The Non-Quintessence of HTML 5

HTML 5, nearly 2 years since its implementation, has a long way to go, and will not replace Flash any time soon.

My conclusion is rooted in experience being a web developer for the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. First project handed to me was the Great Lakes Water Level Dashboard, which after some research earlier this year, was fairly quickly developed using Adobe Flex, and had an initial launch in May. That version is here. Over the past month, only after much brainstorming since June and ~recent developments, I have drafted an HTML5 version which works pretty nicely on my iPad and I believe most modern desktop browsers. It resides here.

Listing what I was able to emulate from the Flash version:

• Buttons, checkboxes and fields have been around for a while, so that's nothing noteworthy.
• Sliders... they work fine on a desktop browser, not on the touch pad so much
• Closeable pop up info windows, powered by jQuery, pretty simple.
• Vertically oriented text does not show up in IE quite well.
• Stacking charts: kind of had to roughly emulate the Flex vGroup behavior in a non-flexible manner...

The stuff I was unable to emulate, documentably so:

• Snapshot with dialog: a cross-browser compatible version seems elusive.
• Fullscreen mode: inadequate for now... and user friendly cross browser zoom buttons aren't really on the table. (searching for more recent queries is resulting in nothing...)

Stuff I am yet to emulate, and probably can:

• Color options for series and chart/plot/graph backgrounds. I'll get to them eventually. 

Additionally, while I could work on the data processing a bit more, it is a bit slow in javascript. Takes a minute in a decent browser to load and properly archive the data for Dygraphs to read it (an awesome and simple charting package for javacsript btw...).

So what am I saying: I have developed the same product for two different platforms - Flash and HTML 5 with varying results. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Flash is not going away.

Pre-Thanksgiving Sunday Variety

Paul Broadwell (Via)

Howdy everyone.

Top of the mind today is the conflict rebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians. Good discussion, as usual, to be had on Metafilter with heavy moderation, thankfully. I took a modern middle eastern history course in my last semester of Community College (before heading for the Umich), and by the end of the class I believed the whole ordeal to be a mess, and I still do today. It's hard really to know where to start without getting your ass intellectually ripped apart and left for dead. I do however have strong feelings for both sides involved, and hope that peace is achieved soon.

Also, I really don't want the world swallowed into the conflict. That is one of my greatest fears.

What else? Oh yeah, the scandal still unfolding with David Petraeus and the CIA (Insert alternative acronym definitions here). NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (11/17 in case you get to the link late) was unusually great this week, partially due to that. There's nothing like hearing an old, 78-year-old radio personality narrate the now famous New York Post headline for the story.

Lastly, the fiscal cliff, and a still somewhat gridlocked congress. No links here. My simple belief is that every American owes a base amount of taxes to keep running the proportion of infrastructure they use to live. Those that take advantage of this fairly powerful and scalable infrastructure and do more than just live off of it should pay more, proportional or scalable to the amount of income over the median income level. We need to pay off our debt, and my (and mostly everyone else's) barely $30K/year from hourly work income is nothing to use to pay that off. I have faithfully paid taxes on scholarships I have gotten previously, and will continue to do so. Meanwhile I work to ease my pressure on the water, electrical, and road system in place. It's a continuous process.

The American Music Awards on it, and I want to enjoy them. So I will talk to y'all later!

US might have wider, longer straw by 2017

I was perturbed today by the trumpeting of news on The Oil Drum, Yahoo, and worse yet NPR that the US is projected to overtake Saudi Arabia in terms of oil production by 2017 (or 2020, as stated in the NPR article). The hypothesis of such a growth in production this large has been fairly critiqued one way or another (1, 2, 3, 4; sorry for lack of variety they are all Oil Drum Reports).

There are other problems though:

• There's a larger-than-most-intellects-think portion of this population that want to live on gasoline like they live on oxygen: cheaply, and dependably. To have any hope of a sustainable society going into the future, this inertia/momentum needs to be halted, and the idea of weening ourselves off limited fuels needs to become mainstream. This news may make me a little less antsy, but odds are that will be compensated with fears of new born momentum and inertia that may not be controllable later on.
• While I am not your stereotypical environmentalist, I do look at the environment as a tool for humans to use to live. Like all tools, you have to use and maintain Earth well, otherwise Earth gets rusty, and can get a little problematic (i.e. Sandy and numerous earthquakes that have occurred attributable to hydraulic fracturing). We need the environment for food, clean water, food for livestock, shelter material, clothing from livestock, etc. We break it, we lose most of everything we used to adapt to various environments, and die.

So, aside from the fact that, fossil fuels, no matter how many new sources we find and how fast we extract them over time, are limited, we have the human inertia factor, and of course the environmental one. This news today was like a trident blow to my mind.

And now to welcome Facebook and Twitter

Facebook notes are pretty few and far between.
Twitter is only 140 characters per post, and chain tweets don't seem wise

...and of course, what am I saying? Blogs are a dime a dozen.

So what am I doing with this?

Call it the Kellogg effect for news articles I read: the big flake news stories I come across I'll share here and provide a bit of commentary, but nothing too gruesome that you'll get lost in details, and nothing too short like: "we're screwed", or "DOOM!", or "That's good", or "Excellent", or a common one - "A very good article on XYZ".

Aside from that, I think some good discussions can happen here. I think you might have a good idea where I am going with this given the topic I never hesitate to talk about in one way or another, and has dominated my thinking since the summer of 2010. But of course, I won't just talk sustainability, 'cause you gotta have fun in life.

For more info, read the first post not too far down from here.

Cheers!

Addendum: Apparently you have to turn a page to my first post since I posted this one... oops!

Sunday Service...

Some Facebook post regarding how MI Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow supports religious employers providing contraceptives and Republican challenger Pete *cough and gargle* Hoekstra supports religious freedom prompted me to passively respond:

"It kinda scares me more, now that it has really sunk in, that 'religious freedom' has become a substitute for a good social, environmental, and resource conscious life, faith or no faith, that actively works to peacefully mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, and bring it to a close. Our Lord may be forgiving, but even He clarified that His forgiveness is not a blank check, as He, according to scripture, made the Earth, and every single trapping that we have discovered comes with it."

Good Sunday to you all.

A Terrific Ode to Video Games and More

When you get a chance this weekend, go see Wreck-it-Ralph in theaters. Not only does it hat-tip a ton of classic video games, it throws you back in time to an era of wonderfully querky branding. That's all. More later.

Dinner: Bad News for the Intellects

Hope you're having or have had a delicious dinner. Probably the top story from the day, aside from the obvious, is a scientific study. A Case Western Reserve investigation found evidence to believe that the brain may not be able to handle empathetic action and analytical thinking simultaneously.

The number of implications that could arise from this study and possibly be verified in future studies is unimaginable. The SlashDot article linked to discussed possible links to underdevelopment. It may also bring a bio-psycho basis to a lot of cultural and social problems and perhaps lead to solutions/compromises.

More study required, but what a (possible) discovery. Have a good evening.

Waking in the Morning: Bring on the Speculation

The Oil Drum has a piece this morning breaking down and critiquing yet another report about the potential for all time high energy production here stateside.

There have been a lot of mixed reports on the state of energy in the US. Some sober, others noticeably high on fumes. There might be plenty of fuel left to burn, but given dynamics that could quickly drain that pot, alongside environmental concerns, leadership in conservation needs to be clear and a first priority.

Have a good morning.

A Sandy Start

Hi all. Not the best note to start this blog on, but Hurricane then Tropical Storm then Tropical Depression then extra-tropical low Sandy is at the top of most people's news minds today. Hard to overstate the damage done, but I'll pass that for a suggestion for outsiders to donate to relief efforts that will soon enough be under way. Texting "REDCROSS" to 90999 will bill you $10 for donating to the Red Cross for example. There are certainly many other channels.

Sandy is another big weather/climate event in this past year to have brought out the Global Warming alarms and climate change monitors. I would read CJR's piece on interpreting it all. Yeah, it's happening, but be careful in attribution to extreme events. Biggest, clearest impact in this current situation is on wave heights and storm surge with the sea level rise (See end of article). The rest is murky at best.

It will be interesting to see how Sandy impacts another aspect closely tied with human caused climate change, and that is the cornucopia of limited (or non-renewable) and slowly renewable resources. As an example, I have been following the MetaFilter thread (warning: large) and there have been some mentions of the need to buy new cars to replace water totaled vehicles. Of course, cars aren't the only thing: houses, businesses, etc. To rebuild, lots of resources will be required, all pulling from the same limited pool.

For now, we can probably take the hit as long as everyone works together (donations, again, fairly good idea). Detroit will likely be boosted by it due to a short term increase in demand for new automobiles. For later and long term planning: what's a more sustainable set up that can stay stable even in the worst of environments and weather conditions? Clearly, a lot of work to do, and having really thought about these things since the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, I really don't know where to begin other than small acts, which can add up, but scalability is a big unknown...

I'll leave on that note. Later.

A Hat Tip and Welcome to the Non-Facebook Non-Twitter World

Hello world, for the nth time. This blog will be pretty simple. It will contain what I post to Facebook and Twitter already, and DON'T WORRY! It's not those silly pictures (but if I see an especially good one, yeah, it will trickle down here).

I post mostly news of interest and some with info that can clue you into as to WHY things are going the way they are. Not the basics like CNN or NBC, but stuff you'd have to know where to look. Mostly aggregated through Google Reader. I should have a list of sites I get sent to Reader somewhere here on the blog page. If not, bug me, and I'll get it up.

I'm careful about strong (i.e. fact based, not feeling based) opinions, liberal or conservative, these days. I have a pretty deep understanding that the freedom of speech comes with great responsibility. This does not mean we suppress it, because as good programming requires good output in case something goes wrong, good governing requires a robust platform to express feelings, reactions, observations, and opinions, to gauge what consequences result from some action and to form good policy in response. At the same time, however, we can, in a non-bullying way, convey the necessity to opine wisely.

That should do for a first post. See you around!