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Video Does Not Belong in Support Pages

If you create software and have a support site on the web the last thing you should be putting in those pages is video.

Video on the web has its place outside of entertainment.  TED talks and Khan Academy are glorious examples.  But when we're looking for detailed technical information a video is completely wrong.

It's slow.  I have to sit and listen through things I don't need to know to maybe get to one part that has the relevant information.  If it was text I could scan it, look for my problem, and get to the solution quickly.  If I need to come back to reference a detail it's right there.  If it's in a video I'm skipping around in the stream trying to hear it again.

It's not searchable.  When I use a search engine to find a solution to my problem the contents of a video are not readily available to their crawlers.  The content is effectively hidden.

It's annoying.  Unless you've got some money to sink into production, the quality suffers.  I'm already annoyed by having to watch a video, but it's more annoying to watch a bad video.

I understand the attraction to using videos for support.  Instead of having to carefully write and format it all you just prop up a video camera and film a support person.  It's a lot less effort.  Writing documentation is drag - we all know it.  But if you're serious about your software you don't want the impression to be that you didn't care enough to provide good documentation.  I'm not buying that.

Now, if you want to have a video and provide written documentation, that's fine.  Just make sure all the important bits are in the text.  And maybe the video can be of a cute kitten.

Web Browsers Suck for UI

I'm not sure why this isn't brought up more often, but web browsers positively suck for user interfaces.

Originally web browsers were for browsing documents.  Note it's called the hypertext transfer protocol.  In the context of a document a web browser makes sense.  The back and forward buttons, bookmarking, scrolling up and down the page, the most of it, form a cohesive and intuitive experience for browsing documents.

Then came JavaScript.  While it provided a fairly straightforward method for adding programmability to the web browser it brought a lot of baggage along with it. We have since learned that it is not a first rate programming language.  As time went on and the web became immensely popular we were stuck with JavaScript.  People were clever and worked around JavaScript's shortcomings, primarily using libraries (jQuery now being the defacto standard).  Perhaps we should be forgiven for not seeing JavaScript's shortcomings early on and considering our options, for the excitement of being able to program a web browser was thoroughly intoxicating.

Now JavaScript has become our DOS of the internet age.  Similar to how Microsoft threw together DOS to have something to show to IBM to sell on their computers, Netscape threw together JavaScript to promote their new web browser, Navigator.  We're stuck with it until someone like Google, who has the  clout, can displace it with something hopefully better.

While libraries make JavaScript almost tolerable it does not solve the problem of how broken the web browsing experience has become.  By turning a web page into a program, particularly using Ajax callbacks to manipulate parts of the page, the metaphor becomes mixed and confusing.  Sometimes the forward and back buttons work, sometimes they unexpectedly change parts of the page, sometimes they take you out of a complex operation you're now going to have to do over again.  What you see when you bookmark a page might not be what you see when you return.  The "state" of a page now matters, and is not represented in the URL, which makes the page difficult to recreate by just following a link.

Web pages are not applications, nor really should they be.  The amount of effort to make a good application in a web browser positively dwarfs the amount of time it would have taken to create a native application that has the same features and functionality.  HTML, JavaScript, and the DOM are too simple to render the controls we need to make powerful programs.  Instead we get broken and limited UI that can only be implemented with difficulty.  I shudder to think of the number of man hours that went into making something like Gmail.

Then there is the problem with 3 or 4 different runtime environments, the web browsers themselves, which all have their own quirks which makes the same UI display and behave differently in different browsers.  Web development has become a game of whack-a-mole.

What can be done about this?  In the near term, we can separate out the pages from the applications.  If you're writing a "web app", when someone loads it, put it in a separate window or tab, and give the user obvious navigation or use a full screen mode" so they're not tempted to use the browser buttons.  For the future, it'd be best if we ditched JavaScript for something better.  I can't say what that is, but do you really want the future of the internet to be programmed with JavaScript?  I didn't think so.

Irrational Beliefs as a Factor for Violence

I've never understood the greater mass of humanity.  I think I understand one thing about them now, though.

The majority of people believe in God, or gods, or some other supernatural thing.  Reams have been written on why this is, I won't repeat them there.  But it's easily said these people believe in something patently absurd.

Another thing that people do is inflict a lot of violence.  From the dawn of history to today people are killing each other on a regular basis.

I'm not implying religion causes violence so much as that believing something that is not rational or proveable causes violence.

When you believe something irrational you have no rational defense.  When someone challeges your beliefs, be it your religion, race, or country, your response cannot be based on reason.  You are basing your life on something without basis; you have no defensible arguement to make.  And your emotional investment is huge.  These are the foundations of your beliefs.

Then violence becomes an attractive, and seemingly justified, option.  Remove the source of this challenge to your beliefs.

This relationship can be seen for anything in which people have a large emotional investment and no justification or control over: religion, race, patriotism, fanaticism, idolatry, even vanity.  It takes away their humanity.

If only they could just see life for what it is, focus on who they are and the time they have.  It's so much easier, and rational.

Life Without Hollywood

Since SOPA/PIPA there's a been a lot of talk in the technical community about "killing Hollywood."  But the angle they take is to provide alternatives, alternatives that are not much different than what Hollywood does now.  I propose this:

Leave Hollywood behind.

Truthfully answer, "Would my life be better or worse without television or movies?"  I think most of us could answer, "Certainly not any worse," and for much of the technical community, I'd hope they'd say, "Better."

Let me put is this way.  When you're on your deathbed, looking back at your life, are you going to be happy about all those hours (years!) you sat on your ass and watched something?  Even right now, looking back on your life, are movies and television what you remember most fondly?  I thought not.

That's because is soul destroying mind wrecking evil.

Hollywood (and I'm lumping TV in there, too) is a tool to put you in place, fix you there, and pump you full of mediocrity while taking your money until you die.  And remember, you have only so much time here.  Do you really want to use it watching something when you could be doing something instead?

It's engineered to drag you down, addict you, and make it so you won't even hesitate at spending $600 a year or $40 an evening to have your intelligence insulted and your time wasted.

It infects you so you'll start to define yourself on their lowest common denominator terms.  They get you early then keep you stupefied, manipulating your emotions so as to keep you feeding at the trough and not notice it's slop.

For me this is easy to see, because I don't watch much TV or movies.  After spending a few years away from them being exposed again is repulsive.  Repulsive isn't a strong enough word.  The sense of revulsion is physical.  The closest analogy I can conjure is that it feels like your mind is being bludgeoned.

Sure, every once in a while something good comes along, but it's so rare, and rarely from Hollywood, that it's a mere side note on my entertainment.  The rest is simply not worth it.

So ask yourself, "Why am I buying Hollywood's product?"  Seriously.  There's a better life without it.

The Fire and the Burn Out

I have a prediliction to jumping up and down when I'm excited.  It started when I was a toddler, and the urge continues to this day.  Now only when I'm alone do I still jump.

It's not exactly just exitement that makes me want to jump, though.  It's tied to a particular feeling.

I have the urge to jump when I make something.

As a child I often drew pictures.  I would draw a few lines, stand back, look, and jump.  Draw a few more lines, stand back, and jump.  As the picture came together, and especially if it was good, I would jump even more.

It was the same for building with Legos, writing stories, painting models, most anything that I made.

I love that feeling.  Maybe more than any other emotion.

I still get it today, though usually not quite as strong.  I mostly have it when I program.

Sometimes at work while I'm putting together a clever little method on a class and it comes together nicely I stand up next to my desk and look at it.  I have the feeling, but I'm too shy to actually jump.  Sometimes I just stand on my tip-toes and pretend to stretch.

That feeling has kept me in programming for over 20 years now.  I go to work and hope I have it.

This last September I lost it.

I wrote a lot of code, under time pressure, for someone who likes to make money instead of things.  I don't like looking at that code, and it doesn't make me want to jump.

I didn't want to program.  It was the first time I remember not wanting to program.  I wasn't getting the urge to jump anymore.

Of course I'd heard of burn out, but I didn't truly know what it means.  I think maybe I do now.

I learned from it, though.  I learned that if you're not careful you can ruin something essential to your nature by compromising.

The pressure let up in November, although the project lingers on.  It was as successful as could be expected, given the choices of fast and cheap on the Project Triangle.

I've limped along since then, trying various things to find that feeling again. 

Sometimes I get it, a little bit.

Baby Jebus Cries for the BBC

Being a technical person and reading the mainstream media is fraught with danger.  Opening a Time or Newsweek, or worse, a newspaper, and reading about something technical often invokes stomach churning.

Case and point, this story over at the BBC.  It's titled South Korean clinic treats web addicts.  But it mostly reports on people who are addicted to video games.  The sub headline is even Internet gaming has gripped South Korea's youth, apparently to prepare you with some cognitive dissonance before the rest of the story.  "Web addict" is certainly catchier than "gripped" for that all important Google page juice.  Both concepts are questionable anyway.  A more accurate headline would have been Korean Doctor Treats Addictive Behavior.  An even more accurate headline would have been Korean Doctor Invents Fake Mental Illness to Make Money.

And then the article just wobbles all over the place.  The highlight is the aforementioned Dr. Lee quoted saying, "internet addicts...are attracted by graphic violence, and the illusion of power".  That's an eyebrow raiser.  It's like the BBC met Dr. Lee and they threw the web, the internet, gaming, Korea, quackery, and anti-social behavior into a chipper and posted a handful of what came out the other end.

There's a video, too, but I didn't watch it.  I read the news because I get to read it instead of wait for it.  I've got things to do.

You know what would be a good article?  Explaining the difference between the web and the internet.  Most people aren't aware of that, and apparently the BBS isn't either.  Or that ADHD is a fraud and the justification for doping our children instead of raising them.  Labeling undesirable personality traits as mental illness has become a socially accepted norm and a lucrative industry.

Maybe the columnist had the story hacked up by their Google whoring editor.  Maybe the columnist doesn't often write technical stories since they are the Asia-Pacific beat, which would prove my point anyway.

When I read Slashdot, Hacker News, or Ars, I hover over the links before clicking on them to see where they go.  If I see a big name news agency, I usually take a pass.  They never get it right.  So much so that I really don't trust them at all anymore, on any subject.  If they get the technical stories so wrong imagine how they must be butchering law, finance, politics, and everything else with which I'm not conversant. 

Don't use HTML Tables for Layout, Use CSS, er, with "Grids!"

If you done any non-trivial web page layout outside of Frontpage or whatever, you've assuredly run into problems getting things to line up properly.  It's annoying enough that I usually resort to an HTML table for a rough framework and then use CSS to style the table and the rest of the page.  Or I use Posterous, since I'm lazy.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks CSS needs some help with layouts.  This article over at .net tells of CSS features in the works that improve CSS layout capabilties.  Ironically, they seem to be emulating tables.  There's more to it than that, and it looks promising, but it is still to come in future browsers, and like HTML5 and a lot of other create technology the adoption rate is snail's pace.

The other thing that bothers me somewhat is why HTML isn't "just another file format."  The tools to create pages without resorting to markup are poor to middling, and trying when you have to drop in somewhere and add some code.  The generated HTML and CSS are human unfriendly.  Someone is going to be popular when they get that right.

"Password" for a Password Epic Lack of Imagination

If you follow tech news frequently it is reported that someone somewhere has used the word "password" for their password and then something bad happened.  When large sites are hacked and an analysis done on the choice of passwords, "password" is nearly always near the top.

Of course, "password" for a password is a bad choice, but I think there is a larger problem involved: epic lack of imagination.  Really, when prompted for a password, the best they could come up with was "password?"  That's so pathetic I hope there is another reason, such as just didn't care or it was automatically assigned to them as a default.

Makes me wonder how many of their dogs are named "Dog."

Writing For Me

Sometimes you read something that speaks to you.  The writer said just what you think, and expressed it better than you could.  That happened to me when reading this Culturebox article over at Slate.com.

Being a programmer and not a columnist my efforts are weighted towards creating software, so I leave this column to speak for me and hopefully speak to you.  The message is important.

But only so important because it pertains to entertainment.  If tomorrow television, movies, and recorded music disappeared, we'd all find other things to keep us occupied.  No great hardship.  Some people would need to find new employment, but competent people are useful everywhere.  And there is something that tugs at me and wonders if we'd even be better off.  It's just got to be better to create and participate than just sit and watch.  Or just that there was more balance in our lives.  We do too much sitting and watching.

I watch comparatively little television and movies.  Part of the reason is the quality, but also the annoyance.  The time wasted from my life watching FBI warnings angers me.  It's not worth the payoff.

If you're in the entertainment industry, take heed.  I like your product, but I don't consume it.  You're doing it wrong.

The Internet is Going to Win

If you're in an industry that makes physical goods that are available in digital form on the internet you have no future.  Books, news, music, video, software, what have you, will all soon use the internet as their prevalent distribution method, and for nearly free.  This is neither a "good" or "bad" thing but simply the truth.

If you're attempting to resist this transition through legal or technical means, now is your time.  Make your money then get out.  The internet will route around your damage.  You are resting on your laurels and the internet is the largest collection of clever and devious people ever assembled.  You can't win.  You can either be annoying and irrelevant or try to figure out your place.  Join and you'll mostly likely be welcomed.

This is difficult.  I empathize.  Money does move like we're used to.  Everything swirls around at a dizzying pace.  It's going to stay that way, though, so adapt, because there isn't another choice.

I'm just some person on the internet, why should you listen to me, you say?  Because you already lost me, and I'm the future.  I don't subscribe to cable or read the newspaper, rarely buy CDs or DVDs, and mostly use free software.  Instead I pay ten dollars a month for Netflix, donate to Soma FM, use Steam, post on Posterous, and read Ars, Slashdot and Hacker News, all for a substantial savings and nothing pirated.  This has nothing to do with piracy.  Let me say it again.  This has nothing to do with piracy.  You're fixating on noise not the signal.

You can ignore all of this, the future will come with our without you.  But it'd be nice to see you there.