Of Faulty Members and Smoothened Text
I'm skimming through the book "Smashing HTML5" by Bill Sanders in my O'Reilly Safari Books Online account. Unlike most people, I suppose, I read things like dedications and prefaces. Maybe that's because as an author myself, I like to take some time with those pieces that are sort of meta-content that help put the book into context.
Well, this material is chock full of unintended humor in this book.
First, the author says one person "worked as an able editor to clarify and smoothen everything I wrote." Smoothen, eh? I guess you didn't let her see this particular paragraph?
Then he describes "one terrible moment when a missing semicolon wrecked havoc on a program." Ah, umm, I'm not sure, but I think you mean "wreaked havoc." Presumably, "wrecked havoc," assuming it would be proper at all, would mean the opposite; by wrecking havoc, it would bring order, no?
But this all gets explained in the "About the Author" section, which starts out by identifying Mr. Sanders as "one of the founding faulty members" of a program at the University of Hartford.
By this time, I'm on the floor.
I mean to cast no aspersions here, by the way. I know this stuff happens. I know how it happens. It's happened to me. But seldom have I seen such a brilliant confluence of errors stacked on errors as this, and it was just too funny not to share. No offense, Mr. Sanders; as far as I can tell so far, you've written a good book here.
The Magic of Christianity
Fred Plumer of the Center for Progressive Christianity has released a thought-provoking, insightful and, for me at least, resonant column that provides interesting parallels between Christmas and Christianity from a progressive perspective.
Building from a childhood Christmas experience, Plumer sgues to a discussion of how Christianity is faring in the midst of deep questioning of its roots and essence by an increasing number of clearly qualified, brilliant scholars who are grounded in that faith. The column is well worth reading, but whether you read it or not, perhaps you can identify with this quotation that seems to summarize his thoughts on the subject. I know I did.
You see for me the magic of Christianity is not in the miracles, or in the beliefs, or in the written word. It is not even so much in having the correct information about the historical Jesus. The magic of Christianity is in the living and being. It is more about praxis than it is about belief. It is more about trust than it is about blind faith. The transformative “magic” can only be discovered in the doing, by opening, not closing, by letting go, and not by clinging. It is not about trying to decide what is divine and what is not. It is about discovering the divine in all things.
This is How the World COULD Work
Best non-Christmas Christmas greeting I've ever seen.
Pass it on?
Reality Shows Are NOT News Dammit!
I was on the verge of incensed this morning by headlines in two of my primary online news sources touting the winner of the reality show "X-Factor."
In what universe is the outcome of a TV show news? I don't see headlines announcing today's Jeopardy winner (though a long-running champ did get some perhaps deserved national attention a few years ago), or who's divorcing whom on a popular soap opera or how last night's case on The Good Wife came out for the lead actress. That's because none of those is real. None of those is an actual "event". Nothing actually happened.
And the reality shows are the same. Yet, news media seem to be blinded to the truth of what they're doing -- acting as touts for shows under the guise of news -- to the extent that they have even spent time and energy trying to find out the outcome before it appears on the show, as if such a "news scoop" gave them some cred.
Have they NO shame? Where is Walter Cronkite when you really need him?
Beginning the Always-On Backlash
One division of VW in Germany has agreed to a union demand that employees' company-furnished Blackberries not be available for constant contact, according to this piece on ABC News. This is apparently the beginning of what observers are seeing as a new trend in Europe
This poses an interesting question in the U.S. If you're a salaried employee, can your boss require that you keep your cell phone on 24/7 so she can reach you if needed? What if you're an hourly employee; does the same rule apply?
Burnout is of course a common malady in the workforce and the necessity of being on the end of an electronic leash certainly adds to the problem. Maybe this movement will carry over to our shores and result in a lessening of demands on workers who are already doing the jobs of their long-since laid-off colleagues.
We can hope.
Flash: Texas Not Part of US!
Headline on Fluent News this morning: Texas, Parts of US May See White Christmas.
Texas AND parts of the U.S. What, Texas isn't one of those parts?
I love it when headline writers get carried away and lose sight of what they're saying.
When I was at the University of Michigan, we used to have great fun with posting headlines on a bulletin board. (One made of cork, not bits! Yeah, I'm THAT old!) My favorites were New York Times headlines about new postage stamp issues being released by various countries.
"Algeria Stamps Out Tuesday"
One wag wrote next to it, "Watch out, Wednesday, you're next!"
Google Alerts: Do They Understand Time?
I have a Google alert set on my name. Turns out to be a pretty useless thing but I'm too busy to kill it and, besides, once in a while it actually reports something that is about me rather than a musician, or a reporter or a minor league baseball player of the same name and spelling. Yeah, I know. I can put all sorts of "No, not that one" qualifiers on the alert search terms but as far as I can tell that feature works poorly if at all.
So I keep the alert.
But today I was rewarded with the information that I was the author of a book called "Pascal Primer for the Macintosh." Amazing. That book, published in 1985 -- yep, more than a quarter-century ago -- launched my career as an author of technology books of which I eventually wrote more than 50. But today, finally, Google "alerted" me to that fact. Really helpful, guys.
What was particularly annoying was that the alert was a pointer to Google Books. Really? A Google search to trigger a Google alert finds out in Google Books that I wrote a book 26 years ago and fires off an urgent alert to that effect?
And we wonder why there's so much crap trafficking around the Net.
(BTW and FWIW, I posted several comments on discussion boards, my own Tweets and Facebook updates and a couple of blog entries in the past week that have yet to show up as a Google Alert. The service is obviously pretty much useless. Think I'll go kill those alerts now.)
Inventive User-Created Apps Growing in Importance
I just posted the following comment in a thread on ZDNet and thought you might find it interesting. Feel free to contact me if you want to talk more about Inventive Users. The post was a response to a user who dismissed the whole idea of user-created apps by saying, "Only a tiny part of workers can really create apps"
Your comment is perhaps a bit antiquated. As a pioneer in the field for which I coined the term "Inventive User" more than 25 years ago, this allegedly newly spotted trend is a yawner to those of us who have been monitoring this space for years.
Employees will bypass the IT department whenever it suits their needs to do so if they can find accessible tools with which to do so. Many years ago, Apple produced a tool called HyperCard that led to tens if not hundreds of thousands of apps being written in the trenches to solve problems that were too specific and small to get the IT shop's attention. A logical successor to that amazing technology (which Apple blew completely) is called LiveCode from Runtime Revolution is even more empowering than its ancestor. Reasonably intelligent employees with an unmet need for processing power will find tools and use them to do things the IT shop can't or won't approach.
I don't know or recommend QuickBase, but I can tell you this: my corporate clients get a clear message from me in consultation situations that they need to find ways to encourage Inventive Users to assist in making the organization more efficient and effective. At a time when most if not all companies are asking fewer employees to do more work with less money, this sort of activity is becoming a key, if invisible, part of a company's IT picture.
Google Dart Aiming to Replace Javascript?
Doing some research on the current state of the JavaScript world, I ran across this article from The Register, headlined "Google plan to kill Javascript with Dart, fight off Apple."
I'm skeptical about the underlying news hook and doubtful that Google has plans to replace or kill JavaScript. But the article has a subtext that posits that JS might in essence collapse under its own weight as its use expands and becomes so complex that it is as difficult to learn and use as, say, C#. In that event, if Google has a language waiting in the wings with some development exposure and experience to support it, migration from JS to this new language wouldn't be unthinkable.
I love JavaScript. I've been a huge fan and booster from Day One and I don't see any reason to abandon it at the moment. I figure my days are numbered and by extension so are my coding days and, frankly, I am not psyched at the idea of learning yet another programming language. So regardless of the outcome, I'll probably never learn Dart or Dash or whatever it gets called. JS is apparently the most widely used language on the Web, with many reports suggesting that virtually all "modern" sites using it. One report says that 45% of the top 100,000 ranked sites (per Alexa) use a JS framework. By contrast, PHP, easily the most widely used scripting-side language (though there are many variants of JS that run server side as well) is used on an estimated 20 million sites running on more than 1 million Web servers.
But that doesn't keep me from being intrigued by the notion that a language as deeply entrenched on the Web as JavaScript could be supplanted by a completely re-engineered language that is, as the article put it, "the ability to be tooled."
Twine Ties All Your "Things" Together on the Net
The so-called "Web of Things" is about to take a ginormous leap forward next month when Twine officially launches with a huge kickstart from thousands of investors who found the product idea on kickstart.com and saw the value.
Twine, from an outfit called Supermechanical, will allow you to attach WIFi devices to appliances and even structures (think basement moisture detection for flood notifications, for example) and set them up, without programming, to send you alerts or take other actions when they are triggered.
What a great idea!
(Thanks to my friend and business partner Chipp Walters for the pointage!)
