Category: computing

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching web services, and all sorts of XML-y acronyms. The one thing I can share from all of this research is that it seems like every single article written about web services, creating them and providing information about them was written with the express purpose of giving me a headache.

I mean, really… can’t I just go back to trying to take over the world with my pirate ship? Do I really need a battleship built of XML documents that shells unsuspecting developers with objects, services and miles of tags? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

I just plain love Drupal. I know, it caused the downfall of our little project (OK, not really, but it’s such a cute fallguy), but it’s working like a charm as our pirate ship. I’ve finally figured out the taxonomy stuff, got all the users lined up and put in their roles, have people submitting content left and right, and it just takes it all, keeps running and keeps us all organized.

I love being able to see who all the new users are, what the popular nodes are and move stuff around easily. I love the flexibility of it, and its hackability (even though I’m no PHP guru, I’ve already hacked the webserver-auth, weblink, node and user modules without breaking anything).

So, if you’ve got a community site you’re planning, definitely consider it!! It makes starting up so much easier, since all the tools you need are right there to start. OK, so it’s still a little tough to get all configured the way you want, but it’s not impossible. It just takes a little patience, and a willingness to experiment.

This blog is four years old. It’s not as old as Max, but a lot older than Brian. It’s been here through some pretty crazy stuff. It survived two years of Blogger, and two more years of Movable Type. It’s been my space to keep my journal, my little signposts along the way because I know I’ll never keep a real journal. This is it. Even though my posting has been more sporadic recently, I think I’ve become a better writer through sharing my idiocy.

I would say more, go deeper into why I blog and what I’ve learned after posting 1,340 entries, but I have to get to work.

To sum up Working out our Play Muscle: play for thirty minutes a day. Yep, gotcha. How about play for eight, nine or ten hours every day? That’s what me being a pirate is all about. I play almost all day, every day. A couple years ago, I figured out that work is a whole lot more manageable and livable if it’s a game. I make up games during meetings, I turn stupid tasks into something subversive or silly. I make coding into a puzzle or a race. I see how much faster, better, smaller, neater, more complete I can make something than some mythical villain I pick out (look out, it may be you). I turn a gigantic task like getting an entire company to embrace web standards into a game of pirates…

I may be crazy, but it keeps me sane.

I just have to share this. So, my cryptic and stupid post about me being a pirate was all about this little group I helped start (with Kimberly and a couple other people who I don’t think have blogs). I’ve been writing a bunch of articles for this new site we’ve put up, and I just had to share the opening of this one that tries to dispel the myth that tables are bad. I think I’ve gone crazy…

One of the mantras of those of us who love web standards is “don’t use tables!!!”, which may confuse people who hear us mid-diatribe. I’m here to clue you in on what those three words mean to us standards cultists. We don’t hate tables. In fact, we love tables. We accept them as part of the HTML and XHTML standards, and glory in their accurate and meaningful execution (not “bang you’re dead” execution either).

Now that I’ve confused you further, let me clarify. We like tables when they’re used to display tabular data (you know, spreadsheet stuff). The problem we have with tables is that people abuse tables and use them for layout. We feel this is abuse of our little misunderstood friend and think it should stop right now.

You’re shocked now, aren’t you? I thought you might be. Some of you are gasping for breath and asking yourself, “What? No tables for layout?! That’s insane!!” You’re right, or at least you were right a couple years ago. I won’t go into it, because it’s painful, but there was a time when the only way to get websites to look the same across the stone tablets we called web browsers was to use complex table soup for layout. This was OK because it was really the only way to do it. There was no other option. We were handcuffed by the poor standards support in those early browsers (Netscape 4.x and IE 3, the Statler and Waldorf of the web). Now that Moses has come down from the mountain, smashed those stone tablets and brought us a whole new set (IE 6, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc), we no longer need to use tables for layout!!! (and there was much rejoicing)

Now that we have decent (or at least with bugs we know about and can work about… ::cough:: IE 6 ::cough::) standards support in these modern browsers, and 99% of the web is using some flavor of modern browser, we can get away from the old ways and move to the wonderful world of standards-based design.

If you want to read up on why you should move to standards-based design, and its benefits, we addressed that in this FAQ article and this one too. The how is a little more difficult. We addressed some of that in … OK, we haven’t addressed that yet. We’ll get there, really. It’s the next item on my list, I swear on a stack of Jeffrey Zeldman‘s hats.

I have a the Jolly Roger up in my office, and the sign next to my door says, “Kevin P.* Lawver *the ‘p’ is for ‘pirate'”. I’ve had the flag for a while now (got it from Archie McPhee), and decided one day to put it up so everyone who walked past my door could see it. I wasn’t initially sure why I did it. I had it, and I put it up… simple as that. My manager asked about it yesterday, and here’s pretty much what I told him (flowered up for the it-ner-net).

I realized I was never going to influence the way the company does things by doing it the same old way. I’ve tried convincing people one at a time, and it was taking too long. I needed to do something subversive, something brash and stupid and “out there”. I decided to become a pirate. I realized that picking off one at a time wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and I needed an army of pirates. I am the fast ship in a world of gold-laden galleons. So, I collected a couple other like-minded people (who don’t realize it, but they’re pirates too), and we formed a pirate club. We put out a pirate manifesto, and now we’re collecting pirates. We’re recruiting them from the ranks of the very galleons we’re going to come back and take over. We’re going to take them off of the Same Old Thing and the That’s Just The Way It Is (which are crappy names for ships if you ask me). We’re going to train them in our pirate ways and then send them back to their ships to incite mutiny.

Why does it have to happen this way? Why am I forced into piracy? The ships are too big to be influenced by a single voice. They need to be taken from the inside, changed from within. The sailors know their one way of doing things, and because it gets them to port, and keeps the captain off their backs; that’s how they do it, and nothing else really seems to matter. I can’t infiltrate every ship and take it over. That would take too long. I need other folks to go in and do it for me.

Here I am, with my musket, eye patch and preachy parrot, to say there’s another way. All those galleons they’re so fiercely protecting are about to sink. The rocks ahead are sharp and the water is getting shallow. It’s time to throw some of that old stuff overboard and learn some new tricks.

I’m a pirate. I’ve got tricks a-plenty. I’m forming a pirate army. We’re taking over.

(this is all about web standards… pretty anti-climactic, huh?)

I have been a very good Employee today. I deserve some kind of SuperEmployee sticker and a bad picture of me in a cheap frame hung on the wall in our temporary lobby that says, “Kevin’s One Super Employee”. I may go do that myself tonight with Max. We’ll make a “Kevin’s One Super Employee” plaque. Then, I’ll bring to work really early tomorrow morning and hang it up before anyone gets here. Maybe I should start with someone else so no one suspects me. Although, I think I’m the only person here who would do such a thing, and everyone knows it. I have a pirate flag up on my wall, ferpetessack.

And to answer your next question, I have a pirate flag on my wall for a very good reason. I’ve been feeling extremely subversive lately. There’s usually a subversive undercurrent running through whatever I do. Recently, though, the undercurrent has become an undertorrent, and I just can’t help it. Maybe I’m feeling extra-subversive because my boss, and boss’s boss have both left in the past six weeks, and I’m feeling a little… grieved? Yeah, that’s as close as I can come to describing it. I lost the guy who hired me, protected our group from a lot of garbage, was in our corner the whole time, and made us better. I’ve also lost the best manager I’ve ever had. It’s kind of thrown me for a loop.

I’m not quite sure what to do next. I still have my projects, the things that “make me go”, but I don’t have the support system I had last week. I don’t have a manager I can tell anything to, give her any problem, and compliant and she’ll go fight the battle, or filter the message appropriately. I have a crappy filter. I usually just come out and say it, which isn’t the most productive trait to possess at the moment.

I’ve come to realize that I work best with a manager I can trust completely. I don’t want to have to play political games, and watch what I say with my direct manager. It’s too stressful, and makes work no fun at all. I have to be able to tell my manager what’s really going on, and have them do the same. If there’s no honesty in that relationship, there’s no trust. When there’s no trust, nothing productive happens. I’ve done pretty well so far in my career finding people I can trust, and good working relationships. The times I haven’t had that support system have been an absolute nightmare.

I don’t know… this post started out really light and sunny, didn’t it? I was faking it. There’s nothing sunny or light going on here. I’m worried that I won’t find that working chemistry again, and I’ll just be working instead of having fun. I’m afraid I’ll spend my days playing politics instead of building cool stuff and challenging myself. I’ve done that already. I’d rather not go back to it. You know, maybe everything will be alright. Maybe it won’t. It’s the not knowing that’s killing me at the moment.

My Googlehood is a whole lot more dignified than I remember it. I’ve got some pretty impressive neighbors now! What happened?

Composer is usually pretty painful to work with, but I realized today that it’s my old laptop’s fault. Composer works like a charm on my swanky new G5 (oh yes, I did not tell you the story of the swanky new G5 – it will have to wait). Composer’s extremely responsive in redrawing tables and other clumsy elements when it has two, count ’em, two 2ghz G5’s to do the calculations. And no, I’m not using Composer to write anything that’s going to see the light of day. It’s a word processor replacement to update a requirements document (using a template I have to use). I hate rules.