John Beales

Last year when I was working on the redesign of BonzoBox I used HTML5 for the first time. The specification is being developed by two groups, and consists of a bunch of different modules, each with a different level of readiness, and the actual specifications, (yes, both of them!), are meant more for people who build web browsers than people who build websites. This led to some confusion. While I eventually wrapped my head around HTML5 I never felt that I had as good a grasp of the language as I would have liked to, so when I heard about Introducing HTML5 I added it to my to-read list. I finally had a chance to read it a couple of weeks ago.

Introducing HTML5 is the overview that I was looking for when I first started learning about HTML5. While I wish I had found it then, (although it wasn’t published at that point), and I learned a lot from it now. One thing that I had completely missed in my self-directed HTML5 studies was the outlining module, (if you’ve missed it too it dictates how an outline of an HTML5 document would be created, which allows you to figure out how important each element is in relation to each other element on the page). I also learned about some new elements that I hadn’t yet stumbled across, (like <mark>), and learned more about HTML5 form elements than I already knew, (although I was fairly familiar with those from the 24ways article).

There’s a chapter about the <canvas> element in Introducing HTML5. I was scared of the canvas element but the canvas chapter changed me from afraid to excited. It’s not so hard as it looks to work with and there’s a lot of really cool stuff that can be done with it. It’ll be fun to play with when I get a chance.

There’s also a chapter about using HTML5 apps offline. It’s possible to tell the browser to cache most, even all, of a website or webapp so that it’s completely usable offline. This cache seems to be a lot stickier than the normal browser cache and I wonder if it would be possible to also use it to drastically speed up online apps. This could lead to some real pain when updating websites, but if it’s planned well enough it might work really well.

Finally, websockets look great. They look fast, to the point that maybe we could make some stuff lightning fast on the web. Unfortunately a security problem was discovered in the websockets protocol so it was disabled in Firefox 4 and the latest Opera, and apparently Google Chrome is set to disable it if any attacks are carried out. I really hope that the security issues will be ironed out quickly so there can be wide adoption of websockets. I’m having problems finding out what the current status is of the security issue, I can’t find any articles more recent than those from December, so if anyone knows what’s going on please post a link.

I learned a lot from Introducing HTML5, and I’m excited to redesign a website, (or a few), using it, plus some CSS3, (I’ll be reading up on that soon).

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

Bringing my reading back into the world of web design is Khoi Vinh’s book Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design, which with Khoi’s grid-based layout and ample whitespace on each page I spent an unexpectedly short single day reading!

The slim book contains a mixture of information that is new to me and things I’ve seen before, but since I’m no grid master I have to right to say that I’m familiar with anything in the book. I appreciated the reminder that I should figure out what I want a website to do before I start writing code and the peek into Khoi’s design process was enlightening.

The book contains a brief history of grids then focuses on creating a grid and the obstacles that need to be overcome to do so. It is not a technical book that delves into the code required to make grids come to life on the world wide web. Once I realized this I appreciated the way it was written as a springboard to allow me to seek out more information on my own.

I think that I was in exactly the right place for Ordering Disorder to help me. I have read a bit about grids in the past, and have tried to use them in my projects with limited success, but reading Ordering Disorder improved my knowledge of grid principles to a level where I feel they can be much more useful when designing a website, even if I don’t take advantage of the springboard effect to launch my grid knowledge into the stratosphere and beyond.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

The number of people in my life affected by Inflammatory Bowel Disease keeps climbing, so I’ve been reading more about IBD and just finished the book The First Year: Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis by Jill Sklar.

While reading about the inner workings of our guts, and what happens when things go wrong down there isn’t the most enjoyable past-time, Mrs. Sklar makes it relatively so. The First Year: Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis primarily covers the “traditional” medical approach to treating IBD but doesn’t dismiss alternative therapies as completely irrelevant as many in the medical profession do. Mrs. Sklar seems at times to be angry that she has Crohns and she has a right to be: it’s really not a fun disease to have and it sounds like she’s had a rough time with it. But despite, (or perhaps because of), her anger she has managed to include sections that remind us of the human side of life, and these special moments outshine other, angrier, moments. For new IBD sufferers who may be angry themselves, realizing that they are not alone in their anger may actually help them feel better.

I spent some time reading the Amazon reviews of The First Year: Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis and they range from “Very misleading book” to “Best Crohn’s Book Available.” While I’m still looking for the “best available” IBD book, (something that gives full consideration to both traditional western medicine and holistic, “big-picture” treatments including alternative, natural, therapy and diet), this book is very good, and I don’t think the science exists yet for my utopia of an IBD book, (and treatment plan). What was included in this book that has not been in other resources that I’ve discovered was information on the cutting edge of medical science related to IBD, including medicines that were not quite approved yet when the book was published, (2007 for the revised edition that I read), information about how new medicines are created and tested, and how to stay informed about the most recent developments in research into the causes and treatment of IBD including environmental and genetic factors. This is a far cry from the “IBD has nothing to do with diet. Take some anti-inflammatory drugs and prepare for surgery” approach that I’ve seen elsewhere, and also far from the “drugs don’t work” approach that many natural medicine proponents preach. In my limited exposure to IBD, I’ve seen both natural and medical methods succeed and fail, and it really does seem that more research needs to be done to figure out what’s actually going on in there, and what can be done to set it right.

So what’s the final verdict? The First Year: Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis is packed with good information and worth reading. Even if you don’t believe in the traditional western medical approach to treating IBD, the resources and methods for coping with the disease in your, or your loved one’s, life make it worth the read.

For more information and support: Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of Canada or Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

After being held up by a bit of a brick, I’m working on reading the rest of the books that I got for Christmas and just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is a book about first impressions and other split-second thinking that we don’t think we’re doing, and how to get the most value out of those thoughts by understanding how they work, what causes them to be wrong, and what to do about it.

While these fast, subconscious thoughts and decisions happen all day every day in most of our lives, the area of first impressions is a great example of near-instant subconscious thought in action. When we first meet, or even first see or hear, someone our minds take in all kinds of information about that person and we form an opinion of, and often a reaction to, that person. The reaction might be to run if it’s someone brandishing a knife in a dark alley, or to stare if it’s someone really attractive at the beach, or anything in between. Often these reactions are exactly the right reaction, but often they’re not the right reaction at all, and that’s what Blink talks about: Our unconscious thoughts, how they work, how they can work much better than painstakingly working our way through a problem, and what to do to stop them from taking you down completely the wrong path.

Blink is easy to read and very interesting. Extremely interesting. After reading it I hope that I can learn how to make “Thinking without thinking” work in my life, especially now that there’s an election on.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

Here’s the brick book that’s been keeping me from reading some other design & HTML books since Christmas, and I’m finally done! Despite its size, I wanted to read High Performance MySQL from cover to cover as I’ve been working a lot recently with some databases that could stand to go faster, and, while it was a long read, (made longer by taking breaks and reading other books), it was very useful, and will never be too far from my desk, especially when I’m working on server-side code and database design and tuning.

Even before I finished the High Performance MySQL my work was seeing the benefits of what I had learned partway through the book. There are a lot of quirks in MySQL that I wasn’t aware of, especially when it comes to joining tables and applying indexes. In one instance I was able to take a query that had been taking several minutes to execute and bring its execution time down to just a few seconds simply by rewriting some joins in such a way that, when thinking only about how data is related, appears to be quite bizarre, but when thinking about how a query will be executed by MySQL makes good sense.

I learned about how indexes are used, not just in theory but actually how MySQL looks for something within an index, and I learned about how I can use indexes to make it so MySQL doesn’t have to touch the underlying table data for some SELECT queries, (quite the speed enhancement there). I learned more about InnoDB than I thought I would know for quite some time. There’s a great appendix about the Sphinx search server, which is a product that I’ve been interested in for quite a while. The appendix gave me the introduction that I needed, and I hope to start using Sphinx to power some searches soon.

If you work with MySQL databases a lot, and especially if you are involved in designing them, then High Performance MySQL is a very good book to have on hand. Even if you don’t read it from cover to cover like I did it’s a great reference and will help you speed up your MySQL instances.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)