March 26th, 2008
6:48 pm
Geek
In the weeks leading up to the launch of this blog, I had a single colour in mind – a particular shade of green that proved surprisingly fickle to catch and indeed, I was envious of those who had found it.
In case you were wondering, here is that colour – 
Doesn’t look that important does it? But if you are interested in web design, that colour is a holy grail – for it means a page you created is Valid XHTML. And yes, I have reached this hallowed place as well. I flaunt this badge of honour elsewhere on this blog. Several factors combined to make this journey a remarkable difficult one, but let’s start at the beginning.
When I finally decided that I needed to radically overhaul my blog, I realized I needed something to hold as a standard for each design decision – what would be the basis by which I would add or remove content? The easiest answer was Web Standards – the promise of a website that would remain usable and accessible in the years to come. That decision was quickly ratified when I realized my old blog had a staggering 91 errors – and they started right from the meta-information.
I read the books, subscribed to the right blogs and was a believer – but almost right away, the first problem appeared.
Strict XHTML is well too strict.
When you install WordPress for the first time, the default look of your blog is based on a theme called “Kubrick“. Typically your next step is to get on the WordPress Theme Browser and find a replacement because quite frankly Kubrick is boring. Once you find a theme that catches your eye, you activate a theme and everything is fine and dandy. Well not quite – you see, most themes approved by WordPress start with this line:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
See that bit that says XHTML 1.0 Strict? – that’s sort of the Greek God of Web Standards for HTML: pure and perfect. Which as it turns it out is not so great for us clumsy mortals. XHTML 1.0 Strict frowns on the use of presentational elements – for example, the fact that I used italics for the words presentational elements is frowned upon under XHTML 1.0 Strict. XHTML 1.0 Strict essentially implies that the document contains only content – the rules on how that content is to be presented are controlled through the use of CSS. So the sentence at the beginning of this part of the post?
Strict XHTML is well too strict
The HTML for that sentence goes like this:
<strong>Strict XHTML is well <u>too</u> strict.</strong>
The fact that I underlined the word “too” makes it an invalid XHTML 1.0 Strict document. Don’t believe me? Look at these two pages – Page 1, Page 2. They look identical, but Page 1 fails validation – You can verify that statement by clicking on the link that says “Check Validity” at the end of each page. So, it’s very likely that if you use a lot of formatting in your blog posts and are using a off the shelf theme, your site would fail validation.
Am I saying that XHTML 1.0 Strict doesn’t make sense? No – if a website has a lot of static content, or content that’s served progamatically, XHTML 1.0 Strict is the way to go.
For content that’s written by humans though, XHTML 1.0 Transitional makes a lot more sense. It’s a lot more forgiving that XHTML 1.0 Strict, but it still keeps you on the high road when it comes to web standards. It worries me therefore, that XHTML 1.0 Transitional is seen as a deprecated standard – future standards such as XHTML 2.0 and HTML5 are even more unforgiving. Is allowing 5 formatting elements and about 20 attributes to remain such a significant issue?
Just because it looks right, doesn’t mean it is right
Remember those two pages I had linked above as examples for the XHTML 1.0 Strict discussion and then said “They look identical, but one isn’t valid”? No? Well now that I’ve told you, you should 
. This really was the biggest source of frustration for me when trying to get my site validated – HTML as a language, and the programs that “compile it” (browsers, search engine robots etc.) are far too forgiving when it comes to errors.
Let’s look at some more example pages – shall we? This page shows a heading, then a list of items using the following bit of HTML:
1: <ol>
2: <li>
3: <h3>The Gnome Plan</h3>
4: <ul>
5: <li>Collect Underpants</li>
6: <li>???</li>
7: <li>Profit!</li>
8: </ul>
9: </li>
10: </ol>
A quick breakdown – there’s a numbered list (the ol-li code at the top), Inside this numbered list, there’s a bulleted list (the ul-li code starting from line 4). Happily, this page is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Now let’s look at another chunk of code:
1: <ol>
2: <li>
3: <h3>The Gnome Plan</h3>
4: <ul>
5: <li>Collect Underpants</li>
6: <li>???</li>
7: <li>Profit!</li>
8: </ul>
9: </ol>
This code fails validation – catastrophically. Try validating this page for proof.
Now if you are a web designer or HTML programmer, you already know why the second chunk of code is crap. But for those of you who aren’t (like me) here’s the answer – Code Example #2 is missing the li from Code Example #1 at line 9.
But what if this example was nested inside HTML that was 200 lines long, how easy do you think it would be to spot? Even more frustrating, unlike regular programming code this bit of code would compile (display) properly! It’s enough to drive non programmers like me to drink ( as I did many times 
)
The reason for this is because browsers follow Postel’s Law, which states in part “Be Liberal in what you accept from others”. As Mark Pilgrim so beautifully demonstrates in his “Thought Experiment“, the alternative is far worse. But what if you wanted your browser to be unforgiving and point out every error you make? After all Postel’s Law also states “Be conservative in what you do”. Sadly, there is no easy way to achieve this. As John Gruber points out in this article, snippets of HTML cannot be validated as HTML is a document format (emphasis Gruber’s). In other words, you would have to build a complete document with all the nessecary header and DOCTYPE information and only then could you determine whether you have valid markup in your pages.
Browsers can give you more immediate feedback though – you see, most CMS software (and other packages) serve your document as “text/html” document and this tells the browser “Hey! Go easy on this page – it’s probably not semantic”. If on the other hand you could get your software to serve those same pages as “xhtml+xml”, any error would result in the Yellow screen of death. Unfortunately, making that change is non-trivial and so we must rely frustratingly, on writing complete pages and then hoping it works.
Getting CSS right is easy, so why do so many websites get it wrong?
The next part of Web Standards that I had to worry about was CSS Validation. This as it turns out, is relatively trivial to accomplish. CSS validation really is more about grammar than anything else – close your brackets, don’t forget the semi-colons and you’re done. Of course, one could argue that HTML validation is also grammar – closing your tags and so on. The difference is – most of the HTML content that’s generated is dynamic and constantly changing, CSS on the other hand is almost carved in stone.
That’s understandable – after all, in the world of web standards, CSS alone defines what your site looks like and how often do you change that? Sure you make tweaks here and there, but radical overhauls are few and far between. So it’s surprising then how often I see this in my browser window:
That little red exclamation mark comes from a Firefox extension called the “Web Developer Toolbar” and it’s telling me there’s a CSS error in the site I’m visiting. The usual culprit? Typing errors – forgetting a semicolon or a closing bracket, “buttom” instead of “bottom” (tee-hee) and so on. Occasionally though, I do see errors because CSS hacks for one browser (coughIEcough) make their way into the main stylesheet. When there exists a simple way to serve different stylesheets for different browsers, why would you opt for the more confusing choice? Um I do know the answer to this one.
It doesn’t end on Day One
Think it’s over because your site validated when you first launched? Ha. Have I got news for you. If you weren’t paying attention, your site is probably rife with errors by now. The culprit – code from other websites that you embed.
Case in point – Let’s say you wanted to embed a slideshow of your photos on Flickr in your blog. You go to this page, follow the instructions and the end you get a big chunk of code to put into your blog template. Plug that in and you can wave your green signal (this one – ) goodbye. The problem comes from the fact that the code that Flickr provides ships with angle brackets by default instead of the HTML entity for angle brackets (this page explains it in more detail) and since this is being embedded in the body of the page, it breaks the validation.
Moral of the story? Be careful about the code you include. As I blogged about earlier, treating your blog as a clearing-house for your online identity is probably not a good idea – from a design and standards perspective.
Can your site take a bullet?
Obviously, if someone actually tried to shoot the server where your site was hosted, bad things would happen. No, I’m taking about what happens when the people who visit your site do unexpected things – like turn off all images, or block javascript. Is your site still functional? For example, if you have white text for your navigation links on a black image background, your navigation links might disappear into the background if the visitor has blocked all images!
Or your page navigation is fancy AJAX refreshes using Javascript – what happens if the user blocks javascript? Clicking on a button does nothing!
This to me is the hardest part of the journey because you have to think of all the things that can go wrong. Thankfully, there is some help in the form of Dan Cederholm’s book. Again, the Web Developer Toolbar is of tremendous help here. No matter how much you test, the reality is that even now, there are visitors to your site who have given up because something went wrong. So it goes.
Your point being…?
Talk about something being TL;DR eh. The payoff of Web Standards is “findability”. Your content is accessible and understandable to all the visitors to your site – humans, search engine robots, site-scrapers the whole lot. I’m not advocating focussing on standards above content. Content is king yes, but if your content is buried in a mass of impenetrable markup – it may as well be 100 monkeys banging on typewriters.
PS: I know that XHTML validation for the blog fails right know, thanks to some of the embedded formatting in this post. I’m treating it as a temporary problem Fixed! I’ve stripped out the custom styling for the code samples for now as that was causing the problem. Custom styles will be back once the WLW plugin I’m using gets a new build that fixed these problems.
March 10th, 2008
7:10 pm
Geek
*Pulls out giant roll of paper, starts reading…*
"I’d like to thank my mother, my father, my wife, my camera for not screwing up like it usually does, the statue that stayed still… "
But seriously, this is the absolute high-point of my brief photographic career – having not one, but two photographs published in a coffee-table book.
As much as I would like to chalk this one up to sheer talent, I think it would be more interesting to talk about some of the real factors that lie behind this little achievement:
Luck – This more than anything else was why my photo got picked in the first place. Being in the right place at the right time, being prepared – whatever you want to call it. For some reason, I chose to carry my point-n-shoot with me that day. I lived dangerously for a moment and stopped to shoot this, despite a hungry wife waiting impatiently beside me . I managed to shoot a relatively sharp photo, despite the poor lighting and lack of any stabilization. Whatever you want to call it, I call it luck.
Location – Add location and location to that. After all, who knows how many beautiful photographs are out there, condemned to obscurity on some obscure photo-blog that no one has heard of? And then there’s Flickr – which is to image search what Google is to the rest of the web. Flickr is far from being an ideal solution for photographers – as Lane Hartwell, Scott Beale and many others would attest, but if you want to be noticed on the web, edgy does not do it.
Licensing – This is really only applicable because I host my photos on Flickr, but it’s important for a photographer to think about. If you are somewhat serious about photography, you have spent hours looking for just that right angle. You have spent far too much time (mostly by your significant other’s standards) in front of a computer, tweaking every photo till it just so. And most likely, a fair chunk of cash on the right gear. So it’s only fair that you want people to give you credit (or cash) when they use your photographs elsewhere. You might decide to go with the licence "All Rights Reserved" in Flickr. But if you take a look at the search function in Flickr, you’ll see they give a lot of love to photos that are Creative Commons-licensed. Which is only going to help your photos get found. Not convinced? Let’s consider a hypothetical situation – some one out there is hunting for a photo to accompany a blog post. They hit Flickr, punch in some keywords and get a few hundred results. They open a couple of interesting photos – one of those interesting photos is yours marked as All Rights Reserved and the other, is marked as Creative Commons licensed. Your blogger-in-a-hurry has 3 options here:
1. Contact you either via Flickr PM or email, requesting for permission to use your photograph. Wait around till you check your email and reply. Negotiate the terms (if any). Embed the photograph.
2. Right-click your photo and Save to Disk. Embed the photograph.
3. Link to the Creative-Commons licensed photograph on Flickr and add a little text attributing the photographer.
Which option do you think the Blogger is going to pick? A lot of them are going to rip off your photo (even if it’s Creative Commons-licensed) but there are some folks who don’t mind doing the right thing – but even they are going to prefer the Creative Commons-licensed photo for it’s ease of reuse.
The reality is that if your work is digital and on the web, it’s going to get re-used without your permission. With Creative Commons-licensed, you stand a better chance of getting some credit.
I personally use the most open of Creative Commons licenses – the free-love Attribution license, which basically lets you use my work (or a part of it) in any way as long as you credit the author. I chose this license for a few reasons – my photography is still fairly ordinary and mostly by luck – if someone wants to use it, why stop them? There is another factor – although I post full-resolution images to Flickr (and I allow the original image to be downloaded), the small sensor size of my camera means that my photos can really only be used on the Web. It’s not good enough to be used in print form. When I do eventually upgrade to a better camera, I’ll be moving to a more restricted license – the Non Commercial, Share Alike License.
Metadata – Now I would have liked to keep that L thing going (you know, Luck-Location-Licensing..) but I couldn’t find any words to match – your loss, I guess . Next to music, I find that photography has an extraordinarily robust mechanism for storing and preserving your metadata – the IPTC Core Metadata Standard. The IPTC standard provides for a vast array of pre-defined and free-text fields that can be embedded into a photograph. Once you take the time to input this information, a vast number of programs and websites (including Flickr) can read this information and expose it to your viewers. The part I really love about IPTC metadata is that it’s inextricably linked to your photos – you move your photos, the metadata goes with you. When I switched from Iview Media Pro to Lightroom earlier this year, that migration was made much more painless by the fact that I had been using this sort of metadata for some time. It allowed me to very rapidly establish my hierarchies in Lightroom and be productive. I expect that you will see this sort of metadata usage grow rapidly over the next few years, as more basic photo organizing software such as Windows Vista Photo Gallery and Picasa encourage people to enter metadata and then store this information using such industry standards. The final question about metadata that one should ask is – how much metadata to include? That is an entirely personal choice, but really more the better. For example, and although I don’t have access to stats in Flickr to back this up, I just know that including a tag "Fuk Tak Chi building" for the photograph that was picked for publication made the difference.
Bonus metadata – skip this section if tech-talk makes your eyes glaze over . Very few cameras support this out of the box, but all photographs can be geo-tagged, i.e., have latitude and longitude information embedded that tells you exactly where in the world this photograph was taken. If you are willing to invest in the time, you get to visualize your photographs in a whole new way. I’m not going to spend too much time talking about my geo-tagging workflow , suffice it to say it has far too many moving parts in it 
.
What it essentially boils down to is this – I happened to be in the right place in the right time, I was prepared and I put in some effort afterwards to help my photograph get noticed. In other words, I was lucky
February 28th, 2008
12:28 pm
Asides
It struck me that the amount of content that we publish about our lives today on the web is simply staggering.
We write down our bigger ideas and thoughts in blogs, twitter the random everyday things, link to the things we like, take photos of places and things we see, converse with friends on social networks and record all the conversations that we have about these in Instant Messenger logs.
It seems to me in our own unplanned, chaotic and sometimes unreliable fashion, we have brought to life the Akashic records of Hindu philosophy – a record of all human knowledge and experiences.
February 26th, 2008
11:04 am
Geek
I have always had mixed feelings about linkblogging – on one hand, I read a lot and it seems natural that I would come across interesting articles that other folks might enjoy. In the back of my mind however, I think of linkblogging as slagging off from the more "real" task of writing something (semi-)coherent.
A reflection of that conflict has been how my own style of linkblogging has gone through a few iterations.
One of the very first questions I was asked shortly after I about the new linkblog was simply "Why not use del.icio.us?". The answer dear reader, is that I actually was using del.icio.us for linkblogging.
It’s well hidden now, with no obvious way of getting at it, but there are over 50 posts on this blog that are just links with a little commentary – here’s the first one, and this one’s the last.
del.icio.us did seem like the answer at first – as I was browsing, I hit a button whenever I came across a link; filled in some text and by some magic it appeared on the blog.
The infatuation disappeared pretty quickly though – at first, it was just the frustration of the 255 character limit for descriptions. But on reflection, it was something deeper than that – I resented the interruption that posting to del.icio.us represented.
Skimming through the never-ending stream of info that the Web can throw at you and picking out something interesting is an art form – when you are reading north of 200 feeds as I am today, it’s pretty much a survival skill. Yet every time I found something useful, I would have to drop everything and focus on writing something meaningful about why I found this link useful – after all what use is a link without context? Do this context switch 20+ times a day and you start to feel a little ragged.
Foolhardily, I decided the answer was to hand-code a daily link dump. I would open links in individual tabs as I came across them, cull them down to a few interesting links at the end of the day and then using a combination of two firefox extensions and some Autohotkey magic, kludge together the HTML required to format the post appropriately. Not unexpectedly, this experiment didn’t last very long – I made exactly 6 linkblog-style posts using this technique before I gave up all-together.
It was only when I made the switch to RSS that I began to consider how best to start linkblogging again. My requirement was simple – I wanted a way to hit a button and share a link; no comments, no tagging, nothing. I knew right away that FeedDemon supported this through "shared clippings" but I balked at paying for a feed reader and tried to postpone the inevitable by using GreatNews.
In the end however, I switched to FeedDemon and that was when the real power of using RSS feeds for linkblogging hit me – I no longer had to provide a context. The author of each individual article had taken the time to craft an introductory paragraph that explained the article better than I ever could. If you wanted to read further, you kept scrolling or you just switched to the next article – a homage to the low-impact way in which the link itself was blogged.
Is this method without flaws? From an attention perspective – I think no, there aren’t any. I can share links with minimum effort, folks who subscribe to the linkblog feed can skim through the links easily as well.
The real problems lie in usability – HTML is being converted into RSS, back into HTML (on the blog) and finally into RSS (in the blog feed). Validation is a pipe-dream, the visual layout of the blog is often broken and some functionality simply does not work.
The other problem is the possibility of ads slipping into the blog – I don’t have any ads running and don’t intend to either. I worry that someday, I might share an article that comes with advertising attached and make a mockery of that claim.
Is that risk worth the reward of sharing interesting ideas quickly and without friction? My answer is a cautious yes.
February 22nd, 2008
8:05 pm
Geek
I think I’ve worked out most of the kinks in moving the blog to it’s new home, so I thought I would spend a little time talking about some of the challenges and ideas behind this shift.
But first a little bit of history – I originally started blogging on a free service provided a site called myblogsite.com. Since this was a hosted service, there was tremendous restrictions placed on what you could and could not do in terms of look and feel. A few months in, the site abruptly shut down and I lost my backup of the posts
Smarting from that loss, I did a little bit of searching and came across Weblogs. It almost was too good to be true – 2 GB storage, full wordpress hosting, FTP access; the works – and all this for free! I shamelessly begged JD for an account and he was kind enough to let me in. Obviously moving from an completely locked down service to Weblogs was like letting a kid loose in a candy store.
I wound up choosing a 3 column theme – strike 1 for visual overload. Next I installed 30-something plugins in my WordPress install – visual overload, strike 2. I then started adding all sorts of “flair” – Flickr photos, feed subscribe widgets, page ranking widgets on and on and on – visual overload, strike 3.
Now in my defence, I should say that alteast initially there was a method to this madness. I saw the blog as a “portal” to my life – a clearing-house if you will, about my online life. You could come here and find out what I was doing (hence a status page). You could look at interesting (ahem) things I had seen. Why you could even find out what the weather outside my window was!
But over time that message got a little muddied – I didn’t update the status page often enough. The blog itself wasn’t updated frequently. And my online “life” was spread far too wide to integrate in any reasonable way into this one page.
It was around this time that two things happened:
1. I actually went and bought this domain name, figuring a guy with some income and a reasonable amount of computer-savvy should really have his own website.
2. I read an article on the Coding Horror on the worst blog cliches – and realized I was guilty of more than half!
It was time to make a clean break with the past. What could I do? I knew I wouldn’t be moving away from WordPress as a platform – it was the only platform I really understood in any way. So that left the look, i.e. the theme and the feel, i.e what content was displayed on the blog.
For the look, I realized the 3 column theme simply did not make sense given the blog is not part of a network of blogs where the 3rd column might display other content. Further, 3 columns just didn’t work well with the way most people read, so it was time to switch to something simpler. A little bit of searching on WordPress Extend yielded the Web2.0 theme that I’m using now.
Reworking how content appears on the blog was two-fold: One, getting rid of the clunky HTML I had wedged into the blog as part of the “flair”. Two, KISS – no extraneous cute stuff like widgets or geo-tagging. My plugin list would be more focused on making the back-end more useful. A plugin would either help people find content in the blog (hence, Simple Tags and Popularity Contest) or help with the flow of the post (hence WP Footnotes) or provide missing functionality (Contact Forms etc.)
The final piece of this puzzle was making sure I actually built up the blog the right way instead of constantly editing and adding on a live install. This way, if I screwed up (and there were quite a few restarts) or changed my mind, a do-over was simply a question of restoring a backup. The answer to this came in the form of WAMP Server – which made the otherwise nightmarish process of getting Apache-MySQL-PHP running on Windows a simple, push-the-button affair.
There were some difficult choices along the way – for example, do I put in the Flickr photos widget or not? My stats tracking on the old blog revealed there was a decent amount of click-through from the blog to some of the photos. Why lose that traffic? The answer to that goes back to the original idea – can my blog be a portal? My own experience says no – our online lives are now too widespread, too entrenched in each of the websites we frequent to easily co-exist. It could be made to work – if you were willing to live with a page that a lot of competing visual elements. But few things are more attractive than a website that does one thing – and does it well .
February 20th, 2008
11:55 am
Geek
This post is aimed at the folks who subscribe to my blog via RSS (If you don’t, why not start now? )
If you are seeing this, then it means I have managed to flip the switches in the right order and big changes have happened!
Come take a look at the all-new, all-singing & all-dancing home of the blog.
February 10th, 2008
5:16 pm
Geek
I had seen tweetstats a while back, but Biz Stone recently about it again so I gave it a shot again and it is just as cool as I remember it . So here’s my tweetstats graph and some analysis
1. My tweet timeline is just about a year old now (my how time flies!) and a fairly clear pattern emerges – I manage to tweet a lot during the early part of the year (93 tweets in Feb ‘07, 131 in Mar ‘07, 131 again in Jan ‘08) and then as the work crunch sets in, the pace drops off pretty rapidly. Two big slumps occur over May-Jun ‘07 and Aug-Sep ‘07. The first slump was during the time I was looking for a new apartment to move into and between that and work, twittering took a back seat. Aug-Sep ‘07 was when I was on vacation – so between clearing the decks for the holiday, being offline while on vacation and again catching up on work afterwards, twittering was pretty much forgotten about.
2. On a daily basis, I do most of tweeting on Fridays (no big surprise there) but a close 2nd place goes to Wednesdays. No easy explanation for this except for that I probably remember that I haven’t tweeted in a couple of days and try to make up. The radical slump over the weekends is because I tend to get online for only a couple of hours on weekends and that’s mostly to catch up on news and post photos on Flickr. Recently I’ve started to read tweets by others on the site over weekends and long CNY weekend has seen me twittering quite a bit actually.
3. Time-wise I have two bursts – one early in morning (around 10-11 AM) and again after lunch (2-3 PM). Both of those are because I tend to hit my feed-reader then and so the tweets naturally follow. The rest of the time is mostly D messages and @ replies. Which neatly brings me to…
4. The replies graph. The first thing to note is that I tend to do a lot more D messaging than @ replies. That’s because I got told off pretty early on by some folks who follow me, when I started using @ messages like IM . But that graph is a fairly accurate representation of how my D message traffic goes.
5. Since I started off by using the site to post tweets, it still is the leader but Snitter is catching up fast and should take the top slot pretty soon. Plug for Snitter here – it is really a much better way of using Twitter and makes the site seem ridiculously clunky in comparison. Plus, (who develops ) responds to any messages you send him pretty quickly.
February 10th, 2008
3:48 pm
Geek
As to where I first came across a recommendation for Richard Rhodes’ books on Nuclear bombs, my memory fails me. But few books I have read stretched me like “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and “Dark Sun” have. For someone who prides himself on being able to read a 500-page novel in less than a day, 6 weeks to finish a 600 page book was a humbling experience.
I just finished Dark Sun yesterday, thanks to the long CNY weekend and am looking forward to reading the final book in this trilogy – Arsenals of Folly. A few ideas have been fermenting ever since I read the first book so here goes:
1. My mental history of the atomic bomb was largely shaped by newspaper accounts and famously Einstein’s E=MC2 equation. I had always believed that nuclear energy had been developed for peaceful purposes by the scientists and somehow the military establishment had twisted it to create weapons. It was a tremendous shock to me to discover that it was in fact quite the opposite – the scientists involved in this field early on (such as Leo Szilard) actually approached the military, fairly aggressively to convince them of the military potential of this new discovery. Civilian uses – atleast on a large scale never entered the picture, until much later.
This has to be understood in the context of when all of this research was going on – at the height of World War II, with Nazi Germany triumphant across all of Europe and Russia on the verge of collapse. Equally interesting in contrast, is the tremendous ethical conflict that the scientists heading up the atomic energy program in the US wrestled with when it came to developing H-bombs in the years following the World War.
2. The amount of everyday technology that arose from the atomic bomb and H-bomb programmes is simply staggering. I had heard of how stuff like Teflon and composite fibres were a spin-off from the space shuttle program. Here’s a partial list of what the atomic bomb programme gave us – Electro-magnetic separation (that lead to particle accelerators), Gas diffusion technology, high speed X-ray photography, Geiger counters (well duh), micro-chemistry, monte carlo simulations. Entire fields of science sprang up from this one endeavour. Also worth noting, the complex calculations required for initial H-bomb research almost directly resulted in advances in computer technology.
3. The impact of espionage at a nation-state level is simply staggering. Consider this – in 1943, a scientific paper authored by the then-head of Russia’s atomic energy programme predicted that it would take 15 years for Russia to develop and test an atomic bomb. In 1949, Russia detonated it’s first atomic bomb (Joe-1) which was in every way, identical to the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki. The only reason that Russia managed to shave 9 years off it’s original estimate was espionage – the incredibly detailed design documents passed by Klaus Fuchs. If there was an object lesson in the power of espionage, this is it.
4. Something that became very clear to me by the time I put down the first book in the series is only referred to in passing by the author at the end of Book 2 – although the basic principles are well known, the sheer effort involved in weaponizing this technology means that this will always be the preserve of nations. It’s easier and more effective for terrorists to make use of low-tech weapons like car-bombs, hijacked plans or even nerve gas. In effect, what the author is saying (and what I believe too) is that all the fear-mongering about terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons or atleast dirty bombs is vastly overblown.
Let’s consider the prototypical rogue nuclear weapon scenario shall we? Terrorist gets hold of portable nuclear weapon – in popular media, suitcase bombs.. more realistically, tactical bombs such as nuclear artillery shells. Let us be clear – just getting your hands on a nuclear artillery shell does not mean that it can be detonated like any other explosive device. After WW II, the bulk of Los Alamos’s efforts went towards “hardening” these weapons. In essence, what they came up with was two safeguards – one, the weapon would not arm prematurely and two, it would not detonate prematurely . In the case of a nuclear artillery shell, that would mean the warhead would not arm till a certain distance/time after launch and would only detonate provided certain criteria of speed, rate of descent and altitude were met. For a terrorist to actually overcome all of these safeguards, would require reverse-engineering the entire weapons system. Even if the terrorists managed to subvert a team of nuclear scientists to their cause, this is no trivial task.
The other scenario tossed around is of the dirty bomb – terrorists achieving a partial nuclear detonation. AFAIK, there is no such thing as partial nuclear detonation. Most nuclear bombs today are implosion weapons : a small amount of Plutonium 239, surrounded by a large mass of mildly radioactive U235 is compressed by high explosives detonated simultaneously, which causes the chain reaction to start. Now unless the terrorist actually achieves that micro-second control over the explosive detonation- what you get is a relatively standard chemical explosive detonation spraying chunks of mildly radioactive U235 around. It’s worth noting that an accident did happen at the beginning of the Korean War, when a plane carrying an early US A-bomb crashed and exploded, causing the explosives to detonate. But the lack of a simultaneous detonation stopped a chain reaction. Imagine that, a fully armed A-bomb was ignited but did not actually become an A-bomb.
Given these challenges and low chance of success, why would a terrorist bother with nuclear weapons? Indeed – the same hawks who forced tens of billions of dollars to be spent on nuclear weapons when it was clear that the USSR was nowhere near the US brought the war right to the terrorist’s doorstep – where he has the advantage of terrain, cover and supply lines. The same factors were at play in Vietnam and we all know how that ended.
January 20th, 2008
6:22 pm
Geek
It is with a sense of disappointment that I draw the curtain on my collection of photos for 2007. There were a few “a-ha” moments during that time, but more overwhelming is the sense that I didn’t do much in pursuit of this art.
A simple look at the numbers says it all – My 2006 collection contains a staggering 294 photos, posted in approximately 230 days, starting in late September ‘06 and ending in May 2007.
My 2007 collection contains an anaemic 58 photos. The kicker? I took 226 days to post that number, a glacial pace of 1.8 photos a week (the daily number is just too pitifully low to talk about).
Now, it is often said that in photography volume is no measure of quality. I could offer that statement to defend the lack of effort I’ve put into my photography.
More practically, I could tell you that in May 2007 I moved from an apartment near the Lower Seletar Reservoir to an apartment right in the concrete heart of Yishun. It is true that the loss of my muse affected me deeply. Not having a ever-changing subject close at hand every day definitely dulls the desire to take out the camera and go hunting.
I could always fall back on the old standby – work was a killer this year. That would be somewhat true as well.
Truth be told, none of those really explains why I have almost no photographic output to speak of. The reality is that I used a mixture of all those reasons to stay within a zone where I felt I had some idea of what the final result would look like.
So, yet more photographs of buildings and shots taken in the dawn hours. I worry that the ability to shoot portraits or just street-shooting has simply withered away under this onslaught.
What then does 2008 hold? A few points are worth talking about:
#1: To establish my geek cred, I will begin by talking about my photographic workflow. For most of 2006 and 2007, I really didn’t have a workflow. Despite access to an extremely powerful photo management software, I spent a lot of time organizing my photos manually. Now that I’ve run of photos to actually go through, I spent some time thinking about how to speed up organizing and editing my photos and came up with a workflow that hopefully is a lot more organized.
First, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom – being able to organize my photos and do most of my processing in the same application should help speed up things.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking over how I organize my photos on Flickr and the keywords I set up in Iview. I then split them up into distinct sets of information and will be exclusively organizing my photos this way. Lightroom will take care of where the photos actually live.
#2: In contrast to the constant travelling that characterized 2005, I spent almost the whole of 2006 and 2007 right here in Singapore. Now I like this place a lot, but nothing quite gets the photographic eye working like something new (my Macau trip is proof of that – a fifth of the photos I posted in 2007 came from that 2 day trip). I expect to travelling again in 2008 to a couple of countries and even if it’s just buildings and hotel rooms, hey atleast it’ll be new buildings and hotel rooms
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#3: As much as I love the portability of my current camera and have been amazed by what it can do, there’s a lot missing in it – manual control of aperture and shutter speeds, optical stabilization, better high ISO performance, RAW shooting; the list could go on. I’ve been talking about buying a new camera for years now but if a few things on the personal front come together, maybe this year will be it (and I’ve probably jinxed it by saying that – oh well).
So there you have it – my very short look back on the year that was and an ever shorter look ahead. I would say watch this space, but that would just be cruel and unusual punishment
