dubious.biz(ness)

Natasha touches the queen’s gate, originally uploaded by killermonkeys.

London

I have no idea what exactly it is about Cory Doctorow that pisses me off, but there is definitely something. In theory, he’s a nice guy who does a lot of hard work for the EFF and other activist organisations, and he’s a media friendly face who is technically knowledgable. But there is just something about the little bugger that pisses me off. I think a part of it is his affection for his voice and his passive aggressive behavior when speaking publicly. He’s like the kid who got insulted every day and decides to never again be out of the spotlight and still can’t be social.

In a recent podcast of TWiT, Cory loudmouths over nearly everyone and fills time and space with his mostly useless and meaningless banter. These sorts of alpha geek contests happen rarely and when they do it’s not a pretty sight (or sound in this case). First nerdy kids make terrible jokes, and a nerdy kid unchecked who demands attention makes horrible jokes. Second nerdy kids have strong opinions based on some sort of empirical derivation that may be completely opaque but fuels their passion. Third nerdy kids are rarely actually required to conflict and their means of conflict resolution border on neandrethalic (new word, rhymes with phallic).

But when someone like Cory is around, it’s not even mildly entertaining, it’s like a fat guy try to shoulder in at a crowded bar. It’s not a plesant place even at the best times but no one wants nasty fat man sweat on them. He simply cannot function around other human beings.

I think that this behavior happens more typically in boys than girls, I think women have a social dynamic that encourages passive aggressive behavior, but in because it is actually encouraged it’s genuine, not some pretense for recentering attention. In fact there are only a few other people I know of who behave this way and I can’t stand to be near any of them.

The worst thing is that people like this have a way of totally discounting what you say in what would appear to be a passive aggressive way, but it’s so obvious that it’s not even effectively passive aggressive. It has everything to do with tone of voice and presentation, so perhaps this is some sort of autistic tendency. The quote goes something like “I just started re-reading the quicksilver series again.” “Oh, yeah those were great. So I…” In fact perhaps it has to do a bit with his annoying accent. Nah, that’s not quite it.

I complain because honestly I think some of the things that he says are on target and he is a political activist with people’s interests at heart. But when I hear him I want to crush his head.

And somewhere near the middle of the podcast, he used “chavvy” with sort of ridiculous elistist tone that old people use when they say “da bomb” or some other slang they think gives them access to a higher level of hipdom. Chavvy is a British slang for something along the lines of “ghetto”, and he totally name checked it trying to show he was “hip” with the “kids” in the “UK”. At this point I realized that Cory is a chav.

An advertisement in the recent bulletin:

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Salary: £20,842-£23,457; Limit of tenure applies*
The Relativity Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge is looking for a recent graduate to fill an assistant position from December 2006.

The Head of the Group is Professor Stephen Hawking who is disabled and communicates using a computer system and speech synthesiser. If you were accepted for the post you would be responsible for maintaining and improving this computer system as well as other pieces of support equipment. You would help him to prepare and deliver seminars and public lectures and assist with scientific papers. You would also accompany Professor Hawking on his many travels and assist other members of the group.

Flexibility, stamina and a confident and caring personality, together with a valid driving licence, are essential for this demanding job.

Come on, that’s funny. What’s particularly funny is that many of the smarter people around here don’t really regard Hawking that much of a genius. Of course some do, and they will be falling all over themselves to get this position which involves hacking away at a talking computer. And that 20k per year isn’t going to buy you very much in the UK either but flexibility, stamina, and a driver’s license will get you far (elsewhere).

I am now headlong into a project to make a firefox extension in response to my previous post. It is very frustrating to not have this sort of functionality available and as the browser becomes more and more like everything you used to have in MS Office. I rarely open documents in word, I spend far more time in front of HTML such as:

• Gmail
• Blogging
• Wikis
• Flickr
• Posting via to random message boards via the web
• the company I’m working at also uses textareas for its edits

I think all these make a fantastic argument for having autorecovery/autosave available to users if they want it. And the only way it will be implemented globally is via a browser, and the only way it will get into a browser (reasonably) is via an extension. So I’m writing a Firefox extension.

The basic design of the extension is: when you load a form, the extension checks to see if this field is being autosaved. We don’t want to autosave everything nor do we want to keep around a lot of potentially embarassing data without an opt-in. So if you want the editing area to be saved, you specifically ask it to save this menu item. As long as this text input keeps the same name and remains on the same page, from then on your undo history will extend past the current page load. So essentially, you will have the ability to edit-undo several days or several hundred levels of undo. This history will also be saved out to disk so that your undo log (along with the current state) so that if your browser crashes or something crazy happens, you can restart, go back to the page, and undo right back to where you started (or the last periodic save point).

That’s the idea anyway. The problem is mozilla and firefox are not incredibly well-documented, though I wouldn’t expect them to be. They are very complex pieces of software and they are written in a highly abstracted way that allows them to be reused. They are the sort of thing that object oriented designers have wet dreams about. But this has resulted in a lot of strange interfaces which are not incredibly well documented. The lack of documentation is not actually at the “what does this method do?” level, as that sort of documentation is easy to write and manage, but at the level of “how to I access this particular method of this particular interface in this context?” In other words, the boards are well documented, but it is assumed that you can figure out how to use the nails.

Further this sort of extension reaches deep into the innards of the editor (every textbox in mozilla invokes a rather complicated editor) and yanks out something useful (easy) but then the bitch is trying to shove that back into to the editor later. Objects don’t like to have their state changed, so essentially the solution is to flip round the “undo” stack into a redo stack (by undoing the actions by hand with the final resulting text), getting from that the oldest text, then feeding back the redo stack into the text editors as actions. The result, if everything works right, is the final text with an internalized undo stack in firefox that mirrors the persisted state of the undo stack in the extension.

This presents a number of problems, all of which seem surmountable, but most of which require a lot more knowledge of mozilla than I currently possess.

And the name for this rather interesting beast? Personal Savior ;-) I hope to release by the end of the month, ie before school starts. I’ve put the super secret sync (SSS) on hold as I don’t have a working box and this particular problem has pissed me off one time too many.

I have, for the second time, lost a significant amount of data due to a combination of page refreshes and AJAX nonsense.

The first time was a massive post about mayo in my yet-unreleased food blog. The backspace key is implemented as a back button in most browsers, and when you go forward again, at least in wordpress, the contents of the heavily reseached 2000+ line blog post are no longer saved. This sort of crap could be fixed by having periodic autosaves using AJAX. That would be absolutely fantastic, and someone has done it and it will be a feature in the new wordpress 2.1. Thank god.

But then again, today on flickr I was bitten in the ass by AJAX. Flickr makes great use of AJAX (nevermind what that means…) but on this occassion it worked against me. I added captions, titles and tags to more than 40 photos which took about two hours, and clicked save after each one, happy that my posts were being sent off to flickr and recorded. Apparently this is not really the case or something else stupid happened, because when I tried to navigate away from the “Organizer” which is a pretty impressive AJAX-enabled web application for managing photos on flickr, it said that things weren’t saved. So I clicked on save, got a very nasty XML error message, and realized I was doomed. All that crap is gone.

So, I’m in the market for some sort of firefox-based plugin as a failsafe which will record the current contents of forms and allow me to refill forms with that data, should stupid shit like this happen again. If it doesn’t exist, by god I’m going to make it.

Ed: It turns out I do have at least one story about Paris. I started this as a caption a photo and it grew to unmanagable proportions inside the tiny editing box at flickr. So I am presenting it here in full form since it actually doesn’t have much to do with the photo at all. It is, however, about a particular bookstore on the banks of the Seine called Shakespeare and Co.

Shakespeare & Co is literally overflowing with books. They are inside, outside, on the narrow staircase, and inside every nook and cranny and absolutely without organisation. When I came in the daft salesclerk seemed to be randomly giving books to people. Not for free, but as a sort of recommendation service with no concern for recommendee’s taste. He handed me a very beaten first edition with both covers held against the pages by his finger pressure.

I took the cover off—it was already completely detached from the spine—and read the title: Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do by E.B. White and James Thurber. Funny enough, so I opened the book to a random page: “I was at the piano, or more exactly, on it—standing on it…” In a book of essays entitled “Is Sex Necessary?” this is all one requires to confirm the need to purchase. I am in luck because this book, says the clerk with a perfect amalgam of American, Irish, and Scottish accents, is for sale. Only five euros.

When these two names sunk in, I realized that E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web, and James Thurber is the well known artist and short story author, both of them were familiar to me from my elementary and middle school reading. In fact, in the US I happen to have another of E. B. White’s famous works on my shelf: The Elements of Style, which should be instantly recognizable to any writer as the reference on American English writing style. And a DVD of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty the film adaptation of the James Thurber book of the same name.

To imagine that two children’s book authors collaborated on such a book is entertaining in itself, but the book actually turned out to be quite good. Both White and Thurber were working at The New Yorker at the time and are in top satircal form. It was also published in 1929, the height of roaring twenties hedonism and just before the crash (in fact it was published on November 7th, 1929, two weeks after Black Thursday).

It is the first publication to display Thurber’s now famous sketches which are in a rather roughshod and naescent state, though much more emotive and evocative than the normal Thurber captioned one-box cartoons. Here they look strikely similar to Keith Haring’s, though predating him by a quarter century.

It is also both White’s and Thurber’s first book and one of Thurber’s first attempts at serious writing, but in the same humorous style that he later became famous for. It is also the two at their youngest and most vibrant. One imagines a very romantic picture of the two literati in the midst of all the madness of New York and prohibition, at one of the most read and highly regarded magazines in New York and America goofing around and deciding to write a book about sex.

Let us not forget that this book is from the store which bears the same name as a bookstore whose owner was all up in the scene of the Lost Generation. And that the previous bookstore was frequently inhabited by such greats as Dos Pasos, Hemmingway, and Fitzgerald at precisely the same time that this book was written. A tenuous link, perhaps. But in some way, far better I would estimate than buying a new copy of A Movable Feast, I have in fact invoked the literary character of Paris.

Finally there is something beautiful about early 20th century books. I strongly believe that the invention of the modern computer typesetting system has led to the slow and sure downfall of typography, but these sorts of old books, nearly all published with metal type, beautiful dimensions and strong paper have a special appeal to me that is subconciously pleasing. But I digress.

Anyway for only 5 euros I purchased a book in three separate parts, held together by a rubber band, and I filled it with a lot of romantic notions about Paris. Probably a bunch of hooey, too.