I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was.
And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with.
I’ve been taking for granted that most folks doing web stuff still remember those days, or at least the decade that followed, but I think that assumption might be a wee bit
out of date. Some time ago I encountered a tweet marvelling at what we had to do without
border-radius. I still remember waiting with bated breath for it to be unprefixed!
But then, I suspect I also know a number of folks who only tried web design in the old days, and assume nothing about it has changed since.
I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it.
(Please bear in mind that this post is a fine blend of memory and research, so I can’t guarantee any of it is actually correct, especially the bits about causality. You may
want to try the W3C’s history of CSS, which is considerably shorter,
has a better chance of matching reality, and contains significantly less swearing.)
(Also, this would benefit greatly from more diagrams, but it took long enough just to write.)
…
I too remember the bad-old days of the pre-CSS and early-CSS Web. Back
then, when we were developing for it, we thought that it was magical. We tolerated issues like having to copy-paste our navigation around a stack of static pages, manually change our
design all over the place etc…. but man… I wouldn’t want to go back to working that way!
This is an excellent long-read for an up-close-and-personal look at how CSS has changed over the decades. Well worth a look if
you’ve any interest in the topic.
I know only a small percentage of you use VR and to everyone else I might as well by telling you how spiffy the handrails are up in this ivory tower, but for what it’s worth,
Boneworks is the first game in a while to make me think VR might be getting somewhere. It’s not there yet. The physics is full of little niggles as you might expect from a game
trying to juggle so much. The major issue with the climbing is only your hands and head can be moved and your in-game legs just flop around getting in the way of things like two
stubborn trails of cum dangling off your mum’s chin, but forget all that.
…
Speaking of VR, Yahtzee’s still playing with it and thinks it’s improving, which is high praise.
So there’s hope yet.
I really need to dig my heavyweight gear out of the attic, but I’m waiting until we (eventually) move house. And I absolutely agree with Yahtzee’s observation about the value of
VR games in which you can sit down, sometimes.
This weekend, my sister Sarah challenged me to define the difference between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. And the more I talked about the differences between them, the more I
realised that I don’t have a concrete definition, and I don’t think that anybody else does either.
AR: the man sees simulated reality and, probably, the whiteboard.
VR: the man sees simulated reality only, which may or may not include a whiteboard.
Either way: what the hell is he doing?
After all: from a technical perspective, any fully-immersive AR system – for example a hypothetical future version of the Microsoft Hololens that solves the current edition’s FOV problems – exists in a theoretical
superset of any current-generation VR system. That AR augments
the reality you can genuinely see, rather than replacing it entirely, becomes irrelevant if that AR system could superimpose
a virtual environment covering your entire view. So the argument that compared to VR, AR only covers part of your vision is not a reliable definition of the difference.
The difference by how much of your view is occluded by machine-generated images fails to define where the boundary between AR and
VR lies. 5%? 50%? 99%?
This isn’t a new conundrum. Way back in 1994 back when the Sega VR-1 was our idea of cutting edge, Milgram et al. developed a series of metaphorical spectra to describe the relationship between
different kinds of “mixed reality” systems. The core difference, they argue, is whether or not the computer-generated content represents a “world” in itself (VR) is just an “overlay” (AR).
But that’s unsatisfying for the same reason as above. The HTC Vive headset can be configured to use its front-facing camera(s) to fade seamlessly from the game world to the real world
as the player gets close to the boundaries of their play space. This is a safety feature, but it doesn’t have to be: there’s no reason that a HTC Vive couldn’t be
adapted to function as what Milgram would describe as a “class 4” device, which is functionally the same as a headset-mounted AR
device. So what’s the difference?
You might argue that the difference between AR and VR is content-based:
that is, it’s the thing that you’re expected to focus on that dictates which is which. If you’re expected to look at the “real world”, it’s an augmentation, and if not then
it’s a virtualisation. But that approach fails to describe Google’s tech demo of putting artefacts in your living room via
augmented reality (which I’ve written about before), because your focus is expected to be on the artefact rather than the “real world” around it.
The real world only exists to help with the interpretation of scale: it’s not what the experience is about and your countertop is as valid a real world target as the Louvre:
Google doesn’t care.
Categories 3 and 4 would probably be used to describe most contemporary AR; categories 6 and 7 to describe contemporary
VR.
But even if we accept this explanation, the definition gets muddied by the wider field of “extended reality” (XR). Originally an
umbrella term to cover both AR and VR (and “MR“, if you believe that’s a separate and independent thing), XR gets used to describe interactive experiences
that cover other senses, too. If I play a VR game with real-world “props” that I can pick up and move around, but that appear
differently in my vision, am I not “augmenting” reality? Is my experience, therefore, more or less “VR” than if the
interactive objects exist only on my screen? What about if – as in a recent VR escape room I attended – the experience is enhanced by
fans to simulate the movement of air around you? What about smell? (You know already that somebody’s working on bridging virtual reality with Smell-O-Vision.)
Not sure if you’re real or if you’re dreaming? Don’t ask an XR researcher; they don’t know either.
Increasingly, then, I’m beginning to feel that XR itself is a spectrum, and a pretty woolly one. Just as it’s hard to specify
in a concrete way where the boundary exists between being asleep and being awake, it’s hard to mark where “our” reality gives way to the virtual and vice-versa.
It’s based upon the addition of information to our senses, by a computer, and there can be more (as in fully-immersive VR) or
less (as in the subtle application of AR) of it… but the edges are very fuzzy. I guess that the spectrum of the visual
experience of XR might look a little like this:
Honestly, I don’t know any more. But I don’t think my sister does either.
I’ll be travelling North through England all day on 2020-02-22 and it’s not a huge diversion to go and climb a hill as a break, so long as I set off early enough in the
morning. We’ll see…
Expedition
It’s a beautiful part of the world, the Peak District, although I could have picked a day when I’d be less-hampered by floods and wind. Nonetheless, I was able to climb a short way up
Haven Hill, divert around an impromptu lake, and scramble into a thicket in order to reach the hashpoint at around 13:40. And to leave a “the Internet was here” sign at the nearest
footpath
Tracklog
Taken by GPSr, but I seem to have lost the charging/data cable for it. Will find at some point.
I’m travelling today from Oxford to Preston with a diversion to see if I can make it to the 2022-02-22 53 – 1 geohashpoint, which looks likely to be on a hill at the South end of the
Peak District. Pulled over here to check my directions and buy myself a snack and find this cache. Ascent up the roundabout was a little slippy and muddy but I was soon able to find the
cache. SL, TFTC!
North end of the village of Curbridge in Oxfordshire. Street View and satellite photography shows it as being alongside a nondescript road, but I’m aware that there’s a housing estate under
construction nearby and there’s a new roundabout which appears on maps but not on satellite views which was constructed nearby last year: I’m hoping that the location is still
accessible.
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to make it to this hashpoint; it depends on how work goes as well as the weather (while I’m not directly in the path of Storm Dennis I’m still in an area that’s getting lots of wind and rain). I’m not committed yet to whether
I’d drive or cycle: it depends on how long I can spare, whether the car’s available for my use, and – again – the weather (I’d prefer to cycle, but I’m not going to do it if it means I
get completely soaked on my lunch break).
Okay: I need to vacate my house anyway because some estate agents are bring some potential buyers around, so I’m setting out to the hashpoint now (12:20) after which I’ll aim to work in
a coworking space for the afternoon. Wish me luck!
Expedition
I drove out to the village of Curbridge and parked in a lane, then walked to the hashpoint, arriving about 13:05. Conveniently there’s a pole (holding a speed detecting sign) within a
metre of the hashpoint so I was able to attach a “The Internet Was Here” sign in accordance with the tradition. Then I made my way to a coworking space half a mile to the North to carry
on with my day’s work.
Tracklog
My GPSr keeps a tracklog:
Obtained, but I didn’t bring the right cable to the coworking space so I can’t get it yet. [to follow]
I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it.
The second is that we can also come up with scenarios that involve real harms. Maybe the very existence of a program is secret or sensitive information. What if a Wacom employee
suddenly starts seeing entries spring up for “Half Life 3 Test Build”? Obviously I don’t care about the secrecy of Valve’s new games, but I assume that Valve does.
We can get more subtle. I personally use Google Analytics to track visitors to my website. I do feel bad about this, but I’ve got to get my self-esteem from somewhere. Google
Analytics has a “User Explorer” tool, in which you can zoom in on the activity of a specific user. Suppose that someone at Wacom “fingerprints” a target person that they knew in
real life by seeing that this person uses a very particular combination of applications. The Wacom employee then uses this fingerprint to find the person in the “User Explorer”
tool. Finally the Wacom employee sees that their target also uses “LivingWith: Cancer Support”.
Remember, this information is coming from a device that is essentially a mouse.
…
Interesting deep-dive investigation into the (immoral, grey-area illegal) data mining being done by Wacom when you install the drivers for their tablets. Horrifying, but you’ve got to
remember that Wacom are unlikely to be a unique case. I had a falling out with Razer the other year when they started bundling spyware into the drivers for their keyboards and
locking-out existing and new customers from advanced features unless they consented to data harvesting.
I’m becoming increasingly concerned by the normalisation of surveillance capitalism: between modern peripherals and the Internet of Things, we’re “willingly” surrendering more
of our personal lives than ever before. If you haven’t seen it, I’d also thoroughly recommend Data, the latest video from
Philosophy Tube (of which I’ve sung the praises before).
I was visited this morning by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, doing the door-to-door ministry for which they’re most-famous, and I was reminded of an interesting quirk in the practices
of the WTS. If you know anything at all about their beliefs, you’re probably aware that
Jehovah’s Witnesses generally refuse blood transfusions.
Commenting on religions while belonging to none of them? That’s me. I don’t see this as a problem; I almost see it as an advantage. I couldn’t find a picture to express that, though,
so you get this one.
I first became aware of their policy of rejecting potentially life-saving blood when I was just a child. A school friend of mine (this one!), following
a problematic tonsillectomy, found his life at risk because of his family’s commitment to this religious principle. Because I’ve always been interested in religion and the diversity of
theological difference I ended up looking into the background of their practice… and I came to a very different scriptural interpretation.
Nowadays, the Jehovah’s Witnesses use their own translation, the New World Bible. I don’t have a copy, but I’m choosing to ignore it because the relevant prohibitions predate its
publication anyway.
I hadn’t noticed until after my visitors left that I’d answered the door wearing a pride flag on my t-shirt. (Their opinion on queerness is wrong about for moral, rather than scriptural, reasons.)
Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants,
I now give you everything.But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.
This is God speaking to Noah, by the way. Sexacentenarian Noah’s took a six-week cruise on a floating zoo and God’s just said “boat number 1, your time is up… and by Me you’d better be
horny ‘cos it’s time to go forth and multiply.” God invents the rainbow as a promise not to reformat-and-reinstall again, and then follows it up with a handful of rules because He’s a
big fan of rules. And even though blood transfusions wouldn’t be invented for thousands of years, the Jehovah’s Witnesses almost-uniquely feel that this prohibition on consuming blood
covers transfusions too.
That all sounds fair enough. I mean, it requires a pretty heavy-handed interpretation of what was meant but that’s par for the course for the Bible and especially the Old
Testament.
The genesis of Genesis. You can quickly find your way into a rabbit hole of these kinds of diagrams if you’re silly enough to ask questions like “but what’s the original
translation?”
But let’s take a step back. Here’s those verses again, this time in Hebrew:
Every moving living thing is your food, like the plants you were already given. But you may not eat any creature that is still alive.
“Still alive?” That’s a very different way of reading it, right? Suddenly this strange verse about abstaining from, I don’t know, black pudding (and possibly blood
transfusions) becomes a requirement to kill your dinner before you chow down.
This is like Deuteronomy 14:21, where it says “Do not cook a
young goat in its mother’s milk.” The same directive appears in Exodus 34:26 but I
prefer Deuteronomy’s because it also has this really surreal bit about how it’s not okay to eat roadkill but you can serve it to your immigrant friends. It turns out that kid-boiled-in-mother’s-milk was an old Canaan recipe and pagan tribes used to eat it ritualistically, so
a prohibition on the practice by Noah and his descendants was not only an opposition to animal cruelty but a statement against polytheism.
“Kids! It’s dinnertime!”
Could “eating things alive”, which is specifically forbidden in Judaism, be – like goat-in-goat-juice – another pagan ritual, formerly widespread, that the early Israelites
were trying to outlaw? Quite possibly.
But there’s a further possible interpretation that I feel is worth looking at. Let’s paint a picture. Again, let’s assume despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary that the bible is literally true, which meets people who use the
covenant of Genesis as a basis for medical decisions much more than half-way:
God’s just declared bankruptcy on his first “Earth” project and wiped the slate clean. He’s had the RNG – I’m assuming that God
plays dice – roll up a new landmass, and he’s populated it with one family of humans, plus two of every kind of land animal. Possibly more of the fast breeders like the insects and some
of the small mammals, I suppose, depending on how closely they were housed in the ark. Don’t make me explain this to you.
Shem: “What do you want for lunch?”
Japheth: “Ham.”
Ham: “Gulp.”
Japheth: “No, I mean a pig.”
Ham: “We’ve only got two left. Let’s just smoke some kush instead; God gave dad all the plants.”
Cush: “Did somebody say my name?”
Let’s assume that God doesn’t want the disembarking humans to immediately eat all of the animals with no concern for sustainability. This is, of course, absolutely what we humans do: if
we take a biblical-literalism viewpoint, it’s a miracle that the delicious dodo would last until the 17th century CE rather than being eaten
on the first post-flood day. God’s sort-of promised that the humans will be allowed to eat almost anything they like and that He’ll stop meddling, but He doesn’t want a mass-extinction,
so what does He do? He says:
You can eat all the plants you want. But don’t eat any of the animals that are alive right now: let them breed a bit first.
This has always seemed to me to be the obvious way to interpret the commandment not to eat living animals: don’t eat the ones that are living at the moment. Certainly
more-rational than “don’t have blood transfusions.” And if what God (allegedly) said to Noah is to be treated as a rule that still stands today, rather than just at the time, then
perhaps it’s vegetarianism for which Jehovah’s Witnesses should best be known. That way, they’d get to argue with the hosts of barbecues about what goes into their bodies rather
than with judges about
what goes into their childrens’.
But try telling them that. (Seriously: give it a go! They’re usually more than happy to talk about scripture, even if you’re a little bit sarcastic!)
Indian horn culture is weird to begin with. But I just learned that
apparently it’s a thing to honk your in horn in displeasure at the stationary traffic ahead of you… even when that traffic is queueing at traffic lights! In order to try to combat the
cacophony, Mumbai police hooked up a decibel-meter to the traffic lights at a junction such that if
the noise levels went over a certain threshold during the red light phase, the red light phase would be extended by resetting the timer.
I told this story to a few guildies a while back and decided to archive it in a longer format; so here is the story of The Great Flamingo Uprising of 2010 as told to me by my
favorite cousin who was a keeper at the time.
In addition to the aviary/jungle exhibit, our zoo has several species of birds that pretty much have the run of the place. They started with a small flock of flamingos and some
free-range peacocks that I’m almost certain came from my old piano teacher’s farm. She preferred them to chickens. At some point in time they also acquired a pair of white swans
(“hellbirds”) and some ornamental asian duckies to decorate the pond next to the picnic area. Pigeons, crows, assorted ducks and a large number of opportunistic Canada geese moved
in on their own.
…
I lost it at the bit where the koi blooped again.
Morals: geese are evil, swans are eviler, flamingos and peacocks are weird as fuck, and this story’s hilarious.
Normally I find Veritasium’s videos to be… less mindblowing than their titles would aim to have me believe. But I found this one pretty inspiring; the first Feigenbaum constant is a proper headtrip. And I feel like I’ve got new insights into the Mandelbrot set too.
Google’s built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100
doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible. To prove that I carried out a little experiment.
…
Manuel Matuzovic wrote a web page that’s pretty-much inaccessible to everybody: it doesn’t work with keyboard navigation, touchscreens, or mice. It doesn’t work with screen
readers. Even if you fix the other problems, its contrast is bad enough that almost nobody could read it. It fails ungracefully if CSS or JavaScript is unavailable. Even the source code is illegible. This took a special kind of evil.
But it scores 100% for accessibility on Lighthouse! I earned my firework show for this site last year but I know better than to let that lull
me into complacency: accessibility isn’t something a machine can test for you, only something that (at best) it can give you guidance on.
This is an RSVP post stating Dan's intention to attend (or not attend) an event. It's presented in a machine-readable format to notify event organisers via Webmention. See more
RSVPs by Dan.
I last handed in a dissertation almost 16 years ago; that one marked the cumulation of my academic work at Aberystwyth University, then the “University of Wales, Aberystwyth”. Since then I’ve studied programming, pentesting and psychology (the P-subject
Triathalon?)… before returning to university to undertake a masters degree in information security and forensics.
Today, I handed in that dissertation. Thanks to digital hand-ins, I’m able to “hand it in” and then change my mind, make changes, and hand-in a replacement version right up
until the deadline on Wednesday (I’m already on my second version!), so I’ve still got a few evenings left for last-minute proofreads and tweaks. That said, I’m mostly
happy with where it is right now.
I found it motivating to maintain a graph of my dissertation’s “outstanding tasks” where I would see it every day. Also, as it started to get hairy, my word limit.
Writing a dissertation was harder this time around. Things that made it harder included:
Writing a masters-level dissertation rather than a bachelors-level one, naturally.
Opting for a research dissertation rather than an engineering one: I had the choice, and I knew that I’d do better in engineering, but I did research anyway because I
thought that the challenge would be good for me.
Being older! It’s harder to cram information into a late-thirty-something brain than into a young-twenty-something one.
Work: going through the recruitment process for and starting at Automattic ate a lot of my time,
especially as I was used to working part-time at the Bodleian and I’d been turning a little of what would otherwise have been my “freelance work time” into “study time” (last time
around I was working part-time for SmartData, of course).
Life: the kids, our (hopefully) upcoming house move and other commitments are pretty good at getting in the way. Ruth and JTA have been amazing at carving out blocks of time for me to study, especially these last few weekends, which may have made all the
difference.
Despite this thing being big and heavy and dense, it somehow doesn’t seem to fully represent the weight of blood, sweat and tears that went into it.
It feels like less of a bang than last time around, but still sufficient that I’ll breathe a big sigh of relief. I’ve a huge
backlog of things to get on with that I’ve been putting-off until this monster gets finished, but I’m not thinking about them quite yet.
I need a moment to get my bearings again and get used to the fact that once again – and for the first time in several years – I’ll soon be not-a-student. Fun fact, I’ve spent
very-slightly-more than half of my adult life as a registered student: apparently I’m a sucker it, for all that I complain… in fact, I’m already wondering what I can study
next (suggestions welcome!), although I’ve promised myself that I’ll take a couple of years off before I get into anything serious.
(This is, of course, assuming I pass my masters degree, otherwise I might still be a student for a little longer while I “fix” my dissertation!)
A personal highlight was that I got to find a genuine use for Sankey charts and treemaps in my work for perhaps the first time.
If anybody’s curious (and I shan’t blame you if you’re not), here’s my abstract… assuming I don’t go back and change it yet again in the next couple of days (it’s still a little clunky
especially in the final sentence):
Multifactor authentication (MFA), such as the use of a mobile phone in addition to a username and password when logging in to a website, is one of the strongest security enhancements
an individual can add to their online accounts. Compared to alternative enhancements like refraining from the reuse of passwords it’s been shown to be easy and effective. However: MFA
is optional for most consumer-facing Web services supporting MFA, and elective user adoption is well under 10%.
How can user adoption be increased? Delivering security awareness training to users has been shown to help, but the gold standard would be a mechanism to encourage uptake that can be
delivered at the point at which the user first creates an account on a system. This would provide strong protection to an account for its entire life.
Using realistic account signup scenarios delivered to participants’ own computers, an experiment was performed into the use of language surrounding the invitation to adopt MFA. During
the scenarios, participants were exposed to statements designed to either instil fear of hackers or to praise them for setting up an account and considering MFA. The effect on uptake
rates is compared. A follow-up questionnaire asks questions to understand user security behaviours including password and MFA choices and explain their thought processes when
considering each.
No significant difference is found between the use of “fear” and “praise” statements. However, secondary information revealed during the experiment and survey provides recommendations
for service providers to offer MFA after, rather than at, the point of account signup, and for security educators to focus their energies on dispelling user preconceptions about the
convenience, privacy implications, and necessity of MFA.
The “where’s my elephant?” theory takes it name, of course, from The Simpsons episode in which Bart gets an elephant (Season 5, episode 17, to be precise). For those of you
who don’t know the episode: Bart wins a radio contest where you have to answer a phone call with the phrase, “KBBL is going to give me something stupid.” That “something stupid”
turns out to be either $10,000, or “the gag prize”: a full-grown African elephant. Much to the presenters’ surprise, Bart chooses the elephant — which is a problem for the radio
station, since they don’t actually have an elephant to give him. After some attempts at negotiation (the presenters offer Principal Skinner $10,000 to go about with his pants pulled
down for the rest of the school year; the presenters offer to use the $10,000 to turn Skinner into “some sort of lobster-like creature”), Bart finds himself kicked out of the radio
station, screaming “where’s my elephant?”
…
…the “where’s my elephant?” theory holds the following:
If you give someone a joke option, they will take it.
The joke option is a (usually) a joke option for a reason, and choosing it will cause everyone a lot of problems.
In time, the joke will stop being funny, and people will just sort of lose interest in it.
No one ever learns anything.
…
For those that were surprised when Trump was elected or Brexit passed a referendum, the “Where’s My Elephant?” theory of history may provide some solace. With reference to Boaty
McBoatface and to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Tom Whyman pitches that “joke” options will be selected significantly more-often that you’d expect or that they should.
Our society is like Bart Simpson. But can we be a better Bart Simpson?
If that didn’t cheer you up: here’s another article, which more-seriously looks at the
political long-game that Remainers in Britain might consider working towards.
