November 20, 2008 at 4:38PM Things I hate: being asked for my title, given name, and surname in forms
It’s insane and culturally ignorant to do this. If you look at the way people’s names work you’ll notice that only a small, small number of people actually have names that fit into that format.
Take Irish names which include ‘O’ (such as “O’Hara” or “O Hara”, depending on preference) or ‘Mc’ (such as “McAllister”): I’ve seen names rejected because of the presence of the apostrophe, the ‘O’ treated like a middle initial, ‘Mc’ and ‘Mac’ treated like middle names, and the likes of “McAllister” normalised ignorantly to ‘Mcallister’. Or take the Irish form of the names ‘McGillacuddy’ and ‘McAleese’, which are ‘Mac Giolla Chuda’ and ‘Mac Giolla Iosa’: I’ll leave how they get mangled up to your imagination.
And then there’s double-barrel names. Spaniards must cringe at the way their names get mangled.
Hungarians too, seeing as they put their surname first and their given name after. Ditto for the Chinese, Japanese, and many other cultures.
Indonesians only have the one name. Yup, one name. Suck on that!
There’s only two sane things to do:
- Ask for their name, their whole name, and only their name,
- But if you really, really need to know how they prefer to be addressed, ask them that too, but make it optional.
Let’s take a simple example using my own name. I prefer to give my name as ‘Keith Gaughan’, and I prefer being addressed as ‘Keith’, not ‘Mr. Gaughan’ or any of that crap, but if I was 50 years of age, I might start to prefer that, or ‘Dr. Gaughan’, if I get a PhD in the future. Similarly, if I was to use my mother’s maiden name in my full name, it’d be ‘Keith Gaughan-McAllister’, but I might want to be referred to as ‘Mr. Gaughan’.
If you stick to either of these two schemes, you’ll be able asking people in a way that will work anywhere and won’t appear quite so ignorant or quasi-eurocentric.
Aside: I’m not giving any decent examples here for a very stupid reason: the idiot database driver on the server that hosts my site kills high-bit characters and doesn’t like UTF-8. Suckage.
Update: I remember finding this article ages back on the subject and agreeing vehemently. Take a read, it’s a good one.
October 22, 2008 at 8:50PM Mayhem in Monsterland on Wii Virtual Console = FAIL
It’s almost painful to watch the second part of this after watching the comparison with the original. This is one of my favourite games, and last time I played it under VICE, it worked perfectly, so how did Nintendo manage to screw things up so badly? Do Nintendo have some kind of irrational GPL allergy or something?
October 3, 2008 at 10:33PM The Me Meme
Taking Reg Braithwaite’s lead, here’s me, right now:
![[Me, right now]](http://talideon.eu/dropbox/images/weblog/me-200810032221-sml.jpg)
Jeeze, do I need a haircut or what! And the acne? Well, I’ve practically given up trying to control that: it comes and goes and there seems to be little I can do about it. I cheated with the picture: to counter for my shaky hands, I ran an unsharp mask on it.
Instructions
- Take a picture of yourself right now.
- Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair... just take a picture.
- Post that picture with no editing.
- Post these instructions with your picture.
September 19, 2008 at 1:08AM Bizarre sensations
Every so often, my senses seem to go all screwy. I’m not sure what causes it, but it’s happened to me since I was a kid.
The first thing I notice is that I’m lightheaded, but my arm feel heavier. My arms and legs feel cooler than usual and have pins and needles, and I’m more aware of the shape of my hands; my sense of bodily proportion feels off.
My field of vision feels inflated, so I can see more things to the left and right of my head. But it’s distorted, so everything looks much bigger and farther away than it actually is. Unlike normal, I’m actually aware of the difference in sharpness of the area my eye is primarily focussed on almost as it it’s not flitting around to build up the whole scene as much as it’s meant to.
I really wish I knew what exactly causes this, but I’ve never found out. The feeling is not entirely unlike that of a trance, but it’s not the same feeling as flow, which I get when I’m deeply involved in work.
Puzzling...
August 28, 2008 at 7:49PM I’m heading to Software Freedom Day 2008
You should head too. There’ll be beer, and Camara is a good cause.
August 20, 2008 at 3:10PM On REST
Tim Bray posted up a good piece called ‘REST Questions’, and one of the commentators asked several questions I felt I should respond to. This was my response with some light editing and additional links:
Mainly because there is still a little confusion on what exactly REST is?
REST is an architectural style. I think the confusion is that people confuse ‘architectural style’ with ‘architecture’ and ‘protocol’, neither of which an architectural style is.
As a technology person, I sure wish REST had some very, very distinct features.
It does, only the thing to remember is that it is neither an architecture nor a protocol, but describes a set of useful and interrelated properties an architecture or protocol fitting it would have as well as the benefits and demerits resulting.
The confusion here is that people are committing a reification fallacy: they’re taking something abstract and treating it as if it’s more concrete than it is.
Even with AJAX...
That’s apples and amoebas. AJAX is quite a concrete thing: making HTTP requests in Javascript within a browser.
Let me ask this question, is there a REST RFC?
No, but there could be, and it’d be informational.
Could one be implemented?
Based on REST, you could ‘implement’ it, after a fashion, by designing a protocol based on REST.
Let me put it this way: a protocol or architecture is a reification or ‘implementation’ of one or many architectural styles. Similarly, an application or system is a reification/implementation of one or more protocols and/or architectures.
What if a server or client library fails to implement the features properly, is it still REST?
Clients and servers don’t implement REST, they implement RESTful protocols. What they’re doing is implementing or using the protocol incorrectly by going against its grain.
Lets say I don’t get HTTP right. I don’t use PUT, I don’t use DELETE. I use a heavy RPC oriented XML messaging format in POST requests. Heavy requests. Am I building a REST application?
PUT and DELETE have nothing to do with REST. You’re confusing REST’s uniform interface constraint with how HTTP implements it. RPC as an architectural style (yep, it is: it’s initial reification from style to protocol was probably RFC1050, though I’m sure something predates that) is diametrically opposed in most regards to REST, so no, it wouldn’t be RESTful. The Flickr API is RPC, plain and simple. The same goes for the ‘RESTful’ Twitter API and the ‘RESTful’ Last.fm API, both of which are RPC and definitely not RESTful.
Can you use custom XML RPC formats with REST?
I’m not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean using XML-RPC as an object serialisation format similar to JSON, sure, but that’s as far as it goes.
If REST is essentially getting HTTP right?
Yes and no. Using HTTP in a RESTful manner is getting HTTP right, but HTTP is not REST, it’s protocol that adheres to the REST architectural style.
August 5, 2008 at 10:21PM Decluttering my feeds
I’ve decided I’m cutting back on the 156 feeds I’m currently subscribed to. While this isn’t quite the heights I was once at, the clutter still feels oppressive. Nothing will escape the wrath of the cull, so I may end up unsubscribing from even friend’s blogs (though I’m considering ways of avoiding that).
The system is this: I’ve consolidated all the feeds into a single Bloglines folder called ‘Clutter’. As feeds are updated in this, they will end up moving into one of three other folders: ‘Daily’ for daily reads, ‘Weekly’ for weekly reads, and ‘Whenever’ for stuff that I’ll read when I’ve a chance, but I’m not too bothered about. This final folder contains the stuff that I’d have little compunction marking all read.
Additionally, there’s a folder called ‘Provisional’. It’s into this folder that anything I subscribe to in the future will go. If there haven’t been any interesting updates within a month of subscription, they’re gone.
This is part of a mission I gave myself today to declutter my life. Next up will be my computer here at work. I’m seriously thinking of killing off Ubuntu and replacing it with something much more minimalist. Ditto for finally reading Getting Things Done and putting it into practice.
So much to do...
