James Wilding | Ruby on Rails Developer

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

The Cost Of Democracy

The campaign against UK voting reform kicks off with a new website. Their best argument is that AV is too expensive.

Nothing feels better than being told you’re too poor for reform.

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.

Reason Enough

AV is a recipe for coalitions – reason enough to vote ‘No’ — an opinionated article on proposed reforms to the UK voting system, from Simon Heffer in the Telegraph. Some extracts from the article:

For the next 12 weeks, those interested in this attempt to experiment with our constitution can be bombarded with the odd fact, and piles of prejudice and assertion, as they prepare to decide.

For “experiment with”, read “change”.

The referendum, on May 5, is one of the carrots held out to the Liberal Democrats for their participation in the Coalition. As with much else that that party has chucked into the political debate in our country, it is a thoroughly reckless proposal.

For “reckless”, read “I don’t like it”.

The most likely [consequences] are that it will be easier for parties that are not Labour or the Conservatives to win seats at Westminster. There would not just be Lib Dems, but also Scottish and Welsh separatists, Greens, possibly even one from Nick Griffin and his chums.

Labour and the Conservatives being the only parties who deserve seats at Westminster, of course. (See also: appeal to fear.)

It would become far less likely that a single party would be able to form a government. Therefore we would have more highly successful, productive and happiness-inducing coalitions like the one with which we are currently saddled.

That the current coalition is bad doesn’t in any way prove that other coalitions would be bad. Had the current government been a straight Conservative majority, it would still have taken the same (if not more) controversial decisions regarding the economy.

AV would then be the thin end of the wedge: soon, full-scale multi-member constituency PR would be introduced.

Read: AV is bad because PR is bad. But in what sense is a voting system bad when it produces parliaments in which political parties are balanced according to their popularity in the country as a whole?

The Yes campaign has brought out leading constitutional experts such as Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, the Bagehot and Dicey of our times, to argue for the change. Such trivialisation should fill us with gloom.

When did Colin Firth last claim to be a “constitutional expert”, and it what sense does involving public figures in political reform “trivialise” the process? But maybe we should let the politicians with a vested interest in our voting system decide what should happen to our voting system, instead of giving the public a say. That could work.

The No campaign seems on stronger ground, not least by arguing that the cost of reform could amount to £250 million, as special electronic machines are required for polling stations.

A thing is bad if it costs a lot of money.

There is a more practical point still. Is this reform really such a pressing problem, in the present circumstances, that it has required all the public money, and parliamentary time, necessary to follow it through?

Maybe we should put it to a vote, and let the people decide.

Prioritised To-Dos In TextMate

Here’s a really simple trick I use to prioritise todo lists in my Rails projects. It uses TextMate’s TODO bundle.

Notice the addition of “:n:” right after “todo”, where n is a number indicating how important the todo item is. I use three levels of priority but you could use a different system depending on how organised you wanted to feel. Run this through the TODO bundle (ctrl+option+shift+T), and you’ll get a list of todo items which can be sorted by priority: Use the up/down arrows to the right of “Comment” to sort your todos in order of priority. Easy! UPDATE: Here’s the snippet I use to create these todos:

I bind this to a tab trigger #todo with scope source.ruby using TextMate’s bundle editor

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World Press Photo Awards

Striking and sometimes disturbing photos from winners of 2011’s World Press Photo award.

The image above was taken in Calcutta, India; the yellow blurs in the centre of the photo are most likely cars but having just watched Inception on DVD, I like to imagine they’re freight trains

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Nabokov’s Butterflies

The New York Times on Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and amateur lepidopterist:

[In] a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

For half a century, few people took Nabokov seriously, but just recently his theory was tested and his predictions found to be accurate:

“By God, he got every one right,” […] “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

The NYT article shows how Nabokov got it right using simple observation and attention to detail: that’s science in a nutshell, and proof that sometimes it’s outsiders who have the best ideas.

Miniature Mobile Base Stations

The Guardian:

Mobile phone base stations no bigger than a golf ball could help to bridge the digital divide and bring mobile broadband to distant areas both in the developing and developed world.

No more fake trees.

Require Javascript Files Like A Rubyist

I like to keep my javascript files well-structured. I also like not to have to add a new <script> tag every time I add a new script file. It’s neater. In a Rails application, I use application.js to load all my other javascript files. Here’s how:

Observant readers will have noticed that I’m using jQuery with Rails here. You can do that now, you know.