Thoughts From Eric Archive

I used to be a programmer.  Way back in the day, I wrote great big heaps of BASIC and Turbo PASCAL 4.5 and worked in a few other languages of that era (I may be one of the few people left who remembers Clipper).  At one point, a high school friend and I worked on creating our own command-line environment for the C64, for no other reason than it seemed like a fun challenge.  I’ve written quite a bit of JavaScript—not like a wizard, but well enough to get some things done—and a fair amount of PHP.  These are languages that I understand, that make sense to me.  I can make them do what I want to do.

But I just don’t get all these new-fangled programming frameworks.  Is something wrong with me?  Seriously.  I have this grumpy, churlish feeling that I suspect is rather similar to the way SGML experts felt when they saw HTML becoming so popular, and that scares me.

People who’ve drunk the various kinds of framework kool-aid don’t make it any easier, though.  “Oh”, they gush, “you should absolutely try Ruby on Rails!  It’s so easy!  It’s almost like writing regular English!”  Which means they’re clearly on crack, because Ruby on Rails is so very different from a human-written language that the few ways in which it sort of resembles prose, assuming you look at it under a dim light through a heavily fractured fresnel lens, serve only to confuse me further.  I have many of the same problems with MySQL, actually:  by dint of its being sort of human-like in its syntax, I’m led into all kinds of incorrect assumptions about what I can do.  Thus I spend a lot more time screaming at opaque error messages than seems necessary, just because I thought a comma made sense when the language didn’t.

I’ve looked at all kinds of different intros and tutorials and “for regular folks” resources, most of which I get from Simon‘s linkblog, for a number of different frameworks.  They serve only to confuse me.  The CakePHP 15-minute blog tutorial?  Didn’t get it, and remember, I can write PHP relatively well (I wrote all of An Event Apart‘s registration stuff using PHP and MySQL, for example).  The oft-recommended Tutorial in Ruby on Rails?  Lost me, Coach.  Even Jeff Croft’s Django for Non-Programmers left me in the dust.

All these frameworks’ proponents say “Just write in this totally simple and obvious way and the messy details will be magically handled for you!” but that’s just not how it works.  You have to write in a very specific and unintuitive way, and unless you know specific magic words and what roles they can take then nothing will happen except the return of an error message.  This is no different than any computer language, of course.  What I think bothers me is that the cheerleaders always seem to believe, or at least pretend, otherwise.

Maybe it’s just that the tutorials never seem to clearly state what’s a piece of built-in magic that I’ll learn about later, what’s something that I’m building myself, or whatever.  I mean, look partway through Jeff’s Django piece.  I don’t mean to pick on Jeff, because he’s not doing anything worse or even different from the other stuff I’ve read; it’s just the one I happened to read most recently.  Anyway, he says, and I quote:

These four lines create a very pretty admin area…. with appropriate entry fields for all of your fields.  The “pub_date” field will automatically get a pop-up calendar for choosing a date. The “enable_comments” field automatically knows to use radio buttons for its interface. The “lead_image” field will be a browser-based upload tool. Et-cetera. Without doing a thing, you’ll get an admin interface the likes of this…

That whole interface just magically happens?  How and why?  Is it part of the Django core?  Why?  Is it useful for other stuff besides what we’re doing here?  How?  Did all this happen based on the class I created, or the variables I defined, or the values I gave them?  How can I tell?  Where can I find a list of the magic things?  How can I re-use them; or, put another way, how far will the magic things stretch?

I feel like there’s some very basic, fundamental, obvious thing that I’m missing, but I don’t even have the necessary level of knowledge to frame the right question.  Or questions.  See?  I don’t even know how little I know.  Is it that I spent too much time doing old-style programming, and so I’m too suspicious of anything I didn’t write myself?  (In which case you’d think I’d be an assembly-language kind of guy, but I’m not.  At all.)  Is it that for years I taught myself programming languages using reference manuals, so I need that kind of function listing before my mind will start to absorb a new language?  Is it just that I’m too old now and my mind isn’t sufficiently elastic to take in radically new concepts?

Basically, my nose is telling me that I’m up a putrescent watercourse and I lack a means of locomotion.  Maybe I’m not alone there, but sometimes it sure seems like it.

• Flummoxed By Frameworks was published on Monday, May 8th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been one hundred seventeen replies.

This one will be of interest to the dozen or so of you who regularly give presentations that involve some sort of (Powerpoint, Keynote, S5, whatever) slide show.

Just before An Event Apart Philadelphia, I went out and bought a Keyspan Presentation Remote.  I picked this particular make and model because I’d used one at Web Essentials 05 and it’s programmable, which always hooks me.  It also has the ability to control the mouse pointer, change the audio volume, and more.  So I bought one.

Bad move.  As attendees of An Event Apart can tell you, we had problem after problem with the damn thing, both with the default settings and with the customized configuration I’d set up.  It turns out the remote has two “modes”, and the default mode can be only partly reprogrammed.  Sadly, it won’t stay in the alternate mode.  If you don’t interact with the remote for a minute or so, it goes back to default mode, which means it stops doing what it’s supposed to do (advance slides).  We ended up just not using it.

While I was at IceWeb, I borrowed Molly‘s (or maybe it was Andy‘s) Kensington Pocket Presenter to deliver my talk.  This little baby is simple as anything: largish back and forth keys that map to Page Up and Page Down, a red button for the laser pointer, and a “stop” button that blanks the screen in supporting applications.  That’s it.  And that’s what makes it great.  Even better, the USB receiver slides into a storage slot in the remote itself, and doing so turns the whole thing off, is pure genius.  It fits easily in the hand, both in terms of size and shape.  It’s the iPod of presentation controllers, designed to do one thing and do it very well.  It’s enough to make me reconsider my whole “one device to rule them all” stance.

I picked one up at the Apple Store the other night for not much more than it costs at your favorite online discount e-store, and I couldn’t be happier.  The one little quirk I noticed was that the first time I plugged one of these into my PowerBook (running Tiger), the system said I was plugging in a new keyboard.  I dismissed the dialog box, and it’s worked without a hiccup ever since.

So: Keyspan remote bad, Kensington remote good.  Of course, if you really need a presentation remote that can do a convincing impression of a slow-moving mouse driven by an Etch-A-Sketch interface, then you may disagree with me on this one.  Me, I’d rather just have a slide controller, and if I need to do something with the mouse, I’ll walk over to the computer and use the mouse.  Shocking!

• Presentation Remotes was published on Thursday, May 4th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been fourteen replies.

IceWeb 2006 wrapped up today (that is, Friday), and I’m deeply honored to have been a part of it.  The attendees were just wonderful, there were great speakers all around, and I was as impressed as everyone else by Joe Clark‘s Icelandic benediction at the beginning of his talk.

In general, it’s been an amazing trip.  In some ways, though, the highlight came before I even set foot on Icelandic soil.  On the way over, the Aurora Borealis was visible out my plane window.  With a touch of desperate improvisation, I managed to coax some half-decent shots of the lights (and the wing of our plane) from my battered PowerShot S45.  You can see them up on Flickr, along with a few of the better shots from our Wednesday trip through the Icelandic countryside (in the general photostream).  The actual aurorae were nowhere near as green to the eye as what’s seen in the photos, but more of a silver-blue phosphorescence with maybe a little tiny hint of green.  It was hard to judge, looking through a plastic airplane window while trying to block out cabin light enough to see them.

That’s not to minimize the beauty of this country, however.  There is a bleak and wild character that’s hard for me to resist, even as I know I’d never survive the dark of deepest winter here.  Much as I love landscapes, and Iceland has those in spades, the people are the best part: friendly and accepting in a way that’s still proud and reserved.  It’s hard to explain.  Moreover, they do know how to party.

My deepest thanks to all our hosts for letting me be a part of IceWeb, and I hope I get to return some time in the future.  Takk!

• IceWeb on Ice was published on Friday, April 28th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Travel categories.
• There have been six replies.

I’ve just done something that seems so common it must have had the term coined and in widespread use, but no: I just Flickrbombed.  Having put up exactly zero photos for months, I got my account turned Pro and dumped a whole bunch of pictures in.  According to Google, only one person has ever used that term online before, so I can’t claim sole credit for it.  I’ll just count it as yet another parallel invention, and see if it catches on more widely.

Anyway, you can check out the general photostream if you’re so inclined, or dig through my two sets: Artistic and Teh Funny.  That’s all I have up there right now, though collectively that’s over 100 photos added all at once (thus the term “Flickrbomb”), and that’s just the ones I made public.

I may toss in more pictures over time, most likely from various and sundry conferences, but that’s an iffy prospect at best.  And while you can feel free to add me as a contact even though the stream may be more of a dry bed, don’t expect a reciprocal link.  I’m already thinking about pruning some of the contacts I’ve already collected, as I just can’t keep up.  Too much content!

Flickr really needs a way to filter your “contacts’ photos” feed to include only those pictures that have comments, or above a certain number of views, or something.  Then again, I wish it showed me photos from friends and family that I can see, not just those that are fully public.  I’m just a walking contradiction.  (Man, I loved that video.)

• Flickrbomb was published on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been ten replies.

The new weekly web-design ‘zine Vitamin (a.k.a. Yet Another Major New Project From The Carsons) launched earlier this week to generally positive notice from the design community.  I was glad to see this for three reasons.

1. I wrote one of the launch articles, “Making Popular Layout Decisions“.  Although now that I think about it more, maybe that should have been “Making Unpopular Layout Decisions”.  Anyway, it’s a commentary piece that will probably annoy a few hard-core purists.  That always makes for a success in my book.
2. I’m a member of the Advisory Board, so I have some stake in seeing it do well.  I’d hate to have things go badly due to my being a bad advisor!  Especially since I’m kind of new to the advisory game.
3. It demonstrates that there’s plenty of room in the web design community for such resources.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what we have—after all, I love A List Apart so much, I wrote the markup!—but it’s a sign of renewed health and interest in the field.

Oh, and speaking of Carson projects, I hear this May’s Professional CSS XHTML Techniques workshop is almost sold out—so if you’re interested, better get cracking.  (The same is true for AEA Chicago, as it happens.)

• Taste the Vitamin was published on Thursday, April 20th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Web and Writing categories.
• There have been seven replies.

I could use a little advice from the crowd, if you have a minute.  Basically, I need a new phone headset for my office landline, and maybe a new phone as well.  My current headset, an aging Plantronics Vista model, is generating this really loud buzz that I can only fix by forcibly contorting the boom mike, and even then the fix isn’t always permanent.  I’ve tried fiddling with the ‘channel’ and gain settings, and then only way to avoid the buzz is to make myself completely inaudible.

All I really want is a nice comfortable headset that has good sound quality.  I’ve looked at headsets that are just 2.5mm plugins, and at ones that have the little amplifier box.  I probably will want an over-the-head set, since the over-the-ear Vista I have makes my ear ache on event moderately long calls.  And a corded set is fine; I don’t really need a cordless headset.  In my specific case, any disincentive to stand up and pace while talking is probably a good thing.

Also, I’m not at all adverse to replacing my phone, which is also old and clunky.  It still works okay (and is not the source of the buzz—I checked) but it’s nothing spectacular.  If there’s a really good headset-and-phone combo out there, I’m completely open to that.

So anyway, if anyone has recommendations they’d like to make, either pro or con, please fire away.  Thanks!

• Looking for Headset Help was published on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Work category.
• There have been fourteen replies.

Dear BlogPulse,

A couple of days ago, you had a page found here on meyerweb titled “How Not To Get a Job” ranked as the top blog post in the blogosphere (blogscape, blogsea, blogsoup, take your pick).  You even made reference to it in your own blog post on April 17th.

Okay, first of all, it’s not a blog post.  It’s a standalone static HTML page that’s just a marked-up version of an email that made the rounds of the Internet in the mid-1990s.  (It might have been a combination of a couple of emails; I don’t clearly remember any longer.)  I have a bunch of those in my “funny bits” section, if you’d like to waste a few hours.

Second, the strength of that ranking has propelled meyerweb to #6 on your Top Blogs list for April 16th, which puts it just below Michelle Malkin and above Engadget, Gizmodo, and—no kidding—Scobelizer.  Thirty-two places above Scoble, which is too many kinds of wrong to easily quantify.  Previous to this, I don’t think meyerweb even registered on your list (except on April 14th, when it was at #16), as it really should be.  I’m fairly well known in my field, but outside it?  Not so much. 

Before I wander too much further into the weeds, let me get to my point: have you looked at the trend chart for that page?  How about its citations?  These results are due to blog spamming, people.  I don’t know why some Blogspot spamachine included a meyerweb URL in its output stream, but it did.  I had nothing to do with it, and frankly, I’m severely annoyed that it happened.  I know there isn’t anything I can or should do about it, but I’m still cheesed that I’ve been tainted by involuntary association.  Your blithely going along for the ride, posting commentary about it without even the barest smidgen of checking into the history of this sudden star on the blog cosmos’ event horizon, just ticks me off all the more.

So please, if you could, pull that URL out of your results, recompute the rankings, and pay more attention to your own data analysis in the future.  At the least, could you manage that last part?  I’ve paid you scant attention in the past, I admit, but this doesn’t exactly leave a positive impression.

Thanks, and sorry if I came off a bit testy.

Addendum: oh, cripes, now it’s been blogged as real over at CBS News.  Thankfully, the reporter, Melissa McNamara, is now aware of the situation and has promised to post a correction.  So it looks like I’ll have a better media outcome than Tim Bray did with the Washington Post.

• A Very Weak Pulse was published on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been three replies.

With Passover recently concluded and yet another viewing of The Ten Commandments under my belt, a question has occurred to me.

The whole point of Passover is to commemorate the events that freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and the English name of the holiday comes from the fact that the Angel of Death passed over the Jews as it slew the first-born of Egypt as the final plague.  So why is it that the very act that caused the Angel to pass by a household and spare any first-born within, the smearing of lamb’s blood on the doorway, is not part of the Passover seder?  You’d think that would be a central act, a way of asking that the Angel of Death pass by the house for another year, in much the same way Jews ask God to inscribe their name in the Book of Life for another year during Yom Kippur.  If I were designing the seder, I’d make the smearing of the blood the opening act of the entire ceremony.

Never mind that lamb’s blood can be hard to come by and disquieting for some to handle; it could be symbolically represented with paint or red wine or some other substance.  Most of the seder consists of symbolic representations anyway.  Why not the Pesach blood as well?

• The Silence of the Lamb’s Blood was published on Sunday, April 16th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been fourteen replies.