mike's web log

This is not the Mike Pope you are looking for

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:32:54 GMT

I subscribe to Google Ads (over there on the left). It's been kind of interesting; for example, if I keep showing the ads for the next 1.8 million years, I'll definitely start making enough for them to send me a check.

Haha. It is interesting, sort of, to watch their contextualization process in action. For the first little while, alls I saw were ads for blogging software. Now and again I'll see an ASP.NET ad. Other than that, it's sort of a crapshoot.

Today I saw one that made me grin, because it indicated that the Ad Sense algorithm isn't quite foolproof. Here's the ad I saw:

Now, if you know me, you probably know that I flail away at learning to play the guitar. On odd occasions I have blathered about that here. So if there's something on the blog that's about guitar, that's not an unreasonable context for displaying an ad for learning to play bass.

But I know better. You see, there are several of us Mike Popes, and if you search Google, the first Mike Pope you get is the Mike Pope who plays jazz bass.[1] Which is to say, a Mike Pope who actually knows what he's doing around string instruments.

Thus Google ad sense has gotten slightly confused. It seems to think that folks reading this blog are fans of the jazzy Mike Pope. That would flattering to me, but ... I don't think so.

Still, if you are interested in learning bass, by all means, click through the ad. Wth Ad Sense, every little bit counts. :-)

[1] "Walk Your Dogma," how excellent a CD title is that?

If you can't say something nice ...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:18:53 GMT

At work, we write documentation for programmers, so our docs include many code examples[1]. We should comment our code, right? Of course. However, a discussion broke out in our ranks yesterday about the whole idea of commenting the example code. The discussion arose out of the complaint that a lot of comments in a lot of code (not just ours) are actually lame. This was an observation made in a recent blog entry, which used the following as an example:

In the wake of this, a semi-unserious proposal was made that because most comments are dumb, we should just strip all comments from the example code. Because code examples are not translated, we have to explain the code in the text of a topic anyway.

Hmmm. This type of proposal is useful for goading me into thinking through our policy. Herewith my thots:

Having decent comments in a snippet is useful for the person who copies and pastes an example into their application, even if the code is explained in the topic.

As with member descriptions, descriptions in orientation topics, UI reference topics, and other such, it takes time and thought to create a comment that is actually useful to the reader. All of these types of text share the characteristic that they are often written as an afterthought, in a hurry, only to fulfill a general requirement, or while the writer's attention is focused elsewhere.

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Two things at a time

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:28:15 GMT

Have I ever recounted my Theory of Two Things? The theory is this: there are many things to attend to in one's life, but I can only attend to two things at a time. For example, here are the sorts of things that are part of my life:

family
work
friends
reading
home improvement
guitar
blogging
exercising
taking classes
teaching classes

And etc. Per my theory, I can only really be putting serious energy into two of these at a time. So, if work is intense and I'm practicing guitar diligently, I'm ignoring family and blogging. If we're doing family things and I'm working on some house project or other, work and guitar and all the rest get short shrift. I can prep to teach a class and work, or I can work and have a busy social life, or I can work out regularly and do home improvement, or I can blog regularly and read a lot, or ... anyway, you get the idea.

Clearly there are people who can handle three or four or more of these types of things concurrently. (I seem to work with a lot of people like that.) But one has to know oneself, no? And I have to recognize, after long experience, that taking on some attention-sucking task means I have to jettison something else, until the total count of tasks is, like, two.

What's your limit for number of concurrent tasks?

More web site usability

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:56:28 GMT

I recently whined about the confusing UI that many web sites present for navigating through the (many!) options that they offer. I used to really have it in for the sites run by banks, but I am obliged to acknowledge that they've gotten much better over time.

But I am happy to say that I can still be snotty about the sites run by universities. Having two kids in college, I go through a quarterly/semesterly exercise in which I log in and behold the price of ... uh ... well, different topic.

Anyway, here's an example. This is the "menu" that the "authorized payer" site at Indiana U presents, with the one I generally need highlighted. Tell me what logic went into the order of the elements.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Zack!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:06:26 GMT

A day late, dang! This was 22 years ago yesterday:

One reason I haven't gotten a Kindle

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:12:13 GMT

I like the idea of e-book readers. But economically it isn't making sense to me.

Of giants and fossil fuels

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:20:36 GMT

Recently I finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson, which is a book about the English scientist Joseph Priestley, who is best known as the discoverer of oxygen. Johnson shows how Priestley had a strong influence on both science and politics (he was a close friend Jefferson and Franklin). But Priestley also sat at a historical confluence that was conducive to, basically, Enlightenment thinking, and Johnson ties together many threads in a way reminiscent of James Burke: coffeehouses and efficient postal delivery, which fostered open and fast communication; innovations in scientific technology, which let Priestley engage in the experiments he did; the wealth of the industrial age, which indirectly provided Priestley with the time to do research; and so on.

At times the chains of connections go quite far indeed -- for example, from Priestley's simple experiment with a mint plant all the way to the field of planetary ecology. A continuing theme is energy: sunlight to feed plants, coffee to feed scientific minds, oxygen to feed animals, coal to feed the industrial revoltuion, and so on. To discuss these last two, Johnson takes a side trip way back in Earth history to the Carboniferous era, where he tells the following story.

Many of the fossils that Brongniart uncovered shared a defining characteristic: compared to their modern equivalents, they were massive. He discovered ferns the size of oak trees, and flies as big as birds. In 1880 he unearthed his most startling find: a monster dragonfly (Meganeura) with a wingspan of 63 centimeters [2 feet]. Subsequent fossils have been discovered with a wingspan of more than 75 centimeters.

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No wonder I get confused using Web apps

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:27:08 GMT
I am one of those people who tends to have multiple instances of multiple browsers open at any given time, usually with several tabs open in each instance:

In this way I often manage to confuse myself -- I'll Alt+Tab between browsers, hunting around for a page I was sure I had open. Which it is, just not in the current tab. (A side effect of this is that sometimes I'll just open another instance of the same page.)

So simply getting to an open Web page can occasionally be confounding. But even once I've managed to find my way to the right page, using a Web application can be a challenge. I've noticed this particularly with Facebook, in the form of people having all sorts of trouble figuring out how to post photos, write on walls, etc. Two reasons, I think. The first is that a lot of people use Facebook who are not 24/7 computer users and are not used to (good for them) doing the sort of poking around that seems to be required. The second reason is that Facebook's layout kind of sucks.

Here's a typical experience, in pictures! First I need to find my way to Facebook. Note the many choices that just the browser presents here:

1 - Menu
2 - Favorites bar
3 - Tabs

Now to Facebook itself, which presents me, by default, with no less than 5 menus that I need to navigate in order to accomplish anything other than post a simple entry:

An even worse example is Gmail, which is a mish-mash of links, buttons, and (for variety?) a drop-down list. I count 10 menu-type items, but I suppose it depends on how exactly one wants to count:

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Is college the only path?

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:38:23 GMT
Among people I know, the discussion for the most part is not whether a kid will go to college, but how this college business is going to be paid for. People start college funds for their toddlers. A college degree is seen as the minimum entry point to a career, or was back when people still talked about careers.

But between the mania for outsourcing that started in the 90s (or thereabouts) and the current economic downturn, the golden ticket of a college degree is looking a little tarnished.[1] A person with a pessimistic POV might wonder why we're training all these kids to jump into a job pool that, at least for the moment, seems to be drying up.

Assuming I'm reading trends correctly, we therefore seem to be undergoing a little bit of a, um, adjustment in how we view the skilled trades. Back in March, the NPR correspondent Adam Davidson appeared on the radio program "This American Life." His mission, he said, was "to save his cousin DJ's life, to make his life better." Save it how? Cousin DJ had dropped out of college. By dropping out of college, Davidson maintained, you are making a conscious decision "to not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decade." The program then featured a three-way conversation between Davidson, his cousin DJ, and the economist Pietra Rivoli, whom Davidson had enlisted to help him convince cousin DJ of his folly.

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More instructions we probably didn't need

Wed, 27 May 2009 08:13:49 GMT
From the instructions (!) for a dog collar:

Not evident from this is that the collar does not have a buckle (plastic snap instead) and that there's no "sliver" loop.

More dubious guidance: 1, 2, 3.

Magical phrases for search-engine listings?

Tue, 26 May 2009 22:16:55 GMT
As with most things, I am several years behind in getting interested in attemtping to, er, "manage" how search engines crawl, weight, and display information from Web pages. I have still not gotten hugely excited about the murky field of search-engine optimization, aka SEO, which is all about trying to make your site as prominent as possible.

However, I did recently take a passing interest in if and how a body might control what a search engine displays for a site. I record some observations here largely for my own amusement; I suspect that if you have an interest in gaming search engines, this is all old news.

So. The default (or perhaps better stated, the fallback) strategy is to display the first real text from the page, which excludes headings and the like. For example, if you search for ASP.NET gridview control, the first hit looks like this:

And indeed, when one looks at the article in question, it starts off with that very text:

I say "fallback" because there are other ways to establish search-engine listing text that take precedence. A well-known one is to set the description meta tag and specify the content attribute, like this:

<meta name="Description" content="ASP.NET technical editor writes about coding, writing, editing, and more.">

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Sign(s) o' the Times

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:08:10 GMT
This is by a condo complex not far from where I live.

Wolfram|Alpha

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:57:02 GMT
Have you played with Wolfram|Alpha yet? Fun. Here's their own description:
[A]n ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.
There's a screencast by Mr. Alpha himself (kidding. It's by Mr. Wolfram) that shows a lot of cool stuff of what the site can do, showing examples from math, chemistry, currency, geography, etc.

The parser is pretty good, but it isn't hard to stump it. In my case, it was a case of using syntax it understood. So, for example, I started with this:

day of week Feb 19 1957

W|A didn't like it:

I tried 2/19/1957 day of week and got this:

But it did like Feb 19 1957 day:

(There's a lot more below this on the actual screen, I just cut it off for space.)

It does music, too, so I played around to see if I could type in a succession of notes and have it tell me what chord they make up. I initially tried c eb g c, but W|A parsed it as multiplication calculation:

[more]

This keyboard shortcut requires the mouse

Sun, 17 May 2009 10:19:44 GMT
Bil Simser spots a problem in the Internet Explorer online Help:

I had a look, and this (or similar text) appears in the Help for IE 6, IE7, and IE8. (The example above is from IE 8.)[1]

Simser comments: "Reading this just makes me wonder if anyone proofs this stuff. Fail."

I am hypersensitive to issues like this for a couple of reasons. One is that errors in the documentation annoy people. Even this small error has a disproportionate effect on how the Help system is perceived.

Another issue is that Simser specifically impugns (correctly) editors. This concerns me because the overall trend -- in newspapers, in technical writing, everywhere -- is to get by with less editing. Various reasons are proposed for this, but one of them is that the general quality of writing on the Web has lowered the bar for what people will accept. Perhaps it's true that readers are willing to wade through subexcellent writing on a blog post that addresses a technical issue of particular concern to them. But it seems clear from this one example, anyway, that people continue to have high expectations for the accuracy of official documentation.

Hat tip: Michael B.

[1] It is conceivable that by "click", the Help authors meant "press Enter," which works. If that's so, however, a) it's not clear and b) they do use the word ENTER elsewhere, so this is confusing at best.

Loquerisne linguam latinam?

Sat, 16 May 2009 15:18:46 GMT
Quick, without looking it up, tell us what the following literally stand for:

i. e.
e. g.
etc.

... and then tell us what those words mean.

Ok, smart guy, maybe you know all these, but does everyone? (Like people who read anything you write?) I'm going to guess no.

Our style guide at work (MSTP) has a strong bias against Latin terms that are, you know, still in Latin. They recommend that we don't use Latin if there's a common English equivalent. MSTP: " ... even if you think they are generally known and understood."

Thus:

i.e. (id est) = that is
e.g. (exempli gratia, "for the sake of example") = for example
ergo = therefore
etc. (et cetera, "and the rest") = and so on[1]
via = through, by
de facto ("from the fact") = real, actual
exit ("he/she leaves") = leave, stop, quit, close Update: See comments.

... and, um, etc. So to speak.

Sticking with English has multiple benefits. One is that ESL readers don't have to rassle with weirdo academese when reading the docs.[2] A second one is that even a lot of English-language writers can't seem to keep i.e. and e.g. straight (why? Coz it's a frickin' foreign language), and not using those terms neatly bypasses that particular problem.

Of course, there are some, haha, bona fide[3 [more]

Why not link to Wikipedia?

Thu, 07 May 2009 22:07:40 GMT
An issue that has come up a number of times at work is the question of linking to articles in Wikipedia. It's not terribly unusual for us to link from the documentation set to non-Microsoft resources. A common example in my world is linking to the W3C site. For example, in the topic (article) ASP.NET and XHTML, we discuss how we implement (or don't) XHTML standards, but we refer you to the W3C site for actual standards.

Other examples where we've linked to external sites:
The Section 508 site for information about accessibility.
The IANA site for a reference of MIME types.
The Mozilla developer site for information about the document object model (DOM) supported in the Gecko browser rendering engine.
The Unicode site for (duh) information about Unicode.
There are more, but you get the idea. The thought here is that these sites provide information that is not specific to our product but that is useful to our audience. It would be silly for us to copy this info or (god forbid) rewrite it so it could be part of our documentation site.

You will probably note that sites have certain features in common. They are:
Authoritative. Many of our links are to the sites of standards bodies.
Commercially neutral, at least for the purposes for which we are linking. For example, the Mozilla site could be thought of as a competitor to, say, Internet Explorer, but from our perspective (server-based Web coding), it's just another client.
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The many dimensions of fasteners

Sun, 03 May 2009 22:50:16 GMT
I’m going to propose to you that each of the items in the following picture is an eight-dimensional object:

Eight? Yes. Or more. Or fewer. It all depends.

Of course, I’m screwing with you. (haha, get it?) I'm using a mathematical definition of dimensions: In Cartesian terms, an object's dimension is "correlated with the number of coordinates that is required to map it."[1] It seems probable that when Descartes was inventing analytic geometry, he did not realize that he could have been analyzing a problem I've been having with coffee cans. Which I'll get to in a moment.

So, eight dimensions? Here are eight attributes/characteristics/coordinates/dimensions to identify this object uniquely:

Fastener type screw
Category machine screw
Drive type Philips
Length 3/4"
Diameter/Gauge #8
Thread count[2]/pitch 32
Material Zinc-plated steel
Head style pan

Go on down to the hardware store and take a stroll through the eponymously labeled Hardware department. Screws, nuts, bolts, washers, pins, nails, anchors ... this department consists of a very large number of small boxes. The boxes are grouped by the categories listed above, and probably several more, like measuring system (US or metric)[3 [more]

Tweeting Twitter

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:11:44 GMT
Social applications need to hit some sort of critical mass for success. In 2006, it was blogs. This year it's Twitter.

You know a phenom has gone mainstream when it reaches Business Week (http://tinyurl.com/58x9gz) and Forbes (http://tinyurl.com/cy55ka).

"Twitter is the stupidest application you’re ever going to see." http://tinyurl.com/bx3g4q

Why is Twitter hard for people to grasp? Maybe they describe themselves all wrong: http://tinyurl.com/cmatvh

Twitter asks "What are you doing?" Wrong question. Better: "What has your attention?" (I forget who said that, sorry.)

What to tweet? News, articles, pithy observations, commentary. NOT your lunch. Unless you want to.

Who to follow? Friends, colleagues, "influencers." Follow the most interesting of your follows' follows and followers.

Some people tweet minor things but blog major things. Some people preview blog entries with tweets.

From the perspective of size and currency, Tweeting is to blogging what IM is to email. (?)

140 characters is a useful limit. Sometimes challenging to meet. More space would not produce better tweets, imo.

Twitter really put URL "tinification" on the map. http://tinyurl.com/decd5s

Twitter v Facebook: Facebook is closed (you approve your circle), Twitter is wide (wide, wide) open.

Twitter descriptions don't convey that it's like conversation. Follow; join if you like. It's a party! (As in life, some talk too much.)

Twitter: community, community, community, community. :-)

Sarah says reading Twitter is like watching the news crawl at the bottom of the TV screen. Except you can jump in and add your own.
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Teh taxonomy of typo's

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:25:58 GMT
I've been soliciting thoughts about blogging from various people, and one of the questions I ask has to do with how important it is that you get all the spelling right. People sort of agree that email and blog writing is in general held to a lesser standard than production writing, but they also sort of agree that spelling errors detract from the text, even so. This was stated most succinctly by Scott Hanselman about his blog: "Hopefully folks don't think TOO poorly of me when I misspell words. Of course, I think horribly of YOU when YOU misspell." Or as John Scalzi once wrote "Here's a good rule of thumb: For every spelling error you make, your apparent IQ drops by 5 points."

[credit]
It never hurts to spell correctly 100% of the time. I was thinking about Scalzi's observation, though, and I realized that it's more subtle than that. I decided that there is a kind of taxonomy of typos, and my reaction to a typo depends on what type of misspelling I encounter. Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. Mechanical. Typos that result from simple fumbles. You obviously know how to spell the word, but got it wrong in haste: teh or alreayd; more generally, transposed letters or missing spaces. (Another way to characterize these might be that they're typos that Word's auto-correct feature would catch and fix.)

2. Language mastery. Typos that confuse words where you should ("should") know better. This includes its/it's, their/there/they're [more]

More instructions we probably didn't need

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:33:38 GMT
From the instructions for the Kill A Watt EZ electric-power usage meter:

DIY (almost) guitar setup

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:07:27 GMT
This post is strictly about guitar setup; for those who care naught for guitar mechanics, nothing here to see. Catch you next time.

I had an interesting guitar setup experience recently. If you have even moderate experience with guitar setup, this will probably all be old hat. (And if you have none, you probably don't care. So who's reading? Hmmm.)

I got my electric a year and some ago. It's a knockoff of a Gibson ES-330:

I like it fine. As I got it, it had some relatively high-gauge strings (11s, probably). Being new to electric, I had nothing to go by, so I used that guitar as-is. I had a setup done at one point, but didn't have it restrung. During one of my lessons, tho, we were talking about bending, and my teacher had a go on my guitar. "Lighter strings, dang!" was his recommendation, so I had one of the shop guys put on some lighter ones (10). It was sort of a rush job, which more-or-less explains the rest.

The lighter strings were a definite plus. However, it seemed to me that the guitar had developed a slight buzz. (This is where the experienced folks say "duh.") I kept thinking I should take it in for another setup, but didn't get around to it.

One night, tho, I was at guitar school (not to be confused with lessons), and the owner dude (Jay) introduced Ryan, a new guy they had. Ryan was a guitar builder, Jay said, and was open for business. Specifically, you could bring him your guitar for repair or whatever. It was the same price as taking the guitar to a shop, but -- the cool part -- you could watch and, if you wanted, Ryan would teach you to do what he was doing.

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Blog feed changes

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:26:22 GMT
What started as a simple request from Phil -- use fully qualified URLs for images -- turned, naturally, into something a bit more. I fixed the feed, then needed to update the feed URL in Feedburner, which led to moving the feed to Google (which bought Feedburner), which led to an error, which led to some further tweaking of the actual feed.

Anyway. If I broke your feed, let me know. PS Sorry if so.

One URL that should always work is this:

http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss

or this:

http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?full=true

if you want full entries in the feed.

But of course that does not go through a subscription service.

HP support: "What, haven't you given up yet?"

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:07:25 GMT
I work for a company that's often accused of having evil intentions. If it does, that doesn't manifest at my level: we obsess about trying to do the right thing for customers, even if we don't necessarily achieve this to the level of everyone's satisfaction. As but one example in my little world, we really do go to extreme lengths to try to be sure that our text is a) readily translatable into multiple languages and b) comprehensible to non-native speakers who do choose to read it in English. (More on that in the near future.)

What brings this to mind is an ongoing, um, discussion that I've been having with the customer service (I did not actually write customer "service," although I was tempted to) at HP. I bought an HP Pavilion[1] a couple of months ago for work stuff. I specifically wanted a multi-~~processor~~core box that had lotsa-lotsa RAM because I want to run Vista 64-bit on it. The computer actually came with Vista Home 64-bit. Begone, said I. I flattened the box, loaded Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and began configuring it with goodies like Virtual PC.

A couple of weeks after I got the box, it refused to boot. After some diagnostics and some hardware switcheroo, I determined that I had one bad bank (2GB) of RAM. With that block of RAM in it, the machine froze; when I removed the memory unit, all was fine except, of course, that I was short 2GB of RAM.

I contacted (via chat) HP support. After about an hour of highly intermittent chatting, I was instructed to do what I had already done (test all the bits of RAM). This was interspersed with crap like "Don’t worry I will help you" and "I will pull up the records and resolve the issue."

[more]

Sign o' the Times

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:46:09 GMT
Just got back from vacation. Here's something we saw in Chicago:

In case of missing child, consult Pub. 501

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:17:20 GMT
Ok, this is the weirdest thing we've found (so far) in the IRS publications for 2008 taxes:
Parent of a Kidnapped Child
The parent of a child who is presumed by law enforcement authorities to have been kidnapped by someone who is not family member may be able to take the child into account in determining his or her eligibility for the head of household or qualifying widow(er) filing status, deduction for dependents, child tax credit, and the earned income credit (EIC). But you have to file Form 1040 or Form 1040A to take the child into account to claim these benefits. For details, see Pub. 501 (Pub. 596 for the EIC).
Don't get me wrong, this is a tragedy. But does the IRS get so many questions about this that they need to include this note in the instructions for the 1040EZ form? Odd.

mike's web log

This is not the Mike Pope you are looking for

If you can't say something nice ...

Two things at a time

More web site usability

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Zack!

One reason I haven't gotten a Kindle

Of giants and fossil fuels

No wonder I get confused using Web apps

Is college the only path?

More instructions we probably didn't need

Magical phrases for search-engine listings?

Sign(s) o' the Times

Wolfram|Alpha

This keyboard shortcut requires the mouse

Loquerisne linguam latinam?

Why not link to Wikipedia?

The many dimensions of fasteners

Tweeting Twitter

Teh taxonomy of typo's

More instructions we probably didn't need

DIY (almost) guitar setup

Blog feed changes

HP support: "What, haven't you given up yet?"

Sign o' the Times

In case of missing child, consult Pub. 501

Fastener type	screw
Category	machine screw
Drive type	Philips
Length	3/4"
Diameter/Gauge	#8
Thread count[2]/pitch	32
Material	Zinc-plated steel
Head style	pan