comes up.

how to go to a festival and not get muddy

2007-07-01T14:23:00.000+01:00

Go to SecondFest of course.

Though to be honest it wasn't awe inspiring. I only managed to get any streaming sound or video once. And yes I did check it was working elsewhere. The build was nice and there was quite a lot to do and see (but not hear obviously).

I thought that RiversRunRed made a big mistake though. They made it too much like a real life festival. Everything was miles apart, it was hard to find your way around and the sound quality was crap. (had to say that one more time), also various prim attachments for my AV kept vanishing

Some teleporters would have been good. I saw lots of people touching signposts expecting them to work as teleports. I ended up using the main map in SL to navigate. You could have done the whole thing in a lot smaller space that would have been more SL friendly I am sure. Stack stuff vertically or something. I guess the different stages had to be on different sims for the streaming music to work well but use your imagination... at the least put in teleports.

The best bit was wandering around in a big scary cyborg av and getting all the newbies gawping at me. Should have took my new Mk19 grenade launcher for some real fun. I did wear a katana with my nice cyberpunk outfit (call me Neo) and some of the RiversRunRed people were very snotty... just thought I was another punk looking to cause trouble I guess.

I havent seen so many newbies in ages though. The worst of all are furry newbies.. they look like they are wearing a kids fancy dress outfit and plastic mask.

I much preferred taking out a couple of nekkos in Toxia with my grenade launcher. If your going to open fire randomly dont shot at the guy with the biggest weapon around with a little 9mm pistol.

SL is getting there as a platform

2007-06-26T12:10:00.000+01:00

I have just installed a RSS viewer in my house in SL. At the moment it can only take in one feed though so its more of a tech demo than something useful. I guess in the future you will be able to have something that takes in multiple feeds or an OPML file so you can sit in your virtual office and keep in touch with RL.

Then again I hear that sooner or later you will be able to turn a wall into a fully functioning Mozilla browser and visit any page you want. Then you would need a way of accessing and editing external files (in vim of course) from SL, a SSH client and terminal emulator and while we are at it have the ability to launch programs on your own computer from inside SL. How about buttons on the surface of a desk?

Then you have LL's holy grail where SL becomes the interface part of your computers OS

needed my swords today

2007-06-25T20:57:00.001+01:00

Got in my first fight in Second Life.

I decided to go exploring in Nexus Prime. Ok so it was more like falling randomly down from the nice polished corporate areas to the sewers. No nice... Anyway I was wandering aimlessly getting very lost indeed when a couple of dots showed up on my local map. Well of course up to now residents of SL have been so friendly so I thought I would ask them to show me the way out. Turns out they were not too friendly and basically attacked me on sight. At least they didnt have any projectile weapons rezzed to hand as I just had my trusty pair of katanas rezzed. One had what looked like a baseball bat and the other had a sword of some type.

Somehow I managed to polish them both off! I got one with the katana's "slash both jugular veins at once" move and managed to get the other with some mad whirling attack.

Needless to say I teleported the hell out of there before anyone else showed up. Here is a pic of my trusty katans slicing the air in my SL home. Just call me Hiro Protagonist!

Eating in

2007-06-18T11:54:00.000+01:00

Time for an update about the garden.

Things have been doing really well lately. Once we identified the plantains as weeds it was easy to get rid of them by hand weeding. We had half a wheelbarrow full of weeds and gone over lettuce out at the weekend. The worms had a good feed.

Hopefully this week we will see the first flowers to bloom properly and I reckon by this time next week we will be eating carrots, peas and courgettes too and maybe spring onions.

The only real fly in the ointment are the weeds that have come up in the lawn and the slugs and snails eating stuff. Both to be expected I guess.

Plans are already afoot for next year. We hope to be a lot more organised and plant more stuff and not just plant loads of lettuce all at once. Hopefully we will have sweetcorn, raspberries, potatoes and more beans. We might even take over another plot of spare land.

This is wierd

2007-06-11T12:32:00.000+01:00

For the second month running my credit card company has rung me to check that my payments to Linden Lab for my subscription to SecondLife are legit. Apparently a lot of people who have been the victims of identity theft have had SecondLife accounts set up in their name.

Thats all very well and good. I am sure your average scum sucking identity thief doesn't want to pay to play. But what its in it for them in the long run? The only thing I can think of its that once the account is set up they would buy lots of L$ using the stolen card details and then transfer them to an account they have "legitimate" access to and convert them into US$ and get them back into the real world.

I would have though the rate of exchange between US$ and L$ wouldn't make this too profitable or just too complex. But on the other hand its a great way to use a third party system to launder your money.

I guess it could be relatively hard to track too. User A buys a lot of L$ on their credit card. Very quickly transfers a lot of them to user B who very quickly moves them back into US$. Not an uncommon practice I would have thought especially in the seedier side of things.

Now if you were being really clever and had access to lots of stolen credit cards you could buy LOTS of L$ and see if you could get into the currency speculation market.

is Linden Lab raising the barrier for making money in SL?

2007-06-06T12:01:00.000+01:00

I spent some time the other evening scaring people with my new AV whilst looking at the new things people have come up with by using sculpties. And very impressive they are too. Animated sculpties even more so.

I can see why people who understand 3D modeling have been crying out for features like this. Sculpties make creating content easier and you can be more creative if you know what you are doing.

I always thought that the default building tools in SL were great for newcomers though as they enable you to get on and build something fairly easily. Having to download, install and learn to use something like Blender or Maya is not trivial. It might be a step too far for many users.

This means that user creativity in SL (which is probably its greatest resource) will be limited to fewer and fewer specialists. There will be more pretty stuff to look at short term but there is a long term risk that SL will exclude people who want to tinker with their own little 3D world and maybe make enough money in game to pay for playing it.

Again this comes back to my proposition that SL at the moment is like the early days of the web. The ratio of creators of content to users of content is fairly high. As things get more complex creation is left to specialists and experts. This can in some cases stifle creativity as opposed to merely creating.

A change of heart

2007-05-31T21:41:00.000+01:00

I have spent the last year in second life making my av look as much like me as possible. Then I thought, "what the hell". I don't like furries or porn stars... I certainly wasn't going to change sex. I did buy a HUGE ED209 av complete with a wide range of weapons but in the end settled on a terminator style cyborg.

Then for fun I got a "relaxed pose" AO to make my new av look nice and chilled out and not scary. Then I got a pair of katanas and some very nice animations for them... to be a bit scary.

Back to javascript for form validation

2007-05-22T12:32:00.000+01:00

Many years ago I used to spend ages with dreamweaver doing form validation stuff. I pointed and clicked to my hearts content setting up validation rules.

Then Jackob Nielsen came along and said "too much javascript is a bad thing. Do server side form validation instead." And we saw it was a good thing and did server side form validation.

Recently we got absolutely fed up with using JSF for forms at ingenta for one of the projects we are working on. Its a nightmare at the best of times and it cant handle dynamically generated forms which is what we wanted to do. So guess what we are using for form validation now? Go on guess.

I spent some time skipping around the DOM with javascript myself to try and write my own script to do it. Then I thought, "Why bother, someone else must have done it before me.

This is a great way of doing things. Include the libraries, a few snippets of javascript to link it into the page and a bit of css and away you go.

I can't help feeling I am going round in little circles though.

Amazing SL building

2007-05-09T18:19:00.001+01:00

Amazing SL building
Originally uploaded by Rob 'n' Rae.

One of the most amazing virtural buildings I have ever seen. Its a Amazon's Web Services Island and was created by French architect Joshua Culdesac.

Its not exactly user friendly. I spent ages trying to walk or fly from one level to another. It was only when I flew outside with the aim of getting onto the roof that I noticed the elevator.

Some of the textures are a little half baked. There is some plywood in places even. That doesn't detract from an absolutely amazing building that could only exist in a virtual world with sandbox physics.

and our first meal using things from the garden

2007-05-06T18:41:00.001+01:00

and our first meal using things from the garden
Originally uploaded by Rob 'n' Rae.

well the greens are from the garden. Fresh lettuce, spinach and rocket. Absolutely delicious. One day soon I want to have a mackerel salad where I have caught the mackerel and all the rest of the stuff on the plate is from the garden.

using card sorting for other things

2007-05-06T17:17:00.000+01:00

Rae is doing an OU degree at the moment and she was really struggling with her current assignment. She had a whole bunch of ideas and concepts floating around but couldnt work out the relationships between them in order to write her essay. Obviously this is really frustrating.

So what we did was write every idea and concept on its own post-it note and use a convienient door to stick them on, randomly at first. Then we did something in between a mind mapping exercise and a card sort. First we re-arranged them into clusters of related concepts. Then we arranged them with the most important idea at the top of each cluster. Then we finally arranged the clusters into the order that Rae is going to write about them.

Using spatial organization and chunking the concepts into manageable groups made us both think on how the concepts were related in new ways. We could easily re-arrange things and re-sort them by using the post-it notes.

Rae really liked the way of doing things like this. Its a good mental kick start.

Our new toy for the garden

2007-05-03T20:44:00.000+01:00

Our wormery arrived today. Its pretty cool. Everything about it is made from recycled material. (apart from the worms)

We set it up tonight and put the worms in with a nice feed of some left over lettuce and stuff.

Hopefully by the end of the summer we will be producing our own worm poo compost. If my Dad finds out you can use it to breed worms for fishing there wont be any left within a couple of weeks.

using a ruler to work out CSS positioning

2007-05-01T14:23:00.000+01:00

Is not as mad as it seems when someone has sent you a word document that they want "made into a web page that prints out just like this."

I ended up using print stylesheets, @page rules and conditional comments for IE to get it all lined up just so.

Blood and sweat certainly

2007-04-23T17:58:00.000+01:00

I was looking through our pics on flickr today. The three below really caught my eye.

These are more or less the beginning middle and current progress of our garden. We went from an unmanagable tangle of coarse grass and weeds to a nice neat well ordered but still developing garden between May 2005 and nearly May 2007. Of course the wedding took up most of 2006 so we didnt get much done apart from getting dad to spray everything with agent orange to kill everything more or less stone dead last September. In fact the last two pictures are just under a month apart

We have rotorvated, built raised beds, raised plants from seed and planted others, put in a "shed" to store all our stuff, put together a mini-greenhouse, terraced one bank, built two paths and even made a scarecrow. All in the last month. We still have to terrace the other bank, move the arch and some of the plants to better locations and plant a few more plants out. Then we get into mowing the lawn and harvesting our veggies whilst admiring the decorative plants. Tonight I did my first bit of hoeing... first of many I think.

It gives both of us a real sense of satisfaction to do something that you can really see. Make a small but significant, to us anyway, contribution to the school, our lives and in a tiny way the planet once we start eating our own food.

Stop the presses! we have just bought a wormery to make our own compost for us.

a great weekend

2007-04-17T20:43:00.000+01:00

We had a long weekend in Titley just outside of Leominster over the weekend. The weather was amazing. 25 degrees plus in the middle of April cant be sniffed at. The only problem was that it was really hazy so we couldnt really see the views.

We spent some time exploring the "black and white" villages of Herefordshire, lots of chocolate box houses and nice pubs.

We both really liked Hay on Wye too. Lots of very nice second hand bookshops. Rae managed to get some collections of Simone de Beauvoir's letters she has been keeping and eye out for. I got loads of random stuff including a book on how cool and amazing the Internet is written in 1993.

Then when we got back things have really started to look up in the garden. We have the beginnings of a lawn! Green stuff is coming up everywhere. Some of it isn't quite where we planted things... we will have to be vigillant.

AJAX pros and cons

2007-04-09T19:02:00.000+01:00

AJAX is a wonderful technology. It enables web developers to break free of the shackles of having to reload a page every time the user has the tiniest interaction with it. The key word in the previous sentence was “tiniest”. It would be pointless to develop a whole AJAX interface for a web based application were everything was handled asynchronously. It would actually be confusing for the user. Users are now used to that little (and getting smaller with more and better broadband) delay between their action and its consequences. The browser provides them with several visual cues as to what is going on. The throbber throbs, the cursor changes, finally the user sees the page redraw.

These visual cues actually reassure the user. They can see they have done something and something is happening elsewhere as a consequence of their action. If they perform an action and nothing happens at all to tell them that their action is being worked upon they become frustrated. Sooner or later this frustration leads to them doing something that has serious consequences like submitting an order form twice in the time it took for the first AJAX call to be processed or more likely leaving the site and taking their business elsewhere.

The AJAX interface designer has to recognise this problem and try to either work with it or work around it. The classic response is to quickly replace some content with a little count down timer or such like while the actual work gets done and then display the real new content. This works well for most simple content. It provides visual feedback to the user. They know their action will get a response. The users patience is still time limited. No one (apart from flash UI designers) likes sitting looking at a progress bar creep across their screen.

For larger more complex interactions it is probably best to stick with a traditional page reload. That way the user is reassured by the browser that important work is going on. Not some icon that looks sort of like a countdown timer but may be something entirely different.

I think all the good web 2.0 sites recognize this. Flickr uses a lot of AJAX but sensibly restricts it to things that can be quickly updated. Where complex interactions are need such as in its organizr it uses flash. Del.icio.us doesn't use AJAX at all. Digg uses a great deal of AJAX if the user is submitting comments etc but again only for small interactions.

The two areas that seems to work well with lots of AJAX are things like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and its various competitors. I personally think this is because they emulate interfaces and interactions that their users are already very familiar with. Often the interaction is simply typing text. Making something bold is not hard to do quickly. The other is in mapping. Google Maps leads the way here of course and it was many peoples introduction to AJAX. There is something very intuitive about dragging a map around and zooming it. If you could bottle it you could make a fortune. However once again its actually a small interaction at each step. “Move left 2 units” etc.

The one thing that in-experienced designers or managers always want is “drag and drop functionality” Macromedia were doing this from Flash 3 / Dreamweaver 4 onwards. And when did you see a drag and drop shopping cart on a web site? Script.aulico.us and other javascript libraries have drag and drop capabilities which are probably a waste of the developers time to write. Why is this. I personally think drag and drop is beyond a lot of non-expert computer users. (even though it is meant for beginners) I have taught computing for the terrified courses. Its there you get a real feeling for users. Yes you become very cynical and jaded but when you have seen people struggling to manage cut and paste or double clicking you realise that anything more complex is beyond most people who use computers. And its no good thinking that in time the level of ignorance will decrease and skill increase. Think of the developing world for instance.

AJAX is wonderful. It can transform some simple tasks on websites. Don't count on developing an entire AJAX interface and your product being successful though. You can have too much of a good thing essentially.

forget SL, forget coding, forget games

2007-04-06T18:06:00.000+01:00

Gardening is far more sastifying.

Spent all afternoon working on the garden. Spread lime on the veg bed and dug it in. Rae built the arch for the clematis and we put it up. Planted all the perennial flowers. Raked and leveled the lawn area one last time before we seed it tomorrow. And we have more stuff coming up in the mini greenhouse!

Tomorrow we sow the grass seed for the lawn and plant lots of veggies. Its all coming together nicely and will look great by the end of the summer hopefully.

Tomorrow is the last really big hard day at it with any luck. The rest of it should be watering, weeding and picking stuff to eat.

what goes around comes around

2007-04-02T10:32:00.000+01:00

I think no matter what job I do I end up having to hand correct vast amounts of badly-written HTML.

My first web job was with a company called VK Research (now gone to the dogs obviously) and it basically involved hand editing a bunch of unworkable html to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. The same when I worked at Cannington College, The same a Pulse and now admittedly after quite a break the same again at Ingenta.

Right now I find myself with a mountain of poor quality html to bash into shape. Back to square one I guess.

ouch my back hurts

2007-03-26T11:57:00.000+01:00

And my legs, and my shoulders and even my hands ache. There is a small bit just to the left of my navel that seems to be ok but everything else hurts.

Yep, we spent the weekend in a frenzy of gardening. We hired a huge rotorvator and blitzed everything in sight back to completely bare soil, and stones. Lots and lots of stones. We are still finding more. Every time I went over any part of the garden we turned up more stones. I think the area must have been used as either a dump for rubble when the extension was put on or possibly its from the original construction of the house. Rae spent most of Saturday morning picking them up while I grappled with the rotorvator.

Then on saturday afternoon we started construction of the shuttering for the raised beds. This was a good mixture of trial and error and actual uses for geometry and trigonometry. Pythagoras was right after all. I always wondered what the practical application of all that stuff in maths lessons was. We used 3-4-5 triangles and other stuff like that to make things more or less square and even. Sadly we ran out of charge on the drill and a few other problems meant we didn't get it quite finished on Saturday.

On Sunday we got my brother and as many bags of well rotted horse poo as we could fit in the car. We finished off the construction of the shuttering with David moaning all the time. (OK we were a little off at times) Then we spread the poo around in the raised beds and took soil off the high spots in the lawn area to make the inner level of the bed to the top of the shuttering whilst mixing in the poo. I got that lovely job.

Then we rotorvated again as walking around making the beds etc had compacted the soil again.

Another trip to Wickes and the poo place gained us more poo, yes more, plus gravel, grass seed, hose pipes etc. When we got back I dug in the poo for the flower bed. I always got the job of digging in the poo. Rae moved the stones we had dug out to make one path and we laid the gravel to make another. One last raking to make it look pretty and that was it.

One long hot bath and a good nights sleep later.... and I still feel like I am 70

A nice way of using SL to sell stuff

2007-03-21T19:09:00.000Z

I have been getting very into the architectural side of things in SL lately. Its interesting to see how an RL architect creates stuff in SL. It appears that most of them moan that they can't import their models from existing software into SL directly. Of course this misses the point in that SL is designed to make it possible for anyone with a minimum of skill and no tools to create content. Just like HTML can be created in your favourite text editor instead of Dreamweaver.

I digress... I was on Architecture island and came across Crescendo design. This is a real life green / sustainable architecture practice in the states which is using SL as an environment in which to demo its designs to customers and as a show-case.

They even offer every r/l customer a virtual version of their r/l home before construction starts in the real world. This enables them to try out things in SL before they become an issue in r/l such as finishes etc.

This seems to be to me the perfect way to meld SL business with r/l. What could be better than trying out your new house before its even built.

I know this firefox extension would be a good thing BUT

2007-03-08T08:14:00.000Z

Just saw Pageaddict which is a firefox extension which allows you to set limits on the time you visit various sites.

I know that in theory that is a great idea but in practice I WANT MY FUN!

Gardening is fun

2007-03-05T19:46:00.001Z

The more I do the more I like it.

Office Space is just so good

2007-03-04T08:39:00.000Z

Finally got to watch it last night. Best £5 I ever spent on a DVD. Its just so funny becasue its true. Well apart from the part about the stapler. Apparently you cant get red swingline staplers for real.

I think my favourite bit was Tom Smykowski's interview with the Bobs. There are just some many people like him out there still even after downsizing and the crash. Basically they are a waste of oxygen but somehow they squirrel themselves into organisations and manage to stay there for years while good people who actually contribute get laid off and fired around them. Its the peter principle and dilbert principle writ large.

Some of the Tom Smykowskis I have worked with in the past really made me wonder why I bothered turning up 5 days a week. No matter what I did they somehow stepped ahead getting all the credit, promotions and stuff. I could burn this place down you know....

Architecture in Second Life

2007-02-28T08:29:00.000Z

Second Life seems to me to be creating its own architectural forms already. There is a definite style to many of the more important buildings in the game.

I think this is actually caused by several factors related to the game itself.

Firstly the absence of many of the more annoying laws of physics and causality. Skyboxes are an obvious one here but many SL buildings would not survive in the real world with walls about 10cm thick holding up a 5 story building for example.
Conserving prims is another important consideration. This means many buildings are actually quite simple when they are analysed from an architectural standpoint. It also means that most architectural decoration is actually done at a texturing level in SL and often doesn't look quite right as it is a 2D image "plastered" onto a flat 3D surface.
The lack of inclement weather also has a huge influence. Every day is hot and sunny and a drop of rain never falls. Why bother with a roof in that case.
Different forms of avatar mobility such as teleporting and flying makes whole new architectural forms open up. Who needs stairs, they are just a waste of prims anyway. Let avatars fly or teleport to where they need to go.

Having said all that I don't think I have come across many buildings that fully exploit all of SL's opportunities for architects. Many use some of the new features such as teleporters and many save prims where ever possible but there are not many really novel buildings being created.

Perhaps this is because as humans we are comfortable in with architectural forms we recognise. Design Patterns were first recognised in architecture after all. Something feels right about a house that looks like a house rather than a series of non-interconnected "rooms" that are assembled in a way that would be impossible in the real world.

This has a parallel in the real world. How many modern "machines for living" to quote Le Courbosier actually turned out to be homes that people are comfortable with?

EDIT 20:08 28/02/07

I just found the Society for virtual architecture in SL. They have some great SL architecture resources for me to explore.

Something not quite right here

2007-02-27T12:59:00.000Z

I was in town today and the Anne Summers shop has a big sign in the window saying "Get your mother a present for Mothers Day here" or something similar.

Yeah I am sure most mums would appreciate a set of "sexy" underwear or a dildo instead of a bunch of daffodils... Its actually really scary when you think about it. What sort of person would even think of buying their Mum a present in Anne Summers at all?

I am not a lawyer but...

2007-02-26T14:09:00.000Z

Some of the legal aspects of Second Life scare me. I think if I were a lawyer I would be even more scared.

As far as I can see there is no way to enforce a legally binding contract in Second Life. So if I pay someone L$ to perform a service for or sell me an item and they just take my money and run I don't have any legal redress.

Similarly if a group of individuals wanted to form a business partnership entirely within the game there is no binding contract law so someone could run off with the groups assets.

I still enjoy SL immensely but I am playing it less and less recently. Time is one factor I guess but at times it seems a little samey. Its just shops and nightclubs as far as the eye can see. (with a sprinkling of sex clubs of course) There doesn't actually seem to be much intellectual discourse going on. For a place thats meant to have the real early adopters and big thinkers crawling all over the place its actually pretty low-brow. It mainly caters to the fairly base human instincts of shopping, sex and increasingly it seems violence.

Try searching the events for some serious discussion that isn't about BDSM rituals and the like and you will quite often draw a blank. The Library project seems to have reverted into a series of pet projects for the founders of the group. Yes there is interesting stuff there but a lot of it is probably there because the creators couldn't get funding for their pet project in the real world. Its basically a museum or exhibition rather than a library.

I can see the argument for keeping things like real world politics out of Second Life. Any one who reads slashdot or digg when a political story makes the front page knows it just triggers a flame war. Text based flame wars are controllable but someone letting off the equivalent of a nuclear device in game because someone disagrees with their point of view is not. There is no moderation system basically.

That doesn't mean there can't be reasoned debate, in fact SL could be a wonderful place for the exchange of ideas and concepts as you cant create a 3D representation of what you are talking about in moments.

I have taken part in some wonderful spontaneous conversations in SL which made me really think and I enjoyed immensely. I don't see the SL debating society starting up though. Perhaps its because there is no easy way of making money from it?

Reliance on tools for web development

2007-02-11T09:31:00.000Z

Back when I was starting out in web development about 10 years ago now I used to rely on Dreamweaver for everything. I more or less understood the principles of how to write html by hand but never did. Then again trying to write table layouts with 5 or more levels of nesting was never easy by hand.

Now I hand code everything I rely on tools like the WebDeveloper and Firebug Firefox extensions and IEs DOM inspector extension to make sense of things when I don't get it 100% right first time.

I guess everyone needs something to give them a helping hand. Even if you can write top quality code by hand every time you need a validator to prove it.

well the cats out of the bag

2007-02-02T12:08:00.000Z

Today www.publishingtechnology.comwas announced to the world. Ingenta have merged with VISTA (no nothing to do with the MS operating system.)

I had been given the "Ultra high priority, ultra top secret" job of creating the site thats up there now. Its only really a placeholder until we actually get more information to put there I guess. I was told to get it done at all costs and cut any corners you have to along the way.

Its XHTML, CSS2 and Bobby AAA. Its easier to do things that way really. The whole lot of it was hand coded in plain old html as there wasn't time to set up anything special for templating. Still every last line is hand coded and I did all the images apart from the main logo.

I was actually quite fun to go back to basics and not have any templating and development environments getting in the way. You can't beat hitting :w and then hitting refresh on your browser straight away instead of waiting for everything to build for 15 seconds.

The tricky part was doing rounded corners with lines not solid blocks of colour. I ended up using a sort of sliding doors technique. The only css borders on the main div are for the vertical borders. The curves and the horizontal borders are background images attached to either the main div or elements within it. They are pretty large so take a while to load but its the only way to do with borders as the background image is positioned inside the border. If it was a solid block it would line up properly. Here it would always be off by the width of the border itself. I guess you could have used a lot more divs and negative margins but this way is cleaner in terms of the html.

getting GTD done

2007-01-29T08:41:00.000Z

This weekend I finally sat down and started GTD properly. I am using MonkeyGTD to organise everything. I will probably use pocketmod for Monkey GTD for a paper based reminder system or just enter my next tasks into my phone as well.

Its already a huge help in concentrating my mind on what to do next. I managed to dot 3 tasks over the weekend that I had been putting off for ages simply by thinking about them sensibly.

search revisted

2007-01-25T12:02:00.000Z

I was looking for some presents for people last night when google turned up a gem etsy.

Just try the different search methods down the left hand menu. Ok so they are flash based but boy are they clever. Searching by colour!

To be honest I don't want to buy anything from the site but its so cool just to play with it.

this is what I have been talking about

2007-01-15T11:39:00.000Z

I just read IA as an extension of web design over at digital-web.com. This is what I think is missing with so many aspects of web developement in general. The recognition that there are not really hard boundaries between the various "disciplines" involved in creating a large scale web site.

OK so you might have a DBA creating a schema who can't write a line of HTML and doesn't want to but they still have to be aware that users of the site and therefore the database will be expecting data in a certain format and also they may well be generating data in various formats too.

But in the realm of actually putting stuff on the screen there are a large number of different roles that contribute. Engineers writing the middleware, graphic designers, IAs, IDs, and humble web monkeys writing the html and css. All of them tend to have different terminologies and jargon for exactly the same things. An engineer will use a language like UML to describe something that an IA uses a wireframe and a html developer uses a bunch of markup and css.

The article is written by an IA so the writer sees IAs at the center of web development and everyone should use the same names for things as the IAs deliverables. Fair enough you have to pick one naming system I guess so why not use the IAs instead of the database schemeas or middleware's names for objects. The point of naming your CSS clases to fit wireframes is valid. I hate sites that have classnames like .bigBlueText. Why not use .formHeading or something meaningful

I also saw a recent job posting that supports this view. The IA position was described as being a mediator between the coding and design departments and as a user centered design champion (come back 2001 you job title is here) IAs can perform this role. Its not quite a project manager role but its ensuring that everyone has a common focus. It might not be IA focused or user focused but as long as everyone can sign from the same hymn sheet its going to be a lot easier.

taking wireframes too literally

2007-01-13T15:41:00.000Z

Or when to just admit something won't fit.

Sometimes you get given some wireframes and page mock-ups that just cant be done. The most annoying sort are ones that look simple but due to the limitations of the technologies your working with you just can't acheive the "layout" in a wireframe.

A lot of people seem to think that a wireframe is a page mock up. To my mind they are two totally different things. A wireframe shows the content that should go on the page. It illustrates groups of content and the relationships between content but it isn't prescriptive in how you implement the layout. A page mock up is one step down from the final HTML. It has nearly all the features of the final page and looks pretty much like how the final page should look.

So why do so many people treat wireframes as mock ups? They get so annoyed if you tell them "It won't work that way".

Of course web developers like to think they can achieve any layout you care to dream up. And pretty much say that sort of stuff regulary. Give them the change to hand code every last bit of code and this is easyish. Once you start working with code that generates code you are hamstrung by the quality of the generated code. If your code generating code writes bad HTML there is nothing you can do about it.

So in this situation even the most carefully crafted page mock up might be impossible.

The moral of the story is you dont know exactly how things will turn out until you try them.

GTD Wikis and Web2.0

2006-12-24T15:37:00.000Z

I have been looking for a good on line GTD solution for a while now. I think I found one for me. Its MonkeyGTD which is based on tiddlyWiki.

It does all you need for GTD. Lists, context etc. Its javascript based so in theory you could use it off line. Some of it is very pretty indeed with lots of AJAX and the like too.

Hopefully I will be able to spend the weekend working on sorting out my "stuff" using GTD.

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GTD is an exoself

2006-12-22T16:59:00.000Z

I was reading the David Allen book again last night and the more I read the more I realise that GTD is a rudimentary exoself. The whole idea of moving stuff out of your conciousness into a trusted external system that takes care of things for you (to some extent) is what GTD is all about.

Of course if you go for the paper based system it doesnt really do much for you by itself. But if you use something like backpack, Tracks, gtd-php or something simillar you will get sent reminders and all kinds of things automatically. Just like any good exoself would do.

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Getting things done

2006-12-14T12:35:00.000Z

A while ago I bought O'Reilly's Mind performance hacks book partly to see if it had any good things to help Rae with her studying and partly for me. I have to admit I am not the most organised person in the world. I am terrible at a lot of that sort of thing. I forget dates, things to do and I am terrible at organising projects of any kind. Rae did nearly all the organising of the wedding. I just tagged along.

The O'Reilly book mentions a lot of "getting things done" stuff like 43 folders, the hipster pda and probably lots of other stuff I dont know about yet. I have had a look at sites like 43folders, lifehack and others and a lot of it is making sense to me.

My problem is I am so disorganised that getting my affairs in order using any system what so ever will take a huge amount of work. I guess once its done things get easier to maintain a system.

This could be the start of a wonderful new years resolution.

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how strict is strict XHTML

2006-12-13T11:15:00.000Z

If your using IE7 its very strict indeed!

I was writing something the other day using IE "conditional comments" e.g.

When I accidentally put a slash in the "closing" tag e.g.

The site I was working was declared as XHTML1.0 Strict and in IE7 it displayed a blank screen. It was fine in all other versions of IE and any other decent browser ^TM. It took a bit of poking around to find the erroneous slash but just like anything else it was obvious once you saw it. The main problem was that it was in a conditional comment block for IE5 so I didn't check it straight away.

It just struck me that IE7 is so strict it refuses to render "bad" xhtml when its not even part of the xhtml standard!

This is something you dont see very often

2006-12-12T14:46:00.000Z

I don't have any outstanding bugs at all, not even an enhancement.

Just about to raise one on myself though :(

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RSS feed for a SL location?

2006-12-11T12:30:00.000Z

We were just making fun of a site Leigh found for a conference on the future of the web a moment ago. Their site uses frames and doesn't even have a RSS feed! Someone else suggested that they might have an email list. I asked if they had a SL presence as a joke.

That got me thinking... it would be good for some places to have a RSS feed in SL. Imagine getting an object that told you about inventory changes in your fave SL shop. Or places like the library or Teazers could use it to announce forthcoming events.

The object would have to look up some sort of feed once you open it so RSS is the idea thing there. Parse the feed and then perhaps create a notecard for the user to read. Could be a good scripting exercise....

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relaxing at home

2006-12-09T11:15:00.000Z

relaxing at home,
originally uploaded by Rob 'n' Rae.
just been messing around remodelling my house... might get some better textures etc... I really like the new furniture... shame I dont have enough prims to rez all the furniture I bought though

I really must get into building and scriptng in SL. I spent about 4 hours building a pretty primitive home in SL.

I think I might be better off trying scripting that building... I can code but making things in 3D makes my brain hurt.

I knew there had to be something like this out there

2006-12-07T09:44:00.000Z

This is what I was talking about in a previous post. OSMP or Open Source Metaverse Project does what it says on the tin.

I haven't had a go with it yet but it looks like they are cobbling together things like quake2 code and XML to make their metaverse.

The OpenSource Metaverse Project is analogous to the web. You can create hyperlinks to any other metaworld running on any metaverse server worldwide. Your avatar uses hyperlinks to move to other worlds, submitting to the Game Control Logic in force in the new world.

This is what I think we need. Something that can be easily set up and controlled by individuals not one centralised authoritarian company. Needless to say I will be downloading it later on to have a play.

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Why SL needs to concentrate on the newbies

2006-12-04T12:15:00.000Z

I am going to talk about the usability and accessibility of secondlife here but its best to slightly redefine the terms here. Usability is the ease at which people in the game can react with it and others, accessibility here is how easy it is for a newcomer to access resources in the game (SL is of course very inaccessible in the more accepted use of the word but thats for another day)

I have stated several times that I think one of the key strengths of HTML is that its easy to learn as a complete novice. You can at least get a basic page up and running easily with a few p h and strong tags or use an editor like dreamweaver until you are confident to branch out on your own. I guess a lot of people would say that a lot of content on free web hosting servers should never see the light of day as its so bad as a direct result of HTML being easy. The point is that its there at all. hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of people made the effort to learn the basic skills to create those pages. HTML is easy and therefore not elitist.

SecondLife is elitist. It requires far more resources than creating traditional content in terms of the client program for a start. Not all pcs can run it etc. And to be honest its not easy at all to create really good looking content in SL. You might say its not easy to create good valid, semantic XHTML, CSS and Javascript plus efficient middleware code and a database either but this is the advanced level of of content creation for the web. SecondLife's problem is that for a newcomer to the world creating content is hard. And 90%+ of its users are newcomers.

The current modelling and scripting tools are basic to say the least. I don't know much about 3D modeling but I know its got to be easier somehow. The scripting language is not exactly a piece of cake either. Also there is a lack of really good coherent documentation both in the world and outside it. If LindenLabs put more effort into their tools more people would want to use them.

But you cant blame them for not doing that. There are enough highly motivated people who will learn through trial and error, others have transferable skills that they can adapt. They will generate the content that the Lindens need to draw in more consumers.

This just creates an elitist society where the privileged few control the resources and supply and demand. I guess this is idea for the Linden Labs as they sit at the top of the pile. The web is far more democratic in that with very little outlay in terms of time, skills and cash you can create content to express yourself and eventually people will come. Thats what blogging is all about after all.

This is why the web exploded in about 1995. It was accessible and usable in the terms outlined above. It was not scary or hard for newcomers when 95+ of users were newcomers.

SecondLife is much more than the web. It has enormous potential. But until it stops being built for an elite by and elite its going to have problems in the long run. Viva La Revolution!

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virtual burglars

2006-12-03T09:46:00.000Z

I just logged into SL this morning and popped into existance in my house. Its on a really obscure bit of formerly first land. I dont actually visit it myself that often even.

I had my inventory open looking for a good landmark to visit (thanks for no search LL :-(( ) when an AV walked into my house and started looking around pretty much ignoring me! The person was born yesterday in SL terms bbut didnt have the best grasp of English and I dont speak Korean so we couldnt really communicate. In the end I just TPed out to a random landmark to avoid further embarassment and frustration.

If that had been real life he would have been in hospital.

Its a very very weird feeling in a virtual world when someone just wanders into your house. I could never see the point of access rules to a piece of land until today. It really did make me feel rather upset although of course there is nothing wrong with it at all.

Open Source, distributed, peer-to-peer SecondLife

2006-11-30T08:45:00.000Z

I was idly wondering about how it could be possible to build objects in SL off line in a more clever and responsive environment. Something better than the current on line tools anyway. Initially I thought you could have your own little SL server running a small hived off little environment where you could do stuff without being on line and experiment with things like scripting without having the worries of testing it on a live grid. This is probably a good idea in itself. One day what the creator thinks is a completely harmless script is going to cause havoc when it gets into the grid. Being able to test scripts etc off line would be a great safety feature.

Then I thought... well if you have a little server running that has your land on it why not connect all the little servers up into one big honking distributed network. You would have to have "flexible geography" somehow so if a persons server went down people in the game see a gap. Its more like Neal Stephensons metaverse where his own house was stored on his own computer.

As things are more distributed it should be easier to put in things like VoIP as your talking directly to the computers of the AVs in your locality instead of the VoIP traffic having to go through centralised servers. Another advantage is that you could make backups of your personal server in case of problems. There would have to be some centralisation... for example on working out what AVs were in a given locality, the flexible geography and for private conversations outside of a locality. Keeping everyone on the right version of the code would be important... but if windows update can do it why not this?

Perhaps a hybrid solution with centralised servers doing the infrastructure and distributed mini-servers/clients for the content would be best. Its got to be possible but probably very difficult.

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My exoself

2006-11-28T11:54:00.000Z

A while ago I was reading a few books that have the concept of an exoself Then I read the following mind hack and got to thinking.

I seem to remember less and less information recently. Instead of remembering facts I remember where to go to look for the information I need. Its a sort of memory palace mind hack but instead of constructing a mental map of where I store information in my head I construct a mental map of where I know information is stored on on line.

Of course this is spread across a lot of services. browser bookmarks and history, backpack, google calendar, rss feeds, del.icio.us, flickr, google alerts, email, im, message boards, second life, google searches, last.fm, itunes, random files on my pcs and pda and also in other peoples heads (this is when I get stuck on a problem I know that joe bloggs is the person to ask for the answer) to name a few.

The value of items stored there may be trivial like "a good photo of a old rusty car I added to my favourites on flickr" to "an important bit of information on an area of CSS that I don't use very often that I tagged on del.icio.us". For each of them I dont actually remember very much about them. For the CSS example I would remember that it was about print stylesheets and I tagged as CSS and something else probably print. I don't actually remember any more detail than that. I don't need to I can go and check my del.icio.us link to see if its what I need.

The findability of many of these items initially might be quite low. To take the css example I might have searched for a long time to find that piece of information. Once its tagged and in del.icio.us its easy to find again. I really must get into using backpack or jotspot once google make it free to act as more of an central system collating together all of these things. Perhaps one of the web based desktops like eyeOS (As a futher example of my exoself I remembered reading about this on digg and then searched digg to find it, I had no idea what it was called, I knew it existed and where I read about it) to organize all my information in my exoself in one place.

Leigh did a thing a while ago called "download my brain" which is essentially an OPML file of your del.icio.us, flickr etc feeds. This is sort of simillar to feedburners "enhanced" rss feeds for a personal site. Its a great way of getting a summary of an persons exoself.

A typo a moment ago made me think some more. I typed personas instead of persons. It might well be possible to have different exoselves for the same person. For instance it seems like some people create whole new identities for themselves in RPGs etc. They play the game entirely in role and correspond with other games in role. I know several people who have separate email and IM accounts for their different on line personas so why not extend it further?

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Another collary to Murphys Law

2006-11-28T08:56:00.000Z

If you are not looking for a job you get spammed by loads of recruitment agencies telling you they all have jobs you would be perfect for. But in reality you wouldn't be interested in any of them.

Then when you are looking for a job you can't find any anywhere you would even want to apply for and all the recruiters vanish.

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The main reason accessibility matters

2006-11-26T11:01:00.000Z

I was just commenting on This digg posting (ok so I somehow managed to comment twice.) on a lame CSS/HTML drop shadow technique when I suddenly reaslised the best reason in the world for sticking to semantic accessible code.

The one user of your site your almost guaranteed to have who doens't have javascript turned on or CSS and is totally blind. Thats right ladies and gentlemen Googlebot!

If Googlebot cant make head or tail of your tag soup then you wont get highly ranked. And we all know what that means don't we.

Googlebot might just be the best web spider out there but if it can't parse your code you don't have a chance. So go forth and separate style from function with CSS, use inobtrusive Javascript and banish "media" plugins forever. Make the world a better place and get more sales!

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just saw my first X-forms document

2006-11-14T13:24:00.000Z

It wasn't pretty but it was very very interesting.

I have heard of Xforms before and not really paid much attention to them. I know that none of the major browsers supports them out of the box, plugins are needed.

The one I saw today was doing sort of AJAX look ups to get data from an XML API and pre-populate the form. Then it had a load of event driven stuff to validate and submit the form. All done with xhtml tags and not a line of javascript. Its all really powerful.

But of course no one really uses it much as no one uses it much... its caught in a vicious circle. The only way this will change is if IE implements it natively and then Adobe put it into Dreamweaver so noddy developers will use it. Its perfect for a visual editor really. As its all tag driven its simple to understand and work with. It makes like easier for server side folk to as they don't have to worry about doing validation etc. they just expose an API. An awful lot of the grunt work in any web application is processing form data. This is what Xforms is all about and it pushes all the work down to the client.

What are the chances of MS and Adobe making their changes to flagship products to accommodate it when they both probably have competing products/technologies? Slim to none.... I would be really annoyed if I had spent ages developing Xforms for the W3C knowing that the chances of anyone really using it are minute.

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