Yes, it helps to be a H2G2 fan to get the title.

Things have been a bit quiet here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m again facing the One Decision that every middle-aged professional comes across at least once in their lifetime.

Basically, it boils down to:

• Keep doing the sort of things I do in the way I usually do them and carry the label of “one man show” forever, relinquishing my chances of making meaningful decisions inside the company.
• Get completely and utterly out of technology altogether and do management stuff. You know, pointy-haired boss stuff.

In my case, the utterly irritating and frustrating aspect is that despite my having joined the company to be in Marketing, I kept getting involved in pretty much everything we’ve done since 1999 in both technical and product development/design aspects. Which means I’m (perhaps irrevocably) seen as being too tied to technology (or technology strategy) to be bumped “up”¹.

Which, I’m told, is a compliment², since upper management sees me as having “valuable insights” and want me available for the next big thing.

But there’s a problem – I’m not that sure I want to be in “the next big thing”. I get a “next big thing” every six months to a year, and I would really like to do something longer for a change. Preferably something that allowed me to flex other mental muscles.

After all, the reason I took a management course four years ago was that I wanted to do something different – and yet, the deluge of new, trendy tech like IMS soon put a stop to that.

But now that I had spent a year and a half involved in a bunch of fixed data initiatives on the Marketing side (despite the odd “hey, you’re the only one that gets this” technically-minded project), I was looking forward to some continuity. Maybe some more formal responsibility (instead of the recurring feeling I’m herding cats across several concurrent project teams), a bit more control over my time, and maybe, just maybe, felling a little less like Dilbert.

And bang, there comes another “big thing”. And I’ve been sorely pissed off during most of the past couple of weeks, wondering what to do.

Not that I’m complaining (much) about what I’m doing now³. In a way, it’s rewarding. People know me, they know they can rely on me, and they know they can ask for help pretty much anytime (although it does get in the way), and I do get to do amazingly interesting stuff.

The thing is, what I’m doing now and what I wish I could do (let alone how I wanted to do it) has pretty much zero to do with “the next big thing” I have been invited to do, about which I also happen to have some deep (and thoroughly mixed) feelings⁴.

Besides, I’m having a hard time with loss of control here. The absolutely worse thing anyone can do to me is to limit my ability to shape the people and environment I’m working in (which requires me to have more than the usual measure of control over things), and I’m not exactly happy right now.

Still, even though I keep wondering if there is a company (short, say, of Google and some portions of Microsoft) that “gets” the transition from worker bee to management, I can’t say I’m thoroughly unhappy.

Just very, very annoyed at the way I keep getting into “the next big thing” and not allowed to sharpen other skills. Or, at least, to make different mistakes.

Oh well.

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¹ Up here being a relative term. I’m told that my net worth to the company has been an embarrassment to some of the people who were formally my superiors in the past, even though I bring home less than old schoolmates who had the stamina to stay on the consulting field.

² It’s like the Peter Principle in reverse, actually. Although I prefer to use the Dilbert principle myself.

³ Actually, there is one particular thing I’m doing that was foisted upon me due to my ISP background that I personally consider a complete and utter waste of my time and abilities (in truth, a loathsome quagmire), and which I have been trying to do the best I can while trying to get rid of it as soon as I can, and which I keep telling people (in a decreasingly jocular manner) will be the reason I leave Marketing and go back to Engineering. But I can’t tell you what it is..

⁴ My first impression was that I’m supposed to jump off the plane blind, carrying a needle, some thread, and a bunch of hideously expensive silk sheets to ensure I land on my feet (given enough effort and creativity, of course). The second (once I realized the similarities to a bunch of things I’ve been doing repeatedly over the past few years) was very much like what the bowl of petunias felt, and that’s what stuck with me.

I’ve been on the ‘net for a good while (even before it was called the Internet), so I’m pretty used to technology taking a while to sort itself out.

Nevertheless, considering all the hoopla regarding (for instance) Firefox 3, whatever-is-the-working-version of IE and Safari (or should I say Webbed Squirrel Fish Kit?), I am astounded that it’s 2008 already and nobody has fixed (and by “fixed” I mean really fixed) these five things:

File uploads

The utterly idiotic, asinine and counter-intuitive file browse field/button combo ought to have been replaced by a multi-file drop target years ago.

We have the technology to do that in every major operating system, and yet people keep having to reinvent the wheel and use funky Flash uploaders and whatnot.

Guess what, none of those are the right solution. The right solution, as far as I’m concerned, would have been for the HTML5 committee to get off their collective arse and deliver something better than RFC 1867 (dated 1995) now instead of doing stupid things like writing a specific codec name in their spec, whether it’s a free one or not (yes, Ogg zealots, I’m looking at you).

And yes, I know about this. It isn’t done yet. And it’s only half a solution.

WYSIWYG editing

This, too, ought to be standard by now, and yet there are a bazillion workarounds – none of which can cope with inserted images or cut & paste from desktop applications properly.

All I ever wanted was a textarea replacement that POSTed a MIME multipart with the images and text I insert, and by the looks of current efforts, I’m going to be lucky if I get rich text with re-usable CSS styles, let alone something that can deal with images.

Again, this should be an integral part of every browser. I am utterly fed up with ActiveX editors for corporate intranet apps (which handle cut & paste from Office beautifully, but generate hideous markup and opaque data blobs) and dinky JavaScript editors that sort of do WYSIWYG HTML until you try to add an image or paste something from a desktop app – at which point they become slightly more useless than your typical X application circa 1991 (i.e., cut & paste sucks).

Saving entire web pages

Everyone does it differently: some save MIME multiparts (as they should), others sets of files inside a folder, and others serialize their internal browser data structures.

Shock, horror, Microsoft is the one doing it properly!

Yes, you read that right – .mht files are (gasp) more standards compliant than Safari .webarchive files.

If you have a Mac, go see for yourself – I’ve mentioned before that there is code to convert between .mht and .webarchive files, by dint of unpacking the MIME structure and loading it into a browser context.

I fervently hope that one of these days my hard disk will stop getting littered with folders entitled random page_files every time I save a page in, say, Firefox (that stalwart of web standards).

Proper vector graphics

I don’t want to care about VML, SVG or canvas – I want something that just works across browsers, and wish people would stop faffing about with plugins and reinventing the wheel.

And yes, I know that some JavaScript libraries are trying to fix that. I think I’ve listed them all in this Wiki, and despite the technical brilliance of most of them, they’re all doing the wrong thing – fixing something that ought to be common across browsers.

It kind of reminds me of the GIF wars, except that the SVG spec has become a political quagmire rather than a troll patent gate.

Standard “widget” definitions

Again, I couldn’t care less about Dashboard, Opera widgets, Widsets or the current hysteria surrounding desktop widget engines, personalized start pages, and (of all things) postage-stamp-sized widgets for mobile phones.

And yes, “widgets” have been around for a while. Even before Microsoft tried to get Digital Dashboard (and its quaintly named “nuggets”) off the ground¹, there were a bunch of people trying to build HTML snippets with a life of their own.

And we’ve been at it on the desktop since Konfabulator (which was the first serious cross-platform effort), and it hasn’t really taken off or turned into a business model for anyone.

I just want it all to stop. It’s pointless, it’s a waste of time and energy, and it doesn’t improve any kind of experience for anybody. If we must have widgets, then please let’s have some kind of agreement as to exactly how sucky they will be regardless of platform.

Someone needs to sit down and define a DTD (or equivalent) for an HTML widget and exactly what it’s DOM can (and can’t, ever) do and pick a decent packaging and deployment method to end all this misery of umpteen incompatible widget platforms, pronto.

And that’s it, really.

Oh, and I’d just like to take this opportunity to say, to all of you out there raving and foaming at the mouth about web applications and storage APIs that I don’t want browser-side storage. That means turning the browser into a fat stateful client, and down that path lies madness – and the negation of what brought the browser into being in the first place.

But I guess that some people will push on regardless, since they clearly cannot remember the past.

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¹ I’m not going to mention the unmitigated disaster that Active Desktop turned out to be and focus on ways to define widgets, OK?

As if getting little sleep wasn’t enough, I’m having this weird feeling of deja vu that has, like, totally messed with my weekend. That and the heat, which makes it utterly impossible to use my MacBook on my lap.

And people wonder why I keep tracking news of smaller, lighter, and much cooler solid-state laptops…

Anyway, more news to come soon.

Yep. Yet another reason for sticking to the PS3 instead of the Apple TV (which, by the way, is in dire need of a hardware upgrade). Still, I expect this to be ruined by regional distribution stupidity nonetheless.

In a few years, my kid is going to ask me how we made do with only a handful of TLDs, and I’m going to say “well, back then people weren’t running out of things to monetize”.

So, Firefox 3 popped up, got downloaded less times a day than the Flash plugin (version 9 is being downloaded at the rate of 12 million a day, well over the 8.3 million the Mozilla Foundation is harping on about), completely botched Flash support for a lot of people¹, managed score some idiotic “0-day” security issue and (more to the point) survived exactly three minutes on my Mac.

Why? Because, like I pointed out earlier, the “awesome bar” is annoying as hell, and it feels way slower than Camino on my MacBook (besides taking up twice² the RAM).

I will eventually get back to it on the Mac when it reaches 3.1 or something, but what amazed me throughout the whole week was the hype wave. It’s just a browser, people. Get a grip.

Still, the portable edition is now my secondary browser on my XP laptop (after Safari), since it doesn’t break anything and I was able to install Firebug and AdBlock Plus on it with a few clicks³. Plus I still prefer the official del.icio.us add-on to the built-in Firefox bookmark manager.

And that is about as much new technology as I was able to muster this week. I’ve noticed that OpenSUSE 11.0 is out and look forward to the day when I can actually find time to try it (or, most likely, version 12), but there were other things to do.

Why would I ever want an Apple TV?

Since moving back in, and since the living room is still a war zone, my ability to watch “regular” TV has been pretty much nil. And there are now around a bazillion photos of the little pink devil (and a couple of short videos) to show to people, so it was about time to put my PS3 to use as a home media center in earnest.

After manhandling a plasma TV into the bedroom and festooning it with a wire hanger to act as an indoor antenna in the best MacGyver tradition (since we never made plans to have a TV set in the bedroom and, as such, there is no RF plug there), I hooked up the PS3 to it via HDMI and, thanks to MediaLink and the PS3’s Wi-Fi connection, was soon streaming music, video podcasts (including the Apple keynote) and most of my photos down to it.

In the old days I’d had tried to get some random UPnP daemon running on a Linux box and devise all these little rules to manage media, but now I just leave iPhoto and iTunes running on the Mac mini I squirreled away in the former broom closet and VNC over to add stuff – there is, after all, only so much time in the day⁴.

While it is true that the PS3’s UI is not immediately intuitive and that the thing is physically imposing, I’ve found that I can live with both by dint of compensating by downloading PS3 game demos and hiding the box behind the plasma (yay for Bluetooth remotes).

The Sony store is slow, pokey and so far behind the iTunes experience that it is almost hilarious, but I find it a lot more interesting because (hint hint) it is actually available for me – i.e., I can get at pretty much everything else any other PS3 owner on the planet can download or buy, and it is a pity that Sony doesn’t seem to care much about TV series or movies – which would be an excellent reason for me to buy an Apple TV, if there was any decent video content on the Portuguese store⁵.

Still, one manages. The thing plays DVDs and DivX files wonderfully, so I can actually watch stuff I’m interested in – although, with the kid interrupting us every half hour or so, it took something like a week to watch the Bee Movie DVD, and I was going crazy with all the junk they stuff in before the DVD menus these days.

I guess I’ll just have to rip all my DVDs to H.264 and drop them into the mini – unless, of course, Apple suddenly decides to start selling movies and TV series on the Portuguese store.

Hmmm… Nah.

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¹ Go Linux!

² For the nitpickers, the score was 310MB for Safari (four windows, thirteen tabs), 35MB for Camino (two windows, six tabs) and 72MB for Firefox (one window, three tabs).

³ For those of you complaining that Firebug doesn’t work, yes it does. Just go over to the add-ons page and get it there instead of relying on automatic upgrades. So much for consistency, right?

⁴ Older and wiser, I guess. Managing photos still requires some planning, but I expect to sort that out and post about the experience sometime soon.

⁵ And yes, I’ve written before about the Beverly Hills: 90210 workaround. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather have things done right.