afongen

This photo of Owen and me reading is one of my favorites. He loves so much to be read to, and I love reading with him. I think it really comes across in that picture.

Apparently others agree. It’s now on the home page for St. Cloud State University’s Department of Child and Family Studies.

A couple months ago I started using Smarty, a templating system for PHP. It’s something that I’d meant to do for a long time but kept getting distracted by other things, namely an overwhelming workload. Finally, an opportunity to work with a student intern gave me the excuse I needed to make the time. It’s been an interesting ride.

Read more about Smarty… I moved this entry there because I was tired of futzing with the markup within Movable Type.

Not what you think.

I am visiting artima.com more frequently. I’m particularly fond of the great interviews, such as the latest, an interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. I am enamored with their broken window analogy: if a little something is broken and not fixed or flagged, it sets in motion a cascade of disrespect and carelessness.

It comes down to showing that you care. Take for example some code that is kind of shared among the team, but primarily is mine. There’s some code in there that is obviously bad, but it doesn’t look like I care about it. I’m just leaving it bad. Anybody else coming into that module might say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care about it. It’s his module. Why should I care about it?” In fact, if you come into my module and do something else that’s bad, you can say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care. Why should I care?” That kind of decay happens to modules as well as apartment buildings.

On the other hand, suppose I notice an edge condition that doesn’t work in my code. I know it’s a bug, but the bug is not critical to the application today and I don’t have time to fix it. I could at least put a comment in there. Or, even better, I could put assertion in there, so that if the edge condition ever hits, something’s going to happen that shows I’m on top of it. By doing that, first of all I make it easier to identify the problem. But I also show other people that I care about that enough that they will fix problems too when they encounter them.

This man is talking to me.

Email’s been down at work the past day or so. If you’ve been trying to reach me there, I’m not ignoring you. I’m just enjoying the feeling of being out of touch, tinged with the dread of what awaits me when the server’s restored.

The oddly named Nemesis Project looks like something to bookmark: a good collection of information and links for CSS and XHTML.

I keep coming across mention of how important it is for dads to read with their kids. Since I read to Owen every day, I never gave this much thought except to wonder why the big push for dads in particular.

At early childhood class on Friday, Kiara found out why: studies indicate that by the time boys are in third grade, they get the idea that reading is a girl thing and resist doing it. Encouraging fathers to read with their kids is an effort to counteract this trend.

Kiara, bless her heart, did not mention just how compulsive a reader I am. I’ll grab anything in sight, especially at breakfast: cereal boxes, of course, but it might just as easily be magazine subscription cards or terms of service for her brother’s cell phone. She caught me at the breakfast table the other day reading the inside of a roll of masking tape. Hey, there was nothing else within reach! I can imagine the discussion:

Teacher: …so it’s important for fathers to read.
Woman: Even if it’s a fishing magazine? That’s about all he reads.
Teacher: Yes, even that’s good.
Kiara: Masking tape rolls?
Teacher: Er, say again?
Kiara: Because my husband won’t read anything unless it’s from 3M.

Mixed Mode – Handling method-differences between paper and web questionnaires (PDF).

In this article, the authors show that in spite of identical design of a web questionnaire and a paper questionnaire (in principle the web questionnaire was printed), test subjects give significantly different answers depending on which version they fill out. Further, they give a few practical pieces of advice to people intending to do mixed mode and/or web surveying.

Kiara’s taken over Owen’s photo gallery. I just wasn’t keeping up with the steady stream of incoming photos. I toyed with setting up a photo gallery app that would automatically create the web pages for her, thumbnails and all, but in the end decided that it made more sense for her to just create and edit the pages herself using her photo software and Dreamweaver.

The problem is that the photo software-generated markup sucks. I considered post-processing the HTML, but if I’m going to go to all that trouble I might as well write the photo gallery app. Besides, Kiara’s pretty damn smart. On her first day tinkering with Dreamweaver, without any help from me she figured out more than some people I know who have been maintaining web sites for over two years. I came home to find her peering closely at the HTML, trying to determine why something wasn’t working right. Last night, after updating the February pictures, she mentioned that she’d figured out how to attach a style sheet.

Ye gods, she’s great.

So I don’t think it’ll take her long to figure out valid XHTML. I suppose that I could even help.

The other day I wrote that the MnSCU IT conference had been cancelled. Matt called me on this today, so I should clarify: strictly speaking, it has not yet been cancelled. Everything but, though. It is not yet official, or perhaps even firmly decided yet. From what I can tell, it’s 95% certain that the conference will be cancelled, or at the very least postponed.

You might think that it would cancelled for budget reasons. Yes, but only indirectly. A number of Minnesota state agencies have been taken to task recently by the local media for what seems to be outrageous spending practices. Things like conferences and meetings being held at resorts or hotels rather than in State-owned buildings. Even though almost all the expenses at our conference are picked up by vendors, there’s concern that even the appearance of overspending would be damaging to MnSCU‘s public image. We could probably set things up so that the vendors pick up all the expenses, but that probably wouldn’t come across in a ten-second spot on TV news.

Oh well. Anyway, for the one or two people who care, now you know what I know.

In an apparent effort effort to forestall the rapid adoption of Linux in the enterprise, Sun is making some of its software free to students and faculty. Stuff like Solaris 9, StarOffice, and Sun ONE Studio. The idea, it seems, is to get students familiar with these tools while in school so they’ll be enthusiastic about them when they start working.

I wonder how that will turn out. My interest in free and open source software was at first inspired by the price tag. I was a poor student, after all. It was only after I’d become familiar with the tools that I became attracted to the philosophy. I would eventually have become a free-as-in-freedom devotee anyway, but I wonder how much I would have brought that into the workplace had I been steeped in the Microsoft world, or even Sun. Donno.