Dynamic scoping/binding of variables has a bad name, rather like GOTO and other remnants of the Bad Old Days before Structured Programming saved us all1. But there are times when dynamic binding is useful and looking around it is very common in web scripting languages, event propagation, meta-level programming, and document styles.
So is it really so bad?
Fiona @ lovefibre and I have often discussed the worrying decline of language used in many comments and postings on the web. Sometimes people are using compressed txtng language or even leetspeak, both of these are reasonable alternative codes to ‘proper’ English, and potentially part of the natural growth of the language. However, it is often clear that the cause is ignorance not choice. One of the reasons may be that many more people are getting a voice on the Internet; it is not just the journalists, academics and professional classes. If so, this could be a positive social sign indicating that a public voice is no longer restricted to university graduates, who, of course, know their grammar perfectly …
Earlier today I was using Google to look up the author of a book I was reading and one of the top links was a listing on ratemyprofessors.com. For interest I clicked through and saw:
“He sucks.. hes mean and way to demanding if u wanan work your ass off for a C+ take his class1”
Hmm I wonder what this student’s course assignment looked like?
Not for the first time I needed to sort arrays of arrays in PHP (structures like tiny DB tables). I have previously written little wrapper functions round usort, but decided this time to make a small class. It is a simple, but generic utility, so popping it up in case useful to anyone.
The rest of this post has moved to a permanent page at:
I’m wondering why people break things when they create new versions.
Firefox used to open a discreet little window when you downloaded papers. Now-a-days it opens a full screen window completely hiding the browser.
A minor issue, but makes me wonder about both new versions and also defaults and personalisation in general.
I’ve just SIOC enabled this blog using the SIOC Exporter for WordPress by Uldis Bojars. Quoting from the SIOC project web site:
The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF.
This means you can explore the blog as an RDF Graph including this post.
<sioc:Post rdf:about="http://www.alandix.com/blog/?p=176">
<sioc:link rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/?p=176"/>
<sioc:has_container rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=site#weblog"/>
<dc:title>going SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)</dc:title>
<sioc:has_creator>
<sioc:User rdf:about="http://www.alandix.com/blog/author/admin/" rdfs:label="alan">
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=user&sioc_id=1"/>
</sioc:User>
</sioc:has_creator>
...
You would think crash reporting would be made as seamless and helpful as possible, after all your product has just failed in some way and you wish (a) to mollify the user; and (b) to solicit their assistance in obtaining a full report.
You would think …
In the following I will reflect on what goes wrong in Adobe’s crash reporting and some lessons we can learn from it.
Although triples can in principle express anything (well anything computational), this does not mean they are particularly appropriate for everything1.
RDF sequences are one of the most basic structured types and I have always found the use of rdf:_1, rdf:_2 at best clunky. In particular I don’t like the fact that the textual form embodies the meaning.
In the RDF schema, rdf:_1, rdf:_2, etc are all instances of the class rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty and sub-properties of rdfs:member. However, I was also looking to see if there was some (implicitly defined) property of each of them that said which index they represented. For example:
<rdf:_3> <rdf:isSequenceNumber> “3”
This would mean that the fact that rdf:_3 corresponded to the third element in a sequence was expressed semantically by rdf:isSequenceNumber as well as lexically in the label “_3”.
Sadly I could find no mention of this or any alternative technique to give the rdf:_nnn properties explicit semantics 🙁
This is not just me being a purist, having explicit semantics makes it possible to express queries such as gathering together contiguous pairs in a sequence:
<ex:a> ?r1 ?a.
<ex:a> ?r2 ?b.
?r1 <rdf:hasSequenceNumber> ?index.
?r2 <rdf:hasSequenceNumber> ?index + 1.
Without explicit semantics, this would need to be expressed using string concatenation to create the labels for the relations – yuck!
Have I missed something? Is there an alternative mechanism in the RDF world that is like this or better?
Mind you I don’t see what’s wrong with a[index] … but may be that is just too simple?
Just scanning a few Google Tech Talks on YouTube. I don’t visit it often, but followed a link from Rob Style‘s twitter. I find the video’s a bit slow, so tend to flick through with the sound off, really wishing they had fast forward buttons like a DVD as quite hard to pull the little slider back and forth.
One talk was by Stuart Hameroff on A New Marriage of Brain and Computer. He is the guy that works with Penrose on the possibility that quantum effects in microtubules may be the source of consciousness. I notice that he used calculations for computational capacity based on traditional neuron-based models that are very similar to my own calculations some years ago in “the brain and the web” when I worked out that the memory and computational capacity of a single human brain is very similar to those of the entire web. Hameroff then went on to say that there are an order of magnitude more microtubules (sub-cellular structures, with many per neuron), so the traditional calculations do not hold!
Microtubules are fascinating things, they are like little mechano sets inside each cell. It is these microtubules that during cell division stretch out straight the chromosomes, which are normally tangled up the nucleus. Even stranger those fluid movements of amoeba gradually pushing out pseudopodia, are actually made by mechanical structures composed of microtubules, only looking so organic because of the cell membrane – rather like a robot covered in latex.
The main reason for going to the text talks was one by Steve Souders “Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code” that has lots of tips for on speeding up web pages including allowing Javascript files to download in parallel. I was particularly impressed by the quantification of costs of delays on web pages down to 100ms!
This is great. Partly because of my long interest in time and delays in HCI. Partly because I want my own web scripts to be faster and I’ve already downloaded the Yahoo! YSlow plugin for FireFox that helps diagnose causes of slow pages. And partly because I get so frustrated waiting for things to happen, both on the web and on the desktop … and why oh why does it take a good minute to get a WiFi connection …. and why doesn’t YouTube introduce better controls for skimming videos.
… and finally, because I’d already spent too much time skimming the tech talks, I looked at one last talk: David Levy, “No Time To Think” … how we are all so rushed that we have no time to really think about problems, not to mention life1. At least that’s what I think it said, because I skimmed it rather fast.
Just saw on Rob @ dynamicorange, that the French have passed a law forcing ISPs to withdraw access based on accusations of IP infringement. Whether one agrees or disagrees or even understands the issues involved, it appear this was forced through by a vote of 16 (out of 577) members of the French parliament at a time when the vote was not expected. This reminds me of the notorious Shetland Times case back in the late 1990s, where the judgement implied that simply, linking to another site infringed copyright and caused some sites to stop interlinking for fear of prosecution1, not to mention some early US patents that were granted because patent officers simply did not understand the technology and its implications2.
It would be nice to think that the UK had learnt from the Shetland case, but sadly not. Earler this year the Government released its interim Digital Britain report. This starts well declaring “The success of our manufacturing and services industries will increasingly be defined by their ability to use and develop digital technologies“; however the sum total of its action plan to promote ‘Digital Content’ is to strengthen IP protection. Whatever one’s views on copyright, file sharing etc., the fact that a digital economy is a global economy seems to have somehow been missed on the way; and this is the UK’s “action plan to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries”3.
Looked at web stats for this blog for first time in ages. IE is still top browser in raw hits, but between them Firefox and Mozilla family have 39% above IE at 36%. Is this just that there are more Mac users amongst HCI people and academics, or is Mozilla winning the browser wars?
