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Blackout Ireland

Entries for January 2006

January 9, 2006 at 12:11AM Happy 2006!

Holy crap! It’s almost five months since I last posted any up here, though I have attempted to write things up in the past. I think the last thing I intended on posting up was a long screed bitching about the awful phoneline quality at home in Sligo, and of how I hoped that Tony O’Reilly and the rest of the eircom board rot in hell for the pain they put everybody in this country through. I thought better upon reading back on it and realising that it was just a little too vitriolic to put online.

I still haven’t much to write about. In fact, I’m a bit bored off my tits right now and need to find something interesting to keep my attention. There are a few things worth mentioning.

Babylon 5: The Complete Universe

At the beginning of December, I was given the Babylon 5: The Complete Universe boxset for my birthday by my parents, which rocked! It puzzled me, however, that each disc has a little note from Warner Brothers telling me that it’s not nice to purchase pirated movies. Why they bother giving out to people with perfectly legal copies of their products is beyond me. After I went through all the packaging, the wod of these notes was over half a centimetre thick. I mean, if they’re really sure that I’m the type who’s going to pirate stuff, if one doesn’t convince me, sixty of them definitely isn’t. What a waste of tree.

Photos!

Though I’m not sure who could possibly be interested in them, I’ve thrown some of the photos I’ve taken on my camera up online. I selected them in Picasa on a kind of ad-hoc basis, so they’re slightly messed up, but they’re roughly reverse chronological order. Here’s a run down of them in the correct order:

A few days before I left Cork (August 24th, 2005)

Visiting Niamh (August 30th, 2005)

Electric Picnic, Day 0 (September 2nd, 2005)

Electric Picnic, Day 1 (September 3rd, 2005)

Electric Picnic, Day 2 (September 4th, 2005)

The rest of the day was a mess. Boring photos, or just ones I, ahem, can’t show.

Stormhoek (September 16th)

The day I got my bottle. I’ve been meaning to write up a review, really! Suffice to say, it was great. Here’s the label.

Guinnie the Cat

Guinnie is the only one of our cats that my father will tolerate being let into the house. I think it may be in part down to her not having a tail anymore. As is tradition on teh intarweb, I thought I’d take a few photos of her playing with the newspaper, eating, relaxing, and giving me the evil eye.

Aclare (28th September)

Guinnie, again

Sleeping, can’t forget that. Most of what she does every day is sleep.

That old mirror photo meme

Do you remember the Mirror Project? Here’s me looking dishevelled.

Boston (October 23rd)

Mark brought me around the Freedom Trail. Here’s some of the photos I took. Unfortunately I lost my photos from the first time I was over, so I tried to get some of the same shots this time around.

I also took a shot of the hotel I stayed in, and the view from my room. It got mightily windy later on that week, and I was a bit worried that my flight home’d be cancelled.

But it wasn’t, so here’s the departure lounge, and a shot of Boston from the air.

Snow! (December 29th)

I stayed up watching B5, and noticed at around 8am that it’d started snowing outside, so I photographed it.

January 12, 2006 at 7:47PM Inequality == XOR?

Seems like it, when you’re dealing with booleans anyway. For years I’ve been using bitwise-XOR where I want either half of some condition to either succeed or fail, but not both, and it didn’t occur to me till last night that the inequality operator would do precisely the same thing.

Odd, that.

January 18, 2006 at 12:17AM Things I hate about...

Having had my head through a ringer today, I feel like picking on people and this, after all, is my personal soapbox. We’ll start with some generic things that are annoying me today and work our way from there to more specific topics and victims with further posts.

...your site

This bit appears to have been translated into Italian. Woohoo!

  1. It doesn’t have a print stylesheet. This really annoys me.
  2. You have a seperate print version of the pages. Really, these days you shouldn’t need one. Try scraping some of the cruft off your pages and use print stylesheets to hide the rest.
  3. You split your articles over multiple pages. At least if you’re going to page your articles (which isn’t a bad idea), do it like the International Herald Tribune and do it on the client with the option of displaying everything normally. And keep what you write short and to the point; whatever Jakob Nielsen might have wrote a few years back, it’s not that people hate scrolling, it’s that reading off a screen is hard and so is something to be avoided. You’re not writing a novel so just give me the information.
  4. The font you use it too small. These days computers have passable anti-aliasing so text looks good at all sizes. Use a decent-sized font.
  5. Similarly, many of us now have high-resolution screens. We’d like to take advantage of that by boosting the size of the text, hences helping to save our eyes. But we can’t because you hardwired the font-size into your pages.
  6. You don’t put sufficient leading between your lines. Leading makes your text easier for poor slobs like me to read, and makes it look better too, especially if it’s small or the lines are long. A reasonable amount of leading is 30%-40% of the text height.
  7. Put vertical margins of at least one ex (approximately half a line) between your list items. When you don’t, they’re hard to read and scan.
  8. You use white text on a black background. Please don’t, it hurts. Use light gray.
  9. You use underlining for emphasis. Don’t, it’s for links. Use italics.
  10. You use bold italics outside of headings or quoted text that’s already italic. Why? Is bold not enough?
  11. Your URLs suck. They’re either long (meaning I can’t paste them into emails), opaque (meaning I can’t use it to figure out the structure of your site), or both! Either structure your site better or use a URL rewriter so that we don’t have to put up with the growling monster driving your site.
  12. You don’t know when to use PNGs (or GIFs) and when to use JPEGs. Instead you use JPEGs for everything. The result is that your site looks uglier than it ought to. JPEGs are for photorealistic or near-photorealisitic images like paintings, screenshots from modern video games and, well, photographs. PNGs (and GIFs) should be used for everything else.

...your commercial website

  1. You use way too much advertising. Yes, I’m talking about you, news sites. If bandwidth is really costing your that much, think about ways of making your pages more slimline. If your site is using lots of CPU time, think about baking it (building static HTML files and serving them) rather than frying it (building HTML dynamically) where possible.
  2. You put advertising below the bottom of your article where I’m never going to bother looking. This just makes the page load up much slower and I’m just going to go away. Time wasted for me and bandwidth wasted for you. Put your ads to the right of the body text.
  3. You have ads before the article. Goodbye, I’m outta here!
  4. Remember what I wrote about URLs above? This goes doubly for you.

...your wordprocessor

  1. Its spellchecker doesn’t recognise that the “fl” and “fi” liguratures ought to be treated like the letters “fl” and “fi”. Idiot!
  2. It doesn’t automatically turn “fl” and “fi” into their ligurature forms. Of course, that wouldn’t be a big deal if...

...your typeface

  1. It doesn’t treat “fl” and “fi” as combining characters giving their corresponding liguratures.

...your variable width font

  1. It doesn’t have “fl” and “fi” liguratures and when typed, “fl” and “fi” have an ugly overlap.

...your monospace typeface

  1. It has “fl” and “fi” liguratures which are just one character wide, which completely misses the point of a monospace typeface! In a monospace typeface, the “fl” and “fi” liguratures should be two characters wide and look like their non-ligurature counterparts. I don’t know of any typefaces that get this right, and I’m probably the only person to whom this is an annoyance. But it just looks so ugly!

...US keyboards (in Windows, at least)

  1. Why is it so hard to type accented characters? God forbid anybody using one would ever need to type an “á” or an “ë”, never mind “ç” or “ñ”. This is the kind of thing that makes wish there was a tool out there for intercepting potential combining characters, e.g. ALT+: followed by “a” giving “ä”. My old Acorn Archimedes had a keyboard layout that was almost exactly like a US keyboard, but RISC OS intercepted key sequences like that and typed out a corresponding accented character. I really miss that.

January 18, 2006 at 1:56AM Reenabling comments.

I’ve just realised that comments are still disabled! Oops! I’ll fix it in the morning.

January 20, 2006 at 1:58PM Irreducible Complexity? Feh! Think Sufficient Robustness

I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved in this rubbish again, but I can’t help myself: I’m just a glutton for punishment.

Why to people persist in bandying about the old trope of irreducible complexity? Orson Scott Card in an article on the eighth of this month [via] threw it out as an example of where (Darwinian) Evolution supposedly fails to explain the evidence. Here’s what he writes:

...and the Darwinian model is, in fact, inadequate to explain how complex systems, which fail without all elements in place, could arise through random mutation and natural selection.

How? Card seems to be confusing complexity with brittleness. Successful complex systems are by their nature robust; unsuccessful ones are by their nature brittle. The big point behind any evolutionary theory (Darwinian evolution included) is that sufficiently robust systems will win out over less robust ones. Irreducible complexity is a false dilemma.

Nature is full of examples. Heck, I can take my own body as an example. Take my DNA, for instance. Each bit of information it contains is recorded twice, once in each half of the helix. This helps make copying as accurate as possible and makes the DNA itself less liable to corruption. It also keeps the mechanics of copying DNA simpler. Take my eyes: I could have been born with one--an incomplete system--and I would have got by just fine. I could lose one and I’d survive; I wouldn’t die, but I’d have difficulty estimating distance.

Let’s push things back a bit. There seems to be this confusion that mutations occur on the scale of a fully-developed organism, but they don’t. They occur in two places: the egg and the sperm. The ovaries and testicles get subjected to quite a bit of abuse over a person’s lifetime. They get bashed around by toxins, radiation, you name it. And this can knock their DNA a bit out of whack. But just a bit, and only occasionally. And being pretty robust, unless they’ve been abused to within an inch of their little existences, they’ll power on. Quite a bit of the time, that damage can be repaired, but no system is perfectly robust. Sometimes the change will be beneficial to the offspring, sometimes it’ll be quite the opposite, sometimes it’ll have no effect. But when the egg is fertilised, you’ve got a slightly mutated version of the parent organism. And the whole robustness thing? Yup, that’s important. Whatever mutations do happen will be small, and biological systems are robust enough to cope with them. If they’re not, they don’t live long enough to make a difference in the wider world.

The change usually isn’t great--you might have slightly longer fingers and a slightly stubbier nose--but if the result is sufficiently robust, it’ll survive. If it’s not, it’ll go the way of poor Cy the Kitten. If you’re an antelope and the cumulative mutations your ancestors gave you make you run that little bit faster, all the better. If they happen to make you a tiny bit slower than everybody else and don’t accrue some other benefit that lets you evade lions, say good-bye to the gene-pool. And if those mutations make you less sexy, say goodbye too.

Another point: the whole survival of the fittest bit is nonsense. Darwin himself didn’t even believe it; it was just a slogan to fit in with the accepted thinking of the day. I don’t believe he even used it himself. A better way of thinking of the whole thing is survival of the fit enough. You don’t have perfect, just good enough to survive long enough to have offspring.

And there’s the whole problem with Intelligent Design: it assumes brittleness. Evolution assumes robustness.

And you know, if the Intelligent Design crowd restricted themselves to trying to explain how life appeared in the first place on the planet--something Evolution doesn’t even try to explain--it’d be fine. That, after all, is where the real apparent irreducible complexity in life lies.

And let me repeat that point: Evolutionary theories do not attempt to explain life origins, only the origins and diversity of species. It works on the level of genes, not the molecular level, and then that only happened once the world learned discovered genetics. We don’t throw out General Relativity just because it doesn’t work on a subatomic level. Instead we try to find out why and resolve it. Every theory is imperfect, but that’s what science is about: you create a model, test it to make sure it’s as firm as possible, and when it breaks, you improve it.

January 24, 2006 at 12:45PM Weight

I came across two blog posts on weight recently. One by Twenty and another by Jeremy Zawodny. Both are well worth reading.

Background

I’m overweight and it’s my own fault.

I can admit to that. I’m 13.5st/85kg and somebody with my height and build should be 11st/69kg. I recognise that this is down to the lack of exercise and poor diet I’ve maintained.

Does this cost me every day? Yes. It leaves me feeling far less energetic than somebody my age should be. While my general health has never been what one might consider good, during the past ten years since I started putting on weight, it’s became worse. But I’m far from a point where I’d be considered obese and what weight I carry is far from life-threatening. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that I value the shape of my stomach and hips from an aesthetic point of view.

Tracking my weight over time, it’s far from unlikely that if I don’t do something about my situation soon, I will become obese. It figures. What’s worse is that 0.5st/3.5kg of that weight is weight put on in the last four months. Up until then my weight had stablised at between 12.5st/78kg and 13st/81.5kg. That whatever exercise I used to get through walking is now gone and that I have steak every other day contributes to this, I reckon.

I’ve unsuccessfully resolved in the past to lower my weight, but laziness and a lack of dedication makes this resolve shortlived.

I know that if I was simply to only eat when I’m hungry and not bother having dinner if I’m not, cut out the Jacob’s Kimberley biscuits, and do some light exercises--the fifteen-minute regime recommended in the Hacker’s Diet would be just fine--within a few months I would be feeling much better, and within a year I’d look an awful lot better.

But I’ll tell you a couple of things I do not do: I don’t blame my weight on some imaginary disease and I don’t try to justify my weight by appealing to economics [via]. Both are laziness, a worse kind of laziness than the kind that convinces you it’s not worth exercising; both kinds divorce you of responsibility for your own actions.

Weight as a disease

This is frankly bullshit, and Twenty, colourful vective and all, gets it right. He puts it a lot better than I ever could, but I’ll try anyway.

Obesity is not a disease. If it was, laziness, greed and gluttony would be diseases too. It’s on thing to be a bit overweight; if you’ve a glandular problem that effects your metabolism, I sympathise. It’s quite another thing to take up two seats on the bus. Stop buying and eating crap, learn how to cook proper food, get some exercise, and develop some self-esteem. Your weight is not its own excuse, and if you end up in hospital because you develop some condition attached to your weight, you’d better expect to pay for it. (And the same goes for smokers, Twenty).

People with glandular problems don’t get away from responsibility. Just because your thoyroid gland doesn’t work right doesn’t mean that you’re excused from keeping fit. It simply means you have to work a bit harder. You might never be at what medical science deems to be your right weight, you might always be a bit heavy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, once you start using your condition as an excuse, you’ve lost my sympathy.

Weight as a good thing

When I read the Washington Post article “Why America Has to Be Fat”, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a joke. Though I’m Irish, not American, the same article could have been written by a newspaper here--like the US, waistlines are ballooning, though we haven’t quite reached their level of corpulence.

As with the last article, I’d point you towards what Jeremy wrote on it. I’ll only add this:

I’ve laboured under the naïve delusion that, like the state, we the people are the economy’s ultimate master and not the other way round. I believed that the economy’s whole reason for existence was to make our lives better. Since when did the economy become our master? If it has, then this great experiment with capitalism is as much of a wash-out as communism was, and I want no part of an economic system that wishes me to sacrifice my own health and well-being and that of my friends and relatives for its own abstract “health”. An economy that demands that we be gluttons to satisfy itself is not one I want to be part of.

That is all.

January 29, 2006 at 5:21AM Comments Reactivated

Comments are working again. Post away!

Remember, spammers: I get emailed whenever somebody posts to the site, and links in comments give no Google mojo, so don’t bother spamming.

I’ve a few ideas on how I can implement a reasonable comment moderation system here, which I might be implementing if I get any spam. It’ll be part of a big rewrite I’m planning.

January 30, 2006 at 3:33PM Things that suck about this site

My vitriol isn’t just reserved for others. No, I’m quite happy to lash out at myself when it’s appropriate. [smile] There’s a lot of things I really don’t like about the code I wrote to drive this site. I thought it’d be good to get everything down.

The software lacks a well-defined structure

Yup, it’s just a bunch of files. The site has five applications running on it:

  1. the weblog;
  2. the comments app (which is separate from the weblog);
  3. the linklog;
  4. the mailer;
  5. the wiki.

The first four were written out on paper over the course of a bored evening and then typed into a computer and uploaded the next day. The wiki was written in two short bursts, once to get something functional for the C&C wiki, and again to slap on a passable change control system on top of it. I don’t think I’ve spent more than ten hours in total on the code here. From that perspective, they’re not bad. But since the day they were first written, all I’ve done is occasionally tweak them when I needed to. They’re starting to smell a bit.

For some ridiculous reason, the comments app was written to be fully independent of everything else. I think I was inspired to do that by something I saw in ACS, but I’m not sure. I wanted people to be able to comment on any page, not just those in the weblog. In the end, I never took advantage of this. This design is the reason why the site currently doesn’t display the number of comments in reply to a post: the join would be a pain as I idiotically store a hash of the page path with each comment! To add insult to injury, it uses CLIENT variables rather than SESSION variables or cookies directly and I have to do comment moderation by hand in the DB! I have no idea what I was smoking when I came up with that system.

The linklog was another misguided idea, but for other reasons. What I ought to have done was have a form for queuing up items for the linklog, and whatever items were in the queue at midnight UTC posted to the weblog in a single post. Or I could have had made them true weblog entries, something Keith Devens pointed out to me in the past. We live and learn. I’m edging towards the former option. But do you know what’s really dumb about it as it stands: I never bothered to make links editable after they’d been posted. I hasn’t caused huge difficulties or anything, but there’s been times when it might have been a wee bit useful.

The mailer’s just a little blob of intermixed markup and code with a bunch of hardwired settings. Not good enough!

The weblog is the best bit of code in it. Where it fails is that I didn’t do enough to seperate everything out (action handers here, views there, &c) and too much of the site is fried rather than baked: everything, including the frontpage with that painfully expensive SQL statement to generate x days’ worth of posts rather than the posts for the past x days or the past x posts, is generated on the fly. Also, the interface for posting and editing’s a bit more primitive than I’d like, and I still haven’t added tags, something I want for my own use more than as a readers’ convenience. Then there’s the lack of a comment count.

The wikis still both stick out like sore thumbs on the site. Not only is the code between them duplicated, but they don’t integrate into the site in terms of look-and-feel. There’s no good reason why this should be so. FusionWiki’s also got a huge to-do list attached to it in other areas that I’ve been procrastinating on. Sigh.

Then there’s the lack of any consistent administrative interface over the whole thing, and the partial hack of a reStructuredText mark-up converter I wrote for the weblog, comments app and wiki. I’m really considering replacing it with a WYSIWYG and server-side HTML scrubber combination (which is something else I really must upload and make public), but every WYSIWYG I’ve tried sucks even more than the mark-up converter. And I’ve tried them all. Or maybe I should just bite the bullet and convert Markdown to ColdFusion.

And have I mentioned how mind-numbingly stupid the syndication code for the linklog and weblog is? Painfully, painfully so. All it does is generate an RSS 2.0 file if the weblog or linklog’s been updated and leaves things at that. It doesn’t check request headers to check how much it should be serving up--I could be sending 35kB down the line and only really need to send 5kB--or to support conditional GETs, nor does it use content negotiation to serve up the most appropriate syndication format. It works ok, but if this was a site that was regularly updated or had a reasonable amount of readers--say, if I was a Y-list rather than a Z-list blogger--it’d die a painful death.

How to make my site suck less

My site has a lot of good ideas. Chief amongst them are the <cf_do> tag (my way of avoiding the scatter of duplicated code--particularly custom tags--that was a definite pain point before CFMX, and this site still runs on CF5, so I’m stuck with it) and the <cf_envelope> tag, which allows me to hook in behaviour to disparate pages quite easily.

If <cf_do> was modified slightly to make it behave a little better and support applications in addition to tags, <cf_envelope> enhanced into the framework it almost is, and the various apps mostly moved in under the _lib directory where a big chunk of the site code already lives, I’m pretty sure this site would suddenly start to feel a lot better.

The weblog should bake the various entry and index pages, especially the frontpage. The linklog should be merged into the weblog, and the wikis should be made to fit into the site as a whole. The comments app, if it’s going to stay independent of the weblog, needs use the full path of the page in question rather than a hash of it, and I need to get rid of those stupid CLIENT variables. The syndication code needs to be smartened up quite a bit and made part of the weblog software itself, with the HTML frontpage being just one representation along with everything else.

I need to, at the very least, make the markup filter suck an awful lot less.

I need to bring back editable page areas. I miss that.

Above all, I need to poach ideas from Syncope, the quasi-framework I use for PHP, and incorporate them into the site.

Any ideas? In what ways to you think the site sucks? And how do you think it could be made better. If you want to take a look at the mess that drives this site, you can download it here (75kB). It’s crap, but it’s mine, so don’t go passing any of it off as your own work (not that it’s worth it) or using any of it anywhere without asking me first. Any incriminating details, such as DSNs, usernames, passwords, email addresses, &c. have been removed. As it stands, it probably won’t work for you as it doesn’t contain the DB schema, but it might be worth a read. Don’t laugh too much, ok? [smile]

January 30, 2006 at 8:57PM It’s one of those days...

...when it’s hard to concentrate on anything and get work done. I’ve only had four productive hours today and it’s so frustrating! I hate days like these.