/devel

In a few hours I’ll be going on a trip to Stockholm, so this is probably the last post of this year. It also happens to be the 100th post since it was started six months ago, making it a perfect place to recapitulate this year and this blog.

It has become a custom by now to flood web with such articles at this time of the year, so I’ve decided to limit mine to a much less talked topic, a state of web in Slovenia.

It’s certainly been an interesting year. We’ve experienced a rise of web standards based designs and even got first slovenian AJAX application intended for wide use. Truth be told, I don’t really know when it was launched, since I more or less stumbled upon it, but it seems that until this year, most of my colleagues weren’t aware of it either. Also it’s the year when feeds started to appear on prominent websites (with most of the public blissfully ignorant of them).

Sadly, it’s still safe to say that most new designs were done with table-based layouts and many table-less left much to be desired. Most of them are abusing or flatly ignoring semantic part of HTML tags and drowning in superfluous div’s. Little thought is spent on usability and even less on accessibility of new sites.

As customary by now, we seem to be lagging at least a couple of years behind the world. Slovenian web of 2005 is still very much the web of closed gardens. Feeds may have appeared, but their shy use is limited and there are few if any public APIs for developers to use.

I expect this will change in new year with public launch of Marela and hopefully other new services. Still, we’re not pioneers and it seems we don’t want to be.

On a personal front, it’s been a very busy, but also a very good year for me. Our service is about to go from a closed beta to more open one and first signs from our users are very positive. We started a series of web related talks through which I met many, from whom I’ve learned a lot. There’s more talent out there than I was aware of and it certainly gave me hope for the future.

I discovered the fun of writing and had a good fortune of having insightful readers who helped me tame my ignorance at least a bit. There were more of you reading this blog than I probably deserve and certainly many more than I’ve ever expected. I’m grateful to you all.

So to end this all, what are my blog resolutions for the new year?

I wrote more frequently than I first expected and probably should. In new year I’ll try to reduce the number of posts in favor of more useful content and prose that doesn’t feel like chewing cardboard.

I’ll try to write shorter posts except when content actually demands a longer one. I’d also like to hear what my readers would like to see more or less of so if you can spare a moment or two, please drop me a line in the comments.

I wish everyone all the best in new year.

This has been bugging me ever since I’ve heard a podcast of Vinod Khosla at Web 2.0 conference a couple of days ago, who touched on a theme that seems to crop up in Slovenia every now and then. He said something along the lines of there’s less need for teaching facts to children today, because they can find them online. Instead they should learn how to think critically and how to sort through information.

No arguement from me about the thinking and sorting part. They are skills definitely needed today more than ever, which seem to be sorely lacking in many, if not most people. Improving them can only be better for them and society as a whole.

I disagree strongly about the need to teach facts though. Current approach to teach them may be wrong, but if anything, we know too few and not too many of them.

First problem is that you need to know something to be able to ask a question at all. If I take the title question as an example, there are three keywords in it: dutch, painter and diplomat. Dropping any of them would probably lead to a different result and likely never to the same one.

The less we know, less questions we can dare to ask. Without facts, there’ll be less we’ll be able to imagine. Ideas are not something that comes from a thin air. They are offspring of the things we already know. They may be a descendant of a previous idea, but if we trace it back far enough we’ll sooner or later find an ancestor which will be a fact.

We might also know enough to get by in our every day life, but in a society where creativity is growing in importance, it’s probably not enough. Knowledge is the soil on which creativity grows. Richer the soil, richer its crop.

What we know doesn’t only limit to what we can aspire, it also defines who we already are. It’s easy to think of knowledge as something that can be separated into useful and useless. Useful being any piece of knowledge that we get to directly apply at least now and then (like basic arithmetics or driving a car) or clairvoyantly know we’ll need some day and useless being everything else. It’s easy and it’s wrong.

We were molded by whole of it, not just with the parts we happen to like or use. We can’t desire what we don’t know and it’s easier to fear unknown. What we know is largely who we are.

I’ve spent most of my life learning as much as I can about as many subjects as possible; about some of them even very deeply. But I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling being an ignoramus. Acknowledging the limits of personal knowledge and wisdom isn’t an absolution from its pursuit. And it should never be one.

P.S: The answer to the question in this post title is Peter Paul Rubens. I’d like to know enough to tell if he’s the only one.

I was playing with a neat script that reads CSS properties of a given element, but there’s a problem. Fetching background color of an element doesn’t work in Safari, if it was inherited instead of explicitly set in CSS.

Does anyone know how to reliably get that information?

A light bulb in our hall died a while ago and it has taken me ages to unscrew it. To my defense, this is not your normal light bulb and the procedure involved a variety of tools, a ladder, few missteps and a couple of moments of fear. You tend to become a bit of a chicken as you get older.

So today we were shopping for a replacement. Not the best day in year to do so, but since we were already out and near the store, it just made sense to fetch it. Experience has certainly been educational.

We visited a store close to our home near the center of Ljubljana, which has been hit hard by newer stores that opened in suburbs. Easier parking, bigger choice and at least competitive if not cheaper prices do that to you and it’s doubtful, if you can survive something like this in the long run. It seems to me the only possible competitive advantage left is having a superior customer experience.

However it’s hard to imagine that this would mean getting a shop assistant to print out a receipt that you need to carry to the only cash register in the store where you’re served by an unbelievably rude clerk who loudly lets everyone know that she’ll be gone in ten minutes if there’s her replacement or not.

I can’t see myself going back again. But I was reminded of a problem observed many times before. Company problems lead to demoralized workers, which lead to work done poorly and that to even more problems for the company. It’s a vicious self-destructing cycle that is not easy to break and just as hard times can’t be completely avoided.

But you’ll be gone if your customers suffer too much and it’s absolutely amazing that so often they still don’t get much more than a lip service. It’s about meeting their needs and nothing else. Good customer experience is the cheapest advertisement there is. It’s also the most effective one.

Now I only need to replace the light bulb.

I’ve rarely, well never really, promoted a blog, but I think Ian Bicking’s blog really is a must read for every python web developer. I wish reading my blog was never a waste of time.