Week Notes 2

Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time...

Talks

The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG.

Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes.

Work

Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate after a holiday. As for the rest...

• Bugs in publishing.
  • As part of my quest to ensure all government documents are open, I occasionally come across quirks like this.
    
    
• Better ODF guidance.
  • One continual (and justified) complaint we got was around letting users know what software they can use to view ODT/ODS files. Now, every file has a link telling users what software is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, etc.
    
• Dual publishing for ODF.
  • I've been going around speaking to departments to make sure they know that they have to use ODF. Some are now publishing in both XLS and ODS! Brilliant!
• Welsh.
  • GDS has a statutory obligation to support the Welsh language. However, I've noticed that the HTML5 attribute lang="cy" is inconsistently applied. That can make it hard for screen-readers and other tools to realise they're looking at a different language. Issue raised, hopefully fixed soon. Rwy'n gobeithio y gall cyfrifiaduron ddarllen y Gymraeg yn fuan!
• Unicode.
  • The Open Standards Board originally fixed our approved standard as Unicode 6.2 - we wanted to update it to Unicode 11. This is about more than emoji - there's a bunch of internationalisation stuff which is really useful. Board approved the change, so now we're just updating things and communicating the change.
• W3C stuff.
  • Having done a huge bunch of editing on HTML5.3, I'm now taking a small step back. I need to get more people in government interested in joining working groups.
• Job interview.
  • I like to apply for interesting looking jobs - even though I'm happy where I am. It's a good excuse to brush up my CV. I'm enormously grateful to the people in my office who gave me a mock interview. I highly recommend getting friends and colleagues to practice with.

Reading List

I took a fortnight off. Literally all I did was read books and binge-watch Doctor Who. Bliss. Here's my reading list. I tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Amazon affiliate links ahead...

Non-Fiction

• Made by Humans - Ellen Broad

  • My old pal Ellen has written a marvellous book about AI and the human foundations of its data. It is the most compelling & timely book on the intersection of AI, policy, ethics, and law. Well researched and perfectly argued

• NASA Open Government Plan

  • Good overview of how different departments in NASA are adapting to the Open Revolution. A little repetitive, and probably mostly of interest to space nerds and standards geeks like me.

• Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact - Steven Kotler

  • A fun romp through some near-future gazing. The author is too credulous at times, a dissenting or sceptical view is rarely sought. An odd emphasis on religion in some places which I found off-putting.

• Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work - Alex Williams

  • Almost unreadable. The sort of book which mistakes polysyllabism for intellectual rigour. Some words were just made up, and some sentences I had to read multiple times to comprehend. I'm sure there's a kernel of a good argument in there, but it's buried too far beneath the convoluted syntax.

• Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss

  • What can an FBI hostage negotiator teach you about communication in business? A slightly silly book - lots of gung-ho adventures - but a decent primer on negotiation. What I most admired was, unlike many other business books, the author talks about his failures.

• The Second Machine Age - Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - Erik Brynjolfsson

  • Brings home the fact that - if all robotic predictions come true - the world could be scary. What are the risks and opportunities. I can't say I learned anything new - but it helped crystallise my thoughts around the future of work. More on that later!

• The Boy Who Could Change the World - selected writings of Aaron Swartz

  • A time-capsule. Some of the essays are still relevant, some are deeply of their time. I'm not sure if I'd want to be judged by the posts I wrote when I was a teenager. Beautiful writing, but it put me in mind of this Jay Foreman song.

Fiction

• Early Riser - Jasper Fforde

  • An orphan, living in a quirky Britain, takes on a perilous quest, with quirky characters, and quirky dialogue, and quirky footnotes. A pleasant read - but nothing new for Fforde fans.

• The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem Book 2) - Cixin Liu

  • Epic sci-fi. It had been too long since I read the first book, so I struggled a bit to remember the complex plot. The second half is superb, absolutely breathtaking.

• Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

  • Astonishing. Just the most ridiculously fun mix of madness and prison caper.

• Lock In - John Scalzi

  • I usually love Scalzi's work - but this fell a little flat with me. In a world where people can take over other bodies, detectives struggle to solve a case. Spoiler - someone took over someone else's body.

• The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock - Imogen Hermes Gowar

  • Perfect! A delightful blend of historic accuracy, bawdy tales, and mystical revelations. Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier in the way it mixes fact and fiction - and that's no bad thing. And I've just realised that Imogen, Tracy, and I all went to UEA - albeit at different times.

If you've written a book - let me know!