It seems that Jonathan Fenocchi has passed me an almost-legitimate Musical Baton. So here’s my contribution to the meme.

Total Volume

4.91 GB in /home/Mike/My Music/

Last CDs Purchased

Beauty From Pain, by Superchic[k]. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but I’ve happened to enjoy most of it, particularly the title track. They’ve changed a lot since their contribution to the Legally Blonde soundtrack, and I think I like the most recent version. Not as rock-ish, but more thoughtful lyrically.

Imaginarium, by Terry S. Taylor. It’s a collection of favourite songs from three of Doug TenNapel’s games: The Neverhood, Skullmonkeys, and Boombots. Bizarre and delightful, all at the same time.

Playing Right Now

Carly Simon — Nobody Does It Better

Five Favourites

• U2 — Mysterious Ways
• Guns ‘N Roses — Sweet Child of Mine
• Dandy Warhols — Bohemian Like You
• Delirious — My Glorious
• Jann Arden — Thing For You

Passing It Along

• Kristy Sammis
• Doug TenNapel
• Rands
• Kevin Menzel
• Patrick Haney

Mike

Shortly after I put up the Jello article, I realised that the technique is really a wee bit silly. It’s great because it’s so tweakable, but it’s silly because the method of tweaking is mostly just trial and error. Read on…

This new design sports what I believe to be a brand new way of creating a website that is flexible relative to one’s browser.

Since the majority of my small readership are not CSS nerds, I’ll start with a little background. Feel free to skip over that if you just want the code. (If you don’t want any of it, the final example is right here)

Read on…

Throw a little Wicked-Worn in a blender with a new liquid CSS technique, some dropcaps, and it’s a new look for uwMike!

Eleven and a half hours late for the Official Reboot, but I needed that little something extra to amuse myself during the past week of working on my UWaterloo Co-op Work Report.

Right now, I have to get rested up for the first day of summer term tomorrow.

Mike

p.s. watch this space for more on that new liquid layout trick…

p.p.s. If you’re looking for the prior layout, it’s archived here.

For my current co-op job, I was asked in the interview this question:

Do you find feature-creep or bug-hunting to be the more time-consuming part of software development?

At the time, I said feature-creep. Each added feature exposes numerous other missing features. Then the missing features become bugs until they’re implemented. So the new feature remains unusable until the supporting features are all implemented.

This is true with any software, but I find it more of a problem on the web.

Listings and Categories

Say that there’s a number of hierarchical categories, and a pile of photographs, each of which belongs to one of the categories. This could be stored as a filesystem, or in two database tables.

Say that you want to add the ability to ‘feature’ a photo inside it’s category… but you may also want to feature it in the parent category also, possibly right up to the root directory.

Adding the ability to feature a photo requires the ability to unfeature it, removing the database record. But you can’t just remove it without a prompt screen. On the prompt screen, there should really be a query that fetches the name of the entry and the name of the category for confirmation. Then on the public side, the featured photos need to show up at the top of the categories that they’re supposed to be featured in, etc.

This is all one big ‘feature’, but unless it’s completely implemented all at once, any missing part is a bug. As soon as it’s half-coded, more things reveal themselves as bugs so long as they’re un-implemented.

Partial Rollout

One of the beauties of a web-app is the incremental rollout that it allows. If a bug is discovered, it can be corrected without everyone having to go and re-download everything.

The trouble with a web-app is the request-response nature of form-based interaction. There’s folks working on that, but the primary mechanism is still as it’s always been. This breaks up code. You’ve got a display case, a response case, sanitization, plus some mechanism for grokking errors. Not only that, but chances are, you’re trying to cover add, edit, and error all in the same block so as to not repeat code.

It’s rather overwhelming. And if you miss any piece of it, you’ve got a bug.

This stuff is a whole lot easier in Windows, even if you don’t cheat.

With PHP, there’s tools out there, but any time something shows up that the abstracted tool can’t account for, you’re back at square one.

Personal Apps

The time this is the worst is with the programs programmers write for themselves — the throwaway programs. Those often turn into bigger and better things than they were originally meant to be, and suddenly there’s a dozen loose ends that need tying up.

My dad mentioned this about a program he’s been working on for the Church, and I notice it all the time on this site. For example, I have a mechanism for submitting the quick news links on the left side of the homepage, but there’s no way for me to edit them. I could spend an hour adding this feature that no one will see, or I could instead play with something that would show up publicside, such as creating an archive screen for that content so that links other than the top-ten are still available.

It takes only a few additional seconds to log into phpMyAdmin and just edit the records manually when I spell something wrong or mis-form a link. So it will continue to stay unfixed. If it was for a client, I’d fix it. But as a hobby project, I’d rather explore the new areas…

So is it feature-creep or bug-hunting that’s worse? They’re really both the same thing. It’s just that the prospect of feature-creep can sometimes be enough to make new coding a rather intimidating process.

Mike

Any web-standards person will tell you that CSS is better than tables, for laying out a site. This site uses CSS instead of tables. They’ll probably also tell you that as powerful as they are, some CSS techniques are just barely worth the effort.

If you’re well familar with positioning and floating already, you’ll want to skip these bits. Read on…

Statistics are fascinating. Some are a little bit scary.

If you send me an email or leave a comment on this site, I know your IP address. I can look at my logs and see every page you clicked, every file you accessed. In fact, I can even see, from the referrals, how you got to this page — by typing it in, searching Google, or linking from another page. Every webmaster has this ability.

If you’ve ever used Google, you have the Google Cookie on your machine — a unique number that they associate with your settings and preferences on their site. And also, it’s well established, with their search logs. They can create extraordinarly detailed personality maps for each computer just based on all the searches you’ve performed since last clearing your cookies.

And that’s fine. They provide me a service: fast, free, and accurate web searches. If my search habit data is entering a larger corpus of information that powers Sergey Brin’s science projects, great. However, the advent of GMail introduces a whole new variable into this equation. Now all those searches can suddenly be connected to a corpus of email, and also the name that was provided on signup.

Even this is fine. Google is a company that I trust. They’re a selfless organization that’s taken advertising online from ludicrous flashing banners to useful, relevant text links.

What’s worrying is what will happen when governments and lawyers suddenly realise that all this personal information may be available, just waiting for a subpoena. The recent attempts of ISPs to protect their customers from the MPAA prove that when it’s the Law versus Privacy, the law wins.

Which, generally, is good. I’d rather be safe. But it’s a slippery slope. Google may just be a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Yes, 99% of the drivel at Google-Watch is complete garbage. But this one point deserves attention. Being the custodian of anything takes responsibility, but perhaps the most when it’s information, which is so easy to share.

Anyone really worried about privacy shouldn’t be online at all. For all the security in email, you might as well have written your private information on the back of a postcard.

Mike

I’m surrounded by the cheerful beep-beep of LEGO’s standard RCX firmware confirm-download signal. Feels like an rtlToronto event.

When I found out that our major design project was a LEGO navigation challenge, I immediately jumped to ‘how can this be done the fastest, and skipped the more obvious question of ‘how can this be done the easiest or most reliably. Our bot is working great, of course, but as with many around me, it’s loaded with two separate programs — a slow and steady one and a quicker, more fault-prone one. Trying to reliably follow a line with a single light-sensor is a really tricky challenge.

So I was surfing over to the rtlToronto site, and I noticed they’ve posted some better pictures from the Deep Yellow game, which was my baby, but there’s also some rules up for a fiendishly difficult new challenge — mini block stacking.

Don’t think I’ve got time to build for this, but I’ll definitely try to make it into Toronto to watch.

Mike

I never really intended the previous incarnation of this site to exist for all that long. It was more of a temporary entity while I mulled over how I wanted this page to appear.

I knew pretty well right away how I didn’t want it to appear — as a centered, fixed-width, two column page, like every single other blog site out there. The two column layout is sensible in terms of content, but I wanted to see if I could really flex a bit of CSS muscle and create something interesting with some bolder colours to contrast all the ultra-modern pastels out there.

I think it came out all right.

It’s not finished, but I’m too busy with school these days to wait much longer before going live. Anyway, the engine is purring much smoother now — all the pages are fully compliant, the links are nice and tidy, the archive is much more browsable, the security is much better. All around, it’s a reflection of everything I’ve learned about PHP in the last year. A worthwhile journey it’s been, and it wouldn’t have started without Blitz, so I’m very much endebted to him. Every month I still see a handful of referrals come through from the old location.

Anyhow, it’s bedtime now, but give me a shout about it. Especially if you’re on a browser other than IE6 or Firefox and you’re seeing a visual anomaly.

On that note, Firefox 1.0 comes out today. Be sure to pick it up.

Mike

Stuff this cool should be illegal. Seriously, I thought only the military had access to satellite maps this good. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get yourself over to Keyhole.com and sign up for the 7-day trial.

My housemates and I spent at least a good hour bouncing around the globe checking out various landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Washington Monument. It seems that some areas are censored out, such as the US Capitol, however the Pentagon is shown in stunning detail, as is my neighbourhood back home.

Unfortunately the town of Waterloo is considered ‘Rural Area’, so the images of campus are considerably less impressive. I was also disappointed to not see some international sights such as the Pyramids and the Palm in Dubai. In spite of these, it’s an absolutely stunning job they’ve done of compiling data from different mapping projects into a single globe like this. It’s my understanding that similar projects have been undertaken before, but never with this slick a result.

It’s hard to even describe, but it gives you such an incredible feeling of the enormity of the Earth when you’re able to zoom from street level to viewing the whole thing in just a few mouse movements.

This sort of thing has incredible potential as a teaching tool. I was embarassed with myself that I wasn’t able to locate the Eiffel Tower without cheating (looking up the co-ordinates). However, experience playing Scotland Yard gave me a significant advantage navigating around London and identifying a few of the buildings between Hyde Park and the Thames.

I don’t know what these people would charge a school board for a site license, but it would be criminal to not at least consider it. This thing has implementations extending far beyond geography. History, Geometry, Languages, Literature, anyone?

Mike