My Web Comics...

I've been lifelong comic reader, starting with Peanuts, Giles and Thelwell but then graduating to the delights of The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County. In many ways they were as influential to me as all the conventional books I read as among their humour was much wisdom.

With such strong early influences it's little wonder that I've kept on reading cartoons though I've transferred my allegiance from the funny pages to the web comic. I think that this is because syndicated cartoons have lost their way - both as a result of lack of courage and the pressures of the modern newspaper business.

I now regularly read a number of web comics and I would recommend these whole heartedly to anyone:

• Butternutquash - Telling the tales of a group of friends that hang around a comic strip. It is far more cynical than you would expect but always funny. I love the Narcoleptic Dog.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del - A delightfully odd ball comic strip following the personal and imaginary life of a dedicated gamer.
• Diesel Sweeties - The life and loves of an assorted group of people, including a fading porn actress her sometime boyfriend - a robot, a chronic hipster, a Canadian, a very disturbing furry and the list goes on. This comic strip has resulted in some of my favourite T-Shirts.
• Girl Genius - A gloriously drawn story of an orphaned. young woman who discovers that she has inherited the 'Spark' from her parents; the ability to build amazing steam-punk devices. This is a complex and involving tale set in a richly realised world.
• Gunnerkrigg Court - I only discovered this recently - A comic that becomes more beautiful as the artist develops his skill. telling the story of a conflict between science and magic through the eyes of a young girl thrown into the middle.
• Kukuburi - By the artist of Butternutsquash. Again a fabulously beautiful comic strip set in a seemingly dream world. Now sadly on hiatus but well worth reading.
• Orneryboy - A richly humorous gothic story about a couple who live with Brian the Zombie and three cats, one of whom is a ghost.
• Penny Arcade - A pure geek gamers comic strip but highly entertaining if you get the jokes. I'm a particular fan of Catsby and Twisp who crop up from time to time.
• PvP - The Godfather of web comics. Many web cartoonists cite Scott Kurtz as their influence both artistically and professionally. He is credited with pioneering making web cartooning a viable career. The comic itself follows the adventures of a bunch of journalists working at a games magazine.
• Scary-Go-Round - A very British comic strip and all the better for it. Over the years it has mutated but always centres around ordinary people living very un-ordinary lives.
• Sluggy Freelance - For a comic strip that started as a little story about a group of house mates this has developed into one of the richest and most perpetually rewarding comic strips that I read. Dimension hopping, big guns and humour make this a firm favourite. One character in particular should always be mentioned: Bun-Bun a psychotic dwarf lop rabbit with a flick-knife.
• The Abominable Charles Christopher - Tough to describe as it follows the perambulations of a perpetually innocent hairy beast that is largely man-shaped. He says nothing but still converses freely with the animals of the forest. Just before the summer break he has found himself face to face with a human town. I love it for the art and the crazy animal characters.
• User Friendly - One of the oldest web comics. I was introduced to this many years ago by my friend Neil. Gloriously anarchic tales told of an Internet Service Provider's support team with occasional visits by characters of the Cthulhu pantheon.

I have read many more over the years but these are particular favourites. What web comics do you read and if not why not?

Further Forays Into the HTML5 Stack - Animation

Short update this one.

I've been doing some simple animations replacing one image with another every 5 seconds using the SVG SMIL animation framework. I'm using the 'defs' element to define a number of image elements that will not be immediately rendered. I then use an 'use' element to refer to the first element in the sequence before using the 'animate' element to alter the 'xlink:href' attribute of the 'use' element every 5 seconds from a set of values in the 'animate' element.

Unfortunately this approach seems to be very CPU intensive even between changes to the 'use' element's 'xlink:href' attribute.

I'm wondering whether the animation timer does not take into account the down time between the changes and just spins its wheels, wasting CPU, all the time.

I think that I need to do some rough benchmarking to work out whether to use CSS3 or SVG SMIL animation and to work out which techniques are more CPU friendly.

Forays into the HTML5 stack.

While working on Cazcade with Neil, Dan C., Jon et al I'm also working on my own little project - DiarWise. It's still pretty stealth so I'm not going to discuss it in detail on an open forum but I think that now is a good time to discuss some of the technology that I've been using.

For DiarWise I've been looking at a much more rich UI experience highly interactive and completely resolution independent. I wanted to be able to create a UI that would be equally renderable on a smartphone, a tablet and a PC without extensive customisation for each. I also wanted a UI that would would be able to interact well with the browser event models for mouse and multi-touch.

I've been focussing on SVG embedded in HTML over the HTML 5 Canvas element for a number of reasons:

• It is significantly more mature as a specification than the HTML 5 Canvas element.
• The HTML 5 canvas element is procedural in its rendering so with a command it renders pixels directly to screen and so does not have a screen graph; the SVG xml elements are the scene graph and are embedded directly in the DOM and so are manipulable using all the tricks that we are familiar with. This also means that a lot of the heavy lifting for re-drawing is done for us.
• Text is more of a first class citizen in SVG and so is easier to make available to Accessible browsers.
• SVG graphics elements are style-able using CSS.
• HTML can also be embedded back into SVG (and manipulated via the DOM) using the foreignObject element

There are a few weaknesses as I've discovered as I've worked with it.

• The default SVG animation framework is built around the SMIL standard which is pretty low level and is not always the easiest to work with though it is very powerful. I'm intending to see how well SVG interacts with the CSS3 animation effects which are much nicer to work with.
• SVG support is present in the latest iteration of all the browsers but is patchy to say the least. The best of the moment is the WebKit family, Firefox is the next best though it has big issues with the text rendering. IE9 claims to be a huge step forwards over IE8 but I have yet to try out the beta and there are question marks over how well it will support SVG animation.
• While its text support is good there is one glaring omission - word wrap. The neatest work-around is to embed an appropriate HTML element in the SVG using foreignObject.

The best trick I've found so far with SVG is the simplicity of decoupling the screen resolution from the render resolution and this cascades down to any embedded HTML elements. The 'svg' element defines a local coordinate space for all its contents and you can override the coordinate system using the viewBox attribute. This means that all embedded elements can be positioned and sized relative to each other in terms of local 'pixels' and the SVG renderer will scale according to the screen resolution. The handles aspect ratios elegantly using the preserveAspectRatio attribute. This gives you the ability to present a consistent interface in a wide range of resolutions and can handle pan and zoom exceedingly smoothly for people with limited eyesight.

So far my grand experiment with SVG is going well and it seems to be well worth using as one of the technologies that make up the HTML 5 stack.

My life with BDD...

This is a blog post that's been very long overdue, but I finally acknowledged that I really need to capture my experiences after a chat with an old friend at Twitter (shameless name drop...).

I first came across Behaviour Driven Development thanks to Mauro Talevi, my first hire on the team that I set up at HSBC back in 2008. He's a major contributor on the JBehave project that is one of the major BDD frameworks. I hope that I'm not going to embarrass him too much by saying that he was an invaluable influence on the project.

I'm not going to talk about the technical implementation as that is well covered elsewhere but instead in this blog I will talk about the general principles and practical experience of working with BDDs.

The basic idea is simple. Any story or feature being implemented in a project should have automated integration tests that proves that the work has been completed successfully. It is important the the tests be comprehensible to the stakeholders requesting the story / feature so that they can confirm that it is complete and done. This provides a very clear goal for the developers and works to build up a suite of regression tests that give a healthy confidence in the application. The tests are defined in terms of business scenarios that represent various paths through the business process.

BDD is complementary to Unit Testing and is in no way a replacement.

The key to building an effective suite of BDD test scenarios is the derivation of a clearly understood Domain Specific Language for the tests. This language bridges the gap between the business concerns and the services and components created by the development team. In one sense this should not be a difficult task as the solution domain being developed should reflect the problem domain defined by the customer. Thus the effort needed to bridge the gap between the DSL and the technical solution is relatively small.

We had a lot of difficulty at first working with the stakeholders to agree and define the DSL as they were used to more traditional development practices and we had to educate them to understand that the scenarios that they were producing were testable. What they had to understand was that the scenarios were the contract between the development team and the project stakeholders. If the scenario was incorrect as signed of by the stakeholders and the analysts then the work produced by the development team would be incorrect too. The scenarios provided a very important structure to the SCRUM methodology we used. The analysis producing the scenarios was typically 1 to 2 sprints ahead of the implementation work.

JBehave provides a set of tools for building the elements of the DSL and for running the scenarios defined in it. Any scenarios in JBehave are written in simplified plain English (or the language of choice for the organisation). A scenario is structured as a list of sentences defining steps in the scenario. These sentences all begin with one of three key words:

• Given: The remainder of the sentence defines pre-conditions for the next steps of the scenario.
• When: Defines activity that the system under test is carrying out as part of the test.
• Then: The assertions that the test should be checking.

These sentences are the reusable elements of your BDD scenarios; the Givens, Whens and Thens can be put together to build different scenarios. The sentences are of course parameterised so that different values can be used in different tests.

What proved very important is the granularity of the concerns addressed by the DSL. Too coarse and you have very short (but deep) scenarios made of elements which are almost impossible to reuse; too fine and the size of the scenarios balloon and they become unmaintainable because of the sheer volume of change required as the system evolves.

In the end on the project at HSBC the appropriate level emerged organically, we paid close attention to the tests and worked hard to refactor and leverage common elements that emerged.

Another critical element is the data representation. When we started we bootstrapped the BDD test data management by using XStream to dump the objects help in memory to be compared with saved text files. This proved very helpful in the early stages but proved an increasing burden as the suite of tests broadened and deepened. The problem was that the test data was acutely sensitive to the domain data model and as that evolved we found ourselves expending major effort to correct tests that were not testing the changes but were affected because of our dumping the whole domain model.

The solution was to move to a factory and builder based mechanism. All tests used the same basic data sets generated by factories which then used builders to alter them to match the test requirements. When we came to make assertions we found that it was best to focus on the data elements required by the specific test and allow other tests to check their own data elements. This dramatically reduced the amount of data that needed incidental maintenance.

As we worked we found that after every major release it was worth spending some time on consolidating the BDD scenarios. The earlier scenarios for new functionality tended to be supplanted by scenarios testing more elaborate versions of the functionality. We worked to actively identify situations where this occurred and reduced the volume of tests while keeping their coverage.

JBehave integrated very effectively with Selenium and proved very effective at automating Web UI testing but rapidly exposed shortcomings in Selenium's implementation. By the time I left work was underway to use the WebDriver integration to address this.

By working to continually polish the DSL and the data representation we started seeing great reuse and efficiencies in developing provably tested new functionality. Where we originally spent anything up to 50% of the development time on building the BDD scenarios we saw that fall to as little as 5% of the development time.

Where this really began to pay dividends was that we had the tools that the test team needed to build out a much wider suite of tests and as they developed them we had probably the most thoroughly tested system I have ever worked on. The regression tests were run on our continuous build server producing near real time feedback as we developed which meant that problems were fixed as they occurred rather than after weeks of formal testing. This meant a much smaller testing team was required to thoroughly test the system at release. Fewer regressions were found and we were much more confident that the acceptance testing cycle would run on budget.

BDD is a key technique that I will use on future projects. It provides real benefits for the work invested and contributes materially to successful delivery.

Some New Social Networking Infrastructure

I'm a long time Facebook and LinkedIn user but as part of my involvement in developing Cazcade I've had to get my feet wet with Twitter.

I've been running FlipBoard for a while and I've found an outlet for sharing what I find on it by adding my Twitter account. I've now joined my blog to my Twitter account by using TwitterFeed and this post will test the whole process.

Twittering is very addictive and I suspect that I will begin to make more and more use of Twitter both to publish and consume content. Certainly Twitter together with FlipBoard makes consumption entirely easy and pleasurable. I'm very keen to bring together a number of my favourite RSS feeds in one place and read them in FlipBoard which has yet to have direct RSS support so TwitterFeed will be further utilised to aggregate them into one Twitter account.

What's interesting to me is how Cazcade fits into all of this. FlipBoard provides a brilliant mechanism for consuming and re-tweeting individual pieces of information. The limitation is that this is a piecemeal mechanism, you can only present one piece of information at a time. Cazcade's analogy by contrast allows you to accumulate various sources (web pages, videos, images and Twitter) into pools and present the information as a wider vision or argument and then pass them on via Twitter.

Cazcade is attempting to provide a mechanism above and beyond the current transient social network conversations.

The question I am asking myself is whether this will meet an unsatisfied need. Only time will tell.

Lyrical Ambiguity in the Kinks' Lola

I greatly enjoy a number of the Kinks songs, they were a brilliant group that created a number of classics that still resonate today.

One thing that always makes me stop and wonder is how many people believe firmly that they know the gender of Lola.

To me it seems that they have missed the brilliance of the lyrical ambiguity. The lines that really seem to be misunderstood are: "But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola.". Most people I talk to who have yet to get it believe firmly that the lines indicate that Lola is a man.

This interpretation arises from the belief that "so is Lola" refers to the fragment "I'm a man". This is a perfectly valid interpretation of the lyric but ignores another equally valid interpretation.

There is another fragment that could be referred to by "so is Lola"; "I'm glad I'm a man". If this is the reference then the interpretation would be that Lola is also glad that the protagonist is a man thus leaving Lola's gender entirely unstated.

In many ways this is the aural equivalent of the face/vase illusion where you can see either the faces or the vase but not both.

Whatever else it is, it is a brilliant song with brilliant lyrics.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPhone 4 has arrived...

Faced a rather unique problem... I got two iPhones in my package rather than the one I expected. The nice young customer service rep nearly fell off her seat when I called and told her about it. The first time they had heard of that happening.

I think that I slightly restored her faith in humanity as she thought that no one would have called up and would have just stayed quiet about it. She asked me to drop off the extra to a store and gave me a nice in-store credit.

I'm now on my way to London waiting for the new SIM to activate and just using the iPhone as an iPod. I'm hoping that the rest of the experience is as painless as the iPad was.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Stoats Nest Rd,Croydon,United Kingdom

My First Track day...

On Monday I took my life into my hands and went on a track day at Bedford Autodrome with EasyTrack.co.uk.

I had a blast! The track was ideal for a novice and my car (an Audi TT RS) proved more than capable. I had asked for a session with an instructor and I got a great guy named Steve. In the end I took a second session in the afternoon. As a result I went from being slowest on the track to not being the slowest by a decent margin. There were some fabulous drivers on the track that day, the two sticking in my mind included one in a GT3 RS and an utter genius in a bog standard MX5.

I've included a photo that was taken by TrackPhoto.co.uk.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Height of Geekery

Well, here I am at my favourite cafe for breakfast with my iPad. I'm trying the whole blogging from my iPad thing with an app called BlogPress.

It's really interesting to see how modern integrated technology is making it feasible to do things that would have been awkward if not impossible a few years ago. The opportunities in this space are endless.

The excitement about the potential for location based services is well known. Unfortunately the excitement can obscure the real win. Location-less Services. The fact that I can start doing this kind of thing truly independently of my location is what's exciting. There have been some early mis-fires with the excitement of being able to take a laptop with you on holiday. Lugging a laptop though is really pretty hard work. We're on the cusp of being able to access and interact with the "datasphere" anywhere in the world.

This is where reading science fiction is a great advantage. Writers have been exploring how to use this for years. I feel that I am ready to make use of this and build on their thinking to go places that people who have not been reading will never think of.

How about you?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Cliffe High St,Lewes,United Kingdom

Constructor Versus Setter Based Dependency Injection

There seems to be two extreme camps here and no middle ground.

I, as usual, agree with neither extreme.

The simple fact is that my preferred approach is to design classes that meet the original intent of object orientation. That the class is fully usable after construction.

That is not to say that I believe that Constructor injection is the one, true way. Rather, I believe that all mandatory dependencies should be configured in the constructor and optional ones should be satisfied by setter methods. This makes the class much easier to understand. It also means that the constructor does not end up completely overloaded with parameters but neither are you left looking at a a sea of setter methods wondering which ones have to be used.

By using this convention the code becomes more self-documenting.

The problem with modern 3D films

What are the problems and limitations of modern 3D? I'm not going to claim any particular expertise in this subject past a decent familiarity with 3D computer graphics. However I do think that there are a couple of key points that are passing people by in the recent excitement about 3D cinema. The pedant in me wants to go on record ;-).

The main thing that is not being said is that the 3D we are experiencing is solely 'Stereoscopic 3D' this means that everyone in the audience is seeing the same 2 images for every frame of the movie.

The best way of highlighting the limitations is to point out the differences in experience between real 3D (i.e. the world around us) and the 3D we experience in the cinemas.

While we do experience the world through two eyes those eyes do have to a degree the ability to sense distance individually through their focus - we do not completely rely on the stereoscopic effect to determine distance and so never lose the ability to determine how far away something is even if we were to lose an eye. This means that the illusion can never be complete as the focus in a 3D movie is determined by the director and camera departments. If something catches your eye that is not in the plane of focus then all you can ever see is a blur though your eyes may strain to focus it. This is both a blessing and a curse as it provides another tool to the director to direct your attention within the frame but can also wreck the illusion.

Another issue is that the stereoscopic effect is achieved by filming the scene from a fixed viewpoint. This means that the frames captured look best from a specific place in the cinema. The further away from that position the less effective the 3D effect is.

A related issue is that the illusion requires one orientation of the spectator. If you lean your head to one side the illusion starts to dissolve as instead of seeing the frames for the top eye and the bottom eye you will keep on seeing the frames for the left and right eyes. This gets worse if you were to continue the rotation as the eyes would then be reversed... Not many people will see the movie standing on their heads but couples leaning their heads on each other's shoulders will have a problem.

The final issue is that of movement. In dealing with a 3D world we are used to moving around it and seeing different perspectives. Despite the fact that we are largely fixed in our seats in a cinema we still have the impulse to crane up or slump down, lean left or lean right just to see that little bit more. Unfortunately the Stereoscopic 3D effect cannot handle that behaviour.

It worries me a little that there is talk of bringing Stereoscopic 3D into the home as there may be an effect where people are trained to sit absolutely still in one orientation to maximise the effect. There are already concerns about how children sitting still in front of the traditional 2 D television and not fidgeting are contributing to the obesity epidemic, how much worse may it become with Stereoscopic 3D TV?

What do I think about Business Analysis?

At work we're currently looking for a new Business Analyst and it has given me pause to review my thoughts on Business Analysis. I originally trained as an Analyst/Programmer and have during the course of my career had cause to do rather a lot of Business and Systems Analysis even though you will not find a huge amount about it on my CV.

I started off using Entity Relationship Diagrams as an Oracle Specialist and, as I encountered more types of formal analysis, made a point of learning about all of them.

As a result of my Java work I became exposed to UML as a diagramming notation for OO programming concepts but over time came to appreciate it as a fairly complete set of diagrams for supporting Business and Systems Analysis.

The recent search for a Business Analyst has highlighted to me that an awful lot of people are described as Business Analysts who, to my mind, do not have the skills to perform the job.

A good Business Analyst can add a great deal of value to a project. They are the front runner in terms of understanding the business domain. They have the following key roles to perform:

• Working with the business to understand the business domain.
• Capturing and documenting business requirements.
• Analyse the business domain to highlight areas of inconsistency and identify areas of uncertainty.
• Distill and communicate the business requirements to the implementation team.

There is a continuum of competency between the parrot and the professional.

The parrot is the so-called Business Analyst that just sits between the implementation team and the business and just acts as a conduit for questions and answers - actively subtracting value from the exchange by slowing it down.

The professional is, for me, the Business Analyst that can work with a business that has yet to fully formulate a problem and work with them to produce a full and clear definition of the problem and the business solution that can be used by the development team. The professional actively helps the Business think about the problem space and gives them the tools to properly understand it themselves. The professional will be able to answer a very high percentage of the implementation team's questions without recourse to the business as the questions have already been addressed by the analysis.

As far as I can tell the vast majority of Business Analysts in the Investment Banking sector fall perilously close to being parrots. While I am most used to UML, any business analyst that can use a clear approach to formally analyse the business domain and its requirements adding value all the while is fine by me.

As many of my colleagues will know I firmly believe that 'code is cheap' and I have come to realise that the same holds true of analysis documentation. What is truly valuable is the knowledge it embodies. While the concept of Bit-Rot is well understood in code; the same concept applies to analysis documentation (Word-Rot?). The real value is held in the analyst's head and in the heads of the business and implementation team at the end of the whole process.

I no longer believe that huge repositories of analysis have any real value - what is valuable is the process of producing the analysis and the knowledge that process imparts. A certain level of high level analysis documentation for invariant concepts can have longer term value but that will only be a small fraction of all that is produced.

I believe that there is no value to analysis artefacts that cannot be formally tested. Once an unit of analysis is complete it should be handed over to a tester for formal testing and then be used as the basis for User Acceptance Tests for the delivered system.

When a business analyst is required then you had better find yourself a professional and once the analysis is done you had better hold onto that professional. Inevitably team members move on, but perhaps the best hand over will be for the outgoing analyst to guide the replacement through a complete analysis of the domain.

I have worked with excellent analysts who have added immense value to a project and I have worked with some complete incompetents. Guess which ones I actively seek to work with again.