Linking To Existing Posts In WordPress 3.1
One of my favourite features in WordPress 3.1 is the option to link to existing posts when you’re using the rich text editor. It’s just so simple: select the link text, hit the link icon, and pick the post you want to link to. WordPress does the rest.
I just love this: recently I’ve been linking to myself a lot (it’s basically egoism) and I’ve been wishing for exactly this feature. Now it’s here, it’s such a time saver: no more tabbing back and forth to get links to my own posts from pages on my own blog.
A small change that makes a big difference: the hallmark of great development.
The Mathematics Of Voting Reform
One of the reasons the UK needs some kind of electoral reform is this: a person’s vote is more or less powerful depending on which political party the person votes for.
That’s not democratic.
The graph above shows the disparity between votes (inner circle) and seats in parliament (outer circle). All parties suffer from some kind of distortion between votes and seats, but look at the Liberals (yellow) and the “others” (grey): they have to get many more votes compared to, say, Labour in order to get the same number of seats. If you vote Liberal, your vote counts maybe half as much as it would if you vote Labour.
Voting reform would give more power to smaller parties, but only because it would create parliaments that more accurately reflect those parties’ votes. The system we have in the UK right now is massively biased in favour of Labour and the Conservatives.
How To Force SSH Password Authentication
Recently I had a problem SSHing into a client’s server: to fix the problem, I forced SSH to use password authentication and disabled public key authentication. Here’s how:
This one-liner won’t affect your global SSH configuration: it just tells SSH to use only password authentication for this one request
Full-Screen Apps on OS X Lion
The developer preview of OS X Lion is out. I’m going to resist “cage” puns and focus on one of Lion’s new features: full-screen mode.
Recently I’ve started using most of my regular apps in what I would, until now, have called full-screen mode. On my Mac, running Snow Leopard, this means that the active application window grows to fill the desktop area — its border and title bar remain visible, as does the menu bar, but after entering this mode I can no longer see the desktop or other windows behind my application. The effect is “fill-desktop” rather than true full-screen.
I’m not going to be picky though: “fill-desktop” is a great way to reduce distractions and it almost harks back to my MS-DOS days. It’s weird that interface design is coming full-circle in this respect: we’ve moved from one app on screen at a time, to many apps in many windows, and back to (the option to have) one app on screen at a time.
Of course this isn’t a return to one-app-at-a-time systems: even if the app you’re using fills the screen, you’re one click/tap/gesture away from any of the other apps you’re running in the background. Even the iPhone and iPod Touch — the smallest and least powerful of Apple’s computers — have this ability.
So: we had one-app screens, then many-app screens, and now with Lion we have one-and-many-app screens. It’s a nice Hegelian synthesis. And so I thought I’d look into exactly what’s possible with full-screen mode in Lion.
My first thoughts — and yours too, probably — were “how do I run an app full-screen?” and “which apps can I run full-screen?”. The original Lion announcement provides a simple answer to the first question (at about 1:04:00): all you have to do to switch an app into full-screen mode is click the green “maximise” button in the title bar.
Watching that announcement again earlier today, I thought that the answer to my second question was “any app”. It looked like a click of the green button would take any app on Lion into full-screen mode. But I was wrong.
Today Apple updated their Lion preview page. Here’s a quote from the full-screen section:
Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too.
The key word there is “allows”: apps can take advantage of full-screen mode if they want to, but they have to want to. If we head down to the foot of the page, we get confirmation in the form of a footnote:
[Full-screen mode is] Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.
In other words, Apple’s own apps will work full-screen with Lion from day one. Third-party apps will need to be updated to use “full-screen technology”. Don’t you just hate those sneaky footnotes?
This is a shame, because I was hoping that my favourite apps would automatically take advantage of full-screen mode once they were running on Lion. But apparently I’ll need to wait for updates.
I’m not complaining though: Lion is full of good stuff and I’m just happy that I don’t have to develop on Windows. But I’m looking forward to the day when I go full-screen for real, and lose myself in my work.
Update: Frederic Lardinois has a nice review of the Lion developer preview, including details of toolbar icons you can use to take an app full-screen (and back again).
Image from fortherock on Flickr
Goodbye Gaddafi?
UK Channel 4: “Gaddafi on the brink of losing power”. Interesting, in-depth article. Most importantly, their conclusion is that Gaddafi is likely to be forced from power but that this won’t precipitate a civil war in Libya. This from Dr Imad El-Anis, a Libya specialist:
I believe we are in for a tough time, but I don’t think there will be civil war in Libya.
Let’s hope not.
Google Moves German Border
From the BBC: Google maps shows the Netherlands’ border running right into the harbour of German border town Emden.
This is what happens when engineers at a billion-dollar company get bored. What shall we do to fill the time? I know, let’s mess with Europe.
Rails 3 + RSpec + Speed
Here’s a nice guide to getting RSpec tests running quickly (and automatically) on Rails 3, from Peter Cooper at Ruby Inside. I use RSpec every day and my tests already run pretty quickly, but anything that speeds things up even more is alright by me :)
As an aside, if you’re not using RSpec on Rails you really should look into it. And if you’re not running your tests automatically (and repeatedly) using something like autotest or watchr — both mentioned in Peter’s article — then I highly recommend doing doing just that to keep your code under control.
No?
There’s some fuss on Twitter over the No2AV campaign poster which presents the AV issue as a straight choice between changes to the UK electoral system and… what: dead babies?
Anyway, ridiculous scaremongering aside, here’s a better poster:
That’s Eric Islley, the former MP who “has been given a year’s jail sentence for dishonestly claiming parliamentary expenses”. Our current electoral system makes it easy for MPs like him to take voters for granted and start living off the system.
More on anti-AV arguments here. To support the campaign for AV, go to www.yestofairervotes.org
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Emails Are Not Letters
Here’s an article from the BBC about the decline of “Dear” as a lead-in to emails, and here’s a quote from Jean Broke-Smith (an etiquette teacher), taken from the article:
If you’re sending a business e-mail you should begin “Dear…” - like a letter. You are presenting yourself. Politeness and etiquette are essential.
One of the problems people have with genuinely new technology is that it’s difficult to categorise. The first cars were “horseless carriages”: try making that comparison now and see if it holds up (who knows what the first aeroplanes were likened too: maybe a machine that could fly was too new to be “like” anything, even in the early days). In my social network at least, Facebook (when it was just getting going) was “like MySpace” — only better.
We make these conceptual links between old and new because it helps us to understand things we’re not familiar with. Take your knowledge of how letter-writing work and use it as a starting point for understanding email, the argument goes. This approach works — up to a point.
Writing an email is like writing a letter in that, well, you’re writing; and more than that, you’re writing to someone, so of course etiquette does matter. But email etiquette and letter etiquette are not the same thing.
Starting an email with “Dear” makes you sound old-fashioned, precisely because you’re taking the etiquette of letter-writing and applying it too rigidly to email. Now, some would say that it’s better to be too formal than too informal. This is true up to a point, but “Dear” is still very formal for an email; it’s really too formal, because it’s a habit of letter-writing that hasn’t carried over to emails.
Email is a modern tool and has modern problems, but beyond all the spam, all the junk, and all the forwarded crap, lies the main advantage of the medium: fast, accessible, informal communication with few limits. This is why we love it: because we don’t have to go through rounds of “Dear James” and “warm regards”; because we can get right down to what’s important without having to go through the formalities first.
This is why you can justifiably start a first email with “Hi”.
We can afford to be informal in emails because the gap between sending a message and getting a reply is small. This makes an email conversation more like a spoken conversation and as you probably know, you don’t need to start a spoken conversation with a formal greeting.
When I was younger, a teacher of mine gave me a great piece of advice: being “polite” means making the people you’re with feel comfortable. It’s not about rules, it’s not about strict etiquette: treating people with respect means learning to fit it. If everyone who sends you an email is kicking things off with “hi”, then it’s time to drop the “Dear sir”.
Image by Loving Earth on Flickr
Opt-Outs Done Right
Following on from last week’s critique of email opt-out forms at whitestuff.com, here’s an example of the right way to do it: 
Simple choices presented in a way that’s easy to understand. They’ve even chosen good defaults. Perfect.
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