DotNetty Ramblings

Well, it has been a while since I have ranted or raved about technological topics so this is a bit overdue. Fortunately this months .net magazine has managed to provide something of interest (although I think this was actually unintentional on their behalf).

Towards the end of the magazine they have a tendency to waste two – three pages on a normally pointless section called “Big Question.” In this, .net asks a selection of .net figureheads (such as people from Adobe, Actinic, ISPs, Nielsen//NetRatings etc., as well as people like Oxblood Ruffin) a question which gives them a lot of latitude to wax lyrical about all things internety.

This month, the question is “If you could remove one thing from the internet, what would it be?” Surprisingly there are several well thought out answers and most stay away from the pointlessly obvious ones like child porn and crime. For example, Chris Barling (Actinic) earns several WhyDontYou Karma Points for his response:

It would have to be any trace of Michael Winner. He gets over 74,000 hits on Google, so there’s lots to remove. he appears to have no redeeming qualities. A quick Google search for his image is even worse, particularly the Daily Mail photo of a swimming trunk clad Winner. There should be a law against it.

Seriously, what else needs to be said? The only way this could be improved is to remove all traces of Winner from everywhere in the universe. Well done Chris Barling of Actinic fame.

Anyway, this wouldn’t be a WhyDontYou rant if there weren’t some annoyingly odd comments to complain about. Let us take a look at this snippet from Steve Burnard (Adobe):

I would remove blogs, for the following reasons: They’re personal opinions, usually by people who are unqualified to have an objective opinion. They can be out of date, yet will still be referenced as valid.

Blimey. Now as this is a blog obviously I am going to strongly disagree with the nonsense Burnard is spouting here.

Sadly, he is echoing comments which I have heard over the last few weeks from a variety of media sources and, with a lot of caveats, I agree with part of the gist myself.

There is, in recent times, a strange public approach towards blogs and internet information (at least there is in the UK). Some people work on the principle that everything on a blog is 100% scientifically proven fact, while others fall in the exact opposite camp. Obviously both are off the mark by a long way. There are lazy journalists, there are lazy researchers and there are lazy commenters – all of whom will do a quick web search, find a blog which agrees with what ever point they are trying to make and then pass the blog off as if it is peer reviewed research resulting from a double blind study.

However, as Burnard points out, these blogs are actually personal opinion. The problem is not their existence but lazy and stupid people expecting more from them. I am somewhat intrigued as to how a person can not be qualified to have an “objective opinion” when they are writing a “personal opinion” blog. It strikes me that Burnard simply dislikes blogs and has tried to throw two arguments together in his dismissal of their value.

If I read a blog which talks about Stanislaw Lem (for example), this tells me more about how the author of the blog understands the person, what he has done and so on, rather than going to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and hoping he has an entry. I do not expect every single detail to be 100% factually accurate (although I am disappointed if I find mistakes – not that I have found any in the Black Sun Journal post I mention) and I do not for one second expect editorial commentary to be impartial. I have yet to find any editorial content which is actually impartial.

As to this mysterious “objective opinion” – where does Burnard suggest we go for this? (He doesn’t make any suggestions in the article) None of the “traditional” media sources could ever hope to be considered “objective” in their coverage, especially when it comes to technology. Nearly ever piece I have ever seen on TV or in the print media turns out to be little more than a regurgitated press release, manufacturers / designers websites are no better. I have yet to see anything even hinting at being objective on the Adobe website.

With blogs you can often work out where their bias lies (if you see a penguin logo, you know MS products will get short shrift for example… 🙂 ), and the more you read the blog, the easier this becomes. While there is a risk of getting press-releases in blog forms, this too can be spotted by visiting the blog frequently. Other than the occasional high profile blogger who gets paid to comment on products, you can normally be reasonably sure that when a blog writes about a product, the manufacturer isn’t calling the shots.

What, I wonder, is the source of the mystical “objective opinion?”

One last odd comment on the “Big Question” is from Ian Pearson (slightly insane, high profile Futurologist with BT). Now, dismissing the frankly off the wall predictions he makes, this is what he thinks should be removed from the internet:

I’d remove holiday cottage agencies. The net doesn’t need them, I don’t need them, the cottage owners don’t need them and the tourist industry as a whole suffers greatly because of them. I and many other potential customers now go overseas instead, They’ve overstayed their welcome.

I get the feeling I am missing something here because this makes no sense to me at all. First off, this is a big bout of hubris by Mr Pearson. Just because “he” doesn’t need them doesn’t mean no one else needs them. I have used one to book a fantastic holiday to Hadrians Wall a few months ago and the cottage owners I have spoken to about them (admittedly only three) have had good things to say about them.

More importantly though, is the idea that the tourist industry is suffering because of online holiday cottage agencies. What madness. The idea that because of the existence of holiday cottage agencies people now decide to travel overseas instead is just too weird for words. Is Ian Pearson (and these mysterious “others”) incapable of booking a UK holiday without going through a cottage agency? Surely the final decider is the reality of economics. If these agencies really add no value, and do nothing but discourage tourists, they will go out of business and the weird happy state he seems to look for will return.

Personally, I just think all this “futureguessing” has sent him insane. (But this is just my non-objective, personal opinion…)

[tags]Technology, Blogs, Blogging, Steve Burnard, Chris Barling, Ian Pearson, BT, Adobe, Actinic, DotNet, .net, Magazine, Web Design, Web Design Magazine, Nonsense, Drivel, Rambling[/tags]

Disability Discrimination – hypocrisy in action

Normally, I would be quicker off the mark with some choice criticisms of the latest .net magazine, but now that I live on the cultural equivalent of Pluto, it takes a while for the magazine to get to me. That said, by page 10 (ironically first full page of content) there is enough to make me want to choke the lives out of the editorial team.

For background, .net is a webdesign magazine and regularly has articles about how important it is to make sure your web sites are accessible – and meet the requirements of the DDA – as well as a monthly “agony aunt” style column which gives out best practice advice. In the last two years, I don’t think a single issue has had less than two pages worth of accessibility advice. Quite rightly this advice emphasises how people should aim for broad audiences and go out of their way to not exclude one category or another.

Now, keeping that in mind, this months “Mail of the Month” is from “Ann Thulin” who describes herselve as “a woman and old” and feels that .net discriminates against her. She points out that in previous months there have been complaints about the insane choice of tiny fonts and colours which are so un-contrasting as to be almost invisible. Ms Thulin puts forward a well written rant, basically saying that as an older person, her eyes are not strong enough to read the text properly and that despite the previous excuses used by .net team (“not our fault – technical problems”, the accessibility issues are actually the result of a human making the (ill)informed choice that 6pt pale grey goes well against off-white paper. I am not old, and I am not disabled and I find it hard to read the articles sometimes – especially as the magazine team seem obsessed with geometric shapes which draw the eye away from already badly contrasted text. The layout is, from an accessibility point of view, almost criminally bad.

You would think, given the monthly obsession about accessibility, that .net would take this seriously. If this was about a website (as previous months “Access all areas” will attest), then the ranting about ensuring the content was accessible and available to all would be almost non-stop. If the .net team were reviewing a corporate website with such bad accessibility issues it would be crucified.

In reality, this is the response (in full):

Wow, that’s some indictment. It’s a little unfair to call us lazy, as we’re still looking at improving areas of low contrast n the magazine. Buy you’re right about one thing: we don’t plan to increase our font size. Our average reader is 31 years old, and it’s with this age group in mind that we design the magazine. Lastly, we’re not sure what Bill Gates has to do with the price of fish, but definitely wouldn’t change our font size for him.

Strikes me as that is a long winded way of telling Ms Thulin to “f**k off, we don’t care about you old farts.” I am amazed that any editorial staff allowed such a blatant dismissal of their readership be printed. Before I go on, the Gates reference is because Ms Thulin said that if she was Uncle Bill, she thought .net would change – I assume implying that if she was rich and male, she would have more impact on their policies. It strikes me, that despite the “witty” response, she is right here.

.net editorial team are lazy. They have had months to pick up on this accessibility issue but still haven’t bothered their arses. The think which infuriated me was the dismissive “we cater for 31 year olds” remark.  If I was Ms Thulin, I would seriously consider getting legal advice on this – it strikes me as being both discriminatory towards people for age and disability. Everything about the response is wrong. Annoyingly wrong.

For example, it implies that 31 year olds have perfect eyesight and colour perception. This is not the case by any stretch of the imagination. I very much doubt that what ever research .net carried out looked into eyesight of their readers. It is not dissimilar to saying “our average reader wears size 8 shoes so we don’t care about your problems reading the text.” They have committed the cardinal discrimination sin and made assumptions about eyesight based solely on age.

Saying the average reader is 31 is pretty meaningless as well. Is the circulation of .net amongst 31 year olds so prevalent that no other age group is important? What about all the 14 and 15 year olds who read the magazine – based against that there will be dozens of people in their 40s, 50s, and sixties or beyond. When you factor in the increased incidence of eyesight problems amongst people who work day in, day out on IT, you see that if anything, .net should be obsessive about accommodating for visual disabilities. If there were any doubt, 20% of the regular contributors and 40% of the “Ask the Experts” panel are shown wearing glasses. Do these people not count? Obviously not.

Given that there is a legal and moral obligation to accommodate people with disabilities (and not discriminate against people on the grounds of age) it is breathtaking that .net magazine feel the integrity of their layout is so important that they can ignore genuine complaints. Does the DDA not apply to web design magazines?

With this blinding disregard for their readership (disabilities or otherwise), it will amuse me no end to read their continued articles going on about how important “accessibility” is…

[tags].net, hypocrites, Accessibility, DDA, Disability, Discrimination, Disability Discrimination Act, Web Design, Magazines, Technolog[/tags]

Links 11 Jun 07

Well, following the 36 hour outage we suffered (as did all the compuskills hosted sites…) yesterday, there has been a fair bit of catching up required. As a “tide over,” during the outage I did come across some interesting web-design related posts which I will link here.

Note: if you are reading this on the wonderful Planet Atheism, you may want to skip to the next article.

CSS3 multi column support in safari (shame it is such a minority browser… 😀 ) http://webkit.org/blog/?p=88

Always specify a background colour http://www.designdetector.com/2007/01/always-specify-a-background-colour.php

Humorous critique about a suggestion to give up on web accessibility by designers and make a browser which is always accessible… http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2007/05/21/browser-instead-of-accessibility

Accessible expanding and collapsing menus – a holy grail of an idea, but for some reason I just can not get it to work: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/accessible_expanding_and_collapsing_menu/

Anyway, now things seem to be back to normal we will try to resume the proper blog content 😀 Until then, improve your web design skills…

CAPTCHA – Work of the Devil

Every one knows that allowing bots to post things on people’s behalf is a bad thing. I mean it contributes to spam comments on blogs – which no one likes. Obviously anything which works against this evil is a GoodThing®?

Well, no. I don’t agree. First off, there are better ways to prevent things like automated signups, automated submissions and spam bots. More importantly, they are such an annoying thing I can’t for one second think they do not drive visitors/subscribers and commenters away. Now, I would love to see the business model of a website (especially a “Web 2.0” one) which is happy to drive a percentage (however small) of it’s customers away.

Now, I am healthy, have good eyesight and fully functional manual control – and I have a hard enough time getting round some of the CAPTCHAs out there. I dread to think what it is like for people who have even slight visual impairments or motor co-ordination issues. Over the last few weeks, I have suffered numerous, infuriating, problems with CAPTCHAs on sites which really should know better. Continue reading

Theme Change

As mentioned previously, the site has undergone another theme change. Hopefully this one should address the problems people had with the older one, and present a nice, pleasant look and feel to the blog.

As with last time, all comments and feedback is more than welcome. Please let us know if you find anything wrong so we can try to fix it!

[tags]blog, Blog Software, Compuskills, Downloads, Site Admin, Technology, Style, Themes, WordPress, Webdesign, Web Design[/tags]

Almost Back Online

Well, this is a short one to say I am almost back online now, although the process has been far from easy. It is entertaining that in today’s modern world, having a short spell offline can cause more problems than you can shake a 32gb memory stick at.

It it hard to work out where to start with my ranting over this recent debacle, so I may be disjointed (no change there though). Some recent examples of the “traumas” (which are, admitedly mostly trivial!), have included such things as working out when the rubbish bins will be emptied. My house now has two types of bin (recycling and landfill), with a note saying they will be collected on alternate weeks. Nothing else. No idea which day of the week, or which week is which. Wonderful.

What the note did say was that to find out the day of collection, and which week was landfill and which was recylcing, I was told to “log on to the councils website and enter my address details.” Brilliant, except I didn’t have an internet connection. Continue reading

Plugin Admin

In a previous post, I wrote:

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Following that post (and it was only a few hours ago), I removed the plugin but it did not help speed things up with the site. Add to this a couple of comments made which drew my attention to the problem still being there and I have had a ruthless clean out of plugins.

It does seem like the “Sphere It” plugin was innocent but I have no removed so many other plug ins I am far from happy about saying it was any of them causing the problem. I removed ones like the popularity contest, the duplicate social bookmarking plugins and some obscure ones which rarely seem to have been used. In my testing here, the site is now loading in about 20 seconds so it seems to have cured the problem. I would appreciate it if people could let me know what they are getting (estimates and approximations are fine, it is what I used 🙂 ).

[tags]Admin, blog, Blog Software, Feedburner, Feeds, plugins, RSS, Site Admin, Sphere, Sphere It, Technology, Upgrade, Web Design, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress[/tags]

Site Matters

Just a few “site admin” comments to make, so I thought I would make them all in one post.

First off, WordPress 2.2 has been released. Normally we would follow the generic Compuskills advice and wait a while before upgrading but, following some off-line playing, it seems this blog could upgrade sooner rather than later. For this upgrade we will have to delete all the existing files and upload new ones, so there could be a period where this site becomes unavailable or unusable. As, recently, we have been having a fairly continuous run of traffic (around 360 visitors per day) there seems no “low traffic” time to do this. All I can offer is an in advance apology if you get funny page layouts and the like.

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Lastly, as I am about to move house there will be a significant interruption of service. Hopefully Heather will be able to hold the fort, but given VirginMedia’s abysmal service there is no guarantee. Please, feel free to continue to comment or email us. They will be read eventually.

On a related note, if any one is a Sky Broadband customer I would love to know what the service you have had is like and how reliable it is – also is the service really uncapped? (Sky Max). I have my doubts over the veracity of Sky when the broadband thing gives three options – Base (£40 set up, no monthly charge, 2MB bandwidth, 2GB cap), Mid (£20 set up, £5 per month, 8MB Bandwidth, 40GB cap) and Max (no set up, £10 per month, 16MB bandwidth, no cap) – all of which seem amazing value for money.

Worryingly, when I put in the telephone number for my current address, I am told the only broadband option is Sky Connect (not one of the above) which is 8MB bandwidth with a 40GB cap (looks suspiciously like “Mid” above) but this will incur a £40 set up fee and £17 per month. Why on Earth does it cost over three times as much as “Mid?” Does this imply Sky have headline services and rates (which are very good) but in reality customers can not get them? (Would this even be legal?)

Still, I will for a while give Sky the benefit of the doubt and consider it as an option- unlike Virgin Media which I would, now, only consider if it was free and uncapped…

[tags]Site Admin, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress, Blog, Blog Software, Admin, Web Design, Broadband, Cable, VirginMedia, RSS, Feeds, Plugins, Feedburner, XML, Technology, Virgin Cable, Virgin Media, Internet, ISP, Upgrade, Sphere, Sphere It, [/tags]

Site Admin

As mentioned previously, we have added some new plugins here and it seems they have broken the theme quite badly. This leaves us with two choices, and as the theme itself has become a bit annoying (second thoughts over the sponsored links, for example), it seems it is time to try out a new theme. The last time we tried this, there were problems in the old versions of IE so I would appreciate it if people can let us know what you think of the layout of the site now.

In addition a “struggle” is ongoing (offline) against the CSS files but when it is won (and by Toutatis it will be WON), we will be moving (again) to a bespoke theme. Thank you for your patience.

Now Rails Hates Me

Previously, I have complained how Linux (and the Linux Gods) truly hated me and went out of its way to make my life miserable. Even repeated sacrifices of Windows and Apples didn’t help until, like a Miracle sent from Tux, I came across PCLinuxOS. This has been wonderful. It works with all my hardware and is really easy to use.

There is one small problem. Since I mentioned Toutatis in the last post, the Linux God Tux seems to have passed the message on to the Rails God to make my life hell once more.

PCLinuxOS is still brilliant. It works really well. It came with Ruby installed (version 1.8.5) and installing ruby gems (0.9.2) was a walk in the park. The problems started when I got all clever and issued:

gem install rails –include-dependencies

The first time, I got an error message saying it could not find rails in any repository, second time it seemed to run ok. Sadly, despite getting messages telling me rails-1.2.3 is properly installed, I can’t get it to run. I get various error messages, depending on what obscure task I am trying to do (eg. “rails demo” produces errors about not having the 1.2.3 version, and needing to edit environment.rb to reflect the actual version…).

This creates a bit of a quandry. I can download (in fact I already downloaded it) the Rails CD version of PCLinuxOS, but I like this installation. It is set up to my preferences. I have spent time tweaking it and installing firefox extensions (for example). The thought of re-installing just to get rails running is nauseating. However, one of the reasons I wanted Linux was to do Ruby / Rails development in a way which matched the deployment server.

Choices, choices… I think it is time for some more sacrifices… Maybe some coffee beans will do the trick for Ruby, no idea for Rails…

Atheist Programmers

Can anyone tell me why so many programmers, software engineers, web designers and the like are devout theists? I spend a fair amount of my time searching the web for things like plugins, new themes and web design inspiration. Oddly, during these searches much more than half of the sites I come across are overt, campaigning theists. I dont mean they belong to people who “believe” but they are sites with blatant “I love God” type statements all over them. This also leads me to wonder what the other 40% of sites are run by — are Atheists such a minority in IT?

As a recent example, I found an interesting looking plugin (Post Information) which was a good few months old, so I thought I would go to the main blog to see if it was still in use (it doesn’t seem to be) or there was any info on it (there doesn’t seem to be).

However, on the main blog is a vast array of pages with text like:

Jesus Christ has a special place in the unfolding of history. History has a special place for Jesus. In fact, all of history is for Him (Colossians 1:16). He is not just a man nor is He just another religious leader.

Now, I am not going to turn this blog post into a simple anti-Theist post with loads of snide remarks. The person who made this blog did not force me to visit, they did not trick me into visiting, and they are not trying (as far as I saw) to pass of nonsensical woo as science. However, I am curious.

This is certainly not the first time it has happened, in fact it is almost the norm now to visit the home page for a plugin or similar and find lots of “I love Jesus” type messages. I have yet to come across a page which says “I am an atheist.” Is this a sign that designers (programmers etc) are more inclined to be theists? Is this a sign that theists make better programmers? Is this a sign that Atheists are simply more relaxed about their lack of beliefs?

Personally I think it is more the case that Atheists have no need to harp on about their imaginary friends and as a result, they simply don’t. Even if every site I come across which doesn’t have a “I heart Jesus” type thing is an Atheist, there are still a LOT of theists out there…

Uninspiring .Net

I have tried to hold off commenting on this month’s issue of .Net magazine. In recent months, the magazine has been showing signs of greatness and some of the recent articles have been inspirational and educational.

Not this time.

Generally speaking, the May 2007 issue (number 162) is completely dull. The cover articles range from potentially interesting “The Power Of Type” to ones you know will be dull, namely “Can the Web save the world?” Forgive me, I never realised I’d bought the Economist by mistake….

The saving the world article is about the OLPC project. This is a project to get children in the third world laptops. I am going to steer clear of any potentially dangerous topics, but I can’t help but think that giving them food, water, shelter and the like would be a lot better. Giving them laptops (and I assume net access) is not going to feed them. I hope they are English speakers as well…

For a while I thought there was some webdesign links to the OLPC, but as the site appears to be unavailable, I can’t confirm. Suffice it to say, it struck me as three pages of filler content.

The filler content thing seems prevalent this month. Reading the magazine I got the definite impression that, although a magazine had to be published, they had nothing to say. Every one of the articles is excessively wordy, and the use of pages of graphics has reached new highs. The “advice” section is pretty poor, for example the graphics teach you how to design a type face. This basically consists of write the text you want, scan it in and use it… Seriously (4 pages though). In the “Expert Advice” there is a box out titled Understanding ID and Classes. I defy any one who doesn’t already understand them to understand them after reading this…

All in all, this is certainly not an issue of the magazine which you read and then run to the computer, fire up Dreamweaver (or Bluefish) and get coding. Even the reviews section is sparse. If I wasn’t a subscriber, I wouldn’t have bought this in the shop.

Themes and Upgrades

Well, it seems my hopes that the last theme I tried out would be the “be all and end all” theme for the blog were dashed against the rocks of reality.

It seems that something on the theme “Cleaker 2.1” was quite badly broken when viewed in IE6. This is a big shame because I really did like that theme. However, more than 35% of the hits this site gets are from IE6 (with almost another 5% coming from IE versions older than 6), so this is not a problem we can ignore.

Screenshot Showing the Site ThemeThere is now a new theme (minor additional changes may have taken place) and the image you see here shows how it is expected to look. If you are seeing something radically different from this can you please let us know?

Although I am not as enamoured with this theme as I was the previous one, it appears to work even in old versions of IE so it may be kept for a while.

This leads me on to another, important (to me) issue. If you are using IE 6 or older – UPGRADE! Please, for the love of Tim Berners Lee get a more modern browser. I am loathe to say IE7, but it is better than IE6. For the 0.4% of you who insist on using IE 4 or older, you really are missing out a lot of what the internet has to offer. I mean, people talk about Web 2.0 and there are still around 5 people a day who come here using Web 0.1beta browsers…

Download FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, SeaMonkey or even (gasp) IE7. They are all free!

Well, at least I have got that of my chest.

(p.s. before any Apple / Linux / BSD etc people pipe up – Windows accounts for over 75% of the traffic to this site)

Site Theme

As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).

It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.

More Photos

Playing with Lightroom a bit more (and a sunny day) has resulted in a new Flash-based photo gallery (Stourhead Gallery – needs flash player). At the moment these are the basic pictures taken earlier today with no editing. It took about 5 minutes to copy the files off the SD-Card, into Lightroom, create the gallery and upload. The first and last stages were the slowest.

Now, I think I should point out that although I like Lightroom (a lot), I have no intention of buying this when the beta runs out. As a free tool it is fantastic. I am not sure I would be willing to pay for this functionality though.

If I was a professional photographer with no IT Skills it may be worth while, but given the ease with which you can create similar sites (flash or otherwise), it strikes me this is a shrinking market. Adobe may have been better giving this away and charging for support.