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This is a brain-dump that got too big for the Idea section on the Science hack day wiki so I’ve moved it over here.

Incidentally, if you like hack days and you like science, you might be interested in finding out more about what’s being planned for this inaugural Science Hack Day. Meanwhile, here’s the idea:

Given an HTML document containing tables of solar system model data, build a stylesheet (using CSS3 transforms and transitions/animations) that can present it as an animated model of the solar system:

• Would be interesting to see what could be done with only HTML/CSS, but realistically might need some scripting to make it a bit more sane. For example, to read data from the table in the first-place.
• Cubes rather than circular images of planets, so we can spin them independently at correct speeds. Might not look so pretty, but means we can aim for a more accurate model. Could use more than 6 faces to get a more ’rounded’ shape, eventually it would look spherical I guess.
• Not sure if reproducing the true elliptical orbits of planets is going to be easy, or even possible. They might just have to be circular, at least in v1.
  • Matthew below has a possible solution for that: using a scale transform to stretch the x-axis.
• Allow for rotating the entire canvas so you can zoom in and out and look at things from different angles using keyboard or mouse controls.
• Need to work out solution for scaling distances vs planets sizes independently so we can fit it on a screen. Presumably there’s prior-art for this. Would be nice to have a few different scaling methods.
• Could do a canvas version too, but probably less fun and actually pretty simple for someone with decent programmatic drawing skills (not me).

Finally, here’s the extremely crappy and ill-conceived 10 minute non-starting point, which I’ve entitled Tiny dots going round a small dot (Webkit only of course). No, none of the table’s data is used in the animations, all the values are hard-coded in CSS, and it’s almost not worth showing. But anyway, if it was all done and dusted we’d have nothing to do on hack day.

See you there?

The Web standards movement has unintentionally cultivated something of a fundamentalist attitude amongst some of it’s supporters. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as having extreme opinions on both sides of the argument is often a healthy sign.

However, it does mean that any good news is often rebutted with a, “Yeah, but this bit here is still crap”, style of response. Fortunately these comments normally expose a limited scope of experience on the part of the commentator, which makes it very easy for me to ignore them.

A recent NYT article by former Microsoft VP Dick Brass has been doing the rounds. It’s pretty middle of the road in terms of its judgement of Microsoft: over-run by middle management, caked in bureaucracy, both of which stifle innovation and creativity.

I’m not really going to give my take, because it seems a bit tawdry when I was only there for two years and was based in London for all of that time. Fortunately I don’t have to, because Scott Berkun unravels my half-baked thoughts very succinctly in a small part of his recent assessment of the company.

The primary problem at Microsoft regarding good design & innovation is the diffusion of creative authority. The problem is not the numbers of people at the company, or the layers of management, as many gripe about. Layers don’t help, but it’s not the problem. The real issue is the inability to grant creative authority to the few people worthy of it. Microsoft has always been a place that gives way too many people a say in matters of design, vision and user experience, and it shows in the pervasive mediocrity of the majority of its products. Films need directors. Orchestras need conductors. But if you divide things into 30 pieces and ask 30 people to play creative visionary, mediocrity ensues. The better products at Microsoft are the ones were [sic] VPs modify the distribution of authority to create clear creative authority.

I’ll quickly put that in terms that fellow colleagues of mine at the time will identify with.

Teams are encouraged to be accountable for everything that they do. Strategy, planning, design, execution, analysis. There are a dozen little teams running around, all being accountable for their part of the puzzle, without having any idea or thought about how they will link up with their neighbouring pieces to create a plausible end product.

I stand by what I said from day one. Technically, it’s a big ass iPhone. But the iPhone is really a pretty magical device. And this is a big ass one.

Here follows my prediction for myself and the iPad.

While it’s impossible for me to buy one, I don’t really want one. I certainly don’t need one. There’s no obvious gap in
my computing armour that it will fill.

That is, until the day it becomes possible for me to walk to a shop and buy one. Otherwise known as the UK release date. On that day, I will almost certainly walk to said shop and buy one.

I’m not proud of myself.

Yesterday I went over to The Werks to listen to Remy enlighten some of the Flash Brighton gang on what to expect from HTML5 in the coming months and years. The subject of Chrome Frame came up, with the general consensus being that it wasn’t really going to have an impact on the number of people browsing with IE, specifically IE 6. I take a different view on that question, and here’s why.

An email from Google appeared in my inbox only a few days ago informing of the impending drop of support for IE 6 on the Google Apps product line. Google don’t want to engineer for IE 6, and they’ve clearly made a decision that with Chrome Frame in the wild they are now at a point where they don’t have to.

Chrome Frame is a strategic move which allows them to drop IE 6 support in some of their core products quicker than they would otherwise be able to. It gives them an answer to users (mostly likely their enterprise customers) that can’t upgrade from IE 6 for whatever reason. Presumably the potential loss of revenue from those customers must now weigh in less than the cost of engineering for IE 6.

As a bonus, Chrome also patches some of the HTML5 and CSS 3 support that’s appearing in Webkit into the more modern versions of IE, which are still lagging behind.

The key point is that Chrome Frame paved the way for Google to make this move, and Google dropping IE 6 support is significant in terms of influencing people to move on from it, either by installing Chrome Frame, or by upgrading to a newer version of IE or a competing browser. It might be difficult to quantify this significance, but where Google lead the way, consumers and competitors tend to follow.

I believe that’s one of two main driving forces behind Google developing and releasing Chrome Frame: it frees them up from the pain of IE 6. The other reason is is that it allows their product teams to focus on the future technologies of HTML5 and CSS 3 now. To get ahead of the game. To discover new ways of using that technology. And to build the next generation of web applications while the rest of the world sits around fixing double margin float bugs.

I’ve been a friend of Clearleft from day one, when Rich left me on my own at Multimap to go and start his new venture in 2005. Pretty much from that day I’ve had the thought in the back of my mind of whether I might one day end up working there. To be honest, I thought the right moment had probably past. But when Rich asked me at the end of last year whether I’d like to apply for the job, other events were conspiring to make it exactly the right time for a new start. Those conspiring events are for another post (possibly); but in essence, a lot of things were up in the air, and it felt right that they land in Brighton with a new job at Clearleft.

I’m in my second week there now, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learnt a ton from working alongside Natalie, and have really enjoyed getting to know those from the team that I’d not previously had the pleasure of meeting. It’s exciting to work alongside people that I’ve admired for a long time; indeed, some of the people that inspired me to become a web developer back in the day. I say that totally unashamedly, because it’s true.

I’ve been commuting down from London the last week, which has been a pain. But from next week I should be a permanent resident, enjoying my daily walk to work (walk to work – did you get that?) and meeting the people that make Brighton’s geek scene what it is. If you’re part of that scene, look out for me, and say hello.

So here starts a new chapter. It’s exciting and a bit daunting, but I feel refreshed and very happy to be here. I’m pretty sure Brighton is one of only a handful of places I’d have left London for; and I’m completely sure that Clearleft is the only agency I would have left Microsoft for.

Last week, some colleagues of mine were discussing how many blog posts they had drafted in their blog software, but never actually published to their blog. I took a look at my draft posts in WordPress today, and thought it might be fun to publish what the titles and ideas behind them were. Some of them are years old, and it wouldn’t make much sense to publish them as they are. So this is just a bit of fun really, as well as being an easy post which might start me down the road of regular blogging again. Actually, this could become quite a fun meme. Maybe.

Using your old PC as a development server – May 2005

This was really a guide on how to set up a machine running Linux with Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc, and make it available on a fixed IP on your local network. The kind of thing you’d be more likely to do using a VM these days. I’d recently inherited an old Pentium 2 which had an aversion to Windows, so it became a playground for my first real experiments with Linux and web server technology outside of a shared hosting environment. I never finished writing it.

Working at Google – November 2005

This was a tongue-in-cheek look at the various employee benefits that Google people allegedly enjoy. It started with a few well known and genuine perks and gradually got more silly, with things such as speed-dating nights for geeks that don’t get out much. I don’t think I knew anyone at Google when I wrote this.

JavaScript Libraries – December 2005

Something of a rant about the dangers of plugging JavaScript libraries you don’t understand into your web pages. This was at the time of Prototype’s dominance, and prior to the rise of jQuery. It was inspired by a Carsonified Ajax workshop with Thomas Fuchs that taught Ajax solely through the features and API of Prototype. It was very silly, not least because 80% of the attendees (BBC, Multimap, Yahoo!) couldn’t go away and put Prototype on their websites.

Redesigning MAS – March 2006

I used to do unsolicited redesigns of small but well-known websites in the music business. Along the lines of 37better projects. This was immediately after the redesign of the MAS website (it’s the one you still see to this day), on which someone did such an appalling job that I couldn’t hold my tongue. As a former client of MAS I should say they are a superb operation, but their web presence is, to put it bluntly, crap.

Buying a bed and mattress – April 2006

On moving into my flat in East Dulwich I was looking for tips on how/what/where to buy a decent bed. I probably should have published this one as I’ve never been happy with the thing that I ended up buying.

Ten years of XHTML – July 2009

In the wake of work on XHTML 2 being stopped I wrote up some thoughts on why it hadn’t worked out, why HTML 5 was working out, and how we can rationalise the specifications and recommendations of the W3C (and others) in our day-to-day work as web developers. Could re-hash this and publish, I guess.

Full Frontal – November 2009

Some thoughts on the Full Frontal Conference that I attended. It was one of the best technically focussed conferences I’ve been to in years, but this post was more around what it’s like to be a Microsoft employee (which I was at the time) at an event like that. I didn’t have the company name on my badge on this occasion (which I was quite glad of) but it’s interesting how it was generally assumed that no one from Microsoft would be there. Not that I would be standing up for or representing the company in any way, but it would be good for people to know that employees are out there, that they are part of the community, and that they’re not all big, bad, and evil in nature.

The Spectrum of Opinion – December 2009

A piece on how having a strong belief or opinion can warp your objectivity on that subject. Your mind subconsciously looks for and solidifies evidence to support your theory, and dismisses or discredits evidence that contradicts it. There’s probably a well known name for this phenomenon, though I haven’t come across it, and it’s something I find interesting.

Understanding HTTP – November 2009

Some thoughts on this fundamental piece of the web’s architecture and its impact on how web technology is innovated, built, and delivered. Will probably finish and publish this now that I have left Microsoft. If you see what I mean.

In just over 24 hours time the domain name bellatromba.co.uk expires.

For reasons I won’t go in to here (except to say that nobody’s to blame), the domain is not under my control and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be renewed. Meaning the website and email accounts that rely on it will effectively cease to exist. Meaning the people that rely on them are up a certain creek.

I do however, have bellatromba.com; and the plan is to move over to that, albeit at this absurdly late stage. With a few months notice, it’s perfectly possible to transition a domain like this fairly smoothly. You may get the odd bouncing email, but in general it’s not the end of the world, particularly if you still have control of the old domain to continue redirecting from.

However, as I mentioned, we’ve got 24 hours. And we don’t have the old domain.

About 20 minutes ago I set up a new virtual host on the server for bellatromba.com, and added some redirect rules to 301 redirect requests to bellatromba.co.uk on to bellatromba.com. So that’s all fine, except that in 24 hours all those links will break. Including Google’s, where the site is the number one result for the search phrase trumpet quartet.

It would be great if Googlebot popped along in the next day or so and indexed the whole site under the new domain, without any loss to search engine rankings. I wonder what the chances of that are?

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why we don’t just go and re-register the domain tomorrow once it expires, it’s because owners that let their domains expire have a grace period of anything up to 75 days to get their act together. Which is great if you happen to have forgotten to renew your domain (which we haven’t), but less great in the circumstance that we are in (which we are).

So that’s the story. Come back next week to see if the site is still number one in Google (unlikely).

Hopefully some good can come from one of the most sickening and distressing moments I’ve experienced in football.

The next time a player taking the field against Arsenal, is encouraged by his coaching staff to give his opponents a good kick, “’cause they don’t like it up ‘em”, maybe there will be a thought in the back of his mind. The thought of a young man walking in tears from the field, having—for the second time in his career—smashed apart the leg of a fellow professional footballer.

I am sure that Ryan Shawcross is a nice bloke. I’m sure the tears were real. And I don’t believe for a moment that he had any intention to cause such a horrific injury on Saturday, or at any other time. But, to use arsebloggers analogy, like a wreckless teenage driver that thinks he’s untouchable until disaster strikes, he does deserve the punishment. And he deserves to be made a role model for what can go wrong when violence of that type is not stamped out, and is in fact encouraged by staff, fans and the media.

Arsenal have suffered three potentially career-ending injuries to players in the last four years. Whether you believe in coincidences or not, my hope is that players stop and think before giving Arsenal the kicking they think they need. Not because I know it can stop us playing. Not because I’m a whining Arsenal fan. But because seeing a young player at the brink of such a promising career (for any club or country) suffer such an injury is the most sickening and distressing thing I’ve experienced in football.

Multimap was acquired by Microsoft, meaning I’m now an employee of the big MSFT. Wowza, where did that come from?

I’ve just spent the last week getting very excited about a software update for my favourite piece of hardware. New features, UI improvements, all downloaded from the comfort of my living room, via iTunes, to my… phone. My phone?! When did I give a crap about software on my phone? Strange times we live in, huh?

Ed parsons is saying extraordinary things about Open Street Map. “Mapping data needs to be comprehensive”, which is like saying “We need world peace”. Yes, we do! Fortunately, he talks some sense when it comes to the BBC’s streaming iPlayer which rocks and has really screwed up my New Years plans of getting a few early nights.

Happy New Year to everyone.