Dan O'Huiginn

Here is a good checklist of what to think about when designing for the web. Some highlights:

• Assume that people won’t read the instructions.
• Redundancy is a useful design technique. Labels+icons, color+width, etc.
• Use loading indicators for XHR requests, even if they’re likely to be very fast. You never know how slow or broken it might be for a user. They should know if something is missing.
• Don’t give someone 20 equally interesting things to do right off the bat. Give them a more focused presentation upfront before turning them loose.
• Get live data into your visualization early. If you can’t, use historical data or something else a little bit representative. Visualizing random test data will lead you astray.
• Clean and transform your raw data stepwise. Make it a repeatable process. Use Makefiles or shell scripts if you can.
• Assume your page will be one of user’s dozen open tabs. Use short, descriptive page titles and a favicon.
• Have a recovery plan, and test it.

France, according to an IPSOS poll, is not in a good mood:

• 73% lack confidence in the Senate, 72% in the National Assembly, 77% in the media
• 63% think Islam is incompatible with the values of French society
• 66% think there are too many foreigners in France

The only institutions which are trusted are the Army (79%) and the Police (73%)

[via Art Goldhammer]

Within the US counterculture, the comedown from the 60s high was debilitating. Sheila quotes the teenage Lester Bangs in 1968, coming to terms with the shootings of Warhol and Robert Kennedy:

America, which is essentially our universe, is having earthquake-sized convulsions, choking, spitting up blood, reeling dizzily into some crumpling limp falldown of terminal disease, weaving back and forth on its knees moaning and clutching itself tightly in one wounded area after another, raving like a wood-grain-alcoholic crashing in the Bowery on his Last Go-Round, and I don’t have any answers, or even very many opinions right now

It’s a beautiful speed-freak preview of the despair which would, over the next 4 years, overcome much of the counterculture. I’ve mentioned it before in the context of Hunter S Thompson. His best writing is shot through with bewilderment and disappointed hope, all sublimated into rage and excess.

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “con sciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meathook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously

If Hunter and Lester’s intensity is unusual, the pattern of gloom is pretty evident.

Much of the world is in a similar position now. The difference is that we’re not coming down from a quick hippie high, but slogging through many years of featureless gloom. Here’s how Bruce Sterling opened his annual State of the World comment thread:

An extraordinary atmosphere of sullen, baffled evil, as the year opens. I don’t know what to compare 2014 to — except for many other glum post-revolutionary situations, when the zealots succeeded in toppling the status quo, then failed to install a just and decent form of civil order. The world in 2014 is like a globalized Twitter Egypt.

As Bruce suggests, the same gloom is present in the Middle East. Still, it was expected — every Arab activist I heard from in 2011 realised the “Arab Spring” was just the beginning of a long struggle with many setbacks. It was only the Europeans and North Americans who looked at the first wave of change and thought Mission Accomplished. Still, there’s plenty of gloom here: Europe, North America, the Middle East are all having a rough time, while the Balkans remains in its perennial stew of unhappiness.

Despite the growing push for legalization of marijuana in the US, I had never realised the speed at which public opinion had changed. This graphy from the Pew Center is striking:

In 1969, 12% of the population supported legalization. By 1991 it was only 17%. But from the early 90s attitudes softened massively, until by this year 52% of Americans wanted marijuana legal.

I have no idea what changed in the 90s, and Pew don’t give many hints. I’d be intrigued to find out, though, and also to see whether attitudes in Europe have changed along similar lines.

Stories like this make it seem that the UK has flipped 150 years back through a time warp.

A pregnant woman isn’t paid the benefits she is entitled to. Desperate, she steals food worth £13.94. She is caught, and sentenced to 10 months in jail.

The jail she is sent to is privately-run. There she suffered a miscarriage, at which point she says the foetus was left with her afterwards and that she had to clean up the blood

Her barrister, Philip Gibbs, told Leicester Crown Court: “There was blood everywhere and she was made to clean it up.

“The baby was not removed from the cell. It was quite appalling. It was very traumatic. She only received health care three days later, after the governor intervened.”

Wow. The headline news from this survey is that 49% of black American men have been arrested by age 23. I’m also pretty shocked by the figures for other groups:

By the time they reached 23 years old, 49 percent of black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males, and 38 percent of white males had been arrested for something other than a minor traffic violation.

What would Africa look like if it had not been colonized? This maps attempts to show African political units around 1840.

Rachel Strohm speculates how this might have developed, in the absence of European intervention:

The most densely populated areas in west and central Africa might have grown into something approaching Westphalian sovereignty, controlling clearly defined territories (as per Jeffrey Herbst’s thesis on state formation in States and Power in Africa). Coastal and riverine areas may have done well off of trade, encouraging the development of stronger local authorities. Places rich in natural resources would have had to fend off various external claimants to their territories, if not from Europe (or India) then perhaps from neighboring kingdoms, and might have developed into stronger states if successful or faced the imposition of external institutions if not.

While oil-for-gold allegations are convulsing Turkey, there seems to be a counterpart on the other side of the border

Reports from Iran indicate that it has initiated a campaign to reign in its profiteering PEPs [Politically Exposed Persons]. Arrested this week was billionaire Babak Zanjani, for “financial crimes.” Zanjani, who engineered the sale of Iranian oil in global markets, notwithstanding international sanctions, is accused of failing to pay the government $1.9bn, that it is owed on the transactions. He alleges that international sanctions, in place against the Central Bank, and government-owned financial institutions, have prevented him from remitting payment.

RFE/RL gives some background:

Zanjani, who mainly resides in Dubai and Turkey, has insisted in the past he is not involved in politics, saying, “I just do business.” However, in December last year the European Union named Zanjani “a key facilitator for Iranian oil deals and transferring oil-related money.”

In April, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed financial sanctions on Zanjani, along with several companies, accusing them of trying to evade the sanctions by moving billions of dollars on behalf of the government in Tehran.

I’m not sure how this many-pronged international scandal is going to develop, but I’m sure it will be fun to watch.

When sex becomes a production or performance that is when it loses its value. Be mutual. Be loud. Be clumsy. Make noises, be quiet, and make a mess. Bite, scratch, push, pull, hold, thrust. Remove pressure from the moment. Love the moment. Embrace it. Enjoy your body; enjoy your partners’ body. Produce sweat, be natural, entice your senses, give into pleasure. Bump heads, miss when you kiss, laugh when it happens. Speak words, speak with your body, speak to their soul. Touch their skin, kiss their goose bumps, and play with their hair. Scream, beg, whimper, sigh, let your toes curl, lose yourself. Chase your breath; keep the lights on, watch their eyes when they explode. Forget worrying about extra skin, sizes of parts and things that are meaningless. Save the expectations, take each second as it comes. Smear your make up, mess up your hair, rid your masculinity, and lose your ego. Detonate together, collapse together, and melt into each other.

— taken from tumblr

Something I never imagined could end up in court. A woman sues her lawyers because they didn’t tell her that getting a divorce would end her marriage:

Much the most striking of Mrs. Mulcahy’s many allegations of negligence against her solicitors was that, having regard to her Roman Catholic faith, Mrs. Boots had failed to give her the advice which was requisite in view of her firmly held belief in the sanctity of marriage, either in terms of the alternative of judicial separation, or about the impossibility of pursuing divorce proceedings to a clean break settlement, without thereby inevitably bringing about the final termination of her marriage, which she wished to avoid.

Here’s a survey across 7 muslim-majority countries, asking what form of dress is most appropriate for women in public:

More here. The ultimate source is apparently the Middle Eastern Values Study at the University of Michegan, but I’ve not been able to track down fuller details. I’d love to see breakdowns by gender and age, and changes over time.

Somebody had fun writing this news report about Cormac McCarthy’s ex-wife:

A domestic dispute over space aliens escalated Saturday morning when a lingerie-clad New Mexico woman allegedly pointed a silver handgun at her boyfriend, a weapon she retrieved from her vagina, where it had been placed while the accused was performing a sex act, police allege.
…
While using the gat as a sex toy, McCarthy reportedly asked her boyfriend, “Who is crazy, you or me?” The probable cause statement, drafted by Deputy Chris Zook, does not indicate whether McCarthy’s boyfriend dared to answer that query.

If nothing else, the story makes this customs report from Jordan more understandable:

Jordan Customs Department (JCD) staff in Aqaba on Wednesday foiled an attempt to smuggle 69,000 pills of Viagra sexual enhancement, as well as 18,984 toy pistols.

Cory Doctorow is as pessimistic as can be about the web in 2014. He thinks a netflix-driven drive from DRM is going to turn most HTML5 interfaces unseeable and unmodifiable:

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.

As near as I can work out, there’s no one poised to do anything about this. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all built proprietary DRM silos that backed the WC3 into accepting standardization work on DRM

My friend Sam is a remarkable hacker-activist, and one of the most aware people I have encountered. He listens deeply to the people around him, and opens himself to the spirit as well as the practicalities of what they are creating. Schooled first by electrical engineering and then by the occupy movement, he has now entwined those threads by developing into a nomadic technical contributer to all kinds of projects.

Thus I’m watching with interest his growing interest in permaculture, Open Source Ecology and related ideas.

Until now, I hadn’t paid much attention to these ideas. I’m temperamentally unsuited to living in a farming commune. Most discussion of permaculture seemed to come from people with a very different makeup to me: enraptured by the natural world, seeking a life of quiet stability in a small community.

So Sam’s approach caught my attention, if only for the superficial reason that he makes farming into slightly less of an impossible lifestyle choice:

You…start to tend the land by using natural processes to get the land to become ‘regenerated’ and then a productive living system gradually over your lifetime and transformed from dead soil or useless land into living soil and a forest garden in which you have planted trees that take 15 or 20 years to grow and can then sustain / feed you

All the while you continue on with your normal life elsewhere in the city or travelling or whatever… but through well timed purposeful, organised planting, sowing, watching and community building it can yield food and fuel. Then your land has more value over time and you then kind of inherit it later in your own life as a living system that will support you and others with fuel and food….

The way I would see it, I would attend the site at various points during my life to gently shape and guide the process but, for the most part, nature would take its course and the land and the system that would be developing there would be largely auto-catalytic and autonomous.

The full post is well worth reading. It steps much further back, linking agriculture to design and to some of the ideas of Buckminster Fuller:

I started to think about how I could use design to change the environment around me in such a way that would extend my internal functions and reorganise my environment so that it would work for me… so that it would, in the fullness of time, support me… as I think of my own future, I would like to eventually create a living system, by which I probably mean a forest garden, which I had designed after much studying and having made the tools to make the tools to make the tools.

Molly Crabapple has a great interview with Art Spiegelman. Some favourite bits:

style is the residue of trying to do it right

By their nature, [comics] are not respectful. As a result, a lot of wild shit comes through. Even when people are trying to do pro-Assad cartoons, there’s all this stuff that leaks out. Because his version of the public narrative of what he’s about is too dissonant with the actual narrative.

I find it very hard to submit work because of [fear that editors won’t like it]. Like I would rather set up a system where I have enablers.

Enablers?
Instead of editors. It’s like, “OK, you want to do something? Here’s some space. Do it.” Now it’s not practical. I’ve been an editor. You can’t run a railroad that way.

I get it but I have a very hard time fulfilling my part of it, which is submission. “Here! Take me! I’m yours!” I can’t do it.

I’ve been working lately with Tolga Tanış of Hurriyet, to document weapons reaching Syria through Turkey — and to back the Turkish government into admitting their tolerance of it.

Turkish officials had furiously denied allowing weapons into Syria. That is, until Tolga’s column forced them to backtrack. At this point the defence minister finally accepted that Turkey had exported “non-military weapons” to Syria.

Tolga’s article was based on Turkish customs records collected in Turkstat, and then incorporated into Comtrade, the UN’s global trade database. From June, Turkish customs started recording exports under international category 9303, which covers hunting and sporting guns. By September the total was 47 tonnes of weapons, costing $1 million:

This kind of data can be pretty flaky — items easily get miscategorised through bureaucratic mistakes, attempts to minimize taxes, or a thousand other reasons. But the Turkish government accepted the truth of the data, and merely quibbled that Tolga’s reporting on it was misleading:

Ungrooved hunting rifle suitable for use for sports purposes and blank firing guns are not war weapons as suggested by the said report. This commodity’s exportation to Syria is not held subject to any limitation in line with the current international rules and regulations.

It’s a slightly garbled statement — “ungrooved rifle” is a contradiction in terms, and Tolga’s article accurately described the nature of the weapons.
But let’s accept the gist — recreational guns aren’t designed for war, so it’s OK to send them into an embargoed warzone.

I don’t know any other country that makes such a distinction between ‘fun guns’ and ‘gun guns’. Turkey certainly didn’t in the past. They have proudly trumpeted seizures of weapons destined for Syria, many of which would be classified as recreational:

Officers found 120 air rifles, 50 blank firing guns, 60,000 fireworks,
14,300 shotgun shells, 4,500 blank firing guns bullets, 107 rifle binoculars and 280 kilograms of bird’s eye [Source]

Some 110 air guns, 51 shotguns, 86 rifle scopes, 86 rifle clips, 104
gun clips and 50,375 bullets were seized in five operations conducted in
the last week of January, Yazıcı told daily Hürriyet. [Source]

Besides which, you have to consider how creative — or desperate — the Syrian rebels have been in making use of ostensibly weak weapons. Brown Moses has an entire playlist dedicated to DIY grenade launchers, many of them made from sporting shotguns. The image on the right, from The Atlantic, shows one such converted shotgun, albeit from before these particular export records.

Finally, remember: this portion of the arms flow into Syria became public, more-or-less by accident. But 47 tonnes of small arms is, well, small, in comparison to the needs of a full-blown war. We only catch small glimpses of the overall traffic, and can easily get a skewed picture of what is going on. It’s great to have something on record, but what is unrecorded is far greater.

Belgiums constitutional court has ruled that arms export licenses should be subject to Freedom of Information laws, despite a government attempt to exclude them:

La Cour constitutionnelle en annule la partie relative à la confidentialité.
La Cour constitutionnelle a rendu un arrêt ce jeudi annulant certaines dispositions du décret de la Région wallonne réglementant l’exportation d’armes. La décision est un nouveau camouflet pour un décret qui a vu le jour dans le sillon du conflit libyen et dont l’avant-projet avait déjà été durement attaqué par le Conseil d’Etat.

Who says the Britain doesn’t have global influence? In the 80s we managed to hobble cellphone encryption so that our spies could listen in on calls. That’s according to Norway’s Aftenposten newsletter, which talked to 4 people involved in developing mobile communications systems in the 1980s.

A European working group designed the encryption system. They had to choose how long to make the keys — the more bits, the more secure it would be. The experts proposed a reasonably-strong 128 bits, but encountered unexpected opposition:

The British were not very interested in having a strong encryption. And after a few years, they protested against the high security level that was proposed. They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised.

Why would Britain want a less secure system? To spy on Asia, it seems. According to two sources, “the British secret services wanted to weaken the security so they could eavesdrop more easily“:

The British argued that the key length had to be reduced. Among other things they wanted to make sure that a specified Asian country should not have the opportunity to escape surveillance.

This fits with the understanding which has been put together by security experts, often baffled by the weakness of GSM encryption. Cambridge academic Ross Anderson wrote in 1994:

Indeed, my spies inform me that there was a terrific row between the NATO signals agencies in the mid 1980’s over whether GSM encryption should be strong or not. The Germans said it should be, as they shared a long border with the Evil Empire; but the other countries didn’t feel this way. and the algorithm as now fielded is a French design.

Incidentally, Anderson also gets in the kind of anti-Murdoch swipe which was as relevant then as now, suggesting that somebody might “break the Royal Family’s keys for sale to News International“

I have very few memories from early childhood, to the perpetual surprise and occasional exasperation of those around me. I’m an extreme case of what is usual: a 5-year-old will have good memories of what they did at age 3, but a 9-year-old will have mostly forgotten. This study tries to pin down the time and nature of “childhood amnesia”, and suggests it happens around age 7:

at ages 5 to 7, the children remembered over 60 per cent of the events they’d chatted about at age 3. However, their recall for these events was immature in the sense of containing few evaluative comments and few mentions of time and place. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 recalled fewer than 40 per cent of the events they’d discussed at age 3, but those memories they did recall were more adult-like in their content. Bauer and Larkina said this suggests that adult-like remembering and forgetting develops at around age 7 or soon after. They also speculated that the immature form of recall seen at ages 5 to 7 could actually contribute to the forgetting of autobiographical memories – a process known as “retrieval-induced forgetting”.

Tim Bray attempts a high-level survey of the development landscape in 2014. Server-side development is solid and improving. But the client-side is a mess — a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of different tools appearing, mutating and vanishing month by month. We’re dealing with the weaknesses of JS and CSS, the annoyances of the DOM, and the need to develop in triplicate for Android, iOS and the web. Eventually we’ll converge on some streamlined solution(s) for client-side development, but it’s anybody’s guess what that will be:

Historical periods featuring rococo engineering outbursts of colorful duplicative complexity usually end up converging on something simpler that hits the right 80/20 points. But if that’s what’s coming, it’s not coming from any direction I’m looking, so color me baffled. Maybe we’re stuck with clients-in-triplicate for the long haul.