Month: October 2003

Oh we all like to bitch about stupid online tests like How Long Will You Live? and Which Postmodern Feminist Zealot Are You? but when we’re put in front of an array of little circles we feel compelled to stick a tiny black dot in one of them. It is a defining dot; it determines who we are. One of the only drawbacks of broadband is its removal, or at least drastic abbreviation, of that glorious moment of anticipation after we click on ‘Submit’; that moment when we know that some random bozo’s cruddy website is about to tell us what defines us as people.

And so it was at the Blogger Code generator. My code is B4 d t++ k s- u f- i o+ e- l- c, which will magically decode with a simple click. It will tell you more than anyone could otherwise know about me.

Or maybe it’s just a stupid questionnaire.

I don’t like to just sit here and say "go there", but sometimes I know that someone else is going to entertain you more than I could hope to. In this case it’s Mark Pilgrim’s collapse into despair over bread-making, or the lack there-of. Go. Read. Enjoy.

Essentially this is nothing more than a reassurance, if anyone was looking for one, that I haven’t forgotten my plan to overhaul the ‘about’ section of this site. I’m just procrastinating. Which is an activity that, I’ve just realised, is much less painful then it sounds.

While you weren’t looking, the Mozilla Foundation snook out new releases of Mozilla Firebird (version 0.7), Mozilla Thunderbird (version 0.3) and the combined Mozilla Suite (version 1.5). Unfortunately the Mozilla Foundation no longer runs on AOL‘s servers, so a timed triple release has earned them a helluva slashdotting. The ftp server is fine, though, if you want to take a look at any of these applications. And I know you do.

More interestingly, at least to those of us who have already been using [Fire/Thunder]bird for some time, is the release of Open Office version 1.1. This suite is, quite simply, better than any other office application I’ve ever used. I won’t list features here — they’re covered in detail on the release page — but I have to say that the formula editor is the best thing to happen to office software since spellcheck. Combined with the option to export to pdf, this just makes it ridiculously easy to create scientific documents that anyone can read.

Developers seem to make much better stuff when they aren’t being paid for it. Perhaps we should consider not paying them at all?

I don’t like to draw undue attention, at least online, to my frankly appalling degree of apathy; even if it is a defining characteristic. However it seems recently that the subject “Gotta Post Something, ‘Cause I Haven’t in a While” is the one I can most comfortably post under. There follow a few limited-appeal entries on diverse topics (I have a few in mind, but I don’t know how many will keep my attention long enough to type them.)

Thunderbird is nearly finished downloading several hundred emails, no doubt all spam. Most of them have been sitting on the server for days or weeks, since my address was harvested from Usenet. I’m making one final effort to reclaim my old @esatclear.ie address from the dreadful deluge. I’m confident the bulk of the recent spam has subsided, hopefully down to about 20 messages a day which I can easily handle.

I keep the address only for continuity. A great many people have it, though most will never have reason to use it; and it’s attached (with the associated ill-effects) to numerous Usenet messages. As I’ve said before, and indeed is suggested in my ‘contact’ page, I would prefer if people would use any @soylentred.net address to contact me.

Who would have thought that @hotmail.com lasted longer than @esatclear.ie?

Every time I break down the third wall and spout about the changes (few of late) that I’m making to scatterbrain, it gets a little easier. So in the knowledge that published roadmaps are a great motivator, I’m going to lay out a few intended changes.

Apparently it’s not entirely clear to new readers what in the blue hell is going on around here. Each entry is unrelated to the last and there is nothing permanent to tell people what it’s all about. And there’s the key word, isn’t it? About. Currently the ‘about’ section of the site consists of a single, somewhat cryptic, page describing me. It contains no attempt at a description of the site’s purpose, or of why one would want to read it. Compounding this is the difficulty in finding the ‘about’ page. It merits a single link, unadorned, squashed in a list.

So onto the plan. The main page will feature a box in the sidebar, above the internal navigation and linkroll, differently coloured and containing a short explanatory text and a link to the ‘about’ section. The main ‘about’ page will explain and link to three others:

• One, similar to the current lone page will describe me. It will likely still include the text written by stephen. It will also likely feature more input from me, including a revised introduction.
• The next is probably the most important. It will be a ‘what the hell is going on?’ page, describing what the site is and how to read it — how to find the archives, how to comment, how to link to entries.
• I have intended to write a basic technical introduction to the site for some time. A desription of scattebrain, how the site is built, the structure of the site. This page will be for other web monkeys who might be interested to see my approach.

Unfortunately UCD computer services and netsoc both seem to be repelled by the idea of offering proxies for ftp or which don’t block all but port 80. In English: I have great difficulty administrating this site from college. Otherwise the changes would be in place and this entry would be ‘Check out the blue box. Cool, huh?’

I realise I’m a little behind the times, but if there’s anyone else who hasn’t seen it, here’s a direct link to the LotR:RotK trailer(~27MB, Quicktime). If you’re in UCD, you can get it from this temporary mirror.

Though I only do it inconsistently, I like to retrace the trail that led to my writing about something online. I used to formalise this with a simple structure, copied from Mark Pilgrim, that listed each relevant page in order, with arrows (→) between them. This seemed a little too formal, so I gave up on it in favour of a simple explanation of where the blue ether took me today.

Slashdot featured a review of ‘User Interface Design for Programmers’, which is exactly what it sounds like, only more entertaining. One comment linked to the author’s website, which contains sample chapters from the book. Chapter one inspired the following piece.

In order to avoid the problem of lazy nettizens , a problem made obvious by the ubiquity of the comment ‘RTFA‘, I’ll give the gist of the relevant part of the chapter here. Incidentally, I always associate the word nettizens, if I can be forgiven for calling it a word at all, with denizens rather than citizens. I choose not to see this as an indictment.

The author, Joel Spolsky, describes his old job in an industrial bakery; a menial job, basically there to fill in for a machine. I believe most people can empathise with this position. It is not always pleasant to be in this sort of situation. Joel describes forgettable incidents that subtly altered his mood. Slipping a little on the wet floor would make him feel just a little bit less under control. Catching the dough from the industrial mixer at exactly the right time would make him feel correspondingly more in control. His point, and the reason that this extended anecdote apears in a book about user interface design, is that small things make a difference, in his words, "Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality."

But I’m not just going to badly re-express the same point, even though I do agree with it. I want to make a different point, that Joel has essentially written about a series of utterly forgettable occasions but has made them meaningful. I imagined Joel having a weblog at the time he held this job, belting his experiences out on a keyboard a few times a week. "Today I cut myself on a chain. I hate this place", "I was totally in control today, everything went my way." Who could have brought themselves to care? His set of experiences in the bakery, compiled as they are and used to make a valid observation of human behaviour, is compelling. Written individually, they would have been a LiveJournal.

The problem I have observed is that weblogging lends itself, however much we may try to avoid it, to spewing random trivialities at an imagined audience, where book writing allows time to combine experience into thought. I don’t know who first said it, and Google only knows it as an old saying, but "great men discuss ideas, average men discuss events, and lesser men discuss people." It seems that with the free expression allowed by the weblogging world, those of us who considered ourselves "great men" (or more distinguished than "average men", at least) can easily be diminished to average status, simply by not allowing enough time for ideas to be developed.

I’ve tried to allow time for my thoughts on this issue to consolidate, so that for now at least I won’t be a victim of my own observed phenomenon. I can only wait for feedback to know if I’ve succeeded. But for now we must decide what’s more important to us; do we want frequent brief outbursts that serve as little more than "I still exist" (encouraged by the fact that my CMS provides entries based on time, those posted within the last week, rather than on number, the last four posted for example); or are we more concerned with the content of our output, the idea that "it’ll be published when it’s ready". Essentially, and very simply, this is an issue of quality versus quantity. I can think of few occasions when I would be tempted to choose quantity as more important, but it is more motivational.

The only concrete conclusion I can provide is that I’d like to provide thoughtful and though-out material for any readers I might have, but I can pretty much guarantee that it won’t happen all that often. On the other hand, you got this essay in place of "my throat hurts and my nose hurts; I have two owies." Which is a step in the right direction.