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The rules [of language] are precise and strict and are understood and followed by every speaker of idiomatic English, even though they're not usually taught in school. Fluent speakers don't know they know them and couldn't explain them, say to someone learning the language, but they know immediately when they've been broken. Native speakers pick up the rules for using such idioms by example and experience and only suffer confusion when these real-life rules conflict with the ones that grammarians of an earlier period would have had us believe were correct.
— Michael Quinion
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First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 7/2/2009
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Update every 30 minutes. Last: 6:14 PM Pacific
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posted at
11:18 AM
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In the wake of this, a semi-unserious proposal was made that because most comments are dumb, we should just strip all comments from the example code. Because code examples are not translated, we have to explain the code in the text of a topic anyway.
Hmmm. This type of proposal is useful for goading me into thinking through our policy. Herewith my thots:- Having decent comments in a snippet is useful for the person who copies and pastes an example into their application, even if the code is explained in the topic.
- As with member descriptions, descriptions in orientation topics, UI reference topics, and other such, it takes time and thought to create a comment that is actually useful to the reader. All of these types of text share the characteristic that they are often written as an afterthought, in a hurry, only to fulfill a general requirement, or while the writer's attention is focused elsewhere.
- Comments might could be written by bearing in mind the Alzheimer's Law of Programming: Looking at code you wrote more than two weeks ago is like looking at code you are seeing for the first time.
- James Edwards once suggested "comment-driven development". Bet you'd get better comments that way, eh?
- Lame comments are partly the result of comments being unedited. Opines the editor.
This business also provides what I think is a good response when I hear anyone suggest that a good way to document APIs is "just have the developers comment their code." Sounds good in theory. But see the preceding.
[categories]
writing, aspnet
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Thursday, 25 June 2009
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Two things at a time
posted at
01:28 AM
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 - family
- work
- friends
- reading
- home improvement
- guitar
- blogging
- exercising
- taking classes
- teaching classes
And etc. Per my theory, I can only really be putting serious energy into two of these at a time. So, if work is intense and I'm practicing guitar diligently, I'm ignoring family and blogging. If we're doing family things and I'm working on some house project or other, work and guitar and all the rest get short shrift. I can prep to teach a class and work, or I can work and have a busy social life, or I can work out regularly and do home improvement, or I can blog regularly and read a lot, or ... anyway, you get the idea.
Clearly there are people who can handle three or four or more of these types of things concurrently. (I seem to work with a lot of people like that.) But one has to know oneself, no? And I have to recognize, after long experience, that taking on some attention-sucking task means I have to jettison something else, until the total count of tasks is, like, two.
What's your limit for number of concurrent tasks?
[categories]
personal
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Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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More web site usability
posted at
09:56 AM
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But I am happy to say that I can still be snotty about the sites run by universities. Having two kids in college, I go through a quarterly/semesterly exercise in which I log in and behold the price of ... uh ... well, different topic.
Anyway, here's an example. This is the "menu" that the "authorized payer" site at Indiana U presents, with the one I generally need highlighted. Tell me what logic went into the order of the elements.
[categories]
technology
[tags]
UI, Web design, usability
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posted at
12:06 PM
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[categories]
family
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posted at
08:12 AM
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[categories]
technology, books
[tags]
Kindle
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posted at
11:20 AM
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 best known as the discoverer of oxygen. Johnson shows how Priestley had a strong influence on both science and politics (he was a close friend Jefferson and Franklin). But Priestley also sat at a historical confluence that was conducive to, basically, Enlightenment thinking, and Johnson ties together many threads in a way reminiscent of James Burke: coffeehouses and efficient postal delivery, which fostered open and fast communication; innovations in scientific technology, which let Priestley engage in the experiments he did; the wealth of the industrial age, which indirectly provided Priestley with the time to do research; and so on.
At times the chains of connections go quite far indeed -- for example, from Priestley's simple experiment with a mint plant all the way to the field of planetary ecology. A continuing theme is energy: sunlight to feed plants, coffee to feed scientific minds, oxygen to feed animals, coal to feed the industrial revoltuion, and so on. To discuss these last two, Johnson takes a side trip way back in Earth history to the Carboniferous era, where he tells the following story.
Many of the fossils that Brongniart uncovered shared a defining characteristic: compared to their modern equivalents, they were massive. He discovered ferns the size of oak trees, and flies as big as birds. In 1880 he unearthed his most startling find: a monster dragonfly (Meganeura) with a wingspan of 63 centimeters [2 feet]. Subsequent fossils have been discovered with a wingspan of more than 75 centimeters.
Meganeura was not alone. Paleontologists worldwide soon discovered that giantism was a prevailing trend between 350 and 300 million B.C., a period now called the Carboniferous era. Like some strange Brobdingnagian natural history exhibit, the landscape of the Carboniferous was populated by foot-long spiders and millipedes, and water scorpions the size of a small boy. The plant life was even more spectacular. Club mosses growing in damp forests towered above the swampland below, reaching heights of 130 feet, five hundred times taller than their modern descendants. Horsetails and rushes that now top out at around four feet regularly reached the height of a five-story building. Early conifers sprouted leaves that were more than three feet long.
 The planetary fad for giantism didn’t last. The dinosaurs evolved immense body plans in the coming ages, of course, but by 250 million B.C., the rest of the biosphere had largely retreated back to the scale we now see on earth. But that pattern was distinct enough that it presented a tantalizing mystery: just as the Cambrian explosion raised the question of why life suddenly grew so diverse, the Carboniferous age raised the question of why life suddenly grew so big and how it managed to survive with such exaggerated proportions. Meganeura shouldn’t have been able to fly, given its size. The respiratory systems of modern insects and reptiles wouldn’t be able to generate enough energy to support a body plan that was ten times their current size. And yet somehow the giants of the Carboniferous managed to thrive in that exaggerated state for a hundred million years.
[...]
The "natural" level of oxygen on Earth was less than 1 percent; the 20.7 percent levels we enjoy as respiring mammals was an artificial state, engineered by the evolutionary breakthrough that began with cyanobacteria billions of years ago. [i.e., photosynthesis] The scarcity of oxygen before the evolution of plant life suggested one follow-up question: why had oxygen levels stabilized at around 20 percent for so many millions of years? Were it to drop to 10 percent, most of aerobic life would suffocate; were it to double, the combustion reactions of oxygen would engulf the planet in a worldwide inferno. So what mechanism allowed the atmosphere to regulate itself with such precision?
[Robert Berner and Donald Canfield researched atmospheric oxygen levels going back 600 million years.]
[Their data showed that] oxygen levels had been relatively stable for the last 200 million years. But the most startling finding came before that long equilibrium. The data showed a dramatic spike in oxygen levels, reaching as high as 35 percent around 300 million B.C., followed by a plunge to the borderline asphyxia of 15 percent in the Triassic era, 100 million years later. The oxygen pulse overlapped exactly with Meganeura and other giants of the Carboniferous.
Since then, dozens of paper have explored the connection between increased oxygen content and giantism, and the growing consensus is that higher oxygen concentration would support larger body plans in reptiles and insects. And the increase in atmospheric pressure that accompanies 35 percent oxygen levels would even alter the aerodynamics enough to allow Meganeura to take flight.
Where did all that oxygen come from? From plants, of course. First, the plants invented the photosynthetic engine that created an oxygen-rich atmosphere billions of years ago. But at some point near the end of the Devonian age, the plants evolved the ability to generate a sturdy molecule called lignin that gave them newfound structural support, allowing them to grow to sizes never seen before on Earth. Larger plants alone might have led to an oxygen increase, but lignin may also have had a more indirect role in the spike. One popular but unproven theory argues that lignin confounded the microbial recyclers responsible for the decomposition of organic matters. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen through photosynthesis; decomposition plays that tape backward, as bacteria and other animals use up oxygen in breaking down the plant debris, releasing carbon dioxide in the process. Lignin may have disrupted that cycle, because the recyclers had not yet evolved the capacity to break down the molecule, creating what the paleoclimatologist David Beerling calls an episode of "global indigestion." With the decomposers handicapped by lignin’s novelty, immense stockpiles of undecomposed biomass filled the swamplands and the forest floor, and the oxygen levels climbed even higher. Oxygen would not return to the 21 percent plateau until the microbes cracked the lignin code, millions of years later.
But the debris accumulated during the age of Meganeura did not disappear from the geologic record. It simply went underground. When it ultimately resurfaced, it would transform human history every bit as dramatically as it transformed natural history the first time around.
[categories]
readings, history, books
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posted at
10:27 AM
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In this way I often manage to confuse myself -- I'll Alt+Tab between browsers, hunting around for a page I was sure I had open. Which it is, just not in the current tab. (A side effect of this is that sometimes I'll just open another instance of the same page.)
So simply getting to an open Web page can occasionally be confounding. But even once I've managed to find my way to the right page, using a Web application can be a challenge. I've noticed this particularly with Facebook, in the form of people having all sorts of trouble figuring out how to post photos, write on walls, etc. Two reasons, I think. The first is that a lot of people use Facebook who are not 24/7 computer users and are not used to (good for them) doing the sort of poking around that seems to be required. The second reason is that Facebook's layout kind of sucks.
Here's a typical experience, in pictures! First I need to find my way to Facebook. Note the many choices that just the browser presents here:
1 - Menu
2 - Favorites bar
3 - Tabs
Now to Facebook itself, which presents me, by default, with no less than 5 menus that I need to navigate in order to accomplish anything other than post a simple entry:
An even worse example is Gmail, which is a mish-mash of links, buttons, and (for variety?) a drop-down list. I count 10 menu-type items, but I suppose it depends on how exactly one wants to count:
To get menu 8 here, you have to know to click the little down arrow by "Reply." And it's the only way above the fold to, say, forward a mail. I have trouble every time remembering where the Compose Mail option is, partly I think because it's just floating by itself off to the left.
One of the things about the Windows ecosystem (and Apple, too, I suppose, tho I have no experience of that) is that the combination of explicit UI guidelines and the weight of user expectations has led to a quasi standardization of how a user can find options. Woe onto a Windows application that a) has no menu and b) whose menu bar does not begin with the File menu:
Indeed, that's the biggest complaint about the Office ribbon -- "Where the hell did my commands go?!?"[1]
I'm sure that the folks who designed the Facebook interface (recently overhauled, in fact) and the Gmail interface put thought into how to lay out the pages and they have reasonable reasons for why things are what and where they are. But for me (and, it seems, for many others) the UI for these Web applications just doesn't work well.
[categories]
technology
[tags]
UI, Web design, usability
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Wednesday, 27 May 2009
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Is college the only path?
posted at
06:38 PM
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But between the mania for outsourcing that started in the 90s (or thereabouts) and the current economic downturn, the golden ticket of a college degree is looking a little tarnished.[1] A person with a pessimistic POV might wonder why we're training all these kids to jump into a job pool that, at least for the moment, seems to be drying up.
Assuming I'm reading trends correctly, we therefore seem to be undergoing a little bit of a, um, adjustment in how we view the skilled trades. Back in March, the NPR correspondent Adam Davidson appeared on the radio program "This American Life." His mission, he said, was "to save his cousin DJ's life, to make his life better." Save it how? Cousin DJ had dropped out of college. By dropping out of college, Davidson maintained, you are making a conscious decision "to not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decade." The program then featured a three-way conversation between Davidson, his cousin DJ, and the economist Pietra Rivoli, whom Davidson had enlisted to help him convince cousin DJ of his folly.
 You can probably see where this is going. Dr. Rivoli sided with DJ; specifically, she sided with him because DJ has job experience and skills that pay decently, that are in essential trades, and most importantly, that cannot be outsourced. In contrast, as a journalist, Davidson himself, Mr. College, could easily be out of a job any time. (You can listen to the podcast; look for episode #350 on the 2009 program archive page. This segment starts at 8:29.)
This last weekend, I had the interesting experience of having a tree guy come over with his massive stump-grinder machine and chew up a huge stump. He came at 10:00 AM; we were the second of five appointments he had that day. He doesn't like stump grinding, he said (his weekday work involves comparatively tamer work with a chainsaw), but he can pick up $1000 in a day with his big chomper. If this weekend was typical for him, he's sure not hurting for work. And even if work slows down, he's not going to get laid off -- he owns his own business.
In an article "The Case for Working With Your Hands" in this week's New York Times magazine, Matthew Crawford makes the same point again:This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Crawford goes on to describe the satisfaction he derives from repairing motorcycles, especially in contrast to the type of white-collar work he did before. He explicitly addresses some assumptions about manual work:When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options.
[...]
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions.
[...]
The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. The emphasis in Crawford's article, as well as in Dr. Rivoli's conclusion, is on skilled trades. Cousin DJ has an array of construction skills, including framing and cabinet-making. Crawford is a doctor of the mechanical world, and in our day and age, the skills of a good mechanic can sometimes seem as essential as those of a good G.P.
It's hard for me at this stage of life to imagine what it might have been like to be, say, an electrician instead. But it's not something I shudder to think about, or that I would panic about if one of my children unaccountably developed a career goal that involved the trades. I am happy that I went to college, and am happy that that's what my kids are doing. But it's clear enough to me that success does not start only when you pick up your diploma.
[categories]
general, readings
[tags]
career, college, blue-collar
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posted at
08:13 AM
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Not evident from this is that the collar does not have a buckle (plastic snap instead) and that there's no "sliver" loop.
More dubious guidance: 1, 2, 3.
[categories]
writing
[tags]
instructions, how-to, procedures, documentation
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posted at
10:16 PM
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However, I did recently take a passing interest in if and how a body might control what a search engine displays for a site. I record some observations here largely for my own amusement; I suspect that if you have an interest in gaming search engines, this is all old news.
So. The default (or perhaps better stated, the fallback) strategy is to display the first real text from the page, which excludes headings and the like. For example, if you search for ASP.NET gridview control, the first hit looks like this:
And indeed, when one looks at the article in question, it starts off with that very text:
I say "fallback" because there are other ways to establish search-engine listing text that take precedence. A well-known one is to set the description meta tag and specify the content attribute, like this:
<meta name="Description" content="ASP.NET technical editor writes about coding, writing, editing, and more.">
If you seach for mike pope blog, you will see that the search listing picks up this text. (Hopefully you will see the updated text where I fixed the typo you might spot here.)
Interestingly, if you search for mike pope blog gridview control, you see this:
Meaning, it seems, that if you search for specific terms, it looks for those terms on the page and bypasses the description meta tag.
The most interesting thing I found out by just playing around was that Google, at least, is attentive to certain phrases that might appear on the page, phrases like "This page describes". It seems pretty clear that Google keys on these phrases as probably including information that summarizes a page. But it ain't necessarily so: these magical phrases are used as listing text even if the phrases are a) not right after the heading and b) not necessarily summaries of the page. Some examples:Not surprisingly, in most of the cases I tried, the phrases in question were in fact at the beginning and did summarize the page, so it's not a bad approach to use these phrases for the listing.
I spent a few minutes searching to see how many of these phrases are already cataloged somewhere, but didn't come up with anything. (Which probably means I wasn't looking the right way.) During my experimentation, I stopped after finding the phrases listed above, but it's not hard to think of some more that seem like they'd fall into this same category of "probably summarizes the page."
I have not yet experimented to determine whether one of these phrases would trump the description meta tag. If I can sustain enough interest in this particular corner of SEO, maybe I'll give it a bash.
[categories]
technology
[tags]
seo, search engine, keywords, listing
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