Year: 2010

Categories
Environment

The Princess is covered in oil and the frog is dead

Like so many others, I am watching the events in the Gulf with a mix of anger and despair, though the despair is winning out; especially after I look at the photos of the effects of the oil.

I moved to Missouri because I was attracted to the very thing that BP’s oil is killing: the wildlife, the history, the culture. Especially the wildlife, though. The marshes along the Louisiana coast are some of the most amazing areas of the country—teeming with wildlife. Now? Well, the photos tell us what to expect in the future.

I am unhappy at President Obama’s handling of this mess. He seems to be unaware that we, the people of this country, needed to feel that his hand was on the rudder; that BP wasn’t completely running the show. Instead you have a stupid dog and pony show earlier this week, with Interior Secretary Salazar saying one thing and some jackass Coast Guard Admiral contradicting him. The EPA asks BP to pretty please stop using toxins in our waters, and BP’s response is no, we don’t think so. What does the EPA do in return? Nothing. Heck, it’s only been this week that the head of the EPA actually headed to the area.

All combined, we don’t have an image that our government is even aware of what’s going on, much less on top of the situation. I may be a Democrat, but I’m not blind.

After the last few weeks, I sadly come away from this event believing that our President doesn’t “get” the environment–that he’s a Harvard educated city boy who probably never ran through a field of wild grasses, or walked a bayou path. He is not connected; he doesn’t feel the pain.

Politics aside, I’m like so many people who are frustrated because there’s nothing we can do. I volunteered with every organization I can think of, but they all say the same thing: they have folks in the area who have volunteered, and they’re only looking for people who have trained to work with oil spills. So I did the next best thing and volunteered for oil spill training when the local Audubon has classes again.

Along the bird wire, everyone is agog over a bitingly satirical Twitter account, BPGlobalPR. Among the quips is the following:

We feel terrible about spilling oil in American waters, we’ll make sure the next spill happens where the terrorists live.

The humor acts as a relief valve, when the anger and the sadness begin to overwhelm. It’s difficult to laugh, though, when you contemplate the extent of the damage to the Gulf.

What this mistake has demonstrated is that we have no business drilling wells offshore. We obviously have no way to easily fix a spill when it occurs, and the potential for long term damage is enormous.

Yes, I know the alternative. I’m not a wealthy person, but I would rather pay more at the gas pump…and for food, and plastics, and everything else dependent on oil. We can’t keep destroying everything beautiful in the interest of cheap goods. We have to think beyond ourselves.

update

Fascinating first person account of a Mother Jones reporter trying to get past the BP controlled machine in Louisiana.

Newsweek article on BP using local government to blockade news photographers.

Video: What BP Does not want you to see.

Categories
Critters

Observations

Every day I take a large bowl of dried corn, sunflower seeds, and peanuts in the shell, and scatter the contents in the grass in front of our place. And every day, a wide assortment of squirrels and birds flock to our yard to scavenge for the food.

We get mourning doves and finches, shy cardinals, and the occasional grackle or starling. Today, a new bird came by. It had a shiny, dark blue head with a brown body, and looked somewhat like a cowbird.

It hopped about on the grass picking up pieces of broken corn, but it didn’t eat the corn. No, it held each in its beak, until pieces started falling out. It would pick up a piece, a piece would fall out. It would pick up that piece, and another would fall out. This went on for some time until the bird suddenly stopped cold, not moving a muscle. You could see the glimmer of something in its eye. Somewhere in its little head, it discovered cause and effect. No longer trying to get every last piece of corn, it was content with what it had and flew off.

Later, I took our recycling to the bins that the town road crew maintain for resident use. At the stop light, out of habit, I glanced in my rear view mirror. Behind me, in one of those tiny little mini Coopers, or whatever they are called, was this huge man stuffed into that car—hunched over the steering wheel, his head tilted down so it wouldn’t bang into the ceiling, and filling the front seat of his car like a big ass fills a tight pair of jeans.

As I watched in fascination, he picked up this absolutely enormous sandwich in one of his hands and took a monstrous bite. I could actually see the pattern of the bite; a perfect half moon shape cut deep into the bread.

The light changed just as the hand holding the sandwich began to rise again, and I continued on my errand. As I turned down the side road to the center, a gust of wind blew thousands of feathery seed pods through the air that swirled softly white around me. I don’t know what they’ll be when they sprout, but I bet they won’t be as beautiful.

Categories
JavaScript Writing

Future. Perfect.

I finished copy edits on my JavaScript Cookbook, which now enters the production process.

The first half of the book focuses on the basic components of JavaScript, while the latter half gets into the more complex material. I touch on the basic JavaScript objects, such as String and Number, but also spend a considerable amount of time covering new ECMAScript 5 and HTML5 scripting features: HTML5 drag and drop, postMessage, the Files API, worker threads, the wonderful new object methods, and so on.

I devoted one chapter to covering ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, as well as some other accessibility features. The more I work with ARIA, the more I view it as more of a rendering semantics than something purely for screen readers. For a data person like myself, ARIA is a very comfortable technology to use. I’ll have more on ARIA in later writings at MyTech.

Speaking of which, I’ve added ARIA landmarks to my web sites. Use View->Source to look for the role attribute, which is how ARIA landmarks are added. It was easy to update the Drupal templates to incorporate the new material. Unfortunately, the pages don’t validate, but I no longer care about validation. Frankly, the days of trying to code your pages to meet some validation criteria are over. Nowadays, pragmatism is the word in web development.

I am at work on my next book, but it’s not going to be for O’Reilly. Instead, I’m going to try my hand at self-publication, which is why I’m spending so much time working with ePub and other eBook formats. I’m also trying to strengthen my self-editing skills. After 18 books, I’ve become dependent on copy editors—my writing has become sloppy, and full of typos. Speaking of which, I strongly recommend, Paula LaRocque’s “The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well.” LaRocque’s book has proven invaluable as I root out my bad writing habits.

Categories
Just Shelley

Thirty years ago: Mount St. Helens

Thirty years ago I was living at my Dad’s in Yakima, going to college. That Sunday was a beautiful day, and Dad was outside in the garden as I was getting ready to go to work. I worked for a photographer, who had a studio in the Yakima Mall. I liked working Sundays. Sundays were always quiet, especially when the weather was nice.

I heard a loud boom, but didn’t think much of it. Yakima was right next to a military training center, and it wasn’t too unusual to have a hot dog pilot break the sound barrier. Some minutes later, my Dad yelled for me to come outside. I ran out and saw this ugly dark brown/black cloud rolling towards the town. We knew that Mount St. Helen’s had erupted.

We ran inside and quickly shut everything up, as fast as we could. My boss called to jokingly tell me that I didn’t have to go into work. Little did we both know that the Mall didn’t shut down the air intake system quickly enough, and when we were able to get into the studio three days later, all of my employer’s cameras would be ruined.

The day suddenly begin to turn into night. The ash started falling all around us. It was quiet, except for the ash, which made a slight hissing sound when it fell—like a snake who is only going through the motions. We turned the TV on, finding it interesting to see our quiet little town being the top story for most of the major networks. The President flew by. We waved.

My cat was still outside. Well, I say “my” cat, but Bonzo was really Dad’s cat—a case of love at first sight between those two. I thought he would come back when he saw the cloud, but evidently, the ash must have panicked him. I told my Dad I had to go find him. Dad was torn between wanting to keep me inside, and being worried about Bonzo. Go find him, Baby Doll, he said, But don’t stay out too long.

Yes, he called me Baby Doll. Dad’s been dead a few years now—I don’t mind telling you he used to call me Baby Doll.

I put on a plastic rain coat I bought on a lark, once, and never wore. It ended up being a perfect cover for the ash fall. I wet a handkerchief to wrap around my nose and mouth, though it didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Walking through the streets, looking for my cat, was like walking on the moon. The ash was very fine, but so persistent. It covered everything, though it slithered off the plastic of my coat. After about half an hour, I couldn’t handle the ash anymore and came home— hoping Bonzo would be smart enough to find cover.

During the day, the ash cloud would sometimes thin out, leading us to hope the worst was over. Then the ash would thicken, the day darken again. I must admit to being more than a little worried about how long the ash would fall. Would we be evacuated if it fell for days?

Were we in danger?

Towards evening, we heard a faint meow at the back door. I opened it, and there on the step was a mound of ash with two brilliantly blue, and really pissed off eyes. Bonzo had made it home.

The ash fell throughout the day and into the evening. The darkness was oppressive, the acrid smell overwhelming at times. Sometime during the night, though, it finally stopped. When we woke the next day, we woke to another world. Ash covered everything.

I used to smoke in those days. I had run out of cigarettes, and we also needed milk and some other odds and ends. We couldn’t drive because of the ash, but there was a neighborhood store a couple of blocks away. I knew the store would be open—you’d have to bury that store under lava for it not to open—so I again donned my plastic coat and set off.

If the walk during the ash fall was unnerving, the walk the next day was surreal. You could see tracks of animals, including that of a bee that had become so weighted down, all it could do was squiggle along the sidewalk. Bird tracks, cat tracks, other small critters—no people though.

People were out and about, primarily shoveling ash off roofs, because the weight was enough to cause some real concerns. Others, seemingly indifferent to the effects of mixing ash and engine, were out driving, and their cars would send up clouds of acrid dust. Some of our more enterprising neighbors built a speed bump of ash mixed with water, which worked pretty good, until the street crews knocked it down.

For the next three months we cleaned up ash. In the beginning we wore a lot of masks, and some folks took off for ashless climes. Silly, really, because bad stuff happens everywhere. If you’re going to leave a place, you leave it before the bad stuff happens. Otherwise, you’re just moving from bad stuff to bad stuff, like a ball in a pinball machine.

My Dad used some of the ash from around our place to mix into cement for a new sidewalk. Other people created souvenir statues from the ash. I bought a t-shirt that said something about the mountain and Yakima, but I can’t remember the words now. Probably something that seemed clever then, but would be stupid, now.

A day by day account at the Yakima Herald Republic.

The Boston.com Mount St.Helen’s photo essay.

Categories
HTML5 Specs

Progress Element: what I’ve found

To recap my weekend effort with the WebKit nightly implementation of the HTML5 progress element:

  • I created a application that uses the progress element and provides a text-based fallback for the element. You need to use setAttribute and getAttribute to get the progress element’s value attribute, as accessing the attribute directly on the object only works when progress is implemented in the browser. Apple’s VoiceOver seems to only audibly announce the state of the progress bar when it first receives focus. I can’t test with Firefox and NVDA on Windows, as Firefox has not yet implemented the element.
  • I created another application that provides a graphical progress bar fallback using two div elements. I also use ARIA to provide audible signals of progress bar state. During this experimentation, I found that you can’t change the background-color of the progress element, as this will wipe out the progress effect.
  • I created a third application, this time embedding the graphical progress bar fallback directly in the progress element. This approach works, but is invalid, since the progress element does not allow flow content. The assumption we take from the allowable content is that we’re supposed to accept a text-only progress bar fallback. This assumption of text-only fallback completely disregards the state of the art when it comes to progress bars that exists today.
  • I created a indeterminate progress bar application today. I discovered that you can’t change height or width of the progress element after all. If you do change the progress bar’s style setting, it adversely impacts on the indeterminate progress bar display. You have to accept the exact presentation of the progress bar, as determined by the browser. Frankly, I’ve never been overfond of the “blue gel” progress bar for Apple, and I think the progress bars, as implemented in WebKit, are ugly. Again, the indeterminate progress bar completely ignores the state of the art of “throbbers” that exists today. Can you see using this progress bar in Twitter?

I would move on to testing other new HTML5 elements, except for one small problem: the majority of new HTML5 elements have no real world implementation. Even many of the input elements, which have been around for six years have no implementation, or only partial implementation in one user agent, Opera.

As I wrote in an email to the HTML WG:

There are many new and modified elements in the HTML5 specification that do not have any implementation, and several that only have partial implementation by one User Agent. There are no implementations of any of the new or modified elements by any User Agent other than browsers (such as in authoring tools, or WYSIWYG plug-ins). Lack of implementation, or plans for implementation, especially when an element has been part of the WD for years, seems to meet the criteria for “features at risk”. Features at risk are those most likely to be challenged during Last Call, which could impede progress of the document through the Last Call process.

We get so caught up in the gee whiz newness of HTML5, and all its perceived glamor and sexy techiness that we forget that, for all intents and purposes, three-quarters of the specification is untried.