Today I upgraded both Chip’s Quips and Chip’s Tips to WordPress version 2.3 (after first trying it out on my test site).   Everything went relatively smoothly.  The Plugins page notified me of three plugins that had upgrades available, so I did that, too.

Shelley let me know about the new tagging support in WordPress 2.3.  Converting the Jerome’s Keywords tags over to the new WordPress tags was simple, using the built-in converter on the Manage/Import page in the Admin panel.  Shelley seems to like the WordPress implementation, but I find it not quite up to the combination of Jerome’s Keywords and my tag cloud widget in several ways:

1. The WordPress tag cloud widget has no options except for title.  The built-in wp_tag_cloud function (which the widget ultimately uses) can take many arguments to control the min/max size of font, what units to use when sizing, the maximum number of tags to display, the format for display, how they’re ordered, and what tags to include or exclude.  None of these options are available to the widget.  The widget ends up using all default settings, the only one of which that really gripes me is that only the top 45 tags get displayed.  You can vote for expanding the options here.
2. I can’t seem to find any place in the Admin panel to manage tags.  Jerome’s 2.0 had options for renaming and deleting tags wholesale, and that page also gave you quick stats on tag usage.  That was very handy when you could see that, for instance, you used the tag “widget” half the time and “widgets” the other half — you could easily rename all of one of them to the other.  Vote for this enhancement here.
3. In the tag cloud, the class name for each entry is differentiated only by the tag id, not by the tag’s frequency of usage, which defeats any custom styling based on frequency.  Granted, there is a “wp_tag_cloud” filter that you could hook into and add your own class names, but that means writing a plugin rather than a style sheet.  Vote for this suggestion here.

Naturally, all of the above (including a more robust widget) could be achieved via a plugin, and maybe I’ll write one.  But first I’d like to see how soon the WordPress team might get around to implementing these suggestions.

Did you ever play the game “Simon Says” when you were a child?  One designated person tells the rest of the players to perform some act, but they are only supposed to comply if the command was prefaced by the words “Simon says”.  It can be entertaining, in a laughing-at-your-neighbor’s-frustration kind of way.  The game plays on the distinction between what sounds like a valid command versus what has been agreed to comprise the requirements for a valid command within the context of the game.

A computer would be very good at playing Simon says.  They’re notorious for following instructions to the letter, within the context of the current instruction set.  They always “do what you said, not what you meant.”  Humans, on the other hand, almost always try to bring knowledge from other contexts into the interpretation of any request — so context-specific requirements for success can be elusive.  I often wonder whether the development of human-like artificial intelligence could compromise a computer’s abilities in the same way.

When designing human interfaces, it’s good to keep this difference in mind.  When the user has to remember to do things in a specific, non-intuitive sequence or combination in order to achieve a desired result, I call that a Simon Says Rule.  Simon says, don’t put Simon Says Rules into your products.  This applies to a wide variety of human interface domains — all of them, in fact.

A good example of a Simon Says Rule in programming language design is PHP’s test for failure on strpos.  You have to remember that you can’t say in effect, “is the result true?”  You have to use the “Simon says, is it really, really equal to true?” operation (=== true) to avoid converting a zero result to false.  In my opinion, any language in which you can say the equivalent of ”if (strpos(…))” and get a false result when the string was found has created a Simon Says Rule on that statement.  No matter how consistent it is with the rest of the language, no matter how well-documented it may be, it will trip up programmers because it runs against their wider language experience.

But I won’t just pick on PHP.  C and C++ have the “strcmp” (and related) functions that return 0 for equality – and zero equates to FALSE when used in a condition.  Thus, ”if (strcmp(…))” has an exactly opposite meaning of its intuitive reading.  It was designed this way because a non-zero return value for inequality allows more information to be returned: -1 if the first string is “less than” the second, and 1 for the opposite case.  But in my experience, 99% of the time I use strcmp I don’t care which is lesser or greater, I’m only checking whether they match.  Perhaps this should have been made into two functions: one that returns TRUE for a match, and another that returns an indicator of the collational relationship between the two strings.

Some languages just add unnecessary syntactic elements so their compilers will have something to complain about if you forget to use them.  Synergy/DE used to require the command “xcall” or the prefix “%” when invoking a function.  That’s a Simon Says Rule, as evidenced by their ability to remove that requirement (in most cases) with their version 9 compiler.  The “$” prefixed on variable names in Perl and PHP (oops, I did it again) is another example — one which Ruby demonstrates to be dispensable in a scripting language.  That “$” benefits only the parser:  ”Simon says, this is a variable name.”

In end-user software, if the user can’t install and use your product out of the box, then you’ve imposed some Simon Says Rules on their experience.  The default configuration should be usable in all but a small minority of cases.  If the user does want or need to tweak the settings, it should be obvious how that is done — and the order of those operations should be unimportant (i.e., no Simon Says Rules there, either).

You could argue that usernames and passwords represent cases of Simon Says Rules.  We’re willing to put up with those for security’s sake.  But wouldn’t it be nice if our identity could be secured without resort to a technique as primitive as ancient warfare?  When we humans see someone we know, we instantly recall the degree to which we believe they can be trusted.  Perhaps one day computers will become capable of that level of recognition.  Maybe then they too will become impatient with Simon Says Rules.

In many ways I was fortunate as a child.  My family farmed, which presented opportunities for regular physical exertion from Spring to Autumn.  When I was 12, I took on a paper route that eventually covered over four miles, and I ran it on foot daily.   This made me a pretty good long distance runner in high school.  Even after years of not exercising in adulthood, all of that early training made it pretty easy to snap back into fitness when I finally resumed daily exercise.  From what I’ve seen, people who rarely exercise in their youth have a much harder time achieving fitness as adults.

When I look around at the lack of activity and obesity of many young people today, I can’t help but wonder how much they’re cheating themselves for the rest of their lives.  Fitness not only helps you live longer, it makes you feel better and even think better.  Your brain is part of your body, after all.

Well, some people are actually doing more about this problem than relating the “when I was a kid” stories and scolding youngsters for not getting out and running a few miles.

Karen Jashinsky (that’s her on the right) and Pam Goldman had a better idea:  make it “hip” (or whatever the word is these days) for kids to stay healthy.  They’ve created O2 MAX, clubs where teens can work out, socialize, study, and access the internet.  They have locations in California and Japan, and they’re planning to expand.  Here’s their story, which is pretty inspiring.

This Saturday (September 30th, 2007), O2 MAX and Assemblies In Motion (a non-profit dedicated to helping youth) will present a free event for teens and families at Beverly Hills High School called Energy Rocks ’07, which will feature food and live music along with many fitness activities.  That’s too far away for me to attend, but if you’re in the area and have teenagers you might want to check it out.

DISCLAIMER:  I am not affiliated in any way with O2 MAX, other than the fact that Karen and her team are readers of this blog (hi!) who asked for my unreimbursed advice on what they’re doing.  I’m happy to give them a little more Google action to support their efforts to promote teen fitness.

This morning as I was walking Halley and Harry, Halley took one of her frequent detours to sniff out the morning news, while Harry and I stood by patiently. My thoughts wandered (as they usually do, having no natural leader among them) and I didn’t notice that Halley began to squat down. When I finally looked in her direction, imagine my surprise to see Harry eating the Play Doh right as it was being squeezed out of the factory!

I grabbed him by the collar and scolded him, “You crazy canine! You don’t have to take everything Halley tells you to do literally, you know!”

Then I remembered a story my father once told me about a “safari” down in Florida to which he had taken some other family members (I had already grown up and moved out by then). He said that when they came upon a herd of elephants, he saw one elephant insert his trunk up to his eyeballs inside his companion. My Dad had opined that perhaps this elephant was selflessly helping his fellow-elephant with a case of constipation. Sure enough, the trunk re-emerged with a huge lump of, um, well you know what — which the pachyderm proctologist proceeded to devour with relish. (No, not pickle relish). The reactions of all observers were generally along the lines of “Ewwwww!”

Remembering this story led me to wonder how common this practice might be among various species of animals.

After some creative Googling, I found that this behavior is called “coprophagia” — an excellent word formed from Greek kopros (feces) + phagein (to eat). According to Wikipedia, natural selection has made the practice a regular feature of certain species, being beneficial to their survival in various ways. Elephants, for instance, are born with sterile intestines, and need to load up on bacteria from the guts of other elephants before they can digest their food properly.

The article also lists several possible reasons why dogs participate in the feces-fest. Some sources indicate that it’s a generally harmless behavior, if disgusting. I’d have to admit that it would be nice not to have to pick up after them — but it sure makes that lick to the face feel a lot less friendly.

Back in January, Kiltak suggested that I try out Brian’s Threaded Comments for WordPress.  This plugin allows users to attach their comment as a reply to another comment, and so indicates by nesting the comment inside a box which is inside the original comment’s box.  I took a look at it at the time, and when I saw that it provides its own version of comments.php (which is part of the theme) I shelved it.  I had made some minor mods to comments.php to enable the MyAvatars plugin, and I didn’t feel like merging.  So I decided to wait until I had more time to look into it.

Well, this weekend I finally uploaded it to my test site.  It worked great, but as expected the MyAvatars plugin was effectively disabled.  However, all it took was adding the call to MyAvatars() back inside the comment div (id=”div-comment-<?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>”) and the avatars were miraculously resurrected.

So, I uploaded and activated Brian’s Threaded Comments both here and on Chip’s Tips.  I find it particularly useful on posts that get a lot of comments, so you don’t have to “@whomever” when responding.  Let me know if you run into any glitches with it.

Last month, Tish and Mike awarded me the I <3 your blog award (where <3 is supposed to be a heart).  Then, before I could rush with all the alacrity of a three-toed sloth to respond, Tish slapped another award on me (I don’t know but think maybe she likes me).  This time it’s the Break Out Out Blogger award.

This award is supposed to honor bloggers who are just beginning to really get noticed.  Well, despite what Google Analytics may have to say about that, I do appreciate getting noticed by Tish.

As for the blogs that I “heart”, that award belongs to everyone on my blogroll.  And here they are:

Here's the OPML

/\ndy

Adam @ Dusk

Arjan`s World

blogstrappingBlogstrapping is Chad Perrin's development blog, focusing on Lump development, software design, and the philosophy of programming.

Burningbird

Camden Software Consulting

Chad Perrin: SOB

Charles Petzold

Chip's Quips

Chip's Tips for Developers

CNN Top Stories

Coding Horror

Commonsense Design

Congratulations, it's a blog!

Consultant Blog from ConsultantJournal.com

Dangerous Intersection

davidpthomas

dive into mark

FreeBSD Diary

From a Hill Outside Rome

Futurismic

Good Morning World

Gustavo Duarte

Homoiconic

Hunter of Genius : Max Kaizen

iBLOGthere4iM

JCooney.NET

Joy of Tech

Labnotes

Phil Factor's Phrenetic Phoughts

PragDave

Rands In Repose

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily)

Savage Chickens

secretGeek

Steve Friedl's Tech Tips

Stevey's Blog Rants

Sticky Comics

Stu Savory's Blog RSS feed.

Synergex CTO blog

Synergy/DE PSG blog

TechRepublic / Career Management

TechRepublic / IT Consultant

TechRepublic / IT Security

TechRepublic / Linux and Open SourceGet Jack'd: Open source in real time

TechRepublic / Programming and Development

TechRepublic / Tech Sanity Check

The Reinvigorated Programmer

The RSS Blog

The Written Weird

Think Security - Articles

Velcro City Tourist Board

Virtuous Code

Vtroom

William Mooney's blog

Wonderland or Not

Workbench

xkcd.com

[Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News

The above was produced from my live OPML using my latest OPML Browser widget for WordPress.

From the simple, complexity:  the Rule 110 cellular automaton, although comprising a very simple set of rules, has been proven to be capable of universal computation.  Thanks to Stu for suggesting this topic.  Stu asked me to do a complete post on it, which it merits — but I’m not sure that I’m up to the task.  Maybe later.

Stu discusses the linguistic problems faced by time travellers.

What not to say to your wife if you have two penises.

How not to dress for an interview.

How not to make a language programmer-friendly.

How to improve network security by not slapping down IM.

Now I understand the distinction between marketing and PR.

A new chapter in the history of SCO:  number eleven, specifically.

Ya might be a Fundamentalist Christian if… (thanks, Greg)

Emily thinks that God can’t count.

How long can you tread water?

Blogging India is back in blogness!  Welcome back, Mohan.

I corrected my correction to Jerome’s Keywords.  Thanks for getting me to take another look at it, Brian!

109 (decimal) is the smallest natural number that is palindromic in bases five and nine.

Kiltak pointed me to the Website Grader, from John Chow. Even if you’re not SEO-obsessed, this useful little tool can point out some things you may not have known about your site.  Check it out, it’s free!

Assaf provides a list of the do’s and don’t's  dos and don’ts  does and don’ts  things to embrace and avoid when striving for coolness by association.

Thank you, Dave Winer.  It’s about time.  Recently, Doc fixed his feed problems, too, by migrating to WordPress.  I’d like to say that they both finally listened to me, but I doubt they even heard me — and besides, I was probably just cheering on the inevitable.

Scott Adams notices an alignment between the characters of Dilbert and the pieces in the game of chess.  Coincidence, or something more?  If it’s a universal pattern, then what piece are you in your game?  Me, I’m board.  Must be my checkered past.

I’m not planning on cashing in anytime soon, but it could make me an easy $3.2 million.  Or so they say (thanks, TDavid).

Ah, the wonders of the old Reverse-Polish HP calculators!

Paul led me to 101 more reasons why I like being independent.  Of course, there’s always the down-side.

Ilker had me rolling out of my chair, beating the floor, and gasping for air twice with the Uncyclopedia and 13 unfortunate brand translations.

Thanks for the link-love, Doug, Arjan, and Brian!

Widget watch:  Babul Babul uses the tag cloud widget.

It turns out that crazy aunts can help you with more than just crawdads.

If you use WordPress (self-hosted or wordpress.com)…

…and you use Akismet (who doesn’t?)

…and you use Firefox as your browser (duh)

…then you really need to get to know your Auntie Spam.

This Greasemonkey script from engtech will save you lots of time scrolling through your Akismet spambox.  Or if you’re like me, now you will actually look through your spambox instead of just blindly deleting all.  How does Auntie Spam make this simpler?  Quoting engtech:

• Fetches all of your spam comments and displays them on one page.
• Sorts spammers by the amount of spam they’ve sent.
• Shows only the first line of spam, so less time is spent scrolling.
• Completely hide obvious spam.
• Automatically checks for a new version of itself every two weeks.

I was amazed at how quickly I could scan hundreds of spam comments.  They only showed up as about three dozen entries, because the same senders commented on so many different posts!  Now that’s the way to target spammers.  This will make it much easier to spot false positives.

Because it’s a Greasemonkey script, you only need to install it once per workstation to get it to work for all of your Akismet-defended blogs. 

Thanks for making my life easier, engtech!

Today I called and cancelled one of my land-lines.  It was only used for fax or modem.

I can’t remember the last time I needed to dial out on a regular phone-line modem — it’s been at least six years.  And now, if DSL went out, I’d just fire up EV-DO.

I don’t receive or send that many faxes, either.  99% of what I do get is pure spam.  This move will be my best spam filter yet.

Taking the manual phone-line switch that I used to switch between fax and modem, I moved the lines to switch between fax and phone.  If you need to send me a fax, you’ll have to call me first.  And then I’ll hang up and switch to fax.  Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but it will save me about $25 a month on my phone bill — and really you should be emailing me that document instead.

Next, I’m considering retiring my telegraph, my semaphore flags, and maybe even my smoke signal service.