dog or higher

rethinking protests

Next week, the whole APEC circus comes to (Sydney) town. I've seen estimates of over 100 million dollars (well over in fact) being spent on security - which to tell the truth is little if anything more than anti protest (that is anti free speech) tactics.

Gaols have been cleared to make way for 1000 potential arrests (people serving weekend detention may stay away for the weekend - think about that - hundreds of actual criminals serving gaol time may remain unincarcerated to leave space for possible unruly protesters.) A large area of Sydney has literally been walled off (5km of 2.8m high fencing), and whole areas outside this cordoned off from their customary use for decades for security purposes, so that the wives and girlfriends of visiting leaders may have lunch in a restaurant.

And constantly there has been talk of how violence will not be tolerated, how water cannon (a lasting image of apartheid South Africa) are on the ready to tackle any unrest.

Now, last time there was a significant protest of this kind in Australia is was against violence, violence which has taken tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives, the Iraq war, protests that drew hundreds of thousands across Australia, with little if any unrest at all.

The irony of that.

Well, I have a suggestion as to how best to protest this time round.

Don't turn up.

Leave the streets empty, silent as the so many graves of Iraq. Shame a government that has spent hundreds of millions on an exercise in embarrassing self aggrandisement, by literally, and pointedly ignoring the whole exercise.
Let the police in their riot uniforms stand facing empty streets. Let the skies thunder with fighter jets and black hawke helicopters echoing thorug the empty empty canyons of Sydney - nothing would more infuriate a government yearning for the relevance of civil unrest (see, our opponents are violent and unruly, they seek to destabilise our free country, blah blah effing blah)
I'm not sure whether there are active organisers for any protest planned, but please consider a day out in the sun far from the centre of Sydney - a huge free concert at say homebush bay. An affirmation of our belief in peace, the quiet enjoyment of this earth, the power of life over death, and family, friends and society over a coercive, self important state. I am sure a roster of the biggest stars in the country would play for little if nothing at the last moment.
And I am sure thousands would donate money to make it happen in no time.

Those of us old enough to remember the rise and rise of Reagan and Thatcher remember the sense that their nasty ilk had inherited the earth, but we are here, and they are long gone. Let's not be defined by others, but define ourselves.

So let's forget the old dispensations of marching and chanting and banners. Let's affirm our lives, and life on a beautiful early spring day. Like Aboriginal elders famously a decade ago, let's turn our back on those we have no respect for, not march to their tune.

C'mon, you know it makes sense.

McFarlane Prize nominations and Web Directions Discount close this Friday at midight

Quick note on two upcoming events.

What kind of a world?

What kind of a world do we live in where whole suburbs are shut down because the WAGs of a few purportedly elected public servants (you know, the folks who in theory work for us) want to have lunch in a restaurant?

Get a grip.

If the world is so insecure, frankly, you aren't doing your jobs properly.

Silly.

Social networking in the physical world

One of the really fundamental reasons why we do web directions is to get people together. Nothing beats talkign to someone, sharing a coffee, or a drink, or dinner, sharing your experiences with someone who does similar things to you, shares imilar interests.
But breaing the ice can be really hard. What have you got in common? Do you use the same tools, work in a similar industry, come from the same city? All of the things that we have in common we need to find out about one another.

I think one reason why online social networking works so well is that peopel can find those things out about one another, or advertise those kinds of things about themselves easily. So right away, you knwo somethings you have in common.

So, this year at Web Directions, we are going to try and do something to help with that first step - and anyone can help out with it.

At the conference, your name badge can also tell people about those things that are really important to you. And the best part is, you get to tell us what that is.

Maybe it's your skills: CSS, HTML, Perl, PHP, Java, Flash, Ajax, Javascript etc etc etc
Or where you're from: NSW, Qld, Vic, WA?
Whether you follow league, rugby, AFL, soccer?
Maybe you're an early bird or a night owl? Clean desk or messy? Desktop or laptop? Coffee or tea?
Mac or Windows? Or Linux?
Are you loking for a job, or clients? Are you looking for a freelancer or employee?

This is a great use for Mikons

once more with the zealots, this time with feeling (or how WaSP ruined everything for everyone)

I posted this as a coment on Joe Hewitt's blog, but feel it needs its own home, so indulge me. Thsi is perhaps the first time I've seen the Web Standards Project atually blamed for the lack of standards development, but Joe is sure an innovative guy. I'm not sure whether to be sad, angry, or just nonplussed. Or maybe it's an elaborate joke?

That the iPhone is not like a return to the bad old days of "best viewed in" - is for the simple reason that the Web Standards Project, and many many individual web developers, as well as those associated with commercial and open source browser development worked really hard, at a time when it was barely heard of, to advocate for a standards based web - not the balkanized, anarchic web introduced orignially by Netscape, and then contributed to by browser and web developers alike for many years.

Frankly, to blame the web standards project for the lack of development of standards is flat out wrong Actualy, it's BS IMO. You can't rerun history, but with Netscape crashing and burning, and long before Mozilla, let alone Firefox put some pressure on Microsoft, IE had effectively a monopoly on web browsing. It's hard to see what else would have brought about the pretty stable, standards based web ecosystem we have today in the absence of the combined positive and critical pressure that this organization brought to bear on all browser developers, the evangelism of the values and value of these standards it undertook, along with with the countless hours many folks spent on newsgroups, mailing lists, developing web sites, and otherwise helping web developers learn CSS, valid HTML, accessibility and the like.

You've done pretty well out of the standards based web Joe - so be a bit more grateful to those who worked very hard, and frankly in many cases sacrified a lot to make it a reality.

To follow a second tangent, imagine that a lot of the WPF/Silveright (no criticism of these, BTW) had been pured back into IE, um I mean standards. Do you think we'd have the Firefox we do today? It barely does SVG, so would it be a first class web citizen trying to support a much more complex rich set of technologies? What about Opera? Even Safari. And whose to say that the development of these standards would have moved ahead more steadily than CSS3? I really need some convincing that the Web Standards Project caused all this.

As to the iPhone, Safari, AFAIC, does innovation right. They work within a stable framework of innovation, as the pain of the years of the version 4 and 5 browsers taught us - for example, the use of -webkit- prefixes for experimental CSS, and in implementing features like text-stroke, border-radius, and box-shadow which of their nature gracefully degrade.

Don't tell those folks who worked very hard to make the web what it is that they "don't even understand how standards come to be in the first place", or that they are blinded by dogma. Of course there are always those who will, but to lump all of those who support standards in with them, and then to suggest that it was the very people who most helped the web who effed it up, well, you are simply overreacting.

XRAY 0.91a released

I've just updated XRAY to version 0.91a. I don't know what's with the numbering system either ;-)

This version now officially supports IE6+ on Windows, in addition to Webkit and Mozilla based browsers wherever they may roam.

Get it here

I also added info on borders widths, as these will impact the box model, and you can now use the arrow keys to move around the DOM - up to XRAY the parent element, down to XRAY the first child, left and right to XRAY sibling elements.

I also removed the dependency on the JQuery library, hopefully speeding things up too.

For future versions, I hope you won't need to change the bookmark again. For this version, I needed to make the change both to stop downloading JQuery, and because IE didn't like the approach I took.

Let me know what you think

john

Announcing the free (as in speech and beer) Hatch Day 2007 - following Web Directions South

Conference are all about talking - and talking is great - we sketch out ideas, share insights, learn new concepts and techniques. But after the talk, we also have to walk.

So, this year we are introducing a new event as part of the web directions family. And it's free - not just for WD attendees but for all (though places are limited.)

For years, (I mean since last millenium) I've been keen to hold an event called "web hack" - a shameless rip of the sadly departed "MacHack" conferences.
Finally, this year we decided to hold just that event. But a bit of market research (ie asking our friends) told us that the term 'hack' was a bit scarey. So, as she usually does, Maxine had a great idea - let's make it a "hatch" day - an "extreme incubator" where great ideas are hatched.

Web Hatch is part unconference, part hack day, and part webjam (hatchers get to present their work at the end of the day at a special webjam), and it all wraps up in a party.

I got a couple of ideas I've been working on slowly for a while, so I might even do a project myself.

Like I said

• it's free
anyone who wants to participate - but you do need to register

Hatch Day is a day of web creativity and idea sharing that falls somewhere between Barcamp and hard core coding weekends like RAILS Camp. Maybe you're a developer or group of developers with a project you're been wanting an excuse to get stuck into. Or perhaps you have expertise you'd like to share, a desire to help people really breathe life into a project.

Hatch Day is "The Extreme Incubator": the day on which you take a proto-project and

1. really put some focussed work into it
2. get some input from experts

turning it into at least the level of a presentable prototype by the end of the day, when there will be a Webjam.

Reminder: McFarlane Prize - nominations close August 31

A quick reminder that the McFarlane Prize nominations close at the end of the month.

The Prize is open to any Australian web design and development teams or individuals. The only other requirement is that the site must have been launched or sigificantly updated between August 1 2006 and July 31 2007.

There is no cost to enter, and no requirement to attend the Web Directions conference (short listed finalists will of course be invited to the award session and following reception).

You may nominate your own site or sites, or a site or sites that has impressed you. Simply fill in the nomination form at the site.

Please spread the word - nominations have been coming in at an excellent rate, but love to see as many possible entrants and demonstrate the quality of Australian Web Design.

Past performance is no indicator of future success

An oft quoted maxim in the finance industry, I think it is also a hueristic we can apply to many other circumstances.

Now, in these paranoid says, I am rather loath to write anything on the issue of terror, because I still travel quite a bit both inside Australia and around the world, and it seems that you never know what you might say when and how can get misconstrued by someone somewhere, and you end up rather constrained in your travel movements.

But.

I can't help thinking about a number of recent incidents where folks have been detained and otherwise sanctioned for photographing buildings, and other public spaces (by the way, older readers like me will remember travellers tales, apocryphal or otherise, of those travelling to places like eastern europe, the Soviet Union, China, having their cameras confiscated, and worse, for photographing planes at airports and so on - typically these tales were told to underline the point that unlike our freedom loving countries, these states were so paranoid that they got hung up on tourist snaps.)

But where on earth could this rambling exegesis be going?

Has anyone seen photosynth? Now, as any more than casual reader knows, I am a geek, and cool technology excites me. This really is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Fullstop. It's almost impossible to adquately describe in words, so I suggest you take a look at this video - jump to about 5.40 to go or so (that's about 40% in) and just watch this.

Basically, it can take a photoset, like say from Flickr or Photobucket, and build a 3D model by analysing these photos and working out where they were taken and stitching them all together.

So, to have a 3D model of any prominent site, all you need is a photo set like those, and a copy of photsynth. And access to a computer and the net.
You don't need to visit the location, or take photos, or even go to that country.

So like much of the 'security' (5m high walls to keep APEC attendees in, no toothpaste on aircraft, Google Maps resolution of Satellite photos of Sydney suddenly becoming lower, and the like), that is supposed to keep us safe, curtailing the photography of public spaces is so much pantomime, impacting on our peaceful enjoyment of the short time alotted to us on this planet, diverting the energy and attention of those whose job it is to protect us, in what I won't argue at all are challenging times, away from genuinely threatening and dangerous behavior.

So, wait for the calls to ban services like flickr and applications like photosynth. They can't be too far off. 'All in the name of liberty'.

In the meantime, see the future of user generated content and crowd sourcing, and be inspired.

Web Directions student discounts

Are you a full time student? Do you know any full time students? If you are, or if you do, then hopefully you'll be interested in our student discounts for Web Directions and for the W3C's Special interest group day, running in conjunction with our workshops.

Places at the SIG day, featuring international and local experts working on current and future web standards like HTML5, CSS3, XForms, GRDDL, accessibility and more for full time students are just $60.
Places at the conference for full time students are just $195 (and that includes all the catering, reception, parties and showbag).

There'll be plenty of potential employers, mentors, opportunities for internships, as well as contacts to be made in the industry. You'll be able to get up to speed with current trends and developments in the industry, and get a headstart when it comes to finding work after you complete your studies (or even while you are continuing to do them).

To take advantage of these special offers, just visit our registration page and use the following promotional codes

For the conference, use WDS07-STUD

For the W3C SIG day, use WDS07-STUD-SIG

If you are an employer interested in offering internships, or employing graduates, please get in touch, and we'll help bring students and potential employers together.

XRAY for IE beta

I've just finished off a releasable version of XRAY for windows (which should also work in Webkit and Mozilla based browsers)

It's definitely beta, but please take a look and let me know about any issues you find.

A couple of definites right now

1. You need to click an element twice in most circumstances to xray it - I should have this fixed shortly
2. there are no width and height indicators as there are in the other browsers. Is this an issue? It is doable, but needs more work than on other browsers, so please let me know your thoughts once you've played with it
3. because of the way that IE reports property values getting the actual value of width and height of the content box is tricky unless it is specifically set. So, in place of these values, you'll often see 'auto' or a percentage, em or other value, telling you not the computed width and height but the current specified width and height.

BUT, there are some bonuses

Ive added border width values as these impact the box model.
I've also made it so that scrolling doesn't hide the xray properties - though resizing the window will probably do some weird stuff, to be fixed soon

To give it a whirl, just use this link (the one bookmark will work for all browsers once we are done, and this one should as I said work for IE, Webkit and Mozilla based browsers already, but has not been stress tested)

XRAY IE

Please give it a whirl and let me know how you get on

john

Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos

So executive governments (anyone noticed the rise of the executive around the world? Whither Parliaments?) from Zimbabwe to the US to Australia and elsewhere, want to effectively erode the very notion of privacy and a private life - intercepting email, telephone calls, physical mail, using surveillance cameras in public (and not so public) spaces, using sniffer dogs to detect drug possession with no reasonable cause.

You know what? I don't care. On one small proviso.

That radical transparency works both ways.
That politicians, senior public servants, the police, all of those who watch over us (Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos) submit to constant (I mean constant) monitoring - every single step you take is monitored. You submit to random blood testing for drugs (and when at work, alcohol). And everything you do is publicly disclosed. Who you dine with. What books you read. Everything. After all, if you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?

In a world with no privacy, everyone has the same privacy - because we are all human. Because we all have faults and foibles which can be used against us. But when the faults and foibles of all are exposed to everyone else, the playing field is level.

Some guy once said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". In a world where all of us are sinners (as we all are) and whose sins are not actively kept secret (name a powerful person, revered or otherwise without secrets and sins) stones are that much less likely to be cast. No one is without sin, and so no one casts stones.

What an irony, should the growing intrusion of totalitarian techniques ultimately liberate us - I'll show you mine should you show me yours.

So, pervasive surveillance - of emails, mail, phone calls, and you know, above all my thoughts is fine. If it's also of yours.

The future of proprietary web extensions

Following on from the discussion on the previous post, a few thoughts about the absence of Flash on the iPhone, and the future of properietary extensions to the web, like Flash/AIR/Flex, Silverlight, Java, and so on.

A couple of caveats.

I tend to think these technologies can, and on occasion do, enable extraordinary additions to the web. My experience is that far more often they are used for annoying splash screens (a couple of years back I judged the SxSW web awards, where the use of spash screens on corporate entries was pretty much 100%, and extraordinarily annoying), and non standard scrollbars and other such UI widgets.
And I think its no secret that I believe the web is fundamentally an open platform.

As the number of devices which bring us the web - phone-like, things like Mylo, fridges, TVs, in car devices, whose responsibility is it to provide a plug-in that works on the device? If it is the developer of that plug-in, then THEY alone decide whether the device is fully "web enabled". However, given resource issues, such as processor power and memory capacity, it may not be feasible to provide such a plug in. Or given the cost of developing for a platform, will new platforms simply not provide the necessary ROI for plugins to be developed for them? And given increasing security concerns, how will security of these runtimes be guaranteed? Whose responsibility will it be?

I think this is the first practical example of what will become a very serious challenge for the developers of any proprietary extension to the web - these extensions must be close to ubiquitous in order for developers to risk relying on them. But as the web diversifies, and yet ironically, converges on core standards, how realistic is that, even for enormously well resourced, highly skilled organisations like SUN, Adobe and Microsoft?

A curious meme

Reading reviews of the iPhone, I keep seeing this curious meme crop up

By far the biggest problem with iPhone Web browsing is the lack of Adobe Flash support.

Is it really that big of a problem? I must say I typically find the use of Flash a noticeable turnoff (this is not an anti flash thing so much as an anti the common use of flash thing - I've certainly seen good and appropriate uses of Flash, just that they are so rare that I'm not sure that the iPhone's lack of Flash support warrants more than an asterisk, and possibly more of a discussion as to why it is the case - a strategic business decision? A technical one? I have no idea)

But look, I'm a stick in the mud curmudgeon - Is this lack of Flash an issue? What do other folks think?

john

The great leap backward

There seems to be breathless excitement in many corners that there is now a "real" third party iphone app.

I think that this is in fact a great leap backward, and those who think that somehow these are better iPhone apps than web based ones are living in a world that is has already changed. Why should we be cheering for single platform locked down apps, when right now, an iPhone app will theoretically work on pretty much any user oriented web enabled device?

By making webapps first class applications, indeed the only way of developing applications for the device, regardless of their motivations or intentions, Apple with the iPhone has ushered in a new world, where the web is the platform. This has been talked about, and promised for many years (SUN's "the network is the computer" captures the idea succinctly), but it really finally has arrived. So the idea that somehow "native" iPhone devices are better than web based ones is profoundly reactionary.

Now, I've made my living writing desktop apps for 15 years, and for a quarter of a century, as a computer enthusiast at high school, computer science student at university, and beyond, lived in a world where the OS was the platform - it provided the services required for an application to run and be used. This new world challenges the framework within which I've lived and worked for all my adult life and more. And the business model which has underpinned my professional career. Yet, it excites me with its possibilities. We live in interesting times.

Via the web browser, the web becomes the platform. And an open one at that. Rather than an app which runs on Mac OS X, or Windows, or Linux, and needs to be substantially rewritten from platform to platform (I know about these things, Style Master is a first class Windows and Mac OS X app, sharing a lot of common code, but still totoally different code bases, UI designs, and much more besides), applications come much much closer to the "write once run anywhere" paradigm that Java promised (and failed) to deliver.

Beyond that, we are beginning to see challenges to the dominance of the WIMP (windows, icons, mouses and pull down menus) paradigm, which has served well for over 20 years, but which is particularly adapted to an isolated desktop environment (think of all the substandard laptop mousing solutions developed over the years for starters, and don't start me on trying to enter a 128 hex character shared key on my PSP's virtual keyboard to access my wifi network) but far less well for all manner of devices, some of which we've barely begun to imagine. Afterall, iPhone and Opera mini don't have menus, iPhone doesn't have menus or windows - we are left with merely icons.

Beyond interface innovation, conectedness becomes central to every application. Sharing of what we do, passively (like last.fm listening to what you listen to) or actively (for example wiki systems, or online office apps like google docs apps making collaborative creation much less complicated) becomes far simpler, and central to what many applications do. Pretty much every bit we create is intended to be communicated and shared, yet networking and collaboration are typically add ons at best to most desktop apps. Most text editors don't let me edit a file on an ftp server, let alone collaboratively edit documents over a network. Indeed, the fanfare that subetheredit received (rightly too) only two or three years ago illustrates just how isolated most desktop apps are.

Those days are rapidly coming to a close. Faster I think than anyone has predicted. Apple may not have conceived of the desktop, but there is little doubt they were the midwives at the birth of its commerial reality (Xerox Star notwithstanding), and they are there, active, at its demise.

Now I have to go away and think of how to personally avoid going the way of the dodo and the desktop in this new world.

PS

I'll still be developing Style Master, indeed we are working hard on version 5 right now, and ironically, due to the nature of web development in many cases, I think that web development tools will likely stay desktop apps for longer than many others.

Tags: iphone

XRAY update - thanks for the feedback

Thanks all for your suggestions and thoughts. The response has been terrific, amazing even.

As you can guess, there does need to be some work done, but we did make the decision to release it early (and hopefully often- that's the beauty of the way the bookmark is set up - no need to upgrade manually, it just happens!)

I've started a forum at the westciv support site for discussing XRAY, making suggestions, reporting bugs and the like, so feel free to head on over ;-)

http://support.westciv.com/forum.php?id=9&page

Please feel free to head over and leave your thoughts

j