Year: 2009

Categories
Just Shelley

Beauty is in the eye

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Boing Boing re-published a photo found on Flickr of a hairless male chimp at the Mysore Zoo in India.

hairless chimp

Chances are this chimp suffered from the same hereditary disease that Cinder, the chimp who recently died at the St. Louis zoo, did: alopecia universalis. The condition is rare among chimps, so I’m not surprised that people aren’t aware of what the chimp was suffering from. I was surprised, though at the reaction of the Boing Boing author, a person who is supposedly a science writer.

I am so sorry.

I ran across this image while searching for something to illustrate that last post and just can’t not share it.

Again. My apologies. Rest assured, I’m going to have nightmares tonight, too. We’re all in this together.

I would have expected some discomfort from some folk. After all, Cinder was once featured at Ugly Overload. But I also would have expected a science writer to be more fascinated by the chimp’s physiology, then repelled. Or to note his similarity to humans, as PZ Myers noted. I didn’t expect someone with a scientific background to go, “Ewww. Ugggi!”

I was also a little surprised to read Short, Sharp Science’s take on the photo: that the chimp is suffering from chimpsploitation.

But unless the poor animal is naturally bald, it seems that he is suffering from stress-related hair loss. From the expression on his face (and it is obviously a male) he doesn’t looks like he’s the most well-adjusted of animals. It’s sure to spark more arguments about the welfare of animals in captivity.

It’s true that hairless chimps are rare, but a single search of “hairless chimp” in Google returns thousands of references to our Cinder, and other hairless chimps. We need to be careful about reading our biases into interpretation of photos, particularly so if we call ourselves “scientists”.

For instance, as to the charge of chimpsloitation of this hairless chimp, The Mysore Zoo in India is one of the oldest in the world, and the most popular in India. It did have problems a few years back, when a new Zoo administration eliminated corrupt practices, and several employees exacted revenge by poisoning several animals. In addition, the training of some of its personnel can be deficient, the result of which cost the life of a tigress and another female elephant. However, it is not a “bad” zoo, if we think of bad zoos as those miserable roadside attractions that occur all too frequently in the US. The Mysore Zoo just reflects the multi-cultural environment that makes up today’s India.

I am glad to have seen these stories, as I’ve been trying to track other hairless chimps. I wish, though, that people would see beyond the “difference” of these hairless chimps—to admire their musculature, and accept our common heritage. And to answer another frequently posted question about hairless chimps: chimps are born with pale skin that tans to a darker shade as they are exposed to the sun.

Categories
Social Media Web

My abbreviated self

I discovered that a URL has to be less than 30 characters, or Twitter automatically creates a Tinyurl version of the URL. This, even if the entire message is less than 140 characters.

There’s no way I can create URLs that are less than 30 character and still maintain my subdomain designations. Therefore I’m not going to try, and will most likely be removing any short URL stuff here. With all the recent “one million followers” foo flah, including the breathless designation that one person achieving one million Twitter followers is equivalent to landing a man on the moon and space flight, in scientific importance, I would just as soon stick with stodgy old weblogging.

Weblogging, where no one really knows how many people are following you, most people don’t care, we can actually communicate complete thoughts, and do what we want with our URLs.

From today’s WhatWG IRC:

hsivonen: I can imagine all sorts of blog posts about evil HTML5 raining on the rev=canonical backpattery parade

svl: Mostly (from what I’ve seen) it’s been “let’s all use this en-masse, so html5 will be forced to include this”.

Of all the items in contention with the HTML5 working group, the use of rev=canonical is not high on my list. Why? Because there’s no real argument for it’s use, and a lot of good arguments against its use, and it’s just as easy to use something else.

This all came about because Twitter was built first, designed later. One of the difficulties to keeping a message to 140 characters is that URLs can take 140 characters, and more. Yet there is no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter. Not only is there no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter, Twitter, itself, uses another, 3rd party, service: tinyurl.com.

Now, all of a sudden, people are in a dead cold panic about using a service that may go away, leaving link rot in Twitter archives. I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

But there are a lot of other problems associated with using a 3rd party service. Problems such as the recent Twitter follies, otherwise known as Twitter Been Hacked, that ended up being a not particularly fun Easter Egg this weekend. When you click on a Tinyurl URL, you don’t know what you’re going to get, where you’re going, or worse, what will happen to you when you get there. Even Kierkegaard would have a problem with this leap of faith.

There’s also an issue with search engine link credit, not to mention everyone using different URL shortening services so you can’t tell if someone has referenced one of your posts in Twitter, or not. This didn’t use to be a problem, but since everyone does most of their linking in Twitter now, it gets mighty quiet in these here parts. You might think, sigh, no one likes what you’re doing, only to find out that a bunch of people have come to your party, but the party’s been moved to a different address.

So I think we can agree that third party URL services may not be the best of ideas. I, personally, like that we provide our own URL shorteners. Not only would we get the search engine credit, it should encourage the use of the same URL in Twitter, which might help us find the party we lost. Plus, wouldn’t you rather click a link that has burningbird.net in it, then one that has dfse.com? Implementation of our own short URLs should be simple in this day and age of content management systems. All we need to do is agree on a form.

Agree? Did someone say, agree?

As I wrote earlier, I’ve heard too many good arguments against rev=canonical, including the fact it’s too easy to make a typo and write rev=canonical, when we mean rel=canonical, and vice versa. In addition, rel is in HTML5, rev is not, and I’m not going to hammer a stake in the ground over rel/rev. I’m keeping my stakes for things that are important to me.

Note to HTML5 WG: she has a hammer. And stakes.

As for what attribute value to use with rel, whether it’s shortlink or shorturl or just plain short, I don’t care. I took about five minutes to implement shortlink in this space. I implemented shortlink, because this is the option currently listed in the rel attribute wiki page. However, it would only take about a minute to change to shorturl. I even added the short link to the bottom of my posts, which can be copied manually and used to paste into a Twitter post, if you’re so inclined. See, I don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval; I am empowered by Happy Typing Fingers.

Regardless of what we do, I agree with Aristotle: way too much effort on something that should be easy to decide, quick to implement, giving us time to worry about things that are important in HTML5. Things such as SVG, RDFa, and accessibility.

Other discussions related to rel/rev/tiny:

And that’s my 4424 character take on tiny URLs.

Another reason tiny URLs are getting attention is because of the evil new DiggBar. Goodness gracious, people, why on earth do you use crap like this?

Categories
Browsers

A browser is more than script

Chrome released on Linux, and IE8 released from beta. Now people are beginning to question Firefox’s increasingly bigger piece of the blogger pie. Case in point, PC World.

Mozilla have several grand aims, and there’s much to be admired, but they’ve forgotten how to make a decent browser. I feel plenty of loyalty for them, because they’ve done more than anybody else to further the cause of open source software in the real world. But when I tried Chrome, as incomplete as it was, I realized I’d found a replacement for Firefox. As soon as it gets to beta under Linux, I will switch to Chrome. No question. It’s just infinitely better. It’s like when we all switched from Alta Vista (or Yahoo!) to Google back in the early noughties. The king is dead! Long live the king!

I was asked my opinion about the future of JavaScript applications this week, especially in light of the blazingly fast Chrome. I was rather surprised at the emphasis on JavaScript, because a browser is more than just a machine to consume script. A browser must also render a web page, as the designers built her; must display photographs accurately, hopefully using any photographer supplied profiles; to render the more complex SVG, in addition to the simpler Canvas; to handle complex file types, including video files, not to mention supporting different markups, such as XHTML in addition to HTML; to provide the utility to enhance the user’s experience, up to and including any extensions, such as the one I use to collect a page’s RDFa. Why, then, are we reducing the browser to nothing more than a device to to render HTML and JavaScript?

Firefox is working on its scripting engine, but it’s also been improving its graphical rendering engine, including adding in built-in support for color profiles, as well as improvements in support for CSS3 and SVG. Chrome has no support for color profiles, it’s graphical rendering engine sucks, as can be seen if you look at CSS3 curved corners in the browser, and it regularly fails my SVG tests. Try this SVG file in Chrome, but don’t blame me if your CPU spikes. Luckily, it seems that Chrome just aborts SVG files it can’t handle now, rather than fry the CPU. Then try the same page in Safari or Firefox; though both render the page slowly, they do render it—Chrome only rendered the file the third time through. It aborted the page the first two times. And the quality of the rendering? Well, see for yourself.

Look at my photos at MissouriGreen. Most use a color profile. Now, the photos look relatively good in Chrome on Windows, because I’m favoring a sRGB color profile to ensure maximum coverage, but if Chrome is ever implemented in the Mac, the photos will look plain, and washed out, as they do now with Opera. Not so the latest Firefox, and Safari.

Lastly, look at this site, or Just Shelley in Chrome, as compared to Safari, or Firefox, even the latest beta of Opera. I make extensive use of box and text shadows, as well as CSS3-based curved corners. No browser is perfect in its implementation of CSS3 curved corners yet, but the anti-aliasing in Firefox and Safari is vastly superior than what you’ll find in Chrome. I have noticed, though, that Chrome has improved its text and box shadows: it doesn’t plaster them half way down the page, now.

Why, then, do we talk about how “superior” Chrome is? And how Firefox is dying? When one looks at all of the browsers from an overall web experience, only IE8 is worse than Chrome.

I apportion blame for an over-emphasis on fast script over everything else equally between Google and the current HTML5 effort. I found it telling that, at the same time people are lambasting Firefox for “slowing” down, and praising Chrome for “speeding” up, Douglas Bowman is leaving Google primarily because the company relies on engineering practices, at the expense of fundamentals of design. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s intuition in order to see that the “machine” is also the emphasis in Chrome. But the same could also be said about the HTML5 effort: an emphasis on mechanistic aspects, such as client-side storage and drag-and-drop, at the expense of a more holistic environment, such as including support for SVG and ensuring continued support for accessibility—though I think this week, at least, client side storage has been pulled for inclusion…elsewhere.

Speed is important in a web browser, speed and efficiency, and Firefox isn’t perfect. Newer versions have been locking up on my Leopard machine, to the point where I now prefer Safari on the Mac. If I had to take a guess, Firefox has threading issues. It also needs to work on isolating extensions to the point where they can’t harm the overall browsing experience—or at least put something in place so that one knows certain extensions can adversely impact on browser performance.

At the same time, Chrome desperately needs to improve its graphics rendering capability. As this occurs, and as Chrome gets loaded down with extensions, I don’t think we’ll see the same fast speeds when rendering pages we see now.

It’s all a question of balance—the best browsers are the most balanced browsers, and sometimes this means slower page loading in support of better page rendering. As it is, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all giants towering over the anemic and disappointing IE8. If we want to talk about a browser “dying”, I have a better candidate in mind than Firefox.

Categories
Social Media

Twitter: an interesting experiment

I’ve now used Twitter seriously for a month or two. I’ve enjoyed chatting with friends, and experiencing an application that brings genuine enjoyment to people I like, and admire. I can also now see the utility of the tool, especially for those who don’t communicate frequently online, as it gives us a way to keep in touch and stay informed. But in the last week, I’ve grown less interested in using the application.

One reason for my growing lack of enthusiasm for Twitter is posts disappearing—a relatively frequent event that has happened to a lot of people this week. Given how taxed the application is, problems of this nature are not surprising. What is surprising, though, is how indifferent most people seemed to be about the whole thing. Perhaps I’m old fashioned but one fact I’ve learned over the years in developing applications is that the data is sacrosanct. That the loss of “tweets” is no big thing to folks tells me that a) the underlying application has problems more profound then just being able to access the service, and b) that people don’t really seem to value what they post on the service. That last one is particularly confusing: if the people don’t value what they post, then why spend so much time using the tool?

Another reason I’m thinking of using it less is that I can’t keep up with the posts. By Twitter standards, I’m practically a loner, but I find the amount of news and information to be overwhelming. Before this week, if I wanted to catch up with specific people, I would just go to their Twitter page. However, with Twitter dropping posts, I’m most likely going to miss half of what they said, anyway.

Then there’s the whole “mean” thing. I guess I’m “mean” or sarcastic with too many of my postings. The problem is, you can easily write upbeat, positive, and wonderful things within 140 characters, but the same can not be said about criticism. Not all of us have mastered the art of Twitter snark.

None of this would matter, though, if it weren’t for my lack of comfort with Twitter. I cannot get over that feeling of being the person at the party who drinks too much and says the wrong thing at the wrong time; or puts on the lamp shade and dances around wearing nothing but socks and strategically placed jello shots. Frankly, I don’t think everyone is cut out for Twitter.

Remember the scene in the movie Pretty Woman, when Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere) takes Vivian (played by Julia Robertson) to the Opera? Just before the curtain goes up, Edward tells Vivian, People’s reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul. Well, I hated Twitter when I first saw it.

Categories
Specs

Best of luck finding a suitable employer

Roger Johansson

I believe having more content creators and ”authors”, i.e. web designers and web developers, in the HTML Working Group would be good. Unfortunately I think it’s hard to find web professionals who can spare the time unless they get paid to participate. I know I can’t.

When I mentioned something virtually identical to Ian Hickson, he told me

I am sorry you feel that you need to be compensated for your participation in the standards community, and wish you the best of luck in finding a suitable employer.

Can’t wait to read Ian Hickson telling Roger Johansson, “…best of luck in finding a suitable employer.”