Category: Just Shelley

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Just Shelley

Letter to Governor Nixon on SB 113 and Proposition B

Governor Nixon:

SB 113 should be on your desk and you’re now faced with a decision: sign or veto the bill.

It’s tempting to think that you should sign the bill and move on. After all, didn’t you work with the Agricultural Appropriations committee to get more funding for the Department of Agriculture to enforce existing laws? Hasn’t the same committee said that you’ll only get these funds if you sign SB 113? And if you don’t sign the bill, won’t you be facing the wrath of the people in your rural communities?

However, you can’t deny one thing: the people of Missouri have stated that we want Proposition B, and no matter how SB 113 is worded, it is a repeal of Proposition B. It is a rejection of the voters of this state.

Can we get by without the $1.1 million in new funding for enforcement? I truly believe we can.

Proposition B provides teeth where existing laws do not. I believe we will find that the worst of the licensed breeders will shut down rather than comply. The worst of the licensed breeders take the most inspector time–what with re-inspections and possibly legal action. Proposition B will, in effect, weed out the worst actors, even before it needs to be enforced.

In addition, other breeders who have over 50 dogs, including those with hundreds, will need to downsize. This should simplify inspections on their kennels, and again save inspector time.

The Prop B rules are more objective, easier to verify than the vague regulations outlined in SB 113.

I strongly believe it is better for the dogs, and for the state, to have Proposition B and no new Department of Agriculture funding, then to have SB 113 and any amount of additional funding.

Proposition B isn’t just a set of regulations and new rules: it is a pronouncement. With Proposition B, we told the world that no, Missouri no longer wants to be the Puppy Mill Capital of the US.

All SB 113 does is tell the world that yes, Missouri wants to keep our puppy mills. Yes, we want to keep this title.

—

Though I didn’t have the room to say more, there is something else for Governor Nixon to consider:

If he signs SB 113 into law, we will come back with another initiative in 2012 to replace what we lost. This initiative, and the initiative to provide a Constitutional Amendment to protect the citizen initiative process, will be on the same ballot as the one related to Governor Nixon’s re-election.

This is a decision that won’t be forgotten and will be painfully obvious on the ballot and in the months and weeks leading up to the election. We will hear, again and again, about representatives who let us down; who disregarded our vote; who disrespected the voters of this state in order to ensure continued cruelty for dogs.

On election day, on the ballot screen or in the ballot page, we will be reminded one last time that many of our leaders let us down.

Categories
Writing

When last we spoke

When last I posted, I had planned on updating that post with W3C co-chair decisions on my other HTML5 issues. I wasn’t quite expecting to be here, over a month later, still waiting on decisions. Not sure what’s happening with the W3C HTML WG at the moment, other than I think the group is making like an iceberg.

Eventually the decisions will be posted. Since I have a good idea what the decisions will be, no need to continue waiting.

Other than watching pots boil, I’ve been slowly working on my first self-publishing book on HTML5. I say slowly, because I ended up drastically changing the focus of the book, and hence the table of contents.

Though I would love nothing more than to fill 150 pages with details about the various HTML5 exploits, in the end I felt that an exposé on HTML5 isn’t going to be all that useful. Cathartic, maybe, but not useful. On the other hand, I refuse to jump on the “Isn’t HTML5 just peachy keen!” bandwagon, either.

I had to find a delicate balance between HTML5 rant and HTML5 rah-rah. Once found, I then had to dig for actual HTML5 implementation experience, which is a lot more difficult than you would think, given the fooflah about HTML5.

I’m still wrestling with the new TOC, so I don’t have any early peeks, yet. One thing the book won’t have is a discussion about HTML5 the brand. For one, isn’t it time to let the Geolocation folks have a little of the spotlight, all on their own? For another, there’s been enough confusion about HTML5 without conflating a formally defined and delimited specification, with a marketing buzzword.

So in the book, I’ll talk about HTML5…and Web 5.0, and Ajax5, not to mention P2P5, as well as Cloud #5, and throw in a little DHTML5, for good measure.

Categories
Writing

JavaScript Cookbook on way to printers

We just finished the last of the quality control checks on the JavaScript Cookbook, and it is now on its way to the printers. The Table of Contents should be showing soon at the O’Reilly book web site, but I’ll give you a taste of what I covered:

  • The usual suspects, such as String, Date, Math, Function, and so on
  • Creating JavaScript objects, including the new ECMAScript 5 object methods
  • The new HTML5 and WebApps 1.0 material, including drag and drop, worker threads, postMessage, and the local storage options
  • Debugging JavaScript, working with a library framework, such as jQuery, and packaging your libraries for reuse
  • Working with media and graphics options, such as SVG, Canvas, and the new audio and video elements
  • Complex performance functionality, such as currying and memoization
  • JavaScript out of the box, including working with desktop-like applications using client-side file access
  • Working with interesting data formats, such as RDFa, microformats, even ePub
  • Ajax, including working with XML and JSON formatted data
  • Debugging and using JavaScript test tools
  • Working with ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) and creating accessible dynamic applications

I devoted one chapter to ARIA and integrating accessibility into dynamic solutions. Because we now have access to an open source and freely available screen reader (NVDA), we can easily test our use of ARIA for dynamic applications. In addition, most framework libraries now incorporate ARIA support, so we need to understand how to use this rich and simple-to-use accessibility enabler.

I also covered ARIA because of my interest in semantic web technologies: ARIA is way of recording rendering semantics, which opens the door for interesting possibilities.

The JavaScript Cookbook should be in the stores in less than a month, and is available for pre-order. It’s a largish book—21 chapters and 530+ pages. The format is cookbook style, where I provide “recipes” in a Problem/Solution/Discussion format. All the code bits are included in example files, so you can play along, as you read.

One thing this book does not provide is support for IE6. Now that major sites and companies are no longer providing support for IE6, it’s time to stop wasting book space on an insecure, broken, and badly outdated browser.

Categories
Just Shelley

Spring Cleaning

This weekend we spent going through the house and creating four piles:

  • books to donate to the library
  • computers and electronics to recycle at the electronics recycling place
  • stuff for Goodwill
  • a recycle/toss pile.

This will be the first time I’ve recycled computers. In the past, I’ve found homes for older machines while they were still useful. However, the first generation PowerBook and the 11 year old PC laptop are too old to be useful, and have developed problems making them useless, even as Linux machines.

They still run, though, and have working hard drives. In order to prepare them for recycling, I spent yesterday writing zeros and random writes over the PowerBook, and used Darik’s Boot and Nuke over both. I’m also paying the ten bucks each to have both hard drives shredded at the recycler.

The other material I’m donating/discarding is like a microcosm of computer technology. We found that floppy drive and zip discs are plastic surrounding a thin film, which is easily cut with scissors. Old CDs make deadly frisbees; I don’t recommend using them as such. Then there’s my first, bulky external CD burner, ethernet PC cards, a wireless router that doesn’t work, a couple of external USB hard drives that hold only a little data, an old inkjet printer, and various other devices that have me scratching my head as I try to remember what the heck they are.

The last of the photographic film stuff is also going, as I’m now completely digital. The same could be said for many of the books, though I always keep my favorites. Since we eliminated all landline phones, I’m also donating phones and a mile or two of phone wire. We get all our video from the internet or over the air, so there goes the coil of cable wire.

I don’t know if life is simpler with today’s technology, but it certainly is less cluttered.

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.