SvN blog: Highly regarded soapbox

Jason Freid, of 37Signals, writes of what he spoke at the recent Web 2.0 conference (Is it possible to not look at that name and anticipate it will be derided and ridiculed in five, ten years time, as much as we now look at the pre-dot com burst and shudder/giggle?) on their weblog, Signal vs Noise.

No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive–you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)—so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.

Less is more in web application development, apparently, and so we are judged: more successful yet strangely lesser in several ways to make this so. Whether or not you agree with this is irrelevant. In what may just be the best weblog comment of the year, Jason succinctly (yet rather eloquently) issues a rebuttal to a commenter who complains of the appropriateness of 37Signals issuing directives on what does and doesn’t work.

“But what position are 37signals in to make these statements? What you do, works for you.”

We have a blog.</p>

I was wondering how long it would take the Internet to realise this. ‘A-list’ digerati or not, any website assuming that form (i.e. a blog) remains, at its core, a personal publishing platform. Or soapbox. Or… whatever. You can give it corporate gloss, if that’s your thing, but the content is (read: should be, by the directive I am now issuing as to what this does and does not entail, because I have a blog, you are reading it, and therefore I will say what should and should not be, damn it!) intrinsically and at its essence of a personal nature. This can mean a variety of things to different people in different contexts, but I think the most important (and unescapable) facet of this is the importance of opinion and the fact that much blogging content is simply that.

Disclaimer: I think I’m morally opposed to meta-blog posts, but they have to happen once in a while… and I try and contain myself to simply responding to stuff that’s happened elsewhere. Feel free to get angry with me in the comments.

p.s. Please excuse my appalling markup in this post. WordPress was being a cow and not letting me nest blockquotes (it mightn’t be valid, anyway, but it would have been semantically appropriate so I don’t particularly care even if it wasn’t), and I’m tired and Alex King’s WP Unformatted plugin doesn’t seem to be working. *cries self to sleep over bad markup* ;-)

Literally annoying

George Bernard Shaw is guilty of hitting one of my pet peeves in “an initialled review” he wrote of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1897. Yeah, I’m still not over it.¹

His review is, in all other respects, perfectly fine. I’d argue over the semantic appropriateness of describing it as a “review”, for it seems more a belated criticism, focussing more on society’s response to the play than on the play itself, but I digress. Write about the annoying bit already! Okay, okay.

The woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her husband left staring at her, helpless, bound thenceforth either to do without her (an alternative which makes short work of his fancied independence) or else treat her as a human being like himself, fully recognizing that he is not a creature of one superior species, Man, living with a creature of another and inferior species, Woman, but that Mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and that the inequality of the sexes is literally a cock and bull story, certain to end in such unbearable humiliation as that which our suburban King Arthurs suffer at the hands of Ibsen.

No, my complaint is not with multiple-run-on sentences (for I myself am often guilty of that, though perhaps less spectacularly than his rather-admirable effor there), but rather with his abuse of the term “literally”. No, GBS, A Doll’s House‘s rejection of the notion of the inequality of the sexes is not achieved through literally presenting this as a story about a cock and a bull. You may use that as a metaphor, but not literally. Declaring something to be literal does not serve to emphasise the point. In fact, in this instance, it serves only to ridicule it.

*pulls faces*

The end.

¹ I’m the first to admit I was born in the wrong century. Love of the Internet and technology in general aside, I could quite happily have spent my days as a fringe-Romantic intellectual arguing with various figures of similar standing in the late nineteenth century. So call me an élitist, or something. I enabled dead keys on my keyboard just so I could type élitist properly, you know? I’m that bad. It makes typing apostrophes hellish…

Pink clouds

HP Photosmart 2610 and XP printing as a restricted rights user

Yes indeed, no longer do you need to run Windows as an Administrator, free to install spyware and other paraphernalia so often associated with the awfully dangerous world that is the Internet. Or something.

Reasons for not wanting to run as Administrator vary (for me, it’s mostly a background in Unix that has educated me thus), but no longer, thanks to a helpful reader, do we have to suffer under the regime of HP’s drivers and automated installation that renders printing as any user but administrator impossible. (Previously elucidated here).

Well, someone had to solve the problem eventually (and, knowing the way things go around here, it wasn’t going to be HP’s notoriously pathetic driver/software team), and that someone was Danlio in the comments of my review! Wooo!

A slightly edited version follows:

Just open the printer settings. (Right click on “HP Photosmart 2610 series, then click “Properties”).
Click on the “Ports” tab.
“Add port”
Select “HP Standard TCP/IP port”.
Click “Next”.
Enter the correct IP address of your HP 2610 printer. The other field will automatically fill — this does not need to be changed. Click “Next”.

There you go!

Now you can print logged in with any user account (not only administrators).

Woo! I don’t think a Windows test page has ever looked so beautiful ;-)

GMail using SPF and another odd feature

I logged into my GMail account today and noticed that a message from a Yahoo! user account was authenticated using SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, and was marked as such when you click “More options”. They’ve probably been doing this for a while, but I only just realised.

Another thing they’ve got going is user aliasing… for example, I signed up for “josh.street” and received an email to JoshStreet (and since email addresses are effectively lowercase, that means joshstreet). Obviously I’m not posting my email address in parsable format (because spammers have programs to harvest email addresses off websites), but the domain is gmail.com, so that’s not too hard to figure out if you want to send me email now is it?