Dan Q
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I enjoyed many of these (I note that my colleagues at Automattic are behind a significant number of them).
I’m not yet at the point of needing emergency assistance for my distributed working habits, but I’ve definitely passed the pigeon stage…
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Back in 2016, I made an iMessage app called Overreactions. Actually, the term “app” is probably generous: It’s a collection of static and animated silly faces you can goof around with in iMessage. Its “development” involved many PNGs but zero lines of code.
Just before the 2019 holidays, I received an email from Apple notifying me that the app “does not follow one or more of the App Store Review Guidelines.” I signed in to Apple’s Resource Center, where it elaborated that the app had gone too long without an update. There were no greater specifics, no broken rules or deprecated dependencies, they just wanted some sort of update to prove that it was still being maintained or they’d pull the app from the store in December.
Here’s what it took to keep that project up and running…
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There’s always a fresh argument about Web vs. native (alongside all the rehashed ones, of course). But here’s one you might not have heard before: nobody ever wrote a Web page that met all the open standards only to be told that they had to re-compile it a few years later for no reason other than that the browser manufacturers wanted to check that the author was still alive.
But that’s basically what happened here. The author of an app which had been (and still did) work fine was required to re-install the development environment and toolchain, recompile, and re-submit a functionally-identical version of their app (which every user of the app then had to re-download along with their other updates)… just because Apple think that an app shouldn’t ever go more than 3 years between updates.
I keep my life pretty busy and don’t get as much “outside” as I’d like, but when I do I like to get out on an occasional geohashing expedition (like these ones). I (somewhat badly) explained geohashing in the vlog attached to my expedition 2018-08-07 51 -1, but the short version is this: an xkcd comic proposed an formula to use a stock market index to generate a pair of random coordinates, impossible to predict in advance, for each date. Those coordinates are (broadly) repeated for each degree of latitude and longitude throughout the planet, and your challenge is to get to them and discover what’s there. So it’s like geocaching, except you don’t get to find anything at the end and there’s no guarantee that the destination is even remotely accessible. I love it.
Most geohashers used to use a MediaWiki-powered website to coordinate their efforts and share their stories, until a different application on the server where it resided got hacked and the wiki got taken down as a precaution. That was last September, and the community became somewhat “lost” this winter as a result. It didn’t stop us ‘hashing, of course: the algorithm’s open-source and so are many of its implementations, so I was able to sink into a disgusting hole in November, for example. But we’d lost the digital “village square” of our community.
So I emailed Davean, who does techy things for xkcd, and said that I’d like to take over the Geohashing wiki but that I’d first like (a) his or Randall’s blessing to do so, and ideally (b) a backup of the pages of the site as it last-stood. Apparently I thought that my new job plus finishing my dissertation plus trying to move house plus all of the usual things I fill my time with wasn’t enough and I needed a mini side-project, because when I finally got the go-ahead at the end of last month I (re)launched geohashing.site. Take a look, if you like. If you’ve never been Geohashing before, there’s never been a more-obscure time to start!
Luckily, it’s not been a significant time-sink for me: members of the geohashing community quickly stepped up to help me modernise content, fix bots, update hyperlinks and the like. I took the opportunity to fix a few things that had always bugged me about the old site, like the mobile-unfriendly interface and the inability to upload GPX files, and laid the groundwork to make bigger changes down the road (like changing the way that inline maps are displayed, a popular community request).
So yeah: Geohashing’s back, not that it ever went away, and I got to be part of the mission to make it so. I feel like I am, as geohashers say… out standing in my field.
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“Even at a young age, I was able to grasp the concept that my mum and dad could love more than one person,” he says. “The only thing I’ve found challenging about having three adults in my family is getting away with things, because it means more people to check up on you, to make sure you did your chores. But I also have more people around to give me lifts here and there, to help with homework and to come to my lacrosse games. The saying ‘raised by a village’ definitely applies to me. I feel like a completely normal teenager, just with polyamorous parents.”
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Yet another article providing evidence to support the fact that – except for the bigotry of other people – there are no downsides to being a child of polyamorous parents. Nicely-written; I’ve sent a copy of Alan for the Poly In The Media blog.
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Cute. Click-through for video.
But yeah: what are blogs in 2020? A topic for future discussion, perhaps.
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In 1953, upon Elizabeth II’s ascent to the throne, a dish was created to mark the event: coronation chicken.
Today, to mark the UK’s exit from the EU, I propose a new dish: chlorination chicken.
I’d laugh if I weren’t so sad.
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There are plenty of opportunities for friction in the user experience when logging in, particularly while entering a two factor authentication code. As developers we should be building applications that support the need for account security but don’t detract from the user experience. Sometimes it can feel as though these requirements are in a battle against each other.
In this post we will look at the humble
<input>element and the HTML attributes that will help speed up our users’ two factor authentication experience.…
Summary: simple changes like making your TOTP-receiving <input> to have
inputmode="numeric" gives user-agents solid hints about what kind of data is expected, allowing mobile phones to show a numeric keypad rather than a full keyboard, while
setting autocomplete="one-time-code" hints to password managers and autocomplete tools that what’s being collected needn’t be stored for future use as it’ll expire (and can
also help indicate to authenticators where they should auto-type).
As my current research project will show, the user experience of multifactor authentication is a barrier to entry for many users who might otherwise benefit from it. Let’s lower that barrier.
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Cute open source project that produces on-demand SVG and PNG maps, like the one above, based on the roads in OpenStreetMap data. It takes a somewhat liberal view of what a “road” is: I found it momentarily challenging to get my bearings in the map above, which includes where I live, because the towpath and cycle paths are included which I hadn’t expected. Still a beautiful bit of output and the source code could be adapted for any number of interesting cartographic projects.
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A frisbee, propelled by the wind and balanced upright by some kind of black magic, makes an elegant and hypnotic dance across a frozen pond.
Which would be beautiful and weird enough as it is, and is sufficient reason alone to watch this video. But for the full experience you absolutely have to turn on the subtitles.
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(Joe reads the text on IE and clicks on “Suggested Sites”)
Me: “Why did you click on that?”
Joe: “I don’t really know what to do, so I thought this would suggest something to me.”
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Finding adults who’ve got basically no computer experience whatsoever is getting increasingly rare (and already was very uncommon back in 2011 when this was written), and so I can see why Jennifer Morrow, when presented with the serendipitous opportunity to perform some user testing with one, made the very most of the occasion.
As well as being a heart-warming story, this post’s a good reminder that we shouldn’t make assumptions about the level of expertise of our users.
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The violent and oftentimes ironically ignorant backlash against Fall’s story sheds light on a troublingly regressive, entitled, and puritanical trend in the relationship between artists and their audiences, particularly when it comes to genre fiction. Readers appear to feel a need to cast their objections to fiction in moral terms, positioning themselves as protectors of the downtrodden. Trans writer Phoebe Barton went so far as to compare Fall’s story to a “gun” which could be used only to inflict harm, though in a later tweet she, like Jemisin, admitted she hadn’t read it and had based her reaction solely on its title.
Many reactions to Fall’s story, for all that they come from nominal progressives, fit neatly into a Puritanical mold, attacking it as hateful toward transness, fundamentally evil for depicting a trans person committing murder, or else as material that right-wing trolls could potentially use to smear trans people as ridiculous. Each analysis positioned the author as at best thoughtless and at worst hateful, while her attackers are cast as righteous; in such a way of thinking, art is not a sensual or aesthetic experience but a strictly moral one, its every instance either fundamentally good or evil. This provides aggrieved parties an opportunity to feel righteousness in attacking transgressive art, positioning themselves as protectors of imagined innocents or of ideals under attack.
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As few days ago, I shared a short story called I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. By the time my reshare went live, the original story had been taken down at its author’s request and I had to amend my post to link to an archived copy. I’d guessed, even at that point, that the story had been seen as controversial, but I hadn’t anticipated the way in which it had so been seen.
Based on the article in The Outline, it looks like complaints about the story came not as I’d anticipated from right-wingers upset that their mocking, derogatory term had been subverted in a piece of art but instead from liberals, including arguments that:
I note that some of the loudest complainants have admitted that they didn’t even read the story, just the title. If you’re claiming to be a trans ally, you really ought to demonstrate that you don’t literally judge a book by its cover.
I don’t think that the story was perfect. But I think that the important messages – that gender presentation is flexible, not fixed; that personal freedom of gender expression is laudable; that behaviour can be an expression of gender identity, etc. – are all there, and those relatively-simple messages are the things that carry-over to the audience that the (sensational) title attracts. Trans folks in fiction are rarely the protagonists and even-more-rarely so relatable, and there’s value in this kind of work.
Sure, there are issues. But rather than acting in a way that gets a (seemingly well-meaning) work taken down, we should be using it as a vehicle for discussion. Where are the problems? What are our reactions? Why does it make us feel the way it does? We improve trans depictions in fiction not by knee-jerk reactions to relatively-moderate stories and by polarising the space into “good” and “bad” examples, but by iterative improvements, a little at a time, as we learn from our mistakes and build upon our successes. We should be able to both celebrate this story and dissect its faults. We can do better, Internet.
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A former colleague talks about some of the artefacts from the Bodleian’s collections that didn’t make it into the Talking Maps exhibition (one of the last exhibitions I got to work on during my time there; indeed, you’ll see plenty of pictures from it in my post about making digital interactives). I was particularly pleased by the Soviet map of Oxford, but everything Nick presents in this video is pretty awesome: it’s a great reminder that for every fantastic exhibition you see at a good museum, there’s always at least as much material “behind the scenes” that you’re missing out on!
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Last week I tweeted a cow-based academic publishing analogy in response to the prompt in the title, and the replies and quote-tweets extended the metaphor so gloriously, so creatively, so bleakly and hilariously at the same time, that I’ve pulled my favourites together below.
Here’s the original tweet:
Cows make milk. They milk themselves.
Other cows check the milk (for free).
Cows – get this – PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away.
Then the farmer (you won’t believe this, honestly) sells the milk *back to the cows.* #academicpublishing https://t.co/mgYneu4Goi
— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) January 16, 2020
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Speaking as a goat, I approve of open access.
When I took a diversion from my various computer science related qualifications to study psychotherapy for a while, I was amazed to discover how fortunate we computer scientists are that so much of our literature is published open access. It probably comes from the culture of the discipline, whose forefathers were publishing their work as open-source software or on the Internet long before academic journals reached the online space. But even here, there’s journal drama and all the kinds of problems that Ned (and the people who replied to his tweet) joke about.
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I’m not sure that I’m physically fit enough for this “sport”, but I’d totally give it a go. If only to troll the BMX and skate kids at the local skate park…
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2020 is only three weeks old, but there has been a lot of browser news that decreases rendering engine diversity. It’s time for some good news on that front: a new rendering engine, Flow. Below I conduct an interview with Piers Wombwell, Flow’s lead developer.
This year alone, on the negative side Mozilla announced it’s laying off 70 people, most of whom appear to come from the browser side of things, while it turns out that Opera’s main cash cow is now providing loans in Kenya, India, and Nigeria, and it is looking to use ‘improved credit scoring’ (from browsing data?) for its business practices.
On the positive side, the Chromium-based Edge is here, and it looks good. Still, rendering engine diversity took a hit, as we knew it would ever since the announcement.
So let’s up the diversity a notch by welcoming a new rendering engine to the desktop space. British company Ekioh is working on a the Flow browser, which sports a completely new multi-threaded rendering engine that does not have any relation to WebKit, Gecko, or Blink.
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Well, I didn’t expect this bit of exciting news!
I’m not convinced that Flow is the solution to all the world’s problems (its target platforms and use-cases alone make it unlikely to make it onto the most-used-browsers leaderboard any time soon), but I’m really glad that my doomsaying about the death of browser diversity being a one-way street might… might… turn out not to be true.
Time will tell. But for now, this is Good News for the Web.
