wheresrhys

As I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice, I have been reading Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin. At the same time I have become severely addicted to participating in the riot of discussion over at stackoverflow.com, the new, and hopefully, self-organised clutter free forum for programmers.

Part of what feeds this addiction is that sometimes you get loads of votes for a mediocre answer, and sometimes hardly any for a great answer, and it becomes a mission… a quest, if you will… to master the beast and always receive great feedback.

Luckily I’ve now managed to get my addiction under control, and it’s all thanks to Deep Simplicity. You see, there is order, where everything is predictable, and there is chaos, where nothing is predictable, and in between there is a thing called (though I don’t think this is quite the official term) self-organised non-equilibrium on the edge of chaos, which is where interesting patterns emerge; things like some regularity in how often ice ages occur, stock market crashes, earthquakes…  loudness of music! When events of a particular size will happen cannot be known, but roughly speaking the log of the frequency of the event is proportional to the log of its magnitude.

The important factors to create a system like this are the following:

1. Positive & negative feedback mechanisms
2. The existance of thresholds which, once the system/part of system crosses it, its state suddenly changes in a disproportionate way to the size of the movement across the threshold
3. A constant soure of new energy (or whatever the equivalent might be. For physical systems it’s energy, but that could mean mass, radiation, motion…)

So the question I ask myself is this: Is Stack Overflow a system on the edge of chaos, where answers getting lots of votes will happen rarely, and getting few votes will happen often, but as to precisely which answer  will get which number of votes… well, that cannot be determined in advance. In particular, if you could have an objective measure of the quality of the answer, this would not indicate it will get a lot of votes; big up-votes just happen at a particular rate to whichever answers are around.

So what qualifies stack overflow as a nearly chaotic system (from the point of view of a user’s movements through the rankings, not individual questions, though the user is the sum of questions and answers):

1. Positive & negative feedback mechanisms
   If one person votes an answer up it goes up the page, is more visible and gets more votes, and vice-versa. Also the reputation system adds to this.
2. The existence of thresholds
   If a question gets enough votes it will appear in more places in the site. the same I think is true of answers (this is perhaps tenuous).
3. A constant soure of new energy
   New users join all the time

I will hopefully not forget to see if I can put together a log plot of the number of users versus their reputation score.

I really think I’ve hit the nail on its head when it come to captioning pictures. I really do.

It always bugged me that there wasn’t a really semantic way to caption a picture, despite it being a very common use of words both on the internet and off (for instance, I caption everything I see by talking about it VERY LOUDLY), and this all came to a head yesterday on stackoverflow.com.

And I hit upon the perfect semantic way of doing it. The picture on the right is a working example. The caption is actually a heading – a h5 in this case – above the image in the markup, but a combination of padding and positioning has put it beneath the picture.

Semantically if you put a heading above a paragraph/section then the heading should tell you what’s in that paragraphsection. Surely the same extends to images too. So my markup literally means “The following picture is a picture of a man looking like santa hammering in a nail”.

So here’s the bare bones code, though you’d obviously want to use classes and wotnot:

<div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:50px">
<h5 style="position: absolute; bottom: 0pt; left: 0pt;
           height: 40px; line-height: 14px; font-size: 12px;">Caption</h5>
<img src="..."></div>

Vive la moderate improvement in accessibility.

Finally, I realised today that because of web standards, my job will get easier with time – another 2 years and I won’t have to take ie6 into account… a few more after that and ie7 will be gone… and from ie8 it will be plain sailing. So the job will be easier, but much less fun.

“I’m fed up with theft”
Said the Turkish grilling king
“Let us build a wall!”

But fortunately
Impenetrability
Wasn’t quite achieved

I have been trying to register with t-mobile online and it says it is sending me a pin. The whole reason for me using t-mobile online is because I cancelled my contract, and want to receive a refund of what I didn’t use in the last month. When I phoned to cancel my contract, I asked how I get the refund and they said to go online. But now I’m online it looks like you’re going to post something to the address where I no longer live before I can use the website. Please can you help me register without needing to receive anything in he post.

There are dozens… perhaps hundreds of proper art websites on the web. Why am I on the front page of Google for “premonition of civil war salvador dali” and they are not? The Philadelphia Museum of Art (“one of the largest museums in the United States” – where the painting actually is) doesn’t appear until the bottom of page 2. They could hire someone like me for a very reasonable hourly rate and have it sorted in less than a week most likely.

I have about 2 inbound links fer chrissakes!!!

Everyone wants one and, let’s face it, anyone cool already seems to have one.

I’m talking of course about overlays, or modal windows, those dialog boxes that grey out most of the browser screen to focus your attention on a  short but important form that needs completing, or to show you an image gallery, or basically make things which could look cooler, look cooler.

So I needed to make one of these for work, and off I went to the jQuery site to search its plug-ins.

However, to give an indication of how good the jQuery site search is, the top result for “overlay” is

IE6 crashing when you click an image

… and this is when the search is restricted to the plug-ins subsite!

So I did what any other person who is me would do in a situation like this – I searched Google, restricting the search to site:plugins/jquery.com/project, and was so impressed with the results that I created the Better jQuery plugins search.

Earlier today I was reading an article on agnosticism with relation to God (itself a response to a better article on how Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are annoyingly agressive in how they promote atheism/put down religiosity (incidentally, Hitchens’ book “God is not Great” has possible the worst written opening paragraph I have ever read – it just screams “I am a twat”).

One comment on the article linked to a site called modern deism, which tries to encourage people to believe in God without believing in religion, essentially making up their own God as they go along. Quite what the point of this is I don’t know. Also, they claim to be in tune with modern thought, incorporating science and all that, but their inspiration for believing in God is that:

The Deist looks at existence and infers that this wonderous thing could not have been an accident.

Which is pretty much the opposite of what a lot of modern science points towards.

Anyway, I was going to quote liberally and try and be funny, but failed at the funny side. But I will leave you with:

Therefore, Deists have a common belief in God based on Reason but the view into the nature of God varies among Deists as this nature is generally unknown to us at this time.

The Phoenix Centre
Crumbling into the ashes
Of Poplar, London

A name full of hope
But an optimistic name
Cannot raise a town

The above is the title of a photo album by an old school friend of mine on facebook. Its lack of consistency in translating from welsh to English is baffling.

Firstly, Eryri is the Welsh proper name for Snowdonia, so in a way doesn’t really need translating (useful for a non native Welsh speaker, but technically “Eryri”, being a proper name, could equally well appear in an English sentence).

“Mynyddoedd y Cambria”, on the other hand is pure Welsh, which to a non-welsh speaker is absolutely meaningless. This is the part that needed translation.

Why do people not think these things through

Anyway for any of her facebook friends who decided a google search woudl be the best way of getting to the bottom of it, it means “The mountains of Cambria”, Cambria being an archaic name for Wales.