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incrementum“Mum, I go to school when I’m five, and I finish when I’m eighteen!” said he, snuggling a fluffy pink bunny as he fell asleep.
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crooked_timber_feedWe just had an election in my home state of Queensland, and the outcomes will be of some broader interest, I hope. The governing Liberal National (= conservative) Party has (almost certainly) gone down to a surprise defeat, going from 78 of 89 seats at the last election to a probable 40 or 41 this time. The key issues were broken promises (particularly regarding job cuts) and government proposals for privatisation.
This can be seen either as a reversal or a repeat of the last election when the governing Labor Party went from 51 seats to 7. That election was also fought on broken promises and privatisation, but with the roles of the parties reversed (Labor had won an election opposing privatisation, then immediately announced it would go ahead).
Among the actual or potential ramifications
Looking internationally, the outcome can be seen as a defeat for the politics of austerity and maybe as an example to suggest that Pasokification can be reversed, under the right circumstances.
Finally, I’ll link to my analysis of the asset sales, which got a reasonably prominent run during the campaign. It probably didn’t change many minds, but it helped to counter the barrage of pro-privatisation propaganda.
chailafestivids! THREE! It an abundance of vid riches, and they are all absolutely fabulous in their different ways. I love them. :Dyasaman
terriko
puzzlementbadgerbagbadgerbagstormys_corner_feedI had breakfast with Cate Huston and I told her that I was working on a blog post called “Should you build an app or a website?” She opined that perhaps mobile apps, both native and web, are better because they have constraints. When you have a small screen, you have to have a good UI. You can’t offer users every possibility, you have to make some decisions and choices for them on what they might want to do.
Cate talked about an art teacher who constrains kids to black and white charcoal, then to a drawing started to someone else and then to a drawing torn in half. They are more creative and come up with more inspired work because they have artificial constraints.
When I think about really single purpose, simple websites, I think about Google’s home page.
There’s a few apps like that too.
What do you think? What would your website look like if you knew that everyone had to look at it through a 640×320 screen and could only interact with it using touch sensitive gloves because it was raining ice chunks outside?
peaceful_sands posting in bitesizedcleaningpuzzlementWait, you hate Lego? I hate Lego too, but that's because I remember the good old days of Lego. Tell me about hating Lego, please! —
crooked_timber_feedThe author is a genius but would prefer to remain mildly anonymous. I think it reads like Donald Barthelme. (I mean, the Stevens influence is also pretty definitely there.)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trollbird
I
Among twenty reasonable comments,
The only livid thing
Was the caw of the trollbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a blog
In which there are three trollbirds.
III
The trollbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a man pretending to be a woman
Are one.
A man and a man pretending to be a woman and a trollbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The banality of congruent discourse
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The trollbird ROFLMFAO’ing
Or just after.
VI
Libertarians filled the long comments section
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the trollbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Webdom,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the trollbird
Walks around the feet
Of the earnest among you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the trollbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the trollbird was banned,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of trollbirds
Remarking in a green mood,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
Wieseltier rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For trollbirds.
XII
The book has four-and-a-half stars.
The trollbird will be flying soon.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The trollbird signed on
With a fresh user-name.
One real advantage of the Roman numeral system is that, like in the old Prison joke, when we see a new troll, we can just call out ‘XII’, or whatever. And everyone will immediately be able to savor the standardized, exquisite aspect.
sumana_feedOn a Julia Evans post, "Fear Makes You A Worse Programmer":
Back to fear - this piece by Skud includes a bit of a horror story -- bad or missing code review led to a bad deploy which led a volunteer to drop out entirely, partly due to fear of messing up again. And here's a story where paranoia by management led to the firm going out of business.....So the distinction de Becker makes [in The Gift of Fear] is that fear is your subconscious telling you about a genuine threat, because your intuition has put together the facts faster than your conscious self has -- whereas anxiety comes from the messages on the 10 o'clock news, racism, etc. Fear is a friend and anxiety is an interloper. If I were to use that framing, I would say that one characteristic of a mature programmer would be: she has a healthy sense of fear, and the reflex to mitigate scary risks ("we need to put this into version control NOW"), but she has control over anxiety ("people say C is hard to learn, maybe I'm not smart enough").
On choosing your own learning path:
I think you might like this reflective post by Ben Rosenbaum on "the moment in which I actually started to determine my education." (And a few current thoughts, by Indian students speaking to other Indians, that by implication say a lot about breaking expectations.) I try to be conscious of how others explicitly and implicitly guided me into certain achievement paths and avoid doing that with others, avoid making assumptions (so, for instance, I have retrained myself to avoid asking, "where did you go to college?").
On Philip Guo's post about "command line bullshittery" as a barrier to research:
I agree with Philip Guo so thoroughly, especially about the demoralizing effect of the gulf of execution, and that a leader should reduce the incidental complexity that slows down the people she's serving.....As a card-carrying fan of Neal Stephenson's "How to Win Friends and Influence People^H^H^H^H^H^H^H In The Beginning Was The Command Line", and of [readings] on the usage and philosophy of Unix concentrating on the command line, I do not consider the command line bullshit. But Philip's right to consider the specifics of *getting research software installed and set up* as incidental complexity in the context of his students' substantive work. And that process takes place on the command line. It's like me calling the process of getting across town in Manhattan "L train bullshit"; it is good that the L train exists but arrrrgh.
On better ways to ask and answer code-related questions online (and the concept of a "yak trace," understanding the series of steps a person has taken to make something or debug a problem):
basically I think a yak trace emerges most easily in conversation with a generous interlocutor, whereas many fora online where people ask for help would prefer that help-requesters' initial speech act be delivered with the concision and throughput of a paramedic running alongside a gurney....In my experience *building even the faintest of relationships* with the asker/user makes it a million times easier to ask the question. In IRC, for example, I've had tremendous success by *starting off saying* (roughly) "Hi [person's nickname]! I'm Sumana, [thing I do] and I live in NYC. Good to meet you, although sorry for the circumstances :/" [wait for reciprocation; most people will reciprocate by giving their name at least] "That problem sounds frustrating. Do you mind if I ask a couple diagnostic questions?" Now we are people together and not just Supplicant and Expert, and I can ask about the environment, and I can say something like "the approach you're using is sort of unusual so I want to check whether you're accidentally making it harder for yourself and there's an easier way to get the functionality you want :) " (although I can't remember the last time I had to literally explicitly say that; usually by this point they are open to talking about their process, their macro goal, etc.).
IMO the affordances of a lot of online tech-help-seeking spaces discourage this kind of necessary trust-building conversation.
In longer-term dev scenarios, understanding the user's underlying goals is a task that product managers and user experience designers have a lot of tools to do. Qualitative interviews. Ethnography. Market research. Looking at traffic stats and discovering/making funnels. IMO Val's insight about what the application developers really wanted was a user experience insight (some folks call it DX, Developer Experience, for stuff like this).
The API usability chapter in Greg Wilson's and Andy Oram's Making Software influenced my thinking thoroughly on this stuff.
Words, other than proper nouns and HTML, in this post that my in-browser spellchecker dislikes: bullshittery, arrrrgh, gurney, IRC, etc., IMO, affordances, tech-help-seeking, dev, stats, DX, API.
aria_stewart_feedA common set of questions that come up on IRC around node web services revolve around how to do MVC “right” using tools like express.
The short answer: Don’t.
A little history. “MVC” is an abbreviation for “Model, View, Controller”. It’s a particular way to break up the responsibilities of parts of a graphical user interface application. One of the prototypical examples is a CAD application: models are the objects being drawn, in the abstract: models of mechanical parts, architectural elevations, whatever the subject of the particular application and use is. The “Views” are windows, rendering a particular view of that object. There might be several views of a three-dimensional part from different angles while the user is working. What’s left is the controller, which is a central place to collect actions the user is performing: key input, the mouse clicks, commands entered.
The responsibility goes something like “controller updates model, model signals that it’s been updated, view re-renders”.
This leaves the model relatively unencumbered by the design of whatever system it’s being displayed on, and lets the part of the software revolving around the concepts the model involves stay relatively pure in that domain. Measurements of parts in millimeters, not pixels; cylinders and cogs, rather than lines and z-buffers for display.
The View stays unidirectional: it gets the signal to update, it reads the state from the model and displays the updated view.
The controller even is pretty disciplined and takes input and makes it into definite commands and updates to the models.
Now if you’re wondering how this fits into a web server, you’re probably wondering the same thing I wondered for a long time. The pattern doesn’t fit.
On the web, we end up with a pipeline something like “Browser sends request to server, server picks a handler, handler reads request and does actions, result of those actions is presented to a template or presentation layer, which transforms it into something that can be sent, which goes out as a response to the browser.”
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It still makes sense to separate out the meat of the application from the specifics of how it’s being displayed and interfaced to the world, often, especially if the application manipulates objects that are distinctly separate. A example might be that an accounts ledger makes no sense to bind the web portions to the data model particularly tightly. That same ledger might be used to generate emails, to generate print-outs, and later to generate reports in a completely different system. The concept of a “model” or a “business domain logic” layer to an application makes sense:
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But some time in the mid-2000s, someone thought to try to shoehorn the MVC concept into this pipeline, and did so by renaming these components:
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And this is why we end up with relatively well-defined models, since that makes sense, and ‘views’ are a less-descriptive name for templating and presentation logic. What’s left ends up being called a ‘controller’ and we start a lot of arguments about whether a given bit of logic belongs there or in the model.
So in express, let’s refer to models and domain logic, to handlers and to templates. We’ll have an easier time of it.
Handlers accept web-shaped data: query strings and post data, and shape them into something the business logic can deal with. When the business logic emits something we should display, that same handler can pass it off to templates, or in the case of data being rendered in the browser by a client there, serialized directly as json and sent off as the response. Let the business logic know little about the web, unless its concern is the web as in a content management sytem. Let our handlers adapt the HTTP interface to the business logic, and the responses out to our presentation layer, even if that’s as simple as filling in values in a template.
We’ll all be a lot happier if MVC keeps its meaning as a paradigm for breaking up responsibility within a GUI.
aria_stewart_feedWelcome to Hexo! This is your very first post. Check documentation for more info. If you get any problems when using Hexo, you can find the answer in troubleshooting or you can ask me on GitHub.
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More info: Writing
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More info: Server
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More info: Generating
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More info: Deployment
emceeaichI had a suite of functional tests written in Selenium 2 using the SE Builder plugin for Firefox. We had wanted to get them running in our continuous integration environment.
We've found that the path to running Selenium Builder tests in Jenkins is not clear. There's a Jenkins plugin, but we try to run it and it fails, tersely.
I didn't want to convert the tests (which are written in JSON) to JUnit, because of overhead. So I needed to down-convert the tests to Selenium 1, and save to HTML so I could run them on Jenkins. This is not ideal, but until I get some more information from Sauce Labs and the Jenkins' plug-in's author, we'll do things the olde way.
There are several commands in Selenium 2 without Selenium 1 equivalents. Most of our tests call commands like storeElementAttribute, to stash attributes for comparison.
The quick replacement for storeElementAttribute (in Selenium 1's HTML format) is:
<tr>
<td>storeEval</td>
<td>window.document.querySelector('meta[name="og:title"]').content;</td>
<td>title</td>
</tr>
Remember that in Selenium 1, the default object from JavaScript's point of view is not the current window, so you need to start with the window object.
rachelmanija
, by Courtney Milan. Heiress Jane Fairfield has tons of money and suitors, but is determined not to marry; in my very favorite part of the book, she fends off her suitors with a combination of social obnoxiousness and spectacularly hideous dresses. Her sister Emily is shut in by her guardian due to epilepsy, but sneaks out and meets a sweet Indian law student. 
, by Sarah Mayberry. A woman filmmaker still recovering from disabling car crash injuries moves in next door to a man with an adorable dog. She too has an adorable dog! It must be fate. I liked the realistic treatment of her disabilities, but there were too many stupid misunderstandings for my taste. 
, by Carla Kelly. Genuinely heartwarming romance between Major Jack Hamilton, just returned from years at war and struggling with PTSD, and the bizarrely named Miss Onyx Hamilton, who is illegitimate and so considered lucky to marry anyone, let alone the vicar whom she doesn't love. (The name is explained, but still.) She is set upon by highwaymen! He is shot rescuing her! She does such a good job nursing him that he asks her to come nurse his dying brother. And their relationship slowly blossoms.branchandroottwtdpuzzlement in incrementum - Night beforecrooked_timber_feed - Queensland electionchaila - An embarrassment of festivids richessynecdochic - Why there is cat hair on all our clean laundryyasaman - A New Empireterriko - Brief Comic Reviews, January 2015puzzlement - Topic meme master postbadgerbag - Dramatic fall onto the fainting couchbadgerbag - Hanging in , going outsynecdochic - Cat lumpsstormys_corner_feed - For good design add constraints to your web pagepeaceful_sands in bitesizedcleaning - Cheering you on for the weekendpuzzlement - Hating Legocrooked_timber_feed - Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Trollbirdsumana_feed - On Fear vs. Anxiety, Self-Determination, the Command Line, and Interlocutors and DXaria_stewart_feed - Why MVC doesn't fit the webaria_stewart_feed - Hello Worldemceeaich - Selenium Hacks for the Temporary Blockedmetanewsmods in metanews - Meta links 2015/1/22 - 2015/1/28rachelmanija - Recent Romances: The Heiress Effect, Summer Campaign, The Other Side of Us