Category Archives: Pedantry

Barriers to Entry

Mmm, tastes like fail

The reason tigers jump through hoops is because their handlers have whips.

From time to time, I’ve harped on Morte’s blog, specifically the requirement that any commenter must have a TypeKey account. I have accounts on several web forums, my ISP account, my bank account, my Gravatar, my admin accounts for my personal gallery, my kid’s website, my kid’s website’s gallery, my sister’s website, my wiki, my office wiki, my office admin server, the ordering system for DSL circuits, the ticket system for DSL trouble reports, the list goes on and on. Do I want to sign up for Typekey to tell an old buddy that he’s on crack for reviewing a book he hasn’t read? No, not really.

Enter OpenID. What a lovely idea, a distributed identification system. I was going to reply to a comment on Wolfgang Baur’s livejournal and noticed that I needed to post anonymously, get a Livejournal account, or get an OpenID instead. The first option doesn’t really appeal to me, as I understand that the Internet isn’t really anonymous, so my comments may as well be associated with my online persona. The second option is basically the same as having to sign up for Typekey. Maybe it’ll let me commend on a couple of other Livejournal pages as well, but frankly that just doesn’t come up very often for me.

The OpenID option immediately struck me as a good idea, so I followed the “What is OpenID” link on Mr. Baur’s page. To be honest, I didn’t really want to know what OpenID was. I’d heard of the concept before, what I really wanted was an ID in that system, one that I could theoretically re-use in a variety of contexts and thus achieve some measure of efficiency in presenting myself on other people’s sites. What missing below?

Let’s learn all about OpenID

That’s right, no “get an ID” option. Well, there’s a link to the OpenID site itself. Let’s give that a try.

Does not deliver

This page is positively fertile with links. I count eight links in the main body of this page, and ten in the sidebar (not counting the Web100 image). The body links helpfully

  • tell me what a URI is and what “authentication” means (color me insulted)
  • refer me to the specifications for their authentication scheme
  • links me to the definition of “strong authentication” because putting an obscure technical term like “strong” in front of the previously-defined “authentication” is bound to lead to confusion
  • links me to the specifications
  • refers me to some kind of bounty system meant to encourage adoption of the OpenID system
  • links me to a Mailman mailing list
  • refers to something to do with medieval identification systems.

Whew. Having skimmed through looking for something like “sign me up” or “get an ID” or “register” or “log in” or “I want to be a part of this thing you’ve got here,” I’m utterly disappointed. The presence of links to definitions of basic Intarweb terminology indicates that the authors of this page assume I’m an idiot, yet the functionality of the site doesn’t accommodate this assumption.

Apparently I’m expected to read through the “How it works” documentation on the OpenID site (something the referring page at Livejournal has thoroughly discouraged me from doing), install something on my own webpage, and then things will magically work themselves out. In short, it was tl;dr, I remain uninvolved in the OpenID system, and Mr. Baur is short a comment on his site. What about instant gratification don’t these folks get? Give me a shiny button that calls upon me to participate, then give me instructions. If I want to know how the nuts and bolts of it work, I’d appreciate an informative link or two, but don’t give me a pile of homework just so I may have the privilege of posting a possibly-witty retort to some dude’s online ramblings. It’s a barrier to entry, an unnecessary hurdle.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, the comment mechanisms of this site are intentionally minimal. The IP banning, Hashcash, and Akismet antispam systems are all transparent to the commenter, and the requested screen name, email address, and URL are more-or-less standard fare. Very little spam leaks through my filters, though attempts at comment spam massively outweigh the number of actual comments.

Humble suggestions:

  • If you want visitors to comment on your site, let them
  • If you want people to participate in your swizzy social networking mechanisms, guide people towards participation. You may notice that successful sites like Youtube, Flickr, and Myspace all have very clear mechanisms for letting newcomers join in on the fun.
  • If you don’t want people to comment or participate, force them to wade through arcane procedures. This is why the clocks on VCRs were almost always flashing “12:00” and why most DVD players and such don’t even have clocks on the face anymore.

Buzzwords versus Precision

Entangled by semantics and pride

One of the many problems facing the public these days is insidious: the misuse of language to obscure meaning. Let’s take a look at an example, two phrases used by people with opposing views on the United States’ involvement in the insurgency / civil war / emerging caliphate in Iraq:

Redeploy / Cut & Run

The current war / occupation / police action in Iraq has become deeply unpopular, with a dwindling supply of heady triumphs and a steady stream of dismal news. Reports of bombings against military and civilian targets have become a disheartening echo of the media drumbeat that lead up to the invasion back in 2003. Increasingly public debate has shifted to the discussion of how American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen are going to be removed from the combat area. As the combat area can be loosely described as “Iraq in its entirety,” we see the repeated use of euphemisms to describe the various plans.

To cut and run is literally when the crew of an entangled ship cuts loose any moorings or anchors that hold it fast in order to get clear of some imminent danger. Those who advocate remaining actively engaged in combat in Iraq have frequently labeled any opposition as a “cut and run” strategy. This plays upon the prideful view most Americans hold of our military. The image of our soldiers fleeing the battlefield is a strong motivating factor for many who lived through the turmoil of the Vietnam War, as well as those simply raised in a patriotic tradition that props up America’s general tendency to prevail in arms. We seem to place less value on soldiers that die on the losing side of a conflict, and fear consigning our recent war losses to such a status.

To redeploy is a pretty straightforward concept. We deployed our armed forced into Iraq (which is to say we invaded), and now many in the public arena would like to re-deploy them back out of Iraq (which is to say they’d like to un-invade it). Traditionally this would involve retreating, surrendering, and acknowledging the victory of the enemy. To acknowledge the victory of the enemy is to acknowledge defeat. Defeat doesn’t play well, so opponents to the continuation of the Iraq War like to call retreat redeployment.

In fairness, most plans that bear the label “redeployment” involve swapping out American men and women with guns with Iraqi men with guns, so that the Iraqi men can win or lose for themselves (spoiler: their victory isn’t really part of the redeployment plan). This will let the Iraqi national government lose without America having to lose. This is similar to what large companies do when they outsource profits for tax purposes or outsource liabilities for their shareholder reports.

Please call it what it is: retreat. We can retreat and let Iraqi national forces take up our positions, or we can retreat and let tribal or insurgent or Al Qaeda forces take up our positions, but we’re talking about retreat here. Learn to swallow the pill, folks; we don’t have the political will to win this fight, so we’re talking about losing it.

Presumably-competent commanders like David Petraeus say it will probably take 9-10 years to properly stomp out the insurgency in Iraq. We can spend a decade pulling this band-aid off, or we can get it over with quickly. The decision is ours, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves about it one way or the other.

Definitions: civil war, insurgency, occupation, police action, redeploy, retreat, surrender, denial

If you’ve got any favorite terms that are being misused or twisted sideways, I’d like to hear about it.

Spam Explosion

Ham and Spam caught by Akismet over time

Anybody that has a website that permits both comments and search engine spiders has run into comment spammers. They don’t care about rel=”nofollow” attributes. They don’t care about the subject matter of your site. They just post their gibberish and URLs and get out of dodge. One of the mechanisms I use to reduce the amount of comment spam on the sites I maintain is Akismet, who have been kind enough to publish stats on the sheer volume of garbage being dumped onto our Internets these days (which, contrary to popular belief, is much like a dumptruck: you can pile all kinds of stuff onto it).

Their stats map pretty nicely to the raw volume of unsolicited bulk email that my benevolent employer sees. It’s nice to know that the spammers are keeping their minds open to both new and old vectors to defraud the public.