Like Automattic (Matt’s company), Three Rings has also long been ahead of the curve from a “recruit talent from wherever it is, let people work from wherever they are” perspective. Until I was recently reading (more than I had previously) about the way that Automattic “works” I was uncertain about the scalability of Three Rings’ model. Does it work for a commercial company (rather than a volunteer-run non-profit like Three Rings)? Does it work when you make the jump from dozens of staff to hundreds? It’s reassuring to see that yes, this kind of approach certainly can work, and to get some context on how it does (in Automattic’s case, at least). Nice video, Matt!
The Bodleian has a specific remit for digital archiving… but sometimes they just like collecting stuff, too, I’m sure.
The team responsible for digital archiving had plans to spend World Digital Preservation Day running a stand in Blackwell Hall for some time before I got involved. They’d asked my department about using the Heritage Window – the Bodleian’s 15-screen video wall – to show a carousel of slides with relevant content over the course of the day. Or, they added, half-jokingly, “perhaps we could have Pong up there as it’ll be its 46th birthday?”
Free reign to play about with the Heritage Window while smarter people talk to the public about digital archives? Sure, sign me up.
But I didn’t take it as a joke. I took it as a challenge.
Emulating Pong is pretty easy. Emulating Pong perfectly is pretty hard. Indeed, a lot of the challenge in the preservation of (especially digital) archives in general is in finding the best possible compromise in situations where perfect preservation is not possible. If these 8″ disks are degrading, is is acceptable to copy them onto a different medium? If this video file is unreadable in modern devices, is it acceptable to re-encode it in a contemporary format? These are the kinds of questions that digital preservation specialists have to ask themselves all the damn time.
The JS Gamepad API lets your web browser talk to controller devices.
Emulating Pong in a way that would work on the Heritage Window but be true to the original raised all kinds of complications. (Original) Pong’s aspect ratio doesn’t fit nicely on a 16:9 widescreen, much less on a 27:80 ultrawide. Like most games of its era, the speed is tied to the clock rate of the processor. And of course, it should be controlled using a “dial”.
By the time I realised that there was no way that I could thoroughly replicate the experience of the original game, I decided to take a different track. Instead, I opted to reimplement Pong. A reimplementation could stay true to the idea of Pong but serve as a jumping-off point for discussion about how the experience of playing the game may be superficially “like Pong” but that this still wasn’t an example of digital preservation.
Bip… boop… boop… bip… boop… bip…
Here’s the skinny:
A web page, displayed full-screen, contains both a <canvas> (for the game, sized appropriately for a 3 × 3 section of the video wall) and a <div> full of “slides” of static content to carousel alongside (filling a 2 × 3 section).
Javascript writes to the canvas, simulates the movement of the ball and paddles, and accepts input from the JS Gamepad API (which is awesome, by the way). If there’s only one player, a (tough! – only three people managed to beat it over the course of the day!) AI plays the other paddle.
A pair of SNES controllers adapted for use as USB controllers which I happened to own already.
Increasingly, the Bodleian’s spaces seem to be full of screens running Javascript applications I’ve written.
I felt that the day, event, and game were a success. A few dozen people played Pong and explored the other technology on display. Some got nostalgic about punch tape, huge floppy disks, and even mechanical calculators. Many more talked to the digital archives folks and I about the challenges and importance of digital archiving. And a good time was had by all.
I’ve open-sourced the entire thing with a super-permissive license so you can deploy it yourself (you know, on your ultrawide video wall) or adapt it as you see fit. Or if you’d just like to see it for yourself on your own computer, you can (but unless you’re using a 4K monitor you’ll probably need to use your browser’s mobile/responsive design simulator set to 3200 × 1080 to make it fit your screen). If you don’t have controllers attached, use W/S to control player 1 and the cursor keys for player 2 in a 2-player game.
Some days my job… isn’t like other people’s jobs. Lately, I’ve been reimplementing Pong in Javascript for the @bodleianlibs’ video wall for an event on Thursday.
Implemented a demonstrative XSS payload targetting a CMS (as a teaching tool, to demonstrate how a series of minor security vulnerabilities can cascade into one huge one).
Gotten my ‘flu jab.
Not every day is like this. But sometimes, just sometimes, one can be.
In addition to the pension I get from my “day job” employer, I maintain a pension pot with a separate private provider which I top up with money from my freelance work. I logged in to that second pension provider’s (reliably shonky, web-standards-violating) website about a month ago and found that I couldn’t do anything because they’d added a new mandatory field to the “My Profile” page and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I’d filled it out. No problem, I thought: a few seconds won’t kill me.
If I’m lucky, I might be able to afford to retire this century.
The newly-added field turned out to be “Gender”, and as it was apparently unacceptable to leave this unspecified (as would be my preference: after all, I’ll certainly be retiring after November 2018, when gender will cease to have any legal bearing on retirement age), I clicked the drop-down to see what options they’d provided. “Not provided”, “Male”, and “Female” were the options: fine, I thought, I’ll just pick “Not provided” and be done with it. And for a while, everything seemed fine.
Leaving the field as the undefined “Select One” option wasn’t valid (I tried!) so I changed the value.
Over three weeks later I received a message from them saying that they hadn’t yet been able to action the changes to my profile because they hadn’t yet received hard-copy documentary evidence from me. By this point, I’d forgotten about the minor not-really-a-change change I’d made and assumed that whatever they were on about must probably be related to my unusual name. I sent a message back to them to ask exactly what kind of evidence they needed to see. And that’s when things got weird.
I received a message back – very-definitely from a human – to say that what they needed to see what evidence of my gender change. That is, my change of gender from “not specified” to “not provided”.
Fluttershy gets it.
They went on to suggest that I could get my doctor to certify a letter verifying my gender change. Needless to say, I haven’t made an appointment to try to get my GP to sign a document that confirms that my gender is “not provided”. Instead, I’ve emailed back to ask them to read what they just asked me for again, and perhaps this time they’ll engage both brain cells and try to think about what they’re actually asking, rather than getting tied up in knots in their own bureaucratic process. Let’s see how that goes.
Programmers in our startup usually put 8 hours and go home. I keep reading stories about 80+ hour weeks. How do you make them work longer hours? Do we have to pay overtime? We gave few of them some equity, but it doesn’t seem to work.
My Answer:
I’m going to tell you a secret, so please listen closely.
No programmers really work 60-80 hours a week, especially in a 5 day span. That is a 12-16 hour day, 5 days a week.
I promise you that any company that has programmers “working” that many hours is really only getting 2-4 hours of real work out of them each day. The rest of the time will be filled with pointless meetings, a fair amount of web browsing, and then a whole lot of looking busy…
This is the second in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January 2013, but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.
I spent the weekend of my birthday working in London, alongside the Squiz team, who make the CMS that forms the foundation of most of the public-facing websites of the Bodleian Libraries. We’d originally scheduled this visit for a different week, but – in that way that projects sometimes do – the project got juggled about a bit and so I found myself spending the week of my birthday away from home.
The team at Squiz’s London office, debriefing over drinks at the end of a crazy week.
But on Tuesday – my second day working on-site at Squiz’s office, and coincidentally my birthday – disaster struck! Our first clue was when the lights went out. And then, a minute or so later, when the fire alarm started going off. No big deal, we all thought, as we gathered our possessions and prepared to leave the office – it’s probably just that the fire alarm sounds as a precaution if it’s electricity supply is disrupted… but as we started to go down the stairs and smelled the smoke, we realised that there really was a fire.
My tweet, from outside the Squiz offices.
The first two fire engines arrived within minutes. Apparently, they don’t mess about when a city centre office block catches light. The smoke was very visible from the street: thick grey plumes pouring out from the basement windows. Theories about the cause of the fire were whispered around the assembled crowd, and the consensus seemed to be that the substation in the basement had overheated and set alight its room.
People were still filing out of the building when the first of the fire engines arrived.
A third fire engine arrived, and – after about a quarter hour of assessing the situation and controlling the crowd – we were told that we wouldn’t be able to get back into our building for “at least an hour, probably more.” So, being British, we therefore decamped to one of the nearby bars for networking and a round of gin & tonic. After I texted some friends to say that I hadn’t expected to spend the afternoon of my birthday in the pub, but that it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome experience, a few of them had the cheek to ask once again how the fire had actually started.
Before long, the fire brigade had established a cordon some distance back from the fire, and were pouring water into the basement.
By the time we were allowed to return to the building, it was already getting dark, and we quickly discovered a new problem that faced us: with the power still well and truly out, the electronic door locks that secured the offices had become completely unusable. Not willing to abandon my laptop, keys, and other personal possessions overnight in an unfamiliar office, I waited around until a locksmith had been summoned and had drilled his way through the cylinder and allowed us into the building.
Without power, it turns out that these things can be pretty useless. At least they “fail secure”, keeping the door locked (from the outside) in the event of a problem, rather than the alternative…
It being my birthday, I’d arranged that Ruth would come and spend the night down in London, and that we’d go out to Dans le Noir, a restaurant that I’d heard about from news articles and via friends some years prior, and always wanted to try. The restaurant has a distinct and quite remarkable theme that you probably won’t find anywhere else: that theme is that you eat unidentified food in pitch blackness.
Don’t be fooled: this picture of the tip of a candle wasn’t taken at Dans le Noir, but at Squiz.
As our (blind!) waiter, Gao, led Ruth and I by touch to our table, we suddenly realised that we’d all but forgotten exactly how dark pitch blackness actually is. When you stumble over your coffee table in the dark on a morning, that’s not truly black: there’s that sliver of light coming from underneath the curtains, or the faint glow of the LED light on the stereo. Real, complete darkness is disorienting and confusing, and to sit around in it – not even able to see whether your eyes are open or closed – for hours at a time is quite remarkable.
Now this is more like what it looks like at Dans le Noir!
It took us a little while to learn the new skills required to survive in this environment, but Gao was incredibly helpful. We worked out mechanisms for pouring drinks, for checking whether our plates were empty, and for communicating our relative movements (being geeks, as we are, Ruth and I quickly developed a three-dimensional coordinate-based system for navigating relative to an agreed centre-point: the tip of the bottle of our mystery wine). We also learned that there’s something truly humbling about being dependent upon the aid of a blind person to do something that you’d normally be quite capable of doing alone: simple things, like finding where your glass is.
My tweets after coming out of Ruth and I’s remarkable experience of Dans le Noir.
But the bigger lesson that we learned was about how darkness changes the way that we operate on a social level. Ruth and I were sat alongside another couple, and – deprived of body language, the judgement of sight, and the scrutiny of eye contact – we quickly entered into a conversation that was far deeper and more real than I would have anticipated having with total strangers. It was particularly strange to see Ruth, who’s usually so shy around new people, really come out as confident and open. I theorise that (in normally-signted people) eye contact – that is, being able to see that others can see you – serves as a regulator of our willingness to be transparent. Depriving it for long enough that its lack begins to feel natural makes us more frank and honest. Strange.
Live updates, primarily for the benefit of the people back at my usual workplace, on progress at Squiz.
Back at Squiz the following day, there was still no electricity. Credit is due to the team there, though, who quickly put in to effect their emergency plans and literally “moved office” to a handful of conference rooms and meeting spaces around Shoreditch. “Runners” were nominated to help relay messages and equipment between disparate groups of people, and virtualised networks were established across the city. I laughed when I discovered that Squiz’s old offices had been in an old fire station.
Team members at Squiz, in their unlit, unheated office, begin to put their emergency plan into place, picking up computers and transporting them to alternative venues.
Before long, the folks I’d been working with and I were settled into a basement meeting room in a nearby café, running a stack of Mac desktops and laptops from a monumental string of power strips, and juggling an Internet connection between the café’s WiFi and a stack of Mifi-like devices. We were able to get on with our work, and the day was saved, all thanks to some smart emergency planning. Later in the week, a generator was deployed outside the building and we were able to return to normal desks, but the quick-thinking of the management ensured that a minimum of disruption was caused in the meantime.
My tweet about seeing comedy with Bryn and about returning to the office (now powered by a huge generator).
Not one to waste the opportunity to make the most of being in London for a week, I spent another of my evenings out with Bryn. He and I went out to the Free Fringe Fundraiser, which – despite a notable absence of Peter Buckley Hill, who had caught a case of the then-dominating norovirus – was still a great deal of fun. It was particularly pleasing to get to see Norman Lovett in the flesh: his particular brand of surrealist anti-humour tickles me mercilessly.
So what could have been “just another business trip” turned into quite the adventure, between fires and birthdays and eating-in-the-dark and comedy. If only it hadn’t taken me two months to finish writing about it…
A strange package appeared outside of the door to my office, some time this morning, wrapped as a gift and accompanied by a card.
A card, bottle of wine, and box of chocolates!
It turns out to have been my colleagues at the Bodleian Shop, whose newly-relaunched e-commerce site I was drafted into at the last minute to iron out a few technical hitches in time for them to start making online sales before the Christmas rush. There were a few somewhat-stressful moments as technical folk from disparate providers worked together to link-up all of the parts of the site (warehouse and stock level systems, order and payment processing, content management, and of course the web front end), but it all came together in the end… and I think a lot of lessons were learned from the experience.
My bottle of wine, chilling amidst the anti-bird-wire on the window ledge of the building.
So that was a very sweet surprise. I knew that they’d appreciated my “hopping department” in order to firefight the various problems that came up during their deployment, but it was still really awesome to get an alcoholic, chocolatey thank-you and a cute card signed by their team, to boot.
From an elevated position in the exhibition room, I run a few tests of the technical infrastructure whilst other staff set up, below.
In particular, something I’ve been working on are the QR codes. This experiment – very progressive for a sometimes old-fashioned establishment like the Bodleian – involves small two-dimensional barcodes being placed with the exhibits. The barcodes are embedded with web addresses for each exhibit’s page on the exhibition website. Visitors who scan them – using a tablet computer, smartphone, or whatever – are directed to a web page where they can learn more about the item in front of them and can there discuss it with other visitors or can “vote” on it: another exciting new feature in this exhibition is that we’re trying quite hard to engage academics and the public in debate about the nature of “treasures”: what is a treasure?
A QR code in place at the Treasures of the Bodleian exhibition.
In order to improve the perceived “connection” between the QR code and the objects, to try to encourage visitors to scan the codes despite perhaps having little or no instruction, we opted to embed images in the QR codes relating to the objects they related to. By cranking up the error-correction level of a QR code, it’s possible to “damage” them quite significantly and still have them scan perfectly well.
One of my "damaged" QR codes. This one corresponds to The Laxton Map, a 17th Century map of common farming land near Newark on Trent.
We hope that the visual association between each artefact and its QR code will help to make it clear that the code is related to the item (and isn’t, for example, some kind of asset tag for the display case or something). We’re going to be monitoring usage of the codes, so hopefully we’ll get some meaningful results that could be valuable for future exhibitions: or for other libraries and museums.
Rolling Your Own
If you’re interested in making your own QR codes with artistic embellishment (and I’m sure a graphic designer could do a far better job than I did!), here’s my approach:
I used Google Infographics (part of Chart Tools) to produce my QR codes. It’s fast, free, simple, and – crucially – allows control over the level of error correction used in the resulting code. Here’s a sample URL to generate the QR code above:
500×500 is the size of the QR code. I was ultimately producing 5cm codes because our experiments showed that this was about the right size for our exhibition cabinets, the distance from which people would be scanning them, etc. For laziness, then, I produced codes 500 pixels square at a resolution of 100 pixels per centimetre.
H specifies that we want to have an error-correction level of 30%, the maximum possible. In theory, at least, this allows us to do the maximum amount of “damage” to our QR code, by manipulating it, and still have it work; you could try lower levels if you wanted, and possibly get less-complex-looking codes.
0 is the width of the border around the QR code. I didn’t want a border (as I was going to manipulate the code in Photoshop anyway), so I use a width of 0.
The URL – HTTP://TREASURES.BODLEIAN.OX.AC.UK/T7 – is presented entirely in capitals. This is because capital letters use fewer bits when encoded as QR codes. “http” and domain names are case-insensitive anyway, and we selected our QR code path names to be in capitals. We also shortened the URL as far as possible: owing to some complicated technical and political limitations, we weren’t able to lean on URL-shortening services like bit.ly, so we had to roll our own. In hindsight, it’d have been nice to have set up the subdomain “t.bodleian.ox.ac.uk”, but this wasn’t possible within the time available. Remember: the shorter the web address, the simpler the code, and simpler codes are easier and faster to read.
Our short URLs redirect to the actual web pages of each exhibit, along with an identifying token that gets picked up by Google Analytics to track how widely the QR codes are being used (and which ones are most-popular amongst visitors).
By now, you'll have a QR code that looks a little like this.
Load that code up in Photoshop, along with the image you’d like to superimpose into it. Many of the images I’ve had to work with are disturbingly “square”, so I’ve simply taken them, given them a white or black border (depending on whether they’re dark or light-coloured). With others, though, I’ve been able to cut around some of the more-attractive parts of the image in order to produce something with a nicer shape to it. In any case, put your image in as a layer on top of your QR code.
Move the image around until you have something that’s aesthetically-appealing. With most of my square images, I’ve just plonked them in the middle and resized them to cover a whole number of “squares” of the QR code. With the unusually-shaped ones, I’ve positioned them such that they fit in with the pattern of the QR code, somewhat, then I’ve inserted another layer in-between the two and used it to “white out” the QR codes squares that intersect with my image, giving a jagged, “cut out” feel.
Test! Scan the QR code from your screen, and again later from paper, to make sure that it’s intact and functional. If it’s not, adjust your overlay so that it covers less of the QR code. Test in a variety of devices. In theory, it should be possible to calculate how much damage you can cause to a QR code before it stops working (and where it’s safe to cause the damage), but in practice it’s faster to use trial-and-error. After a while, you get a knack for it, and you almost feel as though you can see where you need to put the images so that they just-barely don’t break the codes. Good luck!
Another of my "damaged" QR codes. I'm reasonably pleased with this one.
Give it a go! Make some QR codes that represent your content (web addresses, text, vCards, or whatever) and embed your own images into them to make them stand out with a style of their own.
Is this a chronogoldfish? I don't know. And neither do you. I just made them up.
You see: the thing that goldfish are famous for – except for their allegedly very short memory, which is actually a myth – is that they grow to fill the available space. That is: if you keep a goldfish in a smaller tank, it’ll grow to a full-size that is smaller than if you kept it in a larger tank or even a pond. I’m not certain that’s actually true either, and I’m sure that Kit will correct me pretty soon if it’s not, but it’s part of my analogy and I’m sticking with it.
A chronogoldfish, then, is somebody who grows to fill the available time. That is: the more free time you give them, the more they’ll work at filling it up. This is a mixed blessing, which is a euphemism for “usually pretty bad.” You’ll almost never catch me bored, for example – I’ve no idea how I’d find time to be bored! – but conversely it’s reasonably rare to find me with free time in which I don’t have something scheduled (or, at least: in which I don’t have something I ought to be doing).
Earlier this year, I started working for the Bodleian, and this – along with a couple of other changes going on in my life, suddenly thrust upon me several hours extra in each week than I’d had previously. It was like being transplanted from a tank… into a pond and – once I’d stopped checking for herons – I found myself sitting around, wondering what to do with my sudden surge of extra free time. But then, because I’m a chronogoldfish, I grew.
The activities that I already did became bigger – I took on more responsibilities in my voluntary work, took more opportunities to socialise with people I spend time with, and expanded my efforts to develop a variety of “side project” software projects. I’ve even lined myself up for a return to (part-time) education, later this year (more on that in another blog post, little doubt). And so, only a few months later, I’m a big, fat chronogoldfish, and I’ve once again got just about as little “free” time – unplanned time – as I had before.
But that’s not a bad thing. As Seth Godin says, wasting time (properly) is a good thing. And there’s little doubt that my growth into “new” timesinks is productive (education, voluntary work), experimental (side-projects, education), and joyful (socialising, everything else). I’d like to think I use time well, even if I do sometimes wonder: where did it all go?
I suppose the opposite of a chronogoldfish might be a chronomidget: somebody who doesn’t grow to consume any more time than they have to. The test, I suppose, would be to ask yourself: what would you do if there was an extra half-hour in the day? If your brain immediately rushes to fill that space with an answer (a genuine answer: something you’d actually do – there’s no point lying to yourself and saying you’d spend it at the gym if you wouldn’t!), you’re probably a goldfish. If not, you’re probably a midget.
I think I can name people among my friends who are goldfish, and people who are midgets. But I do wonder what type they would say that they are…
In my office at the Bodleian, we’ve got a calendar on which employees mark their annual leave. The theme of the calendar is supposed to be paintings inspired by flowers… but – and maybe it’s just my dirty mind – this month’s image seems just a little bit saucy:
Our calendar this month. That's supposed to be a flower, is it?
Click to embiggen. It can’t be just me that sees… it… right?
Last week, I saw X-Men: First Class at the cinema with Ruth. The film was… pretty mediocre, I’m afraid… but another part of the cinemagoing experience was quite remarkable:
There’s a bit in the film where Xavier, then writing his thesis at Oxford University, and a CIA agent are talking. As they talk, they walk right through the middle of the Bodleian Library, right past my office. It’s not just Morse and Lewis and the Harry Potter films that make use of the Library (at great expense, I gather) for filming purposes! “That’s my office!” I squee’d, pointing excitedly at the screen.
Needless to say, the student-heavy audience cheered loudly at the presence of parts of Oxford that they recognised, too. It’s been a while since I was in a cinema where people actually cheered at what was going on. In fact, the last time will have been in the Commodore Cinema in Aberystwyth. But cinema-culture in Aberystwyth’s strange anyway.
“Thanks to these changes,” I said, “The Bodleian Libraries websites CMS can now support the use of Unicode characters. That means that the editors can now write web content in Arabic, Japanese, Russian… or even Ancient Egyptian!”
The well-known "man standing on two giraffes" hieroglyph.
It sounded like a good soundbite for the internal newsletter, although of course I meant that last suggestion as a joke. While I’m aware of libraries within the Bodleian who’d benefit from being able to provide some of their content in non-Latin characters – and Arabic, Japanese, and Russian were obvious candidate languages – I didn’t actually anticipate that mentioning Ancient Egyptian would attract much attention. Everybody knows that’s meant as a joke, right?
Streetlights of the 2nd century BC were powered by enormous slugs.
“Is that just Demotic symbols, then? Or can we use all hieroglyphics?” came back the reply. My heart stopped. Somebody actually wanted to use a four thousand plus year old alphabet to write their web pages?
It turns out that there’s only one font in existence that supports the parts of the Unicode font set corresponding to Egyptian hieroglyphics: Aegyptus. So you need to ensure that your readers have that installed or they’ll just see lots of boxes. And you’ll need to be able to type the characters in the first place – if you don’t have an Ancient Egyptian Keyboard (and who does, these days), you’re going to spend a lot of time clicking on characters from a table or memorising five-digit hex-codes.
Papyrus was important, but the Egyptians' greatest achievement was the invention of crazy golf.
But yes, it’s doable. With a properly set-up web server, database, CMS, and templates, and sufficient motivation, it’s possible to type in Ancient Egyptian. And now, thanks to me, the Bodleian has all of those things.
Well: except perhaps the motivation. The chap who asked about Ancient Egyptian was, in fact, having a laugh. In the strange academic environment of Oxford University, it’s hard to be certain, sometimes.
Crocodiles can easily be caught using sleeping bags.
I do find myself wondering what scribes of the Old Kingdom would have made of this whole exercise. To a scribe, for example, it will have been clear that to express his meaning he needed to draw a flock of three herons facing left. Millenia later, we treat “three herons facing left” as a distinct separate glyph from “one heron facing left”, perhaps in a similar way to the way that we treat the Æ ligature as being separate from the letters A and E from which it is derived. He couldn’t draw just one heron, because… well, that just wouldn’t make any sense, would it? So this symbol – no: more importantly, it’s meaning – is encoded as U+13163, the 78,180th character in an attempted “univeral alphabet”.
Starting step in the creation of "vulture and asp soup".
To what purpose? So that we can continue to pass messages around in Ancient Egyptian in a form that will continue to be human and machine-readable for as long as is possible. But why? That’s what I imagine our scribe would say. We’re talking about a dead language here: one whose continued study is only justified by an attempt to understand ancient texts that we keep digging up. And he’d be right.
All existing texts written in Ancient Egyptian aren’t encoded in Unicode. They’re penned on rotting papyrus and carved into decaying sandstone walls. Sure, we could transcribe them, but we’d get exactly the same amount of data by transliterating them or using an encoding format for that specific purpose (which I’m sure must exist), and even more data by photographing them. There’s no need to create more documents in this ancient language: just to preserve the existing ones for at least as long as it takes to translate and interpret them. So why the effort to make an encoding system – and an associated font! – to display them?
Two-headed snakes: the original skipping rope.
Don’t get me wrong: I approve. I think Unicode is awesome, and I think that UTF-16 and UTF-8 are fantastic (if slightly hacky) ways to make use of the breadth of Unicode without doubling or quadrupling the amount of memory consumed by current 8-bit documents. I just don’t know how to justify it. All of those bits, just to store information in a language in which we’re producing no new information.
What I’m saying is: I think it’s wonderful that we can now put Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Bodleian Libraries websites. I just don’t know how I’d explain why it’s cool to a time-traveling Egyptian scribe. Y’know; in case I come across one.
A few years ago, I talked about a pet hate of mine that still seems to be prevalent: that is – that when people send me a screenshot, they’ll sometimes send me it in a Word document, for no apparent reason. They could just send me the picture, but instead they send me a Word document containing the picture, thereby increasing the file size, requiring that I have a program capable of viewing Word documents, and making it more-complex for me to extract the picture if I need to use it somewhere. And on top of all of that, it takes longer for them to do it this way: everybody loses!
Today, I saw somebody take the abuse of screenshots to a whole new level. My first clue that something was amiss was when the email arrived in my Inbox with a 300K TIFF file in it. “Well, at least it’s not a Word document,” I thought. And I was right. It was something more convoluted than that.
My only explanation for the contents of the file is as follows:
Print Screen. The user took the screenshot using their Print Screen key. So far, so good. They captured their whole screen, rather than just what they were trying to show me, but we’ll let that pass.
Open Paint. The user opened Paint. At this point, they could have pasted, saved, and emailed the file to me, and still been doing perfectly well. But they didn’t.
Resize canvas. The user expanded the canvas to an enormous size. Perhaps they didn’t know that this would be done automatically, if required. Or maybe they thought that I could do with a lot of white space in which to make notes on their screengrab.
Paste and reposition. The user pasted the screenshot into the Paint document, and positioned it near the centre, making sure to leave as much whitespace as possible. Y’know, in case I was running out of it on my computer. They could still at this point have just saved the file and emailed it to me, and I wouldn’t have complained.
Print Screen again. For some reason, the user pressed Print Screen again at this point, thereby taking a screenshot of themselves manipulating a screenshot that they’d already taken. Maybe the user has recently watched Inception, and decided that “a screenshot within a screenshot” was more likely to make an impact on me. We need to go deeper!
Open Photoshop. Paint obviously wasn’t going to cut it: it was time for a bigger graphics program. The user opened up Photoshop (waiting for a few minutes while this beast of a program warmed up).
Create a new document and paste again. Now the user had Photoshop open, containing a picture of Paint being used to display an (oversized) screenshot of what they wanted to show me.
Crop. This was a good idea. If the user had cropped the image all the way back down to the screenshot, I might not even have worked out what they were doing. Sadly, they didn’t. They cropped off Paint’s title bar and half of its toolbar. Then they added another few layers of whitespace to the bottom and right, just to be really sure.
Save as a TIFF. They could have saved as a PNG. Or a GIF. Even a JPEG. They could have saved as a PSD. But no, for some reason, an uncompressed TIFF was the way forwards.
I N C E P T I O N. A screenshot of a screenshot within a screenshot.
Back in 2009, I predicted that Windows Vista/7’s new “Snipping Tool”, which finally brought screen captures to the level of more-competent operating systems, would see the end of this kind of nonsense. Unfortunately, Windows XP remains the standard at my workplace, so I doubt that this’ll be the last time that I see “matryoshka screenshots”.
