Posts in the Personal Category

A Matter of Conscience

Published 15 years, 2 months past

So Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell has gained national notoriety for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple, referring them instead to another justice to have the marriage performed.  His action has, of course, provoked a great deal of condemnation.  Pretty much every elected Louisiana official above Mr. Bardwell (and plenty of them to either side) in the administrative hierarchy has called for his removal from his position.  That goes all the way up to Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who said:

“This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately – including the revoking of his license.”

As for Mr. Bardwell himself, he has claimed not to be racist, but instead concerned for the biracial children that result from mixed-race marriage.  Of all that he’s said, though, I was particularly interested by the following:

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

It interested me because it’s exactly the kind of reasoning that underlies “conscience protection” laws that exempt medical professionals who wish to refuse participation in abortion, or dispensation of contraception.

So now I’m very curious to know whether what pro-life groups have to say about what this man has done and how he’s done it.  Or, for that matter, what Governor Jindal himself now thinks of the bill he recently signed into law.


Announcing Followerlap

Published 15 years, 6 months past

Last week, I got an interesting inquiry from Velda Christensen:

@meyerweb *wondering just how many of your followers follow @zeldman and vice-versa*

I had no idea.  Furthermore, I didn’t know of a tool that could tell me.  So I built one: Followerlap.

As it turned out, the Twitter API made answering the specific question pretty ridiculously easy, thanks to followers/ids.  All it takes is two API requests, one for each username.  The same would be true of friends/ids, on top of which I suspect I’ll fairly shortly build a tool quite similar to Followerlap.

Since I announced Followerlap’s existence on (where else?) Twitter, I’ve had a few repeated (and not unexpected) bits of feedback.

  • Why not list the common followers?  Because followers/ids returns a list of numeric IDs.  Resolving those IDs as usernames would require one API hit per ID.  If there are 15 followers in common, that’s not such a big deal, but if there are 1,500, well, I’ll run out of my hourly allotment of API requests very quickly.  Maybe there’s a better way; if so, I’d love to hear about it, because that would be a great addition.

  • Why can’t I find out how many people follow both Stephen Fry and Shaquille O’Neal?  Past a certain number of followers, somewhere in the 200,000–250,000 range, the API just dies.  You can’t even count on getting a consistent error message back.  There are ways around this, but I didn’t want to stress the API that way, so it just fails.  Sorry.

  • How can I link to a specific comparison?  At the moment, you can’t.  I hope to make that happen soon, but I decided that a tool this simple should have a similarly simple launch.  Ship early, ship often, right?  Anyway, it’s on the list of things to add soon.  Use the new “Livelink to this result” link underneath a result.  (See update below for more.)

So that’s Followerlap.  Any other questions?  I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments, though for a number of reasons I may be slow to respond.

Update 6 Jul 09: as noted in the edited point above, livelinking of comparison results is now, um, live.  So now you can pass around results like the number of people who follow both God and the Devil (thanks to Paul M. Watson for coming up with that one!).  I call this “livelinking” because hitting a result URL will get you the very latest results for that particular comparison.  “Permalinking” to me implied that it would link to a specific result at a specific time, which the tool doesn’t do and very likely never, ever will.


Kept Afloat In Amsterdam

Published 15 years, 7 months past

It’s taken me slightly more than a month to write this post.  It’s about people at their best.

Last month, just after speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, my laptop was stolen.

Actually, to be more painfully accurate, my laptop case was stolen—and inside it at the time was the laptop, my mobile phone, and my wallet.  Plus the usual assortment of stuff that goes into a laptop case.

Because I still remember to this day advice Tantek gave me just before we boarded a bus to Narita airport, I had my passport on me.  I happened to have picked up my camera to take some pictures of the conference hall.  My clothes were still in my hotel room.  Everything else was gone.

I can’t really describe the feeling.  Maybe you’ve felt it.  Shaking and stunned and self-blaming and nakedly vulnerable.  All that magnified by the complete loss of funds and communication with my family.

And the data.  The lost data.  I have backups, but they’re never as current as one would want.  (Which reminds me: if you aren’t backing up, and you aren’t doing so regularly, learn from my loss and start.)  Besides, at that moment, as the full realization of what had happened slid coldly into my gut and started its slow, merciless expansion throughout my entire body, I didn’t think “Oh, I have backups until that date, and all my work mail is on the mail server, and I’ve been uploading the best pictures to online services.”  Those things didn’t occur to me.  They were completely blocked by the continual, sickening, endlessly looping thought: IT’S ALL GONE.

And that’s when people started pitching in to help me out.

In addition to helping me look for the case in hopes that it had just been moved somewhere non-obvious, Khris Loux of JS-Kit let me call home from his iPhone without a second thought, so I could tell Kat what had happened and get her immediately started on contacting banks and credit card companies.  And the honest concern in his eyes helped snap me back from near-paralysis, touched by the regard coming from someone I’d only met an hour before.

Then Gabe Mac, having heard what was going on, came up to me with a fully charged mobile phone I could borrow so that I could remain in contact with my family until I went home.  He didn’t ask me how I would get it back to him, because I don’t think it had occurred to him.  He just said, “Eric, I have a spare phone.  You need it.  Take it.”

So I did.  And much, much later that same night, it was nearly a lifeline.

Throughout all this, Boris and Patrick, the conference founders, were working to find out if one of the tech crew had accidentally picked it up, or it had been turned in to venue staff.  And when it became inescapably clear that the case was well and truly gone, they sent one of their staff to get a SIMM card for the phone Gabe had loaned me and 200 euros in cash so I could get home.  Just did it, because they could see that I would need those things even when I couldn’t.  They also arranged a ride for me to get to my evening’s social appointment.

That appointment was with Steven Pemberton and his lovely family, who fed me a great dinner in their fabulous top-floor flat and were more than gracious about my disordered mental state.  After dinner, Steven took me to the nearby police station and acted as translator as I filled out a report.  And then he loaned me use of his home phone to call a couple of credit card companies that I had to speak with personally in order to make sure my business credit cards were cancelled.

It wasn’t the relaxed evening of dinner and shop talk I’d been hoping to have, but I did several things that needed to be done and Steven made it possible.  And we did get in a tiny smidgen of (very interesting) shop talk near the end.

At every step of that evening, someone was there to help push me forward, help me lower the unexpected barriers just a little bit, help ease the situation however they could.  So many people coming together to help out someone they’d known for years or never before met.  Thanks to them all, I was able to get home without further incident.  Thanks to them all, I had a major yang to the theft’s yin, a powerful reminder of just how good people can be.

Thank you, all.


Findings of the A List Apart Survey 2008

Published 15 years, 9 months past

At last—at long, long last!—the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available, along with the anonymized raw data we collected.

There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door.  A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings).  I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise.  They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame.  It just took us a while to get them the data to analyze, and then a while longer to take their report and findings and process them into report form.

The biggest change this year is that we’re publishing the results as HTML+CSS instead of a PDF.  This greatly increased the challenge, because it was important to me that the data be presented using styled tables, not images.  That’s easy like cake if all you’re doing is putting them up as visual tables, and we certainly do that for some of the figures.  In the other cases, where we have bar charts of varying kinds, things got difficult.  I managed to devise solutions that are 99.9% effective, and I’m both proud of and frustrated by those solutions.  Proud, of course, because I managed to wring three-stack bars out of table markup; frustrated because of the markup I had to construct to make them possible.  I think this report represents more than half my lifetime usage of the style attribute, but unfortunately there’s no way (using just CSS) to say {width: content;}.

So why not use JavaScript to do that, or to just replace the tables with canvas-drawn charts?  I did consider both, but decided that I would push as far as I could with plain HTML+CSS. 

A few implementation notes:

  • I used HTML 5 in order to step around some previously unrealized limitations of HTML 4—did you know tfoot has to come before tbody in HTML 4?  I didn’t.  I did not use elements like header and footer due to known problems in Firefox 2 and related browsers, which mangle pages containing those elements.  Instead, I took the same path Jon Tan recommends, and classed divs using those names for later, easier conversion.

  • The tables which underlie the charts do not have summary attributes.  If a group of civic-minded individuals would like to write useful summaries, please let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know how best to submit them.  Similarly, I did my very best to make sure all the table headers had accurate scope values, but if I botched any, let me know.

  • I’m aware that Opera shows horizontal scrollbars on most chapters of the report.  This is due to its refusal to apply overflow to table boxes, which according to my recent reading of the CSS 2.1 specification is the correct thing to (not) do.  Every other browser I tested does apply overflow to table boxes, though, which I found most useful.  I tried applying overflow: hidden to a few other boxes, and that got rid of Opera’s horizontal scrollbars, but it also cut off actual content in some other browsers.  I chose a cosmetic problem in one browser over loss of content in others.  The best fix I’ve devised is to wrap the tables in divs and apply overflow: hidden to those divs, but I didn’t want to rush the fix and botch it, so it didn’t make it in time for first publication.  I expect to get it in shortly after publication.

  • In a like vein, there are a few combo charts where a bar goes shooting off the right side of the chart in IE7.  This appears to be due to some kind of width-doubling problem that’s only invoked on elements with a style attribute when the row header goes to two lines instead of being just one.  Googling for an explanation yielded no joy, and a lengthy series of attempts to hack around the problem came to nothing.  If anyone knows how to counteract that problem other than preventing the header text from going past a single line, I’d love to hear it.  (Update: I’ve implemented the “fix” of preventing line-wrapping in the report, so there aren’t any off-the-page bars right now, but you can see an example of the problem on this test page.)

  • Surprisingly, the charts mostly work in IE6.  The exception is some of the triple-stack charts, where data points overlap when the rightmost sub-bars get too small, and also the double-width bars mentioned in the previous point.  I don’t really have a fix for this short of upgrading the browser, but if somebody finds one, I’d be happy to test it out.

On that last point, if there are questions or suggestions surrounding the implementation of the report, we can certainly discuss them here.  With regard to the survey and report itself, though—that is, the questions asked and the results we’re publishing—please direct those thoughts to the comments section of the ALA article announcing the report.  I’m hoping that we’ll have the 2009 survey up within a few months, so comments on what we asked and how we asked it, what we didn’t ask but should have, and that sort of thing could well have a direct impact on the next survey.  But please put those on the ALA site, where more people are likely to see them.

It’s done, it’s out, it’s yours—both the report and the data, about which I’ll soon write a little bit more.  Read the report, or produce your own report using the data.  Just always know that when we publish these reports, we do not mean for them to be the final word.  No, what we always mean is for them to be the first words, a starting point, a place from which to grow.  What comes next is as much up to you as anyone else, and I can’t wait to see what you do.


London: the Gathering

Published 15 years, 10 months past

When I was in Boston earlier this month, one of the people I’d thought to hang out with was Jared Spool, and of course he was on the other side of the country while I was in his hometown.  This was a bit of a downer but I figured, hey, we both speak a lot, so I’d see him again somewhere at some point.

And how right I was: the week after my return home, Dopplr informed me that he and I would both be in London for the first weekend in March.  I’m there for the Carson Workshop I’m giving (and there are only a few seats left, so you should grab one while they’re still open) and he’ll be in town for reasons of his own.  As will Dana Chisnell, it turns out.

How could we not act on this?  So I pinged the folks at Carsonified and asked them if they knew of a venue where we could arrange some kind of meetup.  They were not only glad to help out, they offered to organize the whole thing.  The result: a Web Geek Gathering at the Pitcher & Piano Trafalgar on Sunday, 8 March 2009.  Jared, Dana, and I are all planning to be there.  You should plan to be there too.  You should also RSVP because, unlike the web, there isn’t infinite available space.  Not to mention I’ve heard rumors that there might be some manner of free drinks.  I mean, I’m just sayin’ what I heard.

Hope to see you there!


Life’s Rich Tapestry

Published 15 years, 11 months past

Human beings say, “It never rains but it pours.”  This is not very apt, for it frequently does rain without pouring.  The rabbits’ proverb is better expressed.  They say, “One cloud feels lonely”…

—Richard Adams, Watership Down

The past few weeks have been a bit more intense than usual.  It all started on Inauguration Day, in fact, though that’s pretty much just coincidence.

It all started with a cold.  Carolyn stayed home with a terrible cough and a slight fever, which meant she got to watch the inauguration with us.  A couple of days later, she was fine, and Rebecca was sick.  Nothing unusual about that, of course: you have two kids, they pass germs along to each other.

In Rebecca’s case, though, it didn’t seem to get better.  By the time, a few days later, she spent most of an afternoon sitting very still on my lap, whimpering softly, her skin burning with fever, Kat started to suspect a common but serious childhood illness.  A trip to the doctor confirmed it.  The child in the next examination room had the same illness and was unlucky: two inhaler treatments had little effect, and he was sent to the hospital.  Rebecca fared much better: one treatment and she was much improved.

That was lucky for us all, because we had a long road trip ahead of us.  The night before Rebecca’s doctor appointment, Kat’s mother died after a very long and difficult illness.  We had known it was coming, thanks to the hospice nurses.  We had known for a very long time that this is how it would one day end.  Most of the mourning had been done ahead of time, to be honest, but at the same time it’s never easy to lose a loved one, no matter how much you may have prepared.

We needed to be on Long Island by Sunday night.  Plane fare was far too expensive, even with the bereavement discount.  So we packed up the nebulizer, treatments, and everything else we needed to drive eleven hours to our hotel.  Pennsylvania, as anyone who’s made the drive will tell you, goes on forever.  It’s an even longer forever when you have to make extra stops, as will happen with four people, two of them children.

A very good friend of ours watched the girls as we attended the graveside ceremony, and we spent the next couple of days with Kat’s family as they sat shiva.  And then we drove back to sit our own.

I had to be in Boston the following week for client work, and while a great many awesome things happened on that trip, it was hard to leave so soon after everything else.  In the middle of everything else, really.  I left on the second day of our two-day shiva; the rabbi finished his prayers and remarks and five minutes later I was pulling out of our driveway to catch my flight.  And of course the illnesses, traveling, and general upheaval in our lives had pretty well shattered both girls’ sleeping patterns, and I couldn’t be there to help.

The day after I got back, Kat finally went to the doctor to see about her sore thumb.  It turned out to be broken.  She’s wearing a brace now.  Two days after that, I quite unexpectedly suffered an anaphylactic reaction to a food I’d had many times before.  It was the whole works, too: sore stomach, tightness in the chest and throat, dizziness, itchy hands, and, so my wife tells me, a blue tinge around the lips.  It was a new and wholly unwelcome experience, I assure you.  We’re not completely sure of the ingredient that caused it, but there’s a very strong candidate: avocado.  So no more guacamole for me, it would seem.

All that knocked me even more offline than usual, which is why further writings about HTML5, CSS3, and other topics of note have persisted in collectively playing the parts of Sir Not-Appearing-On-This-Site.  I’m hoping that by getting all this off my chest, I’ll clear up some of the blockage and get things moving again.

So how about you—what’s the first month-or-so of 2009 been like for you?  If it’s been similarly stressful, unload and lighten the burden.  If it’s been good, tell us about it so we can all share a little bit of uplift.  I know I could use a little!


London CSS/XHTML Workshop

Published 15 years, 11 months past

Hey all, and especially those of you in the EU: I’m going to be doing an all-new one-day workshop in London in early March via the offices of Carson Workshops, for whom I’ve done workshops in the past.  Previously I’ve done two-day gigs with a beginner-to-intermediate skill range, but this time we’re trying something different.  I’m going to get down and dirty with some tough topics, and really push hard at the limits of what CSS and semantic markup can do.

You can get the details at the CW site, and note the special price for the first quarter of the seats.  That’s right, this will be a small, intimate workshop, with plenty of chances for questions about and challenges to what I’m saying.  Previous workshops have featured some really great conversations among everyone there, and I expect the same this time around.

I had meant to blog this before life intervened and took me out of my wifi cloud (and more on that soon), so time is a little more of the essence than usual—if you know someone who you think might be interested, pass the word on, willya?  Thanks!


Bahstahn: the Gathering

Published 15 years, 11 months past

The Robot speaks truth: I will be visiting the northern reaches of the greater Boston area in the first few days of February to do some client training (which is one of the many things I do).  To celebrate, I’ve managed to pull the Markup & Style Society (which of course includes that simplest of bits, the inestimable Mr. C.) out of hibernation, get them to link up with the Build Guild, and have the two jointly sponsor a gathering open to all who wish to join us.  Welcome to the social!

This massively meritorious meeting of minds will take place on 2 February 2009 in historic Salem, MA:  here’s the Upcoming entry with all the details and RSVP action.  If you plan to be with us, make your voice heard.  Or, if you’re the fearsome and mighty Windhammer, who rumor has it may also be there, bring forth thunder!  On the Upcoming page.

Hope to see you there!


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