Sam's World Of No

A couple of weeks ago, as I sat waiting for a work-funded eye test, I witnessed a serious violation of personal privacy. I barely know anything about diabetes, but I understand that it has a fairly serious bearing on eyes and the condition thereof, so it makes sense that the reception staff of this facility would need to transfer data regarding their diabetic patients over to some sort of centralised body.

Apparently, this transfer occurs over the telephone. The process involved the receptionist ringing said centralised body and reading every patient’s full name, full address, doctor’s details, date of birth and various relevant parts of their medical history. This happened for something like ten patients. That’s ten identities that could have been stolen by anybody who, like I, was just sitting there being forced to listen to people’s personal details.

Like most people, I bear witness to violations such as these the whole time, and I was barely surprised. The only reason those people still have their identities to themselves is cos I’m not a fraudster, and I didn’t take them down. Forget encryption, PINs, data protection law and general common sense - these people still enjoy fraud-free lives only because I chose not to steal from them. Comforting!

Co-incidentally, this occurred in the same week as the revelations started to fly in about the data protection issues that now seem to dominate the news. Of course, a lot of this is about selling newspapers - now the idea that the government’s data protection is distinctly colander-esque has taken hold, it’s gripping the media. But the real issue is that which we’ve known all along but tried to hide: data protection is currently flimsy, and identity theft is very, very easy.

It is so easy that the only explanation for any of us having not had our identity stolen is that the would-be thieves are busy stealing other identities. In other words: the only safety net we have at the moment is the limit in capacity in fraudsters. That’s it. Screw your ‘Internet security’ software, forget your stupid software firewall and ditch the shredder. If we all published our full names, security passwords, mother’s maiden names, places of birth, bank account numbers and date of births on our front doors identity theft would barely increase.

This may sound ridiculous, but in fact almost all other crimes are similarly without limit - there’s nothing to stop physical crimes from occurring, nothing to stop me hitting somebody in the street - apart from the fear of punishment or reprisal. The problem with technology is that people expect more of it - mostly because of promises made by people who work with it - and so the idea that we could prevent fraud with technology is rampant and erroneous.

In fact, technology makes all manner of fraud a lot easier. Think of the multitude of people who use plain-text storage for their passwords on their PC; and think of the long limit cookies that many websites set on login - only the other day I visited digg for the first time in months, to find myself instantly logged in. Crazy cookie durations. Gtalk means that I am pretty much permanently logged in to all of my Google applications, and Firefox’s immortal sessions mean that chances are I’ll be logged into a whole manner of sites most of the time as well. Security is compromised in the name of convenience.

So the plugged-in age in which we live makes fraud easy and puts the ball in the fraudsters’ court; we give them as much opportunity to defraud us as they can cope with. Is this, simply put, the price we have to pay for convenience, easy access and progress?

I’d say no, and I’d say that biometrics would win the day. But that’s hardly the lesson that we have learnt from history.

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Google and the like have lulled us into a false sense of security about the word ‘Beta’. It’s hardly worth listing examples so I’ll just remind you of one: Gmail is still in beta, three and a half years later. Everyone I know uses gmail. It’s like saying that television is still in beta.

But of course, ‘beta’ is very much part of Web 2.0 marketing and, on the other hand, pragmatism. Release early, learn quickly, and realise that users are - generally - the best judge of products. They’re certainly the best barometer of their success.

Unfortunately, when it comes to BBC iPlayer, beta means what it meant 10 years ago - ‘not finished. At all’. And to call it a public beta is ludicrous. You need support for an operating system other than XP? Go fish. How about you prefer not to use IE to access stuff? Go fish. How about you don’t really feel the love for Windows Media Player? Go fish. Or maybe you think that the days of broadcasting rights, where the money is in the advertising/product placement etc, rather than the content of the show, are over and that DRM is little more than a throwback to the now-antiquated idea that the money is in the copyright?

Yeh. Fishing time for you. ‘Public beta’ my foot.

I presume, although I cannot say as I have no information either way, that my biggest annoyance with iPlayer also stems from this ridiculous corporate obsession with DRM. This is when programmes, some weeks, are not available for no apparent reason. Pretty much all I want to watch is Later with Jools, Have I Got News For you, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Everything else is on at a convenient time so I watch them live. These three programmes, however, I had got into the habit of missing (even if I was around and near to a TV) on the basis that I could download them on iPlayer, as I had been doing for several weeks.

Therein lies the rub. These programmes and - judging from the message boards, others - are not always available. With no explanation, stuff just isn’t there. First I thought that maybe the search facility was broken, so I trawled through the annoying navigation to confirm that these shows were, indeed, not there.

No wonder iPlayer doesn’t allow you (as far as I can tell) to subscribe to a programme and have it download automatically every week. This would instantly break when, with no explanation, programmes disappeared.

So please, dear BBC, ditch your obsession with DRM and please tell us why stuff is disappearing. This will mean that you can keep people happy and move onto non-Microsoft products. Oh and dear reader, take a look at a different view of this subject. Tell me that programmes dissapearing isn’t a consequence of DRM and its underlying reasoning, and I’ll blame something else - next in line on the blame train is the stupid iPlayer interface, and in particular the context menu. Seriously guys, that menu belongs on a serial generator. I half expect to have homemade metal thrashing out of my speakers every time I open it.

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To me, Firefox is a pretty near perfect piece of software; in fact I only have 2 major gripes with it. Firstly, you can only ever open one session at a time. Sure you can open multiple instances, multiple tabs, whatever, but these instances will always share cookies, sessions and ghost stories. There’s no way, yet, of sorting this out, which makes development a pain. Want to be logged into the same website as two different users? Time to boot up Internet Explorer.

Gripe number 2 is Firefox’s memory usage. Firefox looks at your system’s memory like Ronnie Biggs looks at a bag of money, and after only a couple of hours, it’s not uncommon to find that everyone’s favourite browser is using over a 100 meg of memory. If you leave your pc on overnight, as I did last night to get some downloads finished, and happen to leave Firefox open, doing nothing, expect to find it using up to 300 meg in the morning. Frankly, it sucks, and I seem to spend my life opening and closing browser windows just to keep them functional.

To put this problem in context, I feel it should be pointed out that internet browsers are usually the most demanding software packages running on my PC. Google Desktop is mostly tame and under control nowadays. Explorer (as in the Windows kernel) uses less than half your average, brand new, browser instance. MSN Messenger uses only just less memory than the kernel (bloatware tastic), and as I ran the tests below, I had Excel open to collate the results. Even this hefty program was using less than my web browsers, by some margin. I say this to emphasise that my system is hardly under stress; yet still rendering web pages with Firefox seems to be problem.

I’m not convinced that upgrading to version 2.0.0.9 has helped matters either; memory usage now seems worse than ever. This morning I decided to run some tests, side by side with Internet Explorer 7 (version 7.0.5730.11), over what I considered to be a fair sample of sites. I visit them all regularly and have chosen them because of their different technologies and function. For each test, new instances of IE and FF were opened, the relevant page was accessed (including any logins) and then the counter was started. I recorded the memory usage (in KB) every 2 minutes for 10 minutes for both browsers. Here are the results:

BBC News

BBC News is my homepage, and was 10 years old this week. It features biased and smug news reporting, a penchant for spelling, grammatical and factual errors (especially at the weekend) and some really quite terrible JavaScript red box things in the middle. Once it is loaded (88 requests later), it makes no further http requests. This doesn’t stop Firefox from continuing to eat up memory, however:

Ouch. As you can see, Firefox’s memory usage over the course of the test increases by 5096KB. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has a pretty stable consumption, and actually decreases over the time period. Bear in mind that once this page is loaded, there is nothing else to do. Exactly what does Firefox need another 5 meg of memory for, then?

Facebook Homepage

Weighing in at 105 requests for the initial load, the internal Facebook homepage (the one where you see people you barely know leaving 10 groups at at time and adverts for Experian’s credit reporting), is a beast - especially when you remember that it is little more than text that is displayed. No matter for Firefox, though - it will use memory whatever the situation:

Again, IE is stable. FF is poor. What’s more, during this test FF was also constantly using between 1 and 6% CPU - presumably because of the flash-based advert served on the left hand side. IE rendered a similar advert but used 0% CPU.

Gmail

I fully expected Gmail to really humiliate Firefox. It does almost 2 requests a minute; meaning that at minute zero it had completed 65 requests, and by minute 10 that number was 82. After examining the size of these requests, however, I could see that the files returned were often around the 26b mark. This is of course the server checking for new mail and sending back a ‘no new mail’ message (well, an empty JSON array or something similar). 2 requests a minute, for ten minutes, that return tiny files? That’s nothing that Firefox can’t handle, providing you can grease its palm with another 5 mb of memory:

It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter what website you look at; Firefox always wants more. IE is fine, and will sit there for days without bringing your system to a halt.

Martiny

I decided to take a different tack, and to try a much simpler site. Martiny is the homepage of Kristen Mason, someone I used to occasionally email and chat with on forums. Her site is sparse and, well, pretty random to someone who doesn’t know about, well, whatever it is she is talking about. With only one request to load the page, and with no images, CSS, JavaScript, our browsers had a pretty easy time of it:

Apparently both FF and IE needed an extra 200kb of memory to continue rendering this page for 10 minutes. Perhaps they were being cocky and booted up solitaire in the background for a quick game, thus using the remaining memory. Who knows.

Sam’s World Of No

It seemed only fair to test my own site as well. I’m a simple guy, I like simple pleasures and 20 requests is enough for my site to display a blog, some images I hacked together in not very many minutes, and to integrate with a couple of external services. Still, Firefox demands 400k to keep the lights on for 10 minutes.

Sucks to be me.

I am not saying that IE is better than FF. Patently, it isn’t. Even without firebug, which is the Firefox killer app, Mozilla’s browser is nicer, more user-friendly and generally easier to use than IE. I am prepared to give Firefox more memory as it is better and does more. What annoys me is the increasing memory usage, which isn’t immediately explainable. I’m not a win32 programmer, but if IE doesn’t need more memory, why does Firefox?

The only conclusions I can draw is that, for some reason, Firefox is using up memory. Over the next few days I will be attempting various suggested remedies (including disabling the Google Firefox Toolbar, ironically enough) and I’ll try to keep you posted. If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know.

(Writing this post took 30 minutes or so. Firefox is now using 117,060k of memory and about 5% CPU. Almost constantly. Ouch.)

(I’ve now proofed for 5 minutes. Firefox is now up to 134,024k.)

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It was widely reported today that the population of the UK is projected to 65m by 2016, an increase of 4.4 million from the current level. 2.3m of this is categorised ‘natural increase’, whereas 2.1m is attributed to the expected rate of migration. Let’s leave for a second that migration is a natural part of the population rate. Let’s also leave aside the fact that every news outlet’s concentration on migration was spurred by the National Statistics Office’s emphasis on the point. And let’s also, foolishly, leave aside the fact that there is a reason that people are trying to come into the UK. It isn’t the weather.

Let’s leave all of those things aside and look at pretty pictures. Now, in my view, this is primarily a story about statistics. So the Telegraph’s choice of the National Statistics Office’s own graph on the subject seems reasonable. But there are, obviously, wider ramifications. Find a property obviously had a specific slant on the effect, talking about the need for more housing, and they too have chosen a picture of lots of people in the street. Seems reasonable.

Politics.co.uk agrees, choosing a picture of a busy street in their coverage, with the caption, “Concerns raised over how the increase in population growth will effect public services”. Of course, the usual slant on the whole migration issue is the perceived effect it will have on infrastructure, so in some ways the BBC’s choice of image, which furthers the theme of this particular problem, is understandable. Their article features a stock picture of a busy commuter train; it was on the front page of the site for most of the day.

I think the underlying and specific message that choosing this headline image for the story is clear - our public transport system is at breaking point, and all these immigrants are going to just make it worse. Does anybody else feel that perhaps the person sourcing that image had a rough time on the tube this morning?

In my view, the BBC has in this instance crossed the line between telling the news and shaping the news.

The BBC are a credit to the national and international media, and are trying hard to push boundaries with their online presence. They are deeply postmodern in that you can read introspective blogs, such as The Editors, and after the Hutton report they are allegedly committed to being answerable and being open about the way they work. They are better than most, for sure, and they are leaders in this area where other, commercial, entities are allowed to sit on their hands. Oh, and they have a reputation for simply sucking at their choice of pictures for articles.

My academic background is in history. 20 years ago, the idea that historians, as well as journalists, would not adopt an objective and abstracted view of their material was ridiculous; it was their job to be impartial. Nowadays, we mostly accept that all façades of objectivity are conceited and create inaccurate reporting of the facts, so we admit our own subjective influences, and for many historians, these are often the more interesting parts of the stories we tell. Recognising your own subjectivity, however, is a very different thing to becoming objective - and acknowledging that you have influences that are individual and uncontrollable does not mean that you are forgiven for when your reporting is slanted and biased.

This bias isn’t limited to choice of vocabulary or choice of subject matter - choice of image is just a powerful a tool for shaping the theme of your story, and this is a story that has a serious emphasis on the migration issue. In fact, little else is mentioned. Both government ministers and right-wing pressure groups are allowed to give their point of view, as are some of the people from the other side of the debate. The image, though, takes it a step further. It makes us all think back to our morning commute - the busy roads, the packed trains and the smelly buses. It says in a message clearer than words and stronger than bold text that immigrants are going to make your life worse.

Apparently.

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What I like about Zeldman is his can-do attitude. Earlier this year, a set of rants and comments about the demographic of people engaged in web design, and particularly the male/female debate, was marked by its lack of informed data. So Zeldman and various other happy cog people, through their A List Apart/An Event Apart vehicles, commissioned a full survey to try and plug the gap. It was published on the 24th of April this year, and open to responses for almost a month. There were 32,831 respondents, and the full report is available online, along with the data breakdowns.

I took the survey and have had a good old read of the report. I am sure that many of us will have something to say about this in the days to come. Here are some opening points after my first glance at the report; these are the ones I feel most strongly about or are, in my view, the most important findings in terms of the project’s scope and the wider web.

1. Exactly what is “Web Design”? I am certain that a lot of thought was put into the name of this survey, but I am not sure that “Design” is the right angle. Happy Cog and Zeldman are, primarily, a front-end/look and feel shop, so I can see why they chose it. For people like myself, who work full time on the web, create interfaces, build systems and create architectures, but would never consider themselves to be a ‘designer’, it’s just an inappropriate title. But then again, all the other terms are loaded too. The only one that isn’t, “Web Worker”, doesn’t sound like anything you would be introducing yourself as any time soon.
2. There is blogging well and there is blogging badly. The survey finds that roughly three quarters of all web professionals keep a blog or personal site. This proportion stands, broadly speaking, for all salary groupings, job title groupings and age groupings. The title of this section of the report states that “Ownership of a personal website has little or no bearing on success”, which is true. Unfortunately, no account was taken of the amount of traffic/popularity/PR/”importance” or other value factors related to these sites. It would have been interesting to see what proportions of these sites are regularly updated, which are regularly read, and which are ranked as ‘important’ by search engines and social bookmarking systems. I think that it is fair to say that the people who earn more and are higher on the career ladder would also have more popular blogs; some data about this effect and its causality would have been good. As it is, it’s a little bit like saying everyone who works on the web has a website. It’s a bit like getting data that says that racing drivers have cars.
3. There is no widespread practical education for web development. We have this rant at least once a week at work, where we wish we could employ more people (we employ people as fast as they can apply), and more people who had been academically educated in the field. Computer Science is a great degree but courses rarely provide practical, real-world training on the web, and certainly doesn’t formally educate in the soft skills that web development shops need. With marketing, it’s even worse. We long for people who have been formally trained in product management for the web, and wouldn’t need teaching even the most basic information about syntax, how to write for the web and how to manage product and brand identity. I guess this skill is not admired by very small e-commerce ventures, is mostly covered by senior management or customer service in medium ventures, and is utilised by highly-corporate executives and leading marketing experts in larger ventures. So it is not surprising to find that most web professionals did not take a degree which they themselves do not consider to be relevant to their current work. Whether this takes into account soft skills (for me, problem-solving, communication and analytical skills were large and relevant parts of an education in history), cannot be determined. Interestingly, people like project managers, whom I would have thought would be those who are specifically trained in ‘management’ are amongst those who see their education as the least relevant. Perhaps abstract management training just doesn’t provide them with the technical skills they need. Or perhaps technical training didn’t provide them with the management skills they need.
4. “Increased educational attainment generally appears to correspond to increased earning in our sample”. Yes, and in every other survey ever completed. Across the board. But…
5. …“As income level increases, the percentages of respondents for whom their college studies were relevant decreases”. This one is interesting. As is pointed out, salary tends to increase with age, and the time since graduating tends to increase with age, and the relevancy of education decreases over time. Most web development professionals will move into a more managerial role as they progress through their career; this will necessarily involve more people skills and fewer technical skills. In addition, it seems to be that the industry is still, broadly speaking, biased against people with specialist technology degrees. I argue again that this is because these degrees do not have enough web focus to make their applicants suitable for this kind of work. Perhaps this because other types of programming jobs pay more, I don’t know.
6. The proportion of women is just low. Sometimes there really are statistical realities, and the women argument appears to be one. 1 in 10 workers in this profession are women. This is interesting because it addresses the debate that sparked the survey in the first place. They occupy the mid-salary ranges, not the high-salary ranges that high profile people would be expected to occupy, and they generally are happy with their salaries. I hate to say it, but it looks like there really aren’t that many women to do things like speak at conferences and write books. The problem that needs addressing is that there aren’t enough women, not that they don’t get invited to conferences because we are scared of them. I mean, we are scared of them, but we’d get over it if they were around.
7. Nobody wants to be a webmaster. It’s not a cool title, it’s not the sort of title that a dedicated and going-places web shop would use. Frankly, I think it’s pejorative. And in terms of job satisfaction, the people that hold this title are the least satisfied. Of course, the different between their satisfaction and that of the most satisfied category, “Project Manager” is only 10 and a bit percent, but still. Let’s get rid of this title once for all and give the sometimes extremely talented people that hold something decent to put on their business cards. While we’re at it, let’s get them some business cards. We’ve been promising them for ages. The design guys were supposed to be sorting it. I don’t know.
8. We need to learn to write. Possibly so that we can communicate better, possibly so we can improve the amount of success a blog gives you (see point 2), or possibly because of all the under-rated web skills, writing is still the largest. Almost 50% of respondents thought this was a major skill gap for them; I predict that this number will, slowly, change as the importance of the word on the web is finally drilled into skulls everywhere.
9. Let’s all go on holiday. Or a vacation. Just exactly where are we going? It isn’t mentioned in the report (that I could see), but the questions about ‘holiday’ vs. ‘vacation’ were nonsensical to non-US English speakers. I’m a British English speaker, and I barely understood the distinction. Europe has ‘public holidays’ and ‘bank holidays’, guys. Make this distinction clearer next time and you’ll get some meaningful data.
10. Where is the section that tells us who earns more? Finding out your friends’ or co-workers’ salaries is not always a fun game - kind of like when an inappropriate animal documentary comes on when you’re visiting your grandparents - but it would be nice to know which professions are making the money. This is such a glaring omission that I’m sure I must have missed it. Granted, I could correlate the data myself as it has been provided, but why would a couple of stats experts miss this obvious point?

Of course, what will be most interesting about this will be the charting of data over time. Without patterns, controls and averaging, we can’t see what’s actually going on and we can’t spot blips. I would also like to know the average time of year for pay rises and job changes - does the timing of the survey make a big difference?

That said, it’s a terrific start and good on people for getting it done and laying important foundations. Now lets build on them, and get the diversity of our industry up to a respectable level. Because it will help us all in the long run. Seriously.

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