web: ten thousand pages about a hundred ways to do any one thing

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Developing stuff on the web isn’t hard, anyone can View > Source your work, someone made those billion web pages, and a lot of web designers promote themselves by writing about their work. In general this is great and we should be grateful but…

The paradox of choice in the supermarket is nothing compared to the tyranny of choice in web development. And none of the developers are up-front about their hack’s limitations (only one row of images, can’t support different orientations, fails utterly without JS, etc.).

57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions

at first I wanted simple image gallery solution for web design project, but when I started to search I changed my mind and thought how great would be to create article about all the best image gallery solutions available on the Internet.
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web: say no to JavaScript templates you can’t try in a browser

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Dear developers of JavaScript templating systems (all 23 of you),

Instead of telling me that your baby runs in a browser and even showing me canned examples, let me interactively try it out! So Handlebars.js wins over EJS, jQote2, JSON Template, Tempo, … by a landslide.

Handlebars.js is a sweet javascript library for building clean logicless templates based on the Mustache Templating Language.
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web: Conoco’s feedback form incompetence proves SPage’s Law

Posted on 2012-02-18 by skierpage

Conoco-Phillips-76 e-mails me that my February statement is available on their web site. No it isn’t, they only have statement activity. I want to help companies do a better job, so I try and tell them using their contact form (Help & Contact Us > Email Customer Service), but of course SPage’s Law kicks in:

SPage’s law: the part of every Web site with the most problems is the feedback form for reporting problems

  • The form subject line is only 37 characters, but there’s no warning, just a bizarre auto-advance to the next field so you don’t realize you just screwed up your e-mail and which also makes it difficult to correct.
  • The tooltips won’t go away (and don’t activate when you make a mistake).
  • The form thinks “comm@{mysitename}.com” is an invalid e-mail address.
  • The tooltip says “Message can only be 20 lines maximum”, but there’s no immediate feedback if you go over. And 20 lines is meaningless, presumably it’s a certain number of characters.
  • You’re only informed of the last two form problems after you submit. It’s called “Client-side JavaScript form validation”!
  • If the server detects a problem the page redisplays with error text in red (good), but it’s far from the form itself. The site should display errors next to the form fields!
  • If the server detects a problem and the page redisplays it resets the Topic field to “Select one”, so after you correct one problem with the form and submit, you get an error that you didn’t select a topic!
  • The form has repeatedly failed to submit messages of mine, but the only error message is “Please enter your message in the box below” My messages are less than 20 “lines”, one was only 345 characters… is that too much? I have no idea what the f***ing problem is, I just make random changes to the text.

More woes outside this form:

  • Everything in the site navigation menu links to ‘#’ (presumably it uses JavaScript to actually go to a page), so if you right-click any menu item and choose “Open Link in New Tab/New Window”, the new tab contains exactly the same web page you were on before!

And it seems nobody answers their Online Technical Assistance phone number (1-877-345-9723) at the weekend, but they don’t tell you this on the web site or in the phone tree, you find out the hard way.

A chain of incompetence that proves SPage’s Law.

Posted in laws, service, web | 1 Comment

music: guitarist Steve Howe ignored

Posted on 2012-01-10 by skierpage

How can Steve Howe not be on the December 2010 Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists list? He was winning guitarist of the year polls throughout the 70s!! Even if you ignore his skills on classical, fingerpicking, flamenco, pedal steel, and slide (“Going for the One”!), his clattering wail solos put him on the list.

The fantastic interplay on the intro here shows his group skills (close your eyes and it’s almost an Allman Brothers Band jam) then the solo at 5:42, the building chorus at 6:20 into the bridge and then the liquid solo at 6:50 is phenomenal, then another killer at 7:35. And the same guy did the crazed genre-busting mashup on the jazz-rock “Sound Chaser”!

He was winning guitar polls throughout the 70s and now forgotten by the mainstream and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?! It’s insane. Rolling Stone writer David Fricke put him at 69, but they polled a lot of musicians as well.

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architecture: fixing SFMOMA

Posted on 2012-01-09 by skierpage

It’s sad when an architectural statement falls short. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hired Mario Botta for their new building in 1994 and undoubtedly hoped they’d get a statement building from an up-and-coming starchitect. It turns out he ripped off the sloping stack atop the atrium from his own earlier design, the planned ring of trees on it was never practical, and his atrium below that stack is a dark, low-rent uninspiring place.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, interior staircase

original atrium and staircase

Really good architects can work with what exists and make it better, sometimes all that blather about “engage with the skyline that surrounds it. Its sculptural identity is found in a formal language that embraces and invites the silhouettes of its neighbors to participate in the dialogue of the new urban identity” actually means something. In this case it looks like up-and-coming starchitects Snøhetta may have figured out how to fix the bad Mario Botta design with their massive expansion:

The design of the interior spaces synthesizes the current Mario Botta-designed building and the new Snøhetta expansion into one seamless whole … To create an expansive, flowing space on the entry level of the museum, the original staircase will be removed from the Botta atrium.

In other words, junk that stupid ugly staircase peering out on the cheap siding lining the dull box of the original atrium

The sketches look good, and Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House  is really great. The huge expansion will incorporate the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection (they planned their own museum in the Presidio, NIMBY types stopped it, then Don Fisher died), including Richard Serra’s sublime sculpture “Sequence”. The exterior has a New Museum (Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA) Herzog/de Meuron vibe; we’ll see how badly San Francisco planning paralysis and special interests will screw it up.

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computers: browser-based efforts

Posted on 2011-11-28 by skierpage

I wrote a year ago that when it comes to computers, I want to be browser-based — since I’m doing most of my work in the browser, let me do nearly all my work in the browser.

Boot 2 Gecko

Mozilla agrees, and they’re working on the poorly-named B2G (“Boot 2 Gecko“) project “to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web.” Yee-haw! But it’s initially targeting smartphones, and will use the Android lower layers to boot the device. They have to start somewhere, and providing an alternative to silly app stores selling hundreds of thousands of apps that do little more than connect you to an information provider (which is what the web does!) is worthwhile. But that’s not what I had in mind as a replacement for my desktop!

I tried a couple of alternatives.

Jolicloud

Jolicloud is a web-based desktop and app launcher, and you can also run it from a dedicated Linux distribution called Jolicloud OS. It’s OK, but the web-based part isn’t that good. For example, in its app window, if you click the (i) icon to get info about an app, you can’t use the browser’s back button to go back to the app window. Instead it stupidly adds its own [Back] button. The “apps” are actually just web sites, which in some cases is reasonable; but many of them require you to register and get a login, and Jolicloud seemingly does nothing to share a username or OpenID between them all. If I want to make a note, don’t send me to a web site, provide me some intelligent browser-based HTML code that works offline.

BrowserLinux

I downloaded BrowserLinux and ran it in VirtualBox, i.e. I simulated running it on my computer. It’s based on Puppy Linux which is a fine and lightweight Linux distribution, and it provides a working Firefox, but its handling of local files is weak. Despite the name, it doesn’t use the browser for many tasks. E.g. If you click on an image, it tries to run the mtpaint program, even though Firefox itself can preview images.

This is a common failing of Linux distros. They don’t seem to distinguish opening a file in order to look at it and opening a file to in order to edit it, the way Windows’ context menu can. The browser can view all kinds of files, but in many cases it can’t edit them. I don’t know if the XDG specifications distinguish the two operations. The programs that BrowserLinux provides — ROX filer to show files, Alsaplayer to play songs — are lightweight, but have zero consistency with each other, let alone the Firefox browser. BrowserLinux is just a lightweight Linux distro for older machines that puts the Firefox icon on its desktop without rethinking the rest of your computing activities so that you do them as much as possible in the browser, either with local HTML, remote web sites, or browser extensions.

I really want to try ChromeOS to see how Google handles things, but as I remarked earlier, Hexxeh’s ChromiumOS builds require fancy graphics.

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cars: progress in eco, not in design

Posted on 2011-11-19 by skierpage

I went to the local auto show, a low-key affair compared with the Los Angeles one. Mercedes-Benz, smart USA, and Suzuki skipped it altogether, and there were no new reveals.

Fuel efficiency

Toyota will be on a fuel efficiency warpath throughout 2012. The Prius v small van (44 city / 40 highway mpg) is already showing up at dealers, next the Camry Hybrid (43/39) retakes the “midsize car with a trunk” (for people who don’t like the Prius look) crown from the Ford Fusion Hybrid, next the Prius Plug-in Hybrid (100+ mpg if you drive less than ~20 miles, around 60 mpg if you drive further), and then the Prius c compact car (?? 53 mpg?). The last one will finally reapply the laws of physics to gasoline-powered cars; since Honda killed the original Insight 5 years ago, you can buy a smaller car than the Prius, but in exchange for less room and a less powerful engine you get significantly worse mpg. The 2011 Prius gets 51/48 mpg, astounding for a practical reliable midsize car.

No small fuel-efficient all-wheel drive car

Unfortunately Toyota makes nothing for me, none of these are compact all-wheel drive snow cars. The Highland Hybrid gets 28/28 mpg which is fantastic for a 3-row SUV, but way too big. Nobody else is doing much better since I wrote 4×4 x zero 6 years ago: Audi’s A3 TDI isn’t available with AWD, the new Ford Escape won’t offer a hybrid variant and the Ford C-Max hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrids (not at the show) won’t have AWD. Supposedly Toyota will bring out the RAV4 Electric (not at the show) in 2012 with powertrain by Tesla, but it’s a beefy SUV and unlikely to be practical to drive to Tahoe. The chunky Mini Clubman is very roomy for its short wheelbase thanks to its height, but 25/31 mpg is lame. As no one is making a small AWD hybrid, the best replacement for my aging Subaru is likely to be the new Subaru Impreza, which thanks to a smaller engine and a Lineartronic CVT gets an impressive 27/36 mpg; it’s nice to see Subaru finally offering “premium” features on its small car like leather, heated seats and mirrors.

Speaking of plug-in cars…

  • The Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid is a nice car, great as your only car if your regular commute is ~40 miles, but it doesn’t feel like a $39,145 sedan.
  • the Mitsubishi i-MiEV is a quirky small car, just needs to be cheaper
  • the Nissan Leaf was everywhere and they had a fleet you could drive indoors (no emissions!). It feels big and spacious inside and so distinctive.
  • BMW had its lease-only 1-series ActiveE electric car, but the Leaf makes all the “give us $500/month to lease one of a few hundred trial cars” pointless and irrelevant. There was no sign of their innovative i3 and unbelievable i8 future plug-in cars at the show.
  • the Ford Focus Electric was spinning on a stand but you couldn’t open its trunk to see its space-robbing battery pack. At $40,000 it’s way overpriced compared to the Leaf.
  • there was one Fisker plug-in hybrid, an enormous 5,400lb yacht with massive presence

Styling from the past

As for styling, Prius wins for being so aerodynamic, otherwise cars were treading water which means Hyundai and Kia’s handsome-enough models will continue to steal sales. For some reason the Academy of Art had a huge stand showing its classic car collection (do the hordes of would-be artists that it buses around San Francisco know their tuition fees are paying for this?!) and the old cars destroy the new ones. Only Cadillac and Jaguar’s present-day sedans come close to the panache their old cars had. Some classics were so beautiful, like a darling 1947 Cisitalia (one of Battista "Pinin" Farina’s first designs):

and the luscious front and sides of the 1948 Jaguar XK120. 

There was also an “aftermarket alley” with tuner cars, most with oversized wheels splaying out from lowered suspensions that look like comic drawings (look at the wheels on the car in the top-right background below). Don’t try to fit snow chains on them! They had a nice series of Nissan Skyline GT-Rs, I didn’t realize it first came out in 1969. Here too, the oldies were better, particularly the Honda/Acura NSX, looking beautiful and purposeful 21 years later.

Posted in cars, design, eco | Leave a comment

music: Jeff Beck grinds cats

Posted on 2011-11-19 by skierpage

I watched Jeff Beck: Performing this Week… Live at Ronnie Scott’s, and I’m hugely impressed but not quite thrilled. The man doesn’t play guitar, he plays Stratocaster; the whammy bar and volume knob are integral to his right hand technique and it’s great to watch.

Vinnie Colauita is phenomenal on the drums and 21 year-old Tal Wilkenfeld is impressive, but they don’t quite jell. I would love to hear the band with Pino Palladino on bass.

Beck plays a lot of jazz-rock fusion at various tempos, including a tune from John McLaughlin, the master of it (Mahavishnu Orchestra’s drummer Billy Cobham vs. Colauita, tough call). Throughout he wills an angry screaming tone out of his guitar but ultimately I find it wearying. Eric Clapton comes out and you realize there’s no jangle in Beck’s playing.

It’s cool to see where Steve Howe got so many of his ideas. Many of the guitar parts on Relayer sound so similar, screaming yawl vs. clattering wail, tough call but Howe is a far better composer and musician. Beck is riff-tastic but almost funk-free (compare with the awesome John Mayer Trio).

Standouts: Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers (with a fine bass solo) and Nadia.

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music: Quincy Jones on respecting musical styles

Posted on 2011-10-28 by skierpage

I borrowed Q on Producing from the library. As the pretentious banner “THE QUINCY JONES LEGACY SERIES” across the top hints, it’s terrible, sycophantic hagiography woefully short on details of actual music production. But there are a few nice quotes. Around age 15, Quincy Jones was in a band playing any gig that paid, and

We used to try to make the schottisches and bar mitzvah music, like “Eli Eli” and stuff, sound like bebop in Seattle, but Ray [Charles] would say, “Goddamit, don’t! Play it true to the spirit of the music! Let each song have its own soul—its own truth.” That was the best advice. Ray was only two years older than me, but he was like a hundred years smarter. … If you’re true to it, each style of music has its own spirit and it deserves the dignity of having its own space.

As opposed to the less inclusive approach…

Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here?
Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.
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computers: reporting bugs in a sea of versions and projects

Posted on 2011-10-27 by skierpage

Someone’s post When is a bug report useful? inspired me to comment. I have two great ideas in here

  1. bug systems should be aware of my distribution, version, and related packages
  2. software projects should provide a way to test drive the latest version

Good points. But everything breaks down with “It should be about the most recent version available”. (K)ubuntu doesn’t ship the most recent version available!

For reporting, what would be great is if the bug ecosystem was both version- and distribution- aware. I should be able to search for a bug, and even if it’s fixed find relevant bug reports because it still applies to my version and/or distro. Ubuntu’s Launchpad tries to handle this with its “(+) Also affects project (+) Also affects distribution” and upstream linking, but in my limited understanding their implementation creates another fjord in which tens of thousands of bugs languish underwater. The problem also goes in the other direction: these days if you Google for problems with any Linux feature or program, the top search results are invariably cluttered with detailed bug reports and forum threads about Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9… from 2008.

Another issue with reporting is the interconnected layers in any modern Linux distro. My problem “KDE System Settings picks the wrong sound card” turned out to be PulseAudio providing identical description strings for them (“Internal Audio Analog Stereo”) because the kernel’s PCI probing is messed up on my hardware, with a workaround that requires Alsa config file changes. Likewise my problem “Firefox prints blank images” turned out to be bugs in the interaction of Ghostscript and libpoppler exposed by Ubuntu’s configuration of CUPS to still use a PostScript workflow even when apps generate PDFs for printing. Both involved four or more web sites, four bug systems, four wikis, and four forums to wander around in after looking in my distro’s bug system. Many people would call this the typical Linux clusterf*** and give up in despair, but it shows that bug systems have to become smarter about relationships.

In order to reproduce a bug with latest version, if I’m lucky I can download a standalone nightly binary from the project, unpack it into a test directory and retest with that. If I can’t, then sometimes I can switch my package manager to install unstable packages, but often that has cascading dependencies that require updating half a dozen other packages to unsupported latest. I’ve had problems with VLC and Wine and Pulseaudio and no easy way to try the latest short of compiling from source or installing a rolling bleeding-edge distro in a VM.

Here’s an idea: what if projects provided a runnable version of their nightly build? Each could have a test server with compiled code and you could either use X’s DISPLAY to have the remote binary display on your screen, or you could use a remote desktop protocol, some of which can even run in a browser. This “Try the latest” facility could take screenshots and link to bug reports. And imagine how many more people would use your cool program if they could test-drive it!

I really appreciate anyone who triages bug reports in the current situation, it’s a tough mission.

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