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Confronting:

Muslim garb confronting, says Howard

MOST Australians found the full traditional garb of Muslim women confronting, Prime Minister John Howard said today.

But he said there were no plans to ban the head-to-toe costume.

Mr Howard said the experience in France, where schoolchildren were banned from wearing overtly religious clothes and symbols, showed how difficult it was to legislate against clothing.

So it’s the difficulty of framing the legislation that’s stopping us from banning certain forms of dress?

Not confronting:

Abbott withdraws ethnic ’slur’

“Mr Pakula may be very appealing to Cambodian speaking people who are just two per cent of the electorate of Hotham but they’re 30 per cent of the Labor preselectors of Hotham,” Mr Abbott told parliament.

“I’m reading in The Australian last Friday, he’s (Mr Crean) still got the Greek branches but he’s lost the Spanish branches and he’s lost the Vietnamese branches as well as the Cambodian branches.

“And I couldn’t help but think - are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?”

Opposition frontbencher Anthony Albanese, whose inner-Sydney electorate of Grayndler has a large non-English speaking population, immediately objected.

“My point of order, Mr Speaker, is for the minister to withdraw that extraordinarily outrageous slur on every Australian who doesn’t have an Anglo-Celtic name in this country,” Mr Albanese said.

“We’ve heard the dog whistle from this mob one after the other, but this minister as usual has gone too far and I ask him to withdraw it.”

Speaker David Hawker said he did not find the comment offensive.

I’m finding this whole week of Federal Parliament quite confronting.

Images (cc) CharlesFred and dlemieux @ Flickr

Decades of reading poorly written, difficult to navigate, absent, and out of date help content has conditioned computer users that resorting to using the help in an application can only be a humiliating waste of time. I have come to the conclusion that help content should be simply placed online so it can be indexed by Google.

Being helpful

Unusually, perhaps, for a software guy I have created large quantities of help content in my time. In fact, on one application I was the primary creator of help content. I was quite proud of my help content, but I acknowledge that I had an excellent editor who spent her time chastising me, removing my idioms, tightening up the language and transforming it into Microsoft Windows HTML Help - according to the custom of the time. The resulting content was brilliant - succinct, well-written, nicely structured, copiously referenced and accurate (modesty prevents me from using hyperbole). We sweated blood to make sure that the content would be helpful, relevant and, most importantly, able to prevent our users from having to make support calls.

When users finally got hold of our application it became apparent from the support call topics that nobody ever read the help.

“That’s not fair,” I thought “people who use the help probably don’t make support calls.”

I was wrong.

This application had spawned a little mailing list discussion forum with a few hundred subscribers. When users asked for help on the list users who offered help never said “The answer is in the help.” Not ever. I knew most of the answers were right at their finger tips — right there in the help content! Nobody ever read our fabulous help content.

Help content - the state of the art

Is help really that bad? Here is a short list of my impressions of applications I’ve sampled the help content from:

Microsoft Visual Studio

Visual Studio has a pretty nice, integrated help system. Decent IDEs tend to have good linkage to keyword and API information and Visual Studio is probably one of the nicer examples of help integration. Content is voluminous. The style is good and very navigable in the main topics. Updates are frequent. You can search online for updated topics. There isn’t much to complain about here.

Mozilla FireFox 1.5

The FireFox team have developed their own help system which is a curiously half-hearted WinHelp replacement. Annoyingly, it has “always on top” behaviour and is designed according to the tree-view-on-left-content-on-right pattern of sleep-walked MFC applications. I have no evidence that it is an MFC application, but I’m giving you my impressions. Content is light but it does a good job of getting to the point quickly.

Picasa 2

Typical of a Google acquisition, Picasa’s help menu item takes you to the web for answers. http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=0 is the Picasa “Knowledge base” featuring a search function to help answer your questions. Sadly, the knowledge base appears to be a “walled garden” with a simple keyword search engine rather than a clever use of the Google search engine armed with all of the world’s published Picasa knowledge. On a whim I asked about getting the “color[sic] middle” effect, which I know to be called “Focal B&W” in Picasa.

“Your search - color middle - did not match any answers in our knowledge base. Please edit your search terms and try again.”

Ok. Searching on the term “Focal B&W” used in Picasa turned up two results, the second seeming more relevant than the first, but not too bad.

WordPress

Web applications are a rule unto themselves. They don’t have help per se, but they do often (and in the case of WordPress) have a central touch point site and gazillions of users ready to help with problems on various forums and blogs. Apart from links to the WordPress Codex, there’s plain old Google to help solve problems with search hits in abundance.

Flickr

Yahoo!’s Flickr (who would have thought that a possessive noun could have a “!” in it or be missing a vowel or two 10 or 20 years ago?) is *cough* very Web 2.0 in its approach to help. Click on the Help link, and you’re taken to a search page. The trick is that the search page only searches discussions on Flickr. This is actually quite useful and goes well beyond the topics you’d expect. For instance, looking for “macro focus” you get a result list headed by “Sorry to be a newbie, but what is macro?” that when you click it leads you to helpful answers contributed by users. This top forum question was followed by someone who could be channeling Salvador Dali:

uae-style says:

hello!

y flickr is allowing nude photos?
im against it!

Whoa!

A better solution for help

Help isn’t as dire as I remember it being, but it’s not universally helpful or consistent and as a result users don’t care to read it anyway. What can you do?

My proposal is that all applications put their help content online in a manner that’s easily searched with (for instance) Google - like boring old HTML. If you can’t publish to the Internet, or if your application isn’t anything to do with being network connected, then at least put a local mirror of the HTML content on the local PC for desktop search applications and browser access with an option for Internet-connected users to search for related topics with a search engine like Google (I don’t want to sound too much like a Google fanboi… next year Alta Vista might be back in the Search game with a vengeance!)

The drawbacks are that you’re limited to what a browser and a search engine can do for you. The benefits are:

• You’re not limited to what a custom or Windows-based help system can do for you,
• Help becomes self-correcting. If you make mistakes in the help, users can update the body of knowledge organically through blogs, forum discussions, or any other form of web publishing
• Users will find your content through their usual mode of help search

Be kind to your users. When it comes to help - put it all online.

A legend of science fiction dies, aged 58.

Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs, yet Octavia Butler rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the country’s leading writers - a female African American pioneer in the white, male domain of science fiction.
[...]
Butler’s most popular work is “Kindred,” a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler’s solitary life.
[...]
The frustrated artist - who first turned to writing at 12 after the sci-fi movie, “Devil Girl from Mars,” convinced her that she could write something better - battled worries that “maybe I cannot write anymore.”

I’ll have to get hold of her last novel, Fledgeling.

(This started as a comment on an excellent post on OddThinking, but it grew into something unwieldy)

Julian has objected to a variety of points raised in Peter Costello’s recent speech at The Sydney Institute titled: WORTH PROMOTING, WORTH DEFENDING. AUSTRALIAN CITIZENSHIP, WHAT IT MEANS AND HOW TO NURTURE IT. (link)

Apart from holding immigrants to a different set of citizenship criteria to expatriate Australian citizens (the “Australian Diaspora”), there’s the problem of defining what Australian values are:

Costello [...] does try to explain. He just doesn’t do a very good job.

According to different parts of his speech, Australian values are:

• “Loyalty, democracy, tolerance, the rule of law”
• “democratic beliefs; to respect the rights and liberty of others; and to respect the rule of law.”
• “Economic opportunity […] Security […] Democracy […] Personal Freedom […] The Physical Environment […] Strong Physical and Social Infrastructure”

What I perceive, and I think Alan is hinting at in comments, is that Costello and Howard have a nostalgia for their protestant 1950s (and 1960s) without being terribly clear on clearly defining the projected “values” of this era we’re supposed to find nation-defining.

From my reading of memoirs, and the recollections of my parents’ generation, the 1950s was a time of significant cultural division and religious conflict in Australia. The occasional 1950s skirmishes between catholics and protestants on the streets of Australian suburbia would probably read a lot like the Cronulla riots if they were reported by today’s press.

I think Australia and many other countries pursuing a secular ideal have to deal with the messiness of an eternity of revising the unstated, “shared values” that define Australianness.

You can see that the framers of the constitution giving the nod to secularism as an Australian value here:

“116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”

And then they went and made the head of the Anglican Church the Australian head of state.

No wonder we’re confused about our shared values.

I agree that we need a prescribed, or organically generated definition of our shared values to make citizenship of Australia a more active thing. A good start would be a bill of rights, and a value-outlining preamble to our constitution.

The speech really heats up when he decides dog-whistling is too subtle:

There are countries that apply religious or sharia law – Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia.

Is this Costello parading his leadership cred and a grand vision? I’m sure it’s supposed to play that way in the press. I think it’s more like Howard Government strategy 101. If there’s a technocratic issue that’s burying you in the polls, trot out a wedge issue to eat up Op Ed. column inches and provide an interview bridging destination. Remember “Job Snobs,” unionised dock-workers, Tampa, IVF, gay marriage, and RU486?

A future John Laws interview: “Before we talk about the AWB, John, can I share a few thoughts I’ve had about jurisdictional conflicts between Australian and Sharia laws?”

A surprisingly pithy Kim Beazley sums it up (via Crikey & The Age):

“He’s been in office for ten years. If he’s got a problem with people who come into this country who are committed to jihad or committed to any form of violence, why doesn’t he do something about it?”

I’ve just returned to Sydney from a business trip to Denver Colorado. Usually, my business trips to Denver are devoid of deep discussions about politics or local issues. This time there was one hot button issue that I heard from multiple sources that clearly irked Denver locals across the political spectrum.

After the US President’s State of the Union address called on US citizens to reduce the US’ dependency on foreign energy sources, Congress passed budget cuts (and I assume the President signed them into law) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) resulting in a loss of 32 jobs and a huge reduction in research capability.

People I assumed were from both ends and the middle of the political spectrum were aghast and vocal.

Seemingly oblivious to what he had just signed into law, President Bush had previously scheduled a panel discussion at the NREL to promote his renewable energy initiatives.

The comedy gold mine of contrasting the VP shooting a 78 year old man in the face and then blaming him for being in the way with the President leading a panel discussion at an organization he had personally denuded on the topic of why the US is short of alternative energy sources just have seemed suddenly too audacious, even for Bush.

Shortly before Bush arrived yesterday 32 jobs were not-so-mysteriously returned to their previous owners.

From the Washington Post:

“Sometimes, decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, the money may not end up where it was supposed to have gone,” Bush said.

“My message to those who work here is we want you to know how important your work is. We appreciate what you’re doing and we expect you to keep doing it, and we want to help you keep doing it.”

Funny. Funny sad. Not funny ha-ha.

I think I’m the one who introduced _wintermute to Flickr. He’s put some really nice shots up.

Here is a selection.

Wintermute’s photos used with permission.

In some blogs they don’t have advertising. Losers!

Here at Casa del Brainsnorkel we’ve completely sold out. The running dog of capitalism has sunk its rabid teeth into our pinko socialist leg and left a weeping sore of targeted commercial enticement.

Actually, as this blog is my hobby it’s more busy work for when I’m short on blog posts.

Please welcome Brainsnorkel to the wonderful world of inverse-payola.

Business cards and job titles are a shorthand method of letting a person you’re talking to know what you’re all about. Job titles, particularly in sales, are often fabricated to make the customer and the person with the title feel better about themselves. If you are angrily making a complaint about a web site, would you feel better about telling your tale of woe to an anonymous call centre agent, or the “Vice President of Customer Experience Quality and User Interface Design?”

My parents impressed upon me that I should not be judged by what I wore, how much I earned or who I knew. I should be judged (and judge others) by the “content of my character.” It obviously wasn’t meant in the context of the original, but in terms a whiney white guy from regional Australia could comprehend, this ideal has stuck with me through the years. My mind boggles at interview candidates who want to work somewhere where they can dress better, or at a company with more impressive job titles.

One of the career aspirations of many software professionals is to receive a fancy title. I can certainly remember thinking that the “trainee” part of my title in my first job title ever was teh suck. I seriously considered transferring from being a “Trainee Systems Programmer” to a “Tape Operator” because:

1. They got paid more,
2. There were equal numbers or women and men,
3. They didn’t work as hard, and
4. Their job title did not contain the word “trainee”

Some unusually long-term thinking and a desire to write more self-modifying S/360 assembler seduced me, and I remained a trainee systems programmer.

Inside a company job titles tend to be designed to give you a kind of power aura. An inherent importance not apparent to mere mortals until they learn your job title. Like wearing a fancy suit, a title lets people know how they should treat you.

I work at a company where the history and tradition is such that there is a reverence about simply being a “Member of Technical Staff.” When I announced that I had become a “Distinguished Member of Technical Staff” my wife said “Is that good?”

Getting around to the point of this post, I wonder if other readers of this blog could post a history of their job titles?

Here are my (remembered) titles in chronological order. I’ve omitted “Casual Staff” in clothing retail and “Fax Operator” vacation jobs. I’ve also omitted transient role descriptions like “Death March Apologist.” See if you can tell when I changed employers.

• Trainee Systems Programmer
• Systems Programmer
• Senior Systems Programmer
• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer
• Member of Technical Staff
• Distinguished Member of Technical Staff

Seven titles in 17 years. Mission accomplished.

One of the most interesting podcasts I’ve heard in the last few months is this ABC Radio National Background Briefing about Economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The program is mostly edited highlights of a recent speech by Biographer Richard Parker at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The last few minutes are from an interview with Phillip Adams for the Late Night Live program circa 2002.

Galbraith, an economist, began his career working on Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was responsible for controlling inflation in the US during World War 2, and became President Kennedy’s Ambassador to India. There is a fascinating story of how he returned to Washington to find a Whitehouse sleepwalking into Vietnam, motivating him to side with President Kennedy in resisting the push for war.

And in the now-recovered minutes of the National Security Council meeting in which the advisors tried to press Kennedy forward, these minutes were lost for 25 years afterwards, because they were the personal minutes of General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chief of Staff, and the Pentagon papers never saw them, they only came to light a few years ago after Lemnitzer died. There’s a remarkable record. Each of the advisors presents the case for going in, and the President sits silent. Half-way through the two-hour meeting, you see the notes by Lemnitzer saying ‘Attorney-General’ meaning Bobby Kennedy, the words are ‘Don’t you hear? No troops, no way, no fucking troops’. And President says at the end that his criteria for the commitment of American troops abroad to conflict are fourfold. The first is that there must be a clear rationale for their commitment that involves a direct threat to the United States and its citizens themselves. Second, that the United States should commit those troops only following the resolution of the Security Council authorising those troops, just as the United States had done in the Korean War. Third, that the troops would be sent only as part of a multilateral force, not American troops alone, because without the commitment of one’s allies, America would not stay the course. Finally, that the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense owe the White House an exit strategy before we entered.

Now I would submit to you that there is relevance in those words by President Kennedy from November, 1961 to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Because that was the advice that he was hearing from Ambassador Galbraith, and Ambassador Galbraith, because of his particular understanding of power and politics and economics, knew that the issue was not simply the danger of Vietnam as a foreign misadventure. It was also that the Vietnam War would ultimately lead to an over-commitment of US troops that would ultimately endanger the United States economy by kicking off inflation and the very kinds of conditions that he had been able to prevent in the Second World War but that we couldn’t prevent with no declared state of war; that the failure of the economy and the failure of the war would risk tipping over not just the Kennedy Administration, but American liberalism, and the Keynesian economic experiment all at once. And ten years after Kennedy told his advisors what he wanted, Richard Nixon was in the White House. And Richard Nixon declared himself publicly to be a Keynesian. And as Galbraith said, ‘At that moment, I knew we had lost’.

There are plenty of gems of humour and history in this program. Make sure you read or listen to the Clinton anecdotes.

My parents in-law have advocated simple model for an Australian Republic for some time. I must mention that I initially rolled my eyes at it, yet I find it more and more appealing as time passes. I think it’s worth putting into the public domain for serious consideration.

It’s a complex series of constitutional amendments, but it can be summarised for republican model-collectors as - change the head of state from the reigning Monarch of the United Kingdom to Uluru (Ayers Rock).

That would probably be easily done by amending the Constitutional Act so that instead of saying that the word “Queen” refers to the Queen’s heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom it would refer to Queen’s heirs, successors or a monolith elected by the Australian people.

Before electing Uluru, we’d have to be sure to get the permission of the Pitjantjatjara people. However, there are plenty of other worthy Australian monoliths that could be considered if Uluru makes itself unavailable for election.

Uluru has a lot going for it that our present head of state and her viceroy do not:

1. People can easily remember its name
2. Its history can be scientifically discovered. There will be no more heads of state with problematic histories accidentally appointed by idealogue Prime Ministers
3. No real need for security. Our head of state would be quite difficult to kidnap or assassinate

Of course, there may be a few problems with understanding whether the monolith wants to dissolve parliament, alter the sitting days, or go on tour to meet other heads of state. Some circuit-breaker mechanism better than sitting in front of the rock and meditating would have to be developed. More details to be worked out according to the will of the people.

I’m sure that an Australian federal structure with a rock solid foundation would be the envy of the world.

Thanks to Happy A@Flickr for the image.