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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: March 2008 (page 1 of 4)

Links for March 31

  • Jason Kottke: Our collective recent history, online. A collection of magazine archives available online. Putting archives online is cheap, and you can put ads on old stuff just like you can
  • jwz: Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!. Everybody is linking to this, but who cares? jwz has put the original Mozilla Communications home page online. I didn’t know that the old Netscape style of making the first letter in every word really big went back to day one.
  • Josh Marshall: Stickin’. This is a brilliant piece of political analysis. As the Democratic nominating process has proceeded, Hillary’s chances of being the nominee have decreased. As her chances decrease, she must necessarily make increasingly extreme claims to justify remaining in the race. Now her argument is that Obama cannot beat McCain in November. What Josh doesn’t say is that the surest way for that to be true is for the Clinton campaign to make it true. Expect things to continue to get uglier.
  • Chris Blattman: Holy evaluation. I love everything about this blog post.

Push button ignition

This weekend I rented a car that had a push button starter. The first time I heard about push button starters, I thought they were some kind of gimmick, but after driving a car with one for a few days I figured out which problem they were designed to solve.

Back in the day, you had your car key. (Or if you drove a General Motors car, you had at least two car keys. One for the doors and one for the ignition. How dumb is that?) Eventually, though, pretty much every car came with both a key and a key fob used to turn off the car alarm, unlock the doors, and so forth. The push button starter was created to remove one item from your pocket. Since you can’t get rid of the fob, car makers have started getting rid of the ignition key. As long as you have the fob, you can start the car with a button push.

There are two additional advantages to this system beyond eliminating key chain clutter. The first is that you can put your keys back in your pocket as soon as you’ve unlocked the doors. Being a creature of habit, I never remembered to do so and wound up driving with my keys in the cup holder all weekend, but I’m sure I’d adjust before too long if I owned such a car. The other advantage is that the system makes it nearly impossible to lock your keys in the car. Since there’s no key in the ignition, you won’t leave your keys there, and if you use the key fob to lock the doors, it’s guaranteed you’ll have your keys with you when you’re walking away from the car. That’s a nice benefit for the absent-minded.

It’s always interesting to discover that there’s a reasonable rationale for something you originally regarded as a novelty feature.

On the road

I’m going to be traveling for the next few days, so there probably won’t be any blog posts. Stay out of trouble in my absence.

Links for March 27

  • Scott Rosenberg: Give us each day our daily campaign call. The Presidential campaigns hold daily conference calls with reporters to try to manage the news cycle. Dave Winer is working to post the audio of those calls so we can all listen in. Great project.
  • Bzip2 mini-HOWTO: Using bzip with grep. Extremely useful shell script if your log rotation software compresses your logs using Bzip2.
  • Scott Jennings: Design Progression in World of Warcraft, An Illustrated Guide. Analysis of an interesting game design challenge. Building content for games is lots of work, so you want it to see lots of use. The hardcore players play mainly so they can achieve things most people can’t. How do you keep the hardcore players happy and still make the content accessible so more players get to enjoy it?

HTML really sucks right now

Over the past year or so I’ve come to realize that getting the markup right is the most difficult part of building Web applications. Had you asked me back a year ago, I’d have guessed that working with JavaScript was the most difficult, but now I know better.

Server side development is in many ways the easiest. For one thing, the tools are great. These days it’s easy to set up a full server environment on your laptop, and the tools for working with code are incredible. Whether you’re a Ruby developer working in Textmate or a Java developer working in Eclipse, NetBeans, or IDEA, the tools are out there to amplify your productivity. The pace of innovation in the server space is incredible as well. Good ideas are being transported from one platform to another at an incredible pace. (Ruby on Rails stole just about everything good from the Java stack, and now the Java folks are stealing all the good ideas they can from Ruby on Rails. PHP is benefitting from both as well.)

The most powerful advantage of working on the server, though, is that it’s empirical. Does this SQL query return what I expect? Does the markup emitted by this method look like what I think it’ll look like? It’s easy to answer these questions, and it’s advisable to write automated tests to verify that the answers to those questions haven’t changed.

JavaScript was once painful to write. You had to write a lot of code to accomplish simple things, the JavaScript implementations varied widely between browsers, and it was difficult to debug your JavaScript code. Most people got by on scripts of dubious quality that they copied from other web sites. Two things have changed, though to make life much easier for JavaScript developers.

The first is that there are now a number of incredibly powerful JavaScript libraries available. They make it easy to accomplish big things with just a little code, and they abstract away the browser differences that made programming in JavaScript so difficult. The second is that the tools have gotten better. FireBug brings a lot of the key features of a good IDE to Firefox. Having a real debugger is a huge help in working out where issues lie in your code. (You can only take window.alert() for so long.)

These days, I find working in JavaScript to be a pleasure, and I never thought I’d say that.

That brings us to HTML and CSS. Given a design, I’m starting to find that it’s not even possible to guess how long it’ll take to get the design to work across all of the common browsers in use today. Generally, I leave the markup to the experts, but for the past couple of months I had to delve deep into CSS and HTML myself. The first thing I discovered is that even making simple stuff look the same in Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox is a challenge. The next thing I learned is that it’s not even easy to make things look the same in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7.

When I went to people who know a lot more about cross-browser issues than I do, even they had to do a lot of experimentation to get things even close to looking right. And the secondary problem is that there don’t seem to be any sort of systemized tools or techniques to make any of this stuff much easier. Yes, FireBug is essential (how else are we supposed to know when styles are being overridden or aren’t being applied), but it seems like we need a lot more help if we want to make writing markup easier.

Is it really as bad as it seems, or am I missing something here? Because it sure strikes me as a rough time if markup is your medium.

Links for March 25

The genesis of agile software development

Recently the IT Project Failures blog reported on a billion dollar project failure at the US Census Bureau. The idea was that the 2010 census would be taken with handheld devices rather than paper forms, and Harris Corp was awarded a $600 million contract to design the devices. The project is now $2 billion over budget, and the entire thing may have to be scrapped because it wasn’t built to GAO standards.

Obviously on a failure of this size, there are any number of areas where one can find fault. To me, the fundamental problem was starting such a massive project in the first place. According to the FDCA Web site, the contract was awarded on March 31, 2006. The RFP was released in late 2005, and planning for the project started in 2004.

I have no idea how you plan six years in advance for an IT project. The landscape is certain to change so much over that time that whatever you put in the RFP is likely to be obsolete by the time the project goes live, and who wants to go live with an application in 2010 that feels like it was built in 2004? Agile methodologies were a backlash against exactly this sort of project. When you read about failures like the one at the US Census Bureau, it’s easy to see why.

Links for March 24

  • Emily Yoffe: Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe. Seeming fact-based defense of marriage. I don’t have strong opinions on this either way, but it certainly seems like marriage is to be encouraged for people who would be parents. The number that stands out to me is that only 4% of mothers who are college graduates are unwed.
  • 10 Zen Monkeys: Can America Handle a Little Truth? Great essay on the Jeremiah Wright controversy.
  • FP Passport: McCain’s wars. John McCain’s transformation into a neocon on foreign policy issues.
  • New York Times review of Nicholson Baker’s pacifist argument against World War II, Human Smoke.

Links for March 22

  • Exposure: Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on the photographs from Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker. Morris has a new documentary on Abu Ghraib coming out on April 25 called Standard Operating Procedure. It’s tough to believe that Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush will never go to jail after reading this article.
  • Marginal Revolution: Why have burglaries declined? Globalization has made manufactured goods so cheap that the incentive to steal them has been reduced.
  • Compiler: New Wiki-Style Features Allow Anyone to Edit Google Maps. It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment works out.
  • Edmunds.com: We Test the Tips. Edmunds tested a bunch of “better gas mileage” tips to determine which ones will actually improve your car’s fuel economy. Driving less aggressively seems to offer the biggest bang for the buck.
  • Andrew Brown: The nerd is the enemy of civilisation. ELIZA creator on RMS and his friends at MIT in the 70s.
  • furbo.org: Vote for virtualization. Not allowing virtualization puts OS X behind the times.

Links from March 19th

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