Link archive: August, 2013

Tiny Games for Brighton

Look at the streets of Brighton for some games to play while you’re in town for dConstruct.

WTF Visualizations

Data visualisations that make no sense.

Progressive Enhancement. Still Alive and Kickin’

Dan explains the reasoning behind his “Sigh, JavaScript” Tumblr blog, and provides an excellent example of progressive enhancement in the process.

Go, Dan, go!

Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia

Wikipedia edits converted into Eno-esque sound.

Better business by design

Some good-lookin’ stats from a responsive redesign:

Total page views, a metric we were prepared to see go down with the redesign, are up by 27%. Unique visitors per week are up 14% on average and visits per week are up on average 23%.

intention.js

This smells bad: adding a JavaScript dependency for responsive layouts.

I disapprove.

Enabling new types of web user experiences - W3C Blog

Scott gives us an excellent State Of The Web address, looking at how the web can be central to the coming age of ubiquitous computing. He rightly skips through the imitation of native apps and gets down to the potential of just-in-time interactions.

Simon Stålenhag Art Gallery

Scenes from a future Sweden.

Sigh, JavaScript

A great little Tumblr blog from Dan Mall: a collection of sites that don’t work at all if JavaScript isn’t available.

‘Sfunny, I was talking about just this kind of thing at An Event Apart today.

The Twittertape Machine

I would love to have a ticker-tape machine for my tweets.

Is HTML Relevant in the Age of Web Apps? by John Allsopp

John addresses the price of increasing complexity in front-end development.

Yes, tooling can make our life easier. We type fewer keystrokes, and commit more code. But as software engineers learned a long time ago, most of the life of an applications is not in its initial development. It’s in maintaining it. This is something we on the web have had the luxury of being able to largely ignore up to now. After all, how many of the things you build will last years, decades?

Responsive Web Design is Solid Gold

Jason recants on his article from a few years back when he described responsive design as “fool’s gold.”

Responsive web design: it’s solid gold, baby.

PRSM - The Sharing Network

Don’t ever worry about not sharing again.

Blogging Ourselves to Live

The internet never forgets? Bollocks!

We were told — warned, even — that what we put on the internet would be forever; that we should think very carefully about what we commit to the digital page. And a lot of us did. We put thought into it, we put heart into, we wrote our truths. We let our real lives bleed onto the page, onto the internet, onto the blog. We were told, “Once you put this here, it will remain forever.” And we acted accordingly.

This is a beautiful love-letter to the archival web, and a horrifying description of its betrayal:

When they’re erased by a company abruptly and without warning, it’s something of a new-age arson.

The apparent difficulty of living in my head, freelancing, working for large organisations and then descending in to paranoia.

I have a lot of admiration for Reverend Dan Catt.

I don’t want to be in a position where I say “Hey, I’m working at Google, no no, don’t worry, the good bit of Google”, because goodness knows I did enough of that at Yahoo.

Edible Geography

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this site up until now, but it’s right up my alley: equal parts urban planning, ethnography, and food science.

Should JavaScript devs build real things?

This post is about the pros and cons of using JavaScript to programme hardware, but within it is a great summation of what makes JavaScript so powerful:

In my opinion the greatest strengths of JavaScript are its immediacy and its accessibility. It has plenty of weakness (insanely weak typing, implicit casting for comparison, terrible problems with numbers, fluid syntax, I could go on…). Regardless, these weaknesses are entirely overcome by those two points above.

Having taught quite a few people to code, the benefit of being able to open a text editor or a browser console and type code that can immediately and reliably be executed is incredible. The power this brings to the learner is unmatched. When trying to learn new things it’s important to get positive reinforcement very quickly and JavaScript has this ability in spades.

Executing console.log(“hello world”) or window.alert(2+5-20) brings immediate feedback, makes you feel as though you’re getting somewhere and that you are interacting directly with the computer as a programmer. For those of you old enough to own a Spectrum, C64 or Vic20 – BASIC (itself heavily derided) had the same benefit.

Kirby – Let’s build a better web

A rallying cry for the Indie Web.

Let’s build this.

The Best Thing I Ever Created by Jeremy Keith on The Shutterstock Blog

Shutterstock are running a series on their blog called “The Best Thing I Ever Created” and they asked me for a contribution. So I wrote about The Session.

NSA-Proof Your Email! Consider your Man Card Re-Issued. Never be Afraid Again.

We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.

Before You Know It, Drones Will Be Delivering Packages To Your Door - Business Insider

For some reason, this article on domestic drones is illustrated with a picture of me.

I appear to have become the poster child for terrible business models. Fair enough.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : On citing quotations. Again.

The semantics of the cite element are up for discussion again. Bruce, like myself, still thinks that we should be allowed to mark up names with the cite element (as per HTML 4), and also that cite elements should be allowed inside blockquotes to indicate the source of the quote.

Let’s pave that cowpath.

SVG Fallbacks | CSS-Tricks

Alas, that clever SVG fallback trick I linked to a couple of days ago has some unexpected performance side-effects.

My Metaphorical Job Title - That Emil

Get out my head, Emil! This is pretty much exactly how I feel about my work, especially this bit:

In trying to be the best web developer I can, I feel a need to understand the web. That involves a lot of what some of my friends who are not in the web business think my job is about, i.e. “clicking on funny links all day”. I read copiously about new and old technologies. I bookmark them, I try to classify them, see them in the light of history as well as projected future. Follow up on them. Try them out. Even if they’re not specifically about what I do for a living, the nature of them might have a bearing on my understanding of how other people use the web.

Paying Speakers is Better for Everybody by Andy Budd

I agree completely with Andy on this one:

Want more quality and diversity in your conferences? Pay your speakers.

By pure coincidence, Andy was at a SXSW event in Las Vegas this week.

When politicians get the internet wrong, the internet can be ruthless by Caroline Criado-Perez

Oh, dear. An otherwise perfectly well-reasoned article makes this claim:

But the internet is peculiarly adapted to deftly pricking pomposity. This is partly because nothing dies online, meaning your past indiscretions are never yesterday’s news, wrapped round the proverbial fish and chips.

Bollocks. Show me the data to back up this claim.

The insidious truism that “the internet never forgets” is extremely harmful. The true problem is the opposite: the internet forgets all the time.

Geocities, Pownce, Posterous, Vox, and thousands more sites are very much yesterday’s news, wrapped round the proverbial fish and chips.

They’re Using It At Coffee Shops

You can’t demo a digital product without a cup of coffee on a wooden table.

A Timeline made with Timeglider, web-based timeline software

Improve your word power: here’s a timeline of terms used to describe male genitalia throughout history. And yes, there is a female equivalent.

Guantanamo Bay Through The Eyes Of Artist Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple talks about her experiences sketching at Guantanamo Bay.

America, out of fear after September 11th, imprisoned many innocent men under the most brutal conditions, set up a Kafka-esque legal process that made it very, very hard for them to get their freedom, and is still keeping them there because of fear and political grandstanding.

SVG and image tag tricks

A very, very clever hack to provide fallback images to browsers that don’t support SVG. Smart.

The Killing Machines by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic

How to think about drones—an in-depth and fairly balanced article by Mark Bowden on drone strikes and the politics behind them.

In the long run, careful adherence to the law matters more than eliminating another bad actor. Greater prudence and transparency are not just morally and legally essential, they are in our long-term interest, because the strikes themselves feed the anti-drone narrative, and inspire the kind of random, small-scale terror attacks that are bin Laden’s despicable legacy.

Paris Review – “One Murder Is Statistically Utterly Unimportant”: A Conversation with Warren Ellis, Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple interviews Warren Ellis. Fun and interesting …much like Molly Crabapple and Warren Ellis.

Grasshopper Divert | Single Cam - YouTube

Forget Hyperloop: this is some truly mindblowing technology from Elon Musk. In this latest test, the Grasshopper from SpaceX shows off its lateral movement for a reusable rocket.

Combine that with the sheer power of Falcon Heavy and you’ve got some amazing design and engineering.

Ooh, Yay!

This is a great idea—the Brighton Cookbook Club:

You know when you get a new cookbook, but you only ever end up using two or three recipes from it? Coming along to Cookbook Club means that you’ll get to try a whole range of recipes from one book to see what you fancy, maybe broaden your palate, and have a jolly fun evening meeting others while you’re at it!

Science Hack Day San Francisco 2013 Registration, San Francisco - Eventbrite

Registration is now open for Science Hack Day San Francisco at the end of September. Hope to see you there.

JS Bin’s 5th birthday and news

Happy birthday, JS Bin!

Remy has some important news. No, it’s not the competition to recreate animated gifs with canvas; scroll down past that…

Remy will be working on JS Bin full time. To make this possible, JS Bin will have Pro accounts. But don’t worry; all the functionality available today will continue to be available in the future.

But Pro accounts will get a bunch of nifty extra features (and if you’re in education, you get Pro for free).

Sign me up!

The creation of Missile Command and the haunting of its creator, Dave Theurer

The story behind the classic arcade game Missile Command and the toll it took on its creator:

Theurer’s constant strides for perfection left him working his body to the point that Missile Command’s premise started to manifest itself in his subconscious, sneaking into his dreams and turning them to nightmares.

There was something about the sound of those explosions, the feeling of the trackball in your hand, and the realisation that no matter how well you played, you could only delay the inevitable.

THE END

Life Inside Brewster’s Magnificent Contraption « ASCII by Jason Scott

A beauty of a post by Jason giving you even more reasons to donate to Archive.org.

Seriously. Do it now. It would mean a lot to me.

Related: I’m going to be in San Francisco next week and by hook or by crook, I plan to visit the Internet Archive’s HQ.

Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner

A state of the connected union address, with soundbites from smart people in the world of ubicomp, internet of things, everyware, or whatever it is we’re calling it now.

Technical Machine

This looks rather exciting: Tessel is Rasperry Pi-like piece of hardware, but running JavaScript (Node.js) by default.

This charming charlie

In an extension of the “Christ, what an asshole!” theory of comics, here we see Peanuts captioned entirely with lyrics from The Smiths.

Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet

A profile of the Indie Web movement in Wired.

Go! Fight! Win!

If this sounds like your kind of hackery, be sure to come along to Indie Web Camp UK in Brighton right after dConstruct.

Anton Peck Illustration - Gather eBook

You can download the PDF of Anton’s graphic novel Gather for free.

Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

We have lost an ally in the fight to maintain net neutrality. I wonder how Vint Cerf feels about his employer’s backtracking.

The specific issue here is with using a home computer as a server. It’s common for ISPs to ban this activity, but that doesn’t change the fact that it flies in the face of the fundamental nature of the internet as a dumb network.

I think the natural end point to owning your own data is serving your own data—something that Steven Pemberton talked about in his fateful talk.

We must fight these attempts to turn the internet into controlled system of producers and consumers.

Fat pipe. Always on. Get out of the way

How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets - NYTimes.com

Metajournalism.

Human Interest by Trent Walton

Trent proposes a way to avoid implementing dark patterns: take a leaf from the progressive enhancement playbook and assume the worst conditions for your user’s context.

The perils at Great Falls - Washington Post

On the one hand, this is yet another Snowfall clone. On the other hand, the fact that it’s responsive is impressive.

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Improved support for high-resolution displays with the srcset image attribute

WebKit nightlies now have support for srcset. I’m pleased to see that it’s currently constrained to just handling the case of high-density displays; it doesn’t duplicate the media query functionality of picture.

I’ve always maintained that the best solution to responsive images will be some combination of srcset and picture: they each have their strengths and weaknesses. The “art direction” use case is better handled by picture, but the “retina” use case is better handled by srcset.

Federated uncertainty

Stuart nails it: the real problem with delegating identity is not what some new app will do with your identity details, it’s what the identity provider—Twitter, Google, Facebook—will do with the knowledge that you’re now using some new app.

This is why I want to use my own website as my identity provider.

Galaxy Zoo Quench

This is quite remarkable. Now that the Galaxy Zoo project from Zooniverse has successfully classified all its data (already a remarkable achievement), its volunteers are now collaborating on writing a scientific paper.

There’s something going on here. This isn’t just a “cool” or “cute” link—this is the first stirring of something entirely new that is made possible by network technology.

Line-mode browser dev days participants announced

These are the lovely and talented people who will be joining me at CERN for two days of historical hackery.

The House Of Lockwood

The Internet, day one. A sad tale of data loss.

EIRE signs of WW II | GPS of the past

A fascinating project to document markings from 1939—designed to be visible from the air—placed all around the Irish coast.

BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - BUGGER

Adam Curtis usually just pours forth apopheniac ramblings, but this is a really great collection of pieces from the archive on the history of incompetence in the spying world.

Y’know, the best explanation I’ve heard so far of the NSA and GCHQ’s sinister overreaching powers is simply that they need to come up with bigger and bigger programmes to justify getting bigger and bigger budgets. Hanlon’s Law, Occam’s Razor, and all that.

▶ 100 Robots - Spaceteam - YouTube

See that helmet? That’s my helmet. Jim borrowed it for this video.

And now I think that the Future Friendly posse has a theme song.

Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you - Coding 2 Learn

This is a really well-written and worrying piece that pokes at that oft-cited truism about kids today being “digital natives”:

The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

The causes of this lack of digital literacy can be traced back to school:

We’ve mirrored corporate networks, preventing kids and teachers access to system settings, the command line and requiring admin rights to do almost anything. They’re sitting at a general purpose computer without the ability to do any general purpose computing.

Also, this article has the best “TL;DR” description ever.

A Breathing Earth

Beautiful animated GIFs showing the lungs of our planet.

This Recycling Bin Is Stalking You by Siraj Datoo in The Atlantic Cities

I, for one, welcome our new recycling bin panopticon overlords.

You might want to put your phone’s MAC address into this form.

The Pastry Box Project | 8 August 2013, baked by Viviana Doctorovich

Empathy is for everyone:

No matter how many times I go through this journey, it never stops surprising me how easy it is to lose perspective in the heat of a project and forget that there is no difference between a user, a client and a designer. It shouldn’t be so hard to remember that no matter the title, we’re all just people trying to get things done.

A nice reminder from Viv.

Reflections on An Event Apart DC 2013

Jason pulls together some of the themes that emerged at An Event Apart DC this week.

The Pastry Box Project | 7 August 2013, baked by Karen McGrane

Preach it, Karen!

“Why would someone ever want to do that?” is the wrong question. It doesn’t matter why they want to do it. The fact is that people do. The right question, the one that we all should be asking, is “how can we make a better experience for them?”

Design Jargon Bullshit

Fodder for a Markov chain.

Unmoored

James re-imagines the Barbican as an airship drifting free of central London.

The Ecuadorian Library by Bruce Sterling

A good ol’ fashioned rant.

stevenberlinjohnson.com: How We Got To Now

This sounds like it’s a going to be a good: a new TV series by Steven Johnson on the history of technology and innovation. Sounds very Burkian, which is a very good thing.

We Need More Communism by Scott Jenson

A terrific lighting talk by Scott on the need to think bigger. The solution to long-term issues is rarely “start a company”—we need to think more about creating a shared infrastructure …just like the internet.

Chrome’s insane password security strategy by Elliott Kember

A description of the shockingly cavalier attitude that Chrome takes with saved passwords:

Today, go up to somebody non-technical. Ask to borrow their computer. Visit chrome://settings/passwords and click “show” on a few of the rows. See what they have to say.

LukeW | An Event Apart: The Long Web

Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart DC.

Sketchnotes: The Long Web

Jason Garber took some nicely-hyperlinked notes during my presentation at An Event Apart DC.

Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs by Karl Groves

Yes! THIS!

Webby Podcasts

A handy collection of links to web-related podcasts. Go forth and huffduff.

Android Fragmentation Report July 2013 - OpenSignal

A look at the degree of diversity in Android devices, complete with pretty pictures. The term “fragmentation” is usually used in a negative way, but there are great points here about the positive effects for web developers and customers.

You say fragmentation, I say diversity.

Not Real Programming by John Allsopp

A terrific long-zoom look at web technologies, pointing out that the snobbishness towards declarative languages is a classic example of missing out on the disruptive power of truly innovative ideas …much like the initial dismissive attitude towards the web itself.

UX secrets revealed - Features - Digital Arts

I was interviewed for this article on psychology in web design. The title is terrible but the article itself turned out quite nicely.

Being Practical - TimKadlec.com

Yet another timely reminder from Tim, prompted by the naysayers commenting on his previous excellent post on progressive enhancement, universal access, and the nature of the web.

The Future of Programming

A wonderful presentation by time-traveller Bret Viktor.

Create a responsive ad unit - AdSense Help

Looks like Google are offering responsive (or at least adaptive) ad sizes.

Crippling the web - TimKadlec.com

A great call-to-arms from Tim, simply asking that we create websites that take advantage of the amazing universality of the web:

The web has the power to go anywhere—any network, any device, any browser. Why not take advantage of that?

Inevitably there is pushback in the comments from developers still in the “denial” stage of coming to terms with what the web is.