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I dusted off my long-neglected copy of Les Misèrables. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is this time I’m certain I’ll actually finish the thing.

I’ve been reading on the train ride home all week. Normally that would put me well on the way to finishing an average novel but thing—thing is 900 pages of small print (about 12-15 words per line, the usual novel text runs 8-11 words per line). This got me to wondering—how on Earth did this book get read enough to become popular? Were people such voracious readers back in the day that a tome like Les Miz didn’t put them off of starting, much less actually finishing it?

Certainly in this day an age brevity contributes to popularity—In spite of the high page count you could finish a Dan Brown in hours, not weeks. If Victor Hugo were alive today his works could easily go unnoticed because honestly, not enough people would actually read books of this size and weight to popularize it.

Although, there is the “Ulysses” effect… That’s my pet theory that only a dozen people have actually read James Joyce’s Ulysses all the way through—But J.J. has such a good rep for “artistry” that no one wants to admit they don’t get it… For an example of this theory in a modern context, see the reviews of the TV mystery/drama/WTF/show called Twin Peaks. Nobody knew what the hell was going on there, but anybody who raved about the show was certain they knew what was going on.

Did the same fate reach Les Misèrables? Did people start off insisting it was great because they didn’t have 3 or 4 weeks of spare time to finish the book yet they had too much pride to admit the book beat them?

I know of at least one person who read the book all the way to the end, that guy who made the musical… Presuming the book also ends with the lost alien rejoining his parents on a spaceship to outer space.

Tags: novels, reading, classics, great books

I open Windows’ Live Writer, I type, I press “Publish” and I’m done.

For all those who dispute Microsoft’s ability to make something simple that works well—well, I wouldn’t need to argue with them. Just knowing Live Writer is out there tells me people who make these spurious statements have the wool pulled over their eyes or aren’t looking in the right direction.

Sure, there’s more to do in Writer than my description in the first paragraph but that’s just added value. You don’t need to use the extras if you don’t want to. This is a fundamental to good application design. No, it’s the highest principal of all, an axiom:

Extra features are nice, but they shouldn’t stand in the way of getting the job done.

Axioms are all well and good, but how do we make those that have influence on our apps understand this principal? Honestly I often go home feeling like I’ve spent the entire day talking to a brick wall. And those walls are impossible to get around. This frustrates me like only fellow developers can understand. Shabby applications are not all our fault. They are often the sum of many decisions and arguments: good, bad and unfortunate.

Tags: axioms, good design, simplicity, creativity

I’m actually relieved.

A poster in the lobby of my apartment building saying anyone who didn’t have a registration card yet could sign up on Tuesday—last Tuesday… and they were a no-show!

Next, a quick glance through the Elections Canada website made me wonder if getting re-registered would be a PITA. I was hoping they’d suggest filling out a form at the post office or something. But no, there were numbers to call, postal codes to verify… Maybe the stuff to do wasn’t all that bad, but when you imagined it being simpler before you saw how simple it was—well, that is a let-down.

No matter. The card turned up in the mail today. Now I get to vote and retain my right to criticize whatever government we end up with… Free speech FTW!

Tags: election, voting

Like many of you, I’m getting more and more frustrated with the failure of Adobe to produce a Flash plugin that actually works well inside of Firefox. The two biggest complaints, as ever, are Flash ads that choke the browser and some Flash videos are unwatchable because the video stops every 3 seconds or so.

Through the grapevine I heard the patch-up solution is to download the beta of Flash 10. This stops random videos from freezing every few seconds. But as one problem goes away, a new one takes its place. Those stupid “pop-out” Flash ads that you encounter on just about every mass-media site rely on transparency to hide itself when your mouse isn’t hovering over the add. But transparency isn’t working on the beta 10 edition of Flash yet. So instead of a mostly-invisible pop-out advertisement, the content I really want to read is blocked off with a big white rectangle. Total Flash FAIL.

The Solution: Firefox Add-Ons To The Rescue

Originally I thought Remove It Permanently was all I’d ever need to get these Flash ads off of my screen, but the easiest way to use RIP was with the context menu and clicking on Flash doesn’t show you Firefox’s context menu. This is where Flash Killer comes in real handy. With one click you shut off all the Flash and its obstructions are over! It does leave the original area that Flash occupied with a really fugly rectangle, but that’s OK. Right-click on the fugly and you’ve got the real Firefox context menu to nuke the annoying flash.

The Force Is Strong, But Use It Wisely…

I like to think I play fair with this. I won’t remove Flash ads that aren’t pop-outs because I don’t need to, they don’t get in my way so there’s no need to waste my time with a zero-value-add operation. Hopefully to a website this means I’m leaving most media outlets the opportunity to serve up less obtrusive ads and still make some money.

Now, if only I can work out a good method to block all those 3rd-party usage tracking scripts that never ever finish loading.

Tags: flash, firefox, plugins, adblocking

I used to have a problem when I booted into Windows Vista. Even waiting a few moments before I logged-in, my network connection wouldn’t be ready. No IP address was available, even if I set one manually the NIC just would not serve up anything network-related. Rebooting the NIC by disabling-enabling it from the Manage Network Connections would never fail.

It seems to me that the order my hardware is booting it probably at issue here. While the NIC is trying to go online, some resource required to initialize it is in use by something else. Sifting through Event Viewer did not turn up any clues either. But by the time I’m logged in that resource is free again, by the process that initializes the NIC has given up trying by that time.

So this got me to wondering why there couldn’t be a background process that’s surveying all your services and hardware to determine what’s running and what’s not running? You know:

1. RAID-array: check
2. Video-display: check
3. NIC: check
4. Database-server: check
5. Web-server: check
6. …ad nauseum…

…Then if one of those services was to fail, the background process that’s noting these problems would check to see if it had a history of failing, note its dependencies and determine a better order for booting. For example, a web-server booting before the NIC would be a problem in most cases, so the algorithm that determines the boot order would push that service down the ordered-list of services to boot up.

Furthermore, if this boot-up analysis saw things were all booting up fine, but detected some services could boot in parallel because they had mutually-exclusive dependencies then the ordered-boot up list could be optimized by reordering and re-synchronizing the boot order again.

This would be advantageous to a Windows or Linux based PC because the hardware and services of all the machines out there covers a very wide spectrum of configurations and duties. Today, boot order optimization is a manual task that is probably overlooked by all but the uber-geek administrator types. This automated approach is well within our grasp already and we only need to write an application that will do the dirty work for us.

Tags: optimization, windows, linux