Gimlé

Reading through a thread on rss feed aggregator security,recently, hammered in how narrow people’s perspective can be when it comes to programming techologies:

If all you’ve got is Perl, every problem will look like a regular expression.

Needless to say nobody suggested using html tidy to generate valid and well-formed xhtml and then an xslt stylesheet to transform the document into xhtml sans all the insecure attributes and elements.

But, of course, XHTML is the spawn of the devil, a format with no future. HTML 4 and tag soup is good enough.

Bit grumpy today. Please ignore.

Been exposed to a few inane comments on the web and weblogging in the last few days. I’ve also been the recipient of a few comments on weblogs from academics that would either have to be categorized as ‘rude’ or ‘ignorant’ depending on how charitable you feel.

Most of these links are a bit old, the trail is a bit ‘cold’ if you will. Most of you have already read these, no doubt, as they were linked to from enough people. Can’t even recall where I first saw them, myself.

The first one to annoy me was Andrew Orlowski’s piece at the Register where he compares webloggers to Polish teenage girls, claiming that webloggers don’t read, don’t go out, and flatly states that engaging in community debate and structured writing is less social than being a television-watching couch-zombie or going out and getting plastered with a bunch of vomiting frat boys.

Cuz weblogging ain’t social, y’know.

It’s nice to see that when writing is unpopular, intellectuals pick up on bad writing and post-modern masturbatory pseudo-intellectual essays as a hallmark of ‘being smart.’

Now that normal people are given the chance to write, debate and read, those activities suddenly cease to be intellectual activities. While other activities, such as watching television, and getting drunk get redefined by the poseurs as i. Why do you think snobbish, post-modern poseurs like Buffy? It’s self-refential and cancelled, a double whammy for the camp of post-modern, post-ironic, elitist exclusivity.

I might not like the kind of writing that takes place on most weblogs but my gripe is that I want more of it and of a higher quality, not that people should abandon their writing in favour of going out and getting pissed, or collapsing, braindead in front of TV.

And he berates the group he classifies as ‘A-list bloggers’ for not being inclusive in what they put the ‘weblog’ stamp on.

Ars Technica is a weblog in all but name. They’re not a part of the Movable Type/Blogger/Userland/Blosxom gang which is generally what forms our view of that ugly word ‘blog.

But it looks like a ‘blog, walks like a ‘blog, smells like a ‘blog, and so it must be a weblog.

You see, weblogs aren’t revolutionary like the software people like to tell you. After all, part of the reason they’re saying it is because they’ve got software to sell you.

What we’re seeing now is functionally identical to the web we had circa 1995. Personal websites with sporadic updates that use linking technologies to create semantic interconnections. Dialogue and debates taking place over vast distances, aided by that there thing in the corner called a computer.

Weblogs are not a revolution, merely the ‘one step forward’ in a sequence of ‘two steps forward, one step back, one step forward again.’

We’re just getting where we should have been in 1998-1999.

Which leads me up to the comments I’ve been heard amongst serious digital media academics up at college last week.

It seems that some people missed the whole ‘two steps forward’ thing in the first place, let alone the ‘bouncing back after a setback’, thing that the current state of weblogging represents.

People who don’t get that you can have a community engaging in serious, structured debate that is not be a closed, exclusively academic group. That you can have a large collection of professionals, intellectuals and academics all hashing a subject out in a thorough manner, resulting in texts and essays that are better written and make more sense than most journal articles would ever do in their editors’ wildest and wettest dreams.

People who would say that weblogs are merely the ‘usenet writing for the naughties’ if they knew what the usenet was in the first place. People who think that webloggers are sad Star Trek fans without a life writing for other Star Trek fans without a life on websites visited only by Star Trek fans without a life.

People who simply do not understand what online writing is about.

I’d say that it was their loss, except that they’re the people in the way, preventing the rest of us from integrating weblogs and online collaborative writing with university teaching and debate.

If they don’t get it, it won’t happen.

The third comment simply highlighted the ongoing identity crisis that post-modern, semi-intellectual, poseurs are going through these days. “They’re writing about stuff? Intelligently? But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

It’s exactly these people that are threatened by weblogs, not journalists. Media people, generally get what it’s about, in no seconds flat.

It’s guys like this that will hopefully be out of a job. He makes a bad habit in this essay out of attributing his laziness and poseur ambition to the population in general. Go on, read it. It’ll make you feel happy about yourself. The more you read and write on the web, the more endangered this particular species of animal will be.

In this case we can safely say that it is their loss, while the rest of us continue to browse like it’s 1995.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’m working hard at not being a nasty bastard.

The problem being partially that I forget that people don’t have three inch thick skin when I give them feedback on the projects.

That part is something I can work on (and have been). Sitting down, listening and thinking about what it is that the student or researcher is working on and then giving them feedback that you hope will help them do their thing better.

Never tell them what you think they should be doing instead. Support people, don’t slate them.

Which is something I still forget sometimes, being an opinionated bastard at heart.

In this context it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong or simply grumpy as hell—of course, being me, I tend to think that I’m right—what matters is that that sort of snide attitude is misguided.

But there is a larger problem here as well.

The name of the course I’m “teach assistin’” on used to be “Narrative and New Media,” a name that in my opinion highlights the course’s continued primary emphasis in a much clearer way than “Communications Media (Interactive Media)” does.

This is especially important because the course description is wooly as hell, suffused with market-speak and catch-phrase mumbo-jumbo—

The alternative being nonsensical, academic mumbo-jumbo, which would probably be just as lacking in content.

So when the brief is unclear everybody interprets the brief according to their own individual tastes.

I’m a comp. lit. storytelling kinda guy, so I interpret the brief with a narrative slant to it.

And I know that others working on the course have their alternative, differing interpretations and teach/advise/support according to that particular interpretation.

So when I let out a nasty comment, criticising a project for being ‘a toy’ that is not only wrong in the sense of breaking the ‘support, don’t slate’ rule but it’s also a misguided, nasty comment based on my particular interpretation of the course brief.

Even if I had been right (which I’m not so sure I was) then the problem lies in the clarity (or lack thereof) in the module’s project brief rather than any shortcoming of the students’ part. Most of them fulfilled the set brief excellently, with skill.

The fact that only about two projects did the “let’s say something, tell a story” thing did annoy me.

But that’s just me being a pompous arse following my particular agenda.

The difference between me and most other people working in academia (present company excepted) is that I acknowledge that I have an agenda and am not in favour of letting it affect my teaching or project feedback.

So, my bad.

I’d still like to give the course more of a storytelling/narrative slant, but the way to do that is not by hammering the students with your grumpy comments, but to pull/push the other teachers on the course in that direction.

Oh, well. Live and learn. And apologize.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, my thoughts return time and time again to the subject of academia.

It gives people hope and then, in the suicidal manner made famous by Mad Cow-propagating English farmers, it grinds its veterans up and feeds their torn flesh and pulped brains to the hopeful young. The same young flesh that will be the teacher-meat of tomorrow.

What is frightening is the fact that I tend to consider the academic system to be little short of a wholesale industrialisation of our intellectual and cultural processes…

… And yet, here I am doing a Phd full-time, teaching part-time and attending conferences once or twice a year.

So, like a moth drawn to a candle-flame, I am being pulled to the subject of academia, the compulsion being the age old question of Why?

Why am I in academia?

The question is not of the sort where the asker is going through a slow but sure realisation that he is out of place, in the wrong field of work, or making the biggest, career-annihilating mistake of his life.

Sure, I’m piss-poor and will end up owing a lot of money.

Loans are a burden, sure, but remain manageable. And we all know that the best way to make your finances unmanageable is to not manage them.

And it’s not as if I expect to get an academic position out of it, those things are rarer than those few speciments of red-bellied, four-eyed koalas that are capable of pulling a perfect three-pull pint of Guinness.

Rarer than bartenders capable of pulling a perfect three-pull pint, for that matter.

Universities are moving almost entirely to using freelance or part-time academically-qualified intellectuals to teach its courses. A manager-in-all-but-name will be used to run the course. A person that, most of the time is likely to be miserablee because he or she’s likely to be an academic shoehorned into a managerial position.

So that leaves those of us interested in working in academia with the option of pursuing positions of teaching where we will be competing with intelligent, highly-qualified and less specialised freelancers.

Less specialised but specialised enough, mainly because that will increase their chances of finding a teaching-position somewhere.

Being a narrowly focused specialist is going to be a job liability soon, no matter how detrimental that change might be to the fields in question.

Is this the job market we’re heading for?

I think so.

And the reason why I’m doing a Phd, chasing after short term projects, doing part time teaching and all that lark is that I like it.

I plan to be one of those less-specialized freelance academics—a jack of all trades.

Very few job markets give its employees space to pursue organised, intelligent and ambitious projects in their own time, on their own terms.

The only profession that comes to mind are a few select areas within software engineering and programming where having an employee working on open source project in his or her own free time is taken to be part and parcel of hiring those pesky programmers in the first place, maybe even a sign that that person really enjoys coding. Which can only be a good thing if your hiring that person for his coding skills.

Academia has traditionally been another one, where your own private research projects are almost mandatory if you wanted to get anywhere in the field.

That, of course, is going out the window in an industry where in many cases applying for funding requires to to declare, authoritatively, what your conclusion will be, and job security means that your course and faculty still exist in a year’s time.

It does mean that the attitude is still in place. That you should be working on your own stuff in your own time.

Combine that with the change in the academic job market that means that it’s one of the few fields where, with a bit of perseverance, you should be able to have space to work on your own projects while still being able to pay your bills at the same time.

Not a recipe for an impressive career or a joyful bank account.

But it sure as hell looks more interesting to me than the industrial alternative.

We’ll see.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Those who seriously doubt that the decision to use typographic distinctions for links was a bad idea should read this (a part of Tom Gilder’s Converting HTML to CSS series).

Tom quite rightly points out that, because links are traditionally underlined, this otherwise fine method of adding typographic emphasis is de facto removed from the web designer’s toolbox.

Underlining text is a no-no because readers will think that it is a link.

And the people responsible for that blunder are the same as the ones trying to push the “Semantic Web” on us.

How about trying to do hypertext properly before you start bumbling around with metadata?

Speaking of bumblers, as a part of my ongoing endeavour to make the number of browsers this site is compatible with match the number of regular readers (two to three), I’ve added CSS-only drop down menus to the navigation box to the right. After looking through a number of implementations I decided to adapt (nick, steal, pillage) Designmeme’s approach.

Now, as you roll over either “Weblog” or “Archive” on the left, you should see a menu pop up containing either this site’s categories or monthly archives, depending on what you rolled over and your browser flavour.

IE on Windows users probably don’t see anything. In fact, they probably can’t even see this site (I’ll have to get myself a Windows test computer at some point).

IE on the Mac should have a slightly better time, although without the popups.

The category list and the archive list are both autogenerated by blosxom plugins.

Strangely enough, right now hacking CSS and reding Code Complete is more fun than preparing for my tutorial tomorrow.

Other stuff I need to read is the Xlink spec now that I’ve finished leafing through the OEBPS 1.2 spec.

Speaking of which…

Who over at openebook.org had the daft idea to fork one of the few standards that the W3 has actually done properly?

Consider this: The APIs to munge XML are miles ahead of the APIs for CSS when it comes to maturity, design quality and implementation.

XML transformation even has a readymade standard for you.

The OEBPS publication structure working group states that it is “…aware that this definition of a media type goes against the recommendation of the CSS Working Group, but has chosen to do so due to practical considerations.”

Extend CSS with OEBPS specific stuff and make the more difficult ones optional, by all means. Just leave the media type alone.

Sheesh.