This year, I thought it might be fun to try taking part in something that would get me writing more. Anton Peck started Project52 with a simple aim to produce a blog post a week for all of 2010.

It's hard. Really hard.

It's week 5 and although I generally suffer various rage related incidents* over the course of a week, nothing has presented itself as particularly bloggable. Likewise, work has been fairly unspectacular and I've not been especially creative so I'm lacking anything of true substance to talk about or teach. Next week should be better, as there's an upcoming event I'll be involved with and I'll have produced some extra-curricular illustrative commisions I'd like to share.

I asked twitter - the natural home for people who don't know what to talk about - and the suggestions came back that I just get this stupid meta-post over and done with and talk about writer's block (cheers Olly and Craig).

I like writing. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I can string a few words together into something that vaguely resembles prose. Finding topics that haven't already been talked about excessively in the web world is just an especially difficult challenge.

Only today, a mailing list I frequent has been discussing how difficult it can be to stay motivated and interested in a field that's coming out of it's emergent phase. Finding a cause that doesn't already have more than enough band-wagoners is rare and finding something unique to add is unusual and perhaps it's feeling less ground-breaking. There's less to do for the invidiual as more hands come on deck. Ultimately, this is super for the web but not so good for personal satisfaction, in my opinion. The word "jaded" was used, but I think (and hope) it's a bit early for that.

Finally, a suggestion from Matt:

@phae Ask for suggestions of what to write about. :)

matthewpenell

So, dear readers (probably, mostly, I should just address this to "mum"), anything I've hinted at in the past that you'd like me to elaborate on in the future? I know it's a cop-out, and it's lame to ask, but hey... you never know, it might work.

• OK, here's a little bonus list of things that have made me want to strangle people this week:

• CSS3 being compared directly to Java Applets - please, people. Lets at least let it out of the stalls before we condemn it.
• More pro-homeopathy articles, the Pope, the Daily Mail, the usual.
• Email responses to technical debates that consist of nothing more than off-topic quotations.
• Latest version of Chrome reporting unexpected background-repeat values in JS-land.
• iFrames.
• A guy on the tube who complained about the placement of someone's feet (they were a cm too close to his) and the crowded nature (it wasn't very crowded) of the carriage.

I'm generally completely non-plussed about petitions and marches and all that freedom of speech type gubbins that angry people get involved with all too easily. I think you should pick your battles and save up your bile and wit for when it really counts. But there's something about the 1023 campaign that really strikes a chord with me. There were government reviews in 2009 as to whether the NHS should continue to fund homoeopathy, so I think this could be the year we see it finally get cut and I'm happy to help tip the balance by picking a side.

If you haven't already stumbled across the many manic rants about homeopathy, and why it's such a ludicrous load of rubbish, then here's a selection of posts I could recommend (Update: Here's an excellent one from New Scientist today that covers everything up to now). The videos on the 1023 site alone are good and will help explain things quickly and often hilariously.

This weekend, 1023 has organised an active protest aimed at Boots. Around the country objectors to homeopathy will be necking a whole packet of homoeopathic pillules (sugar pills) to show that there's no actual active ingredients in them, since they won't be keeling over (I shall be amongst them). Homoeopaths are making defensive statements already to suggest that it won't do anything (they know as well as we do that they won't have any affect), because without a trained homoeopath prescribing the correct pills for the correct illness, it won't work (something to do with it being like the likelihood of having an allergy, or you have to have the right illness for the right pill for the magic to work... I don't quite get it). In my mind, that weakens their argument even more, since Boots sell non-prescribed pillules without advice to anyone - so they shouldn't work for those non-protesting people either.

I love the NHS. It's one of the main reasons I'm walking around now having a generally jolly good time of it. I think as a nation we're proud of it and what it provides for us, but as with most things, it's under-funded. Something like four million pounds a year goes into funding homeopathy treatments and hospitals. If you take a look at the research on homeopathy, it's just an elaborate placebo effect, and it seems a lot of homeopathists don't even deny this, and say that it's the act of caring and talking and the long appointments people get to have that help make them feel better - so I'm all for scrapping the lunacy and putting that money into therapies and councillors. Should have a similar sort of result, no?

Anyway - all that aside, and all the obvious nonsense and I'm still left with my biggest issue with the topic. If you want to take a "them" and "us" approach to the argument, my problem is with some of the people on "our" side. You'll see comments on articles and posts all the time that go something along the lines of "Who cares? It's charlatans selling pills to fools". Sounds fair, right? I don't agree. Charlatans: yes, generally. Fools: I don't think so. I think consumers and patients are well within their rights to follow recommendation.

Take Boots for example. Although clearly a commercial entity first, they still have a role in our world as a trusted pharmacy with a brand we recognise. Is it so wrong that people should trust a pharmacy to sell pills that have some efficiacy? Could you honestly say that you understand how the paracetamol or aspirin you take works? What it's chemical structure is? How it's produced? What it does to your body? You take them regardless, because you trust that those tablets have been tested to be safe, work and reliable. We're not expected to be experts on medicine. We don't have to be, because we rely on trained professionals to direct us. When the NHS provides money to a practice that is unproven, who are we as consumers of the NHS to question what appears on the surface to be a funding-based seal of a approval? Call people fools if you like once they've been shown and had to confront the science, but you can't label general man-on-the-street consumers as those people.

Someone asked me once if it meant we should be up in arms over anti-aging face creams with false claims for all the same reasons and my response to that is I'll start caring if they falsely claim to cure your illnesses too. Buying a cream and still having a few wrinkles isn't likely to be fatal, but not taking the prescribed and proven medication, in place of a few sugar pills when you're seriously ill, just might be.

Update: I did email Madison Maclean to complain, with a link to this post on the 19th January, and as of a week later, I still have had no response.

Update 2: Today, 19th October 2010, I received an email from the manager of Andrew Holden. He requested that I remove this blog post. Since these events did happen, I won't be removing the post. I am however adding this comment to say Andrew no longer works at the company (and hasn't for some time), although I have no confirmation if that was the same person who cold-called me, and whether you choose to work with them in the future is entirely up to you. I was not offered an apology.

Original post

So, a little story about yesterday and what not to do if you're contacting me.

Around 4.30pm my office phone rang (I don't publish this number, and I'd have trouble reciting it myself - you can only get it from the outside by calling the reception and being asked to be put through). My phone never rings at work, except for cold-calls from recruitment agents, so I'd already anticipated answering, saying "no thanks" and hanging up. A 30 second call at best.

Instead, I answer and the chap on the end of the line does his usual speil of who he is and where he works and if I'm available to talk at the moment. I answer "No, not really. As you can probably tell I'm at work, and also, you're a recruitment agent and I'm not looking for work at the moment, so I'll save you the time and say "no thank you"".

"But you haven't heard what I want to offer yet..."

Ok, that's true, but I still wasn't interested, thanked him for the call and as an ending question, I enquired as to where he got my number.

"From your linkedin profile".

Now, I'd like to direct everyone to my linkedin profile. Click through to contact me and find the section. What does it say? You have to be a member to take a look, so to save you the time, this is what it says:

Please email me. Calling my company and getting to my desk phone via the switchboard is unappreciated (and this keeps happening, so stop it). *NO* cold-calls from agencies.

To be fair, I added the final line about cold-calls yesterday evening, but the rest was there about not calling my switchboard and to email me.

So, being caught out with a lie, I expected an apology or at least some sort of sign that he had become confused or disorientated, and I point out that I expressly say that I do not want people to phone me. No, instead, he says: "Well, I might have got it from a colleague that you'd previously spoken to, but you're clearly all over the internet. You're inviting people to phone you, and you shouldn't expect people not to. I'm perfectly within my right...". I'm sorry, what? I invite recruitment agents who can't be bothered to read my profiles properly to cold-call me about jobs I'm clearly not interested in? I correct him and said that wasn't the case, and he continued to argue the point, at which time I decided this wasn't worth my time of day, thanked him again for his call and hung up on him mid-sentence. That might have been rude of me, but not half as rude as he was. I quickly vented on twitter, and some of the responses I received were interesting:

Some choice coloquialisms seem warranted. In the King's English, you might remind them that a combative cold call accomplishes nothing

by erickolb

wow. does this mean you need to have a 'no recruitment agencies pls' signature appended to every online post you make?!

by gradualist

there’s something about that argument that strikes me as a bit—for want of a more appropriate adjective—“rapist-y”.

by fatbusinessman

Reading that again, it sounds like a horrible rape defence

by jaffathecake

From what I can tell, part of a recruitment agent's job is building up a relationship and repertoire with potential candidates. Cold-calling people, lying to, and arguing with potential candidates does not seem to be the fastest way to build a lasting bond.

Identifying the company

I had to google the company to remember who it was that called me, as I'd seen red and forgotten exactly who it was. I'm so used to just saying "no thanks", hanging up and that being the end of the story. I knew it was Madison-something, but couldn't recall which. Turns out there's a whole ton of Madison-something recruitment agencies in London alone, each apparently specialising in IT. It strikes me that there's too many companies with names Madison-something, too many agencies and too many that specialise in the same thing. So, I can imagine the area is highly competitive.

He had hinted that he'd got my name from a colleague, so I searched my inbox for "Madison" and bingo, I had an email from Madison Maclean in 2008 from an Andrew Holden. I can't recall if that's the name of the guy that called me, but he's certainly the person I responded to with "I'm not currently seeking employment at this time, and probably not ever in the financial services area." after he emailed me in 2008 with job opportunities in the banking area, so I'm happy to let him take the blame for not taking me off their books (that I never signed up for in the first place).

As a favour to me, could you avoid Madison Maclean if you're job hunting? Thanks.

Friend and colleague, Jake Archibald, has been developing Woosh, which is a JavaScript speed testing framework. Essentially, it's been developed for Glow because we want to make sure that Glow 2 kicks Glow 1's ass (and any else who fancies a piece), but he's open-sourced the work to let everyone benefit from it.

I thought I'd run you through how to set up some basic tests and start benchmarking your own code with Woosh. Bear with me, as it's still quite new to us too.

Setup

If you're a git user, feel free to include Woosh as a submodule of your own project.

Woosh is primarily designed for comparing libraries, but there's no reason why you can't use it to take a benchmark of your existing scripts and then work up optimised versions to compare. If your code can be unit tested well, it can be speed tested just as easily.

Firstly, you need to let Woosh know about the scripts you want to test. You can just add references to each of your scripts using the Woosh.libs property. For each script to test, though, just make sure they have a unique name so you can reference them later (have a sneaky look in Woosh.js to see which libraries already exist and the formats used - infact, if you're taking your own copy of Woosh, you can just edit your files and add your scripts straight into this file and skip adding them in the test runner page).

Below is how your test runner HTML page should look (also available in the examples directory in the Woosh repo). Notice the reference to your script in the woosh include section, then beneath are links to your individual test files. To make it more manageable, it's probably best to have one test JS for each script you're comparing. Remember that Woosh looks for your scripts relative to where you've got woosh.js.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<title>My Tests</title>
<!-- include woosh -->
<script src="/where/youve/got/it/lib/woosh/woosh.js" type="text/javascript">
woosh.libs['myTestScript1'] = ['/path/to/scripts/myTestScript.js']
</script>
<!-- Add any CSS you need for the test, but restrict styles to #htmlForTest -->
<!-- Add your tests. The first will be treated as the master -->
<script src="MyTestScipt1-Tests.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wooshOutput"></div>
<div id="htmlForTest">
<!--
Put elements you want to use in your tests here. The page will be
refreshed for each set of tests, so don't worry about one framework
messing with another.
-->
</div>
</body>
</html>

The final item in the example above would be your intitial test script to be benchmarked (MyTestScript1-Tests.js). This is just a JavaScript file which will call woosh.addTests (as further down).

Now you've got a choice: You can either make minor changes and incrementally watch the improvements, possibly using the save feature, or you can create a copy of your script. I'd recommend the latter, so create a copy of your script, and add a reference to it with Woosh.libs again and also create a file to add the actual tests to for it.

You can add and compare as many scripts as you like, so long as their methods are comparably the same.

Creating tests

Test files look like this and you can either put all your tests in each file, with a block for each script, or put each block in it's own file. So, below would be your contents of MyTestScript1-Tests.js. You'll need a second for MyTestScript2-Tests.js etc.

woosh.addTests('myTestScript1',
	'Test name identifier 1': new woosh.Test(1000, function() {
		return myFunc();
	}),
	'Test name identifier 2': new woosh.Test(1000, function() {
		return myOtherFunc();
	})
});

Things that matter about these files:

1. The name identifier needs to match for each of the tests. Woosh isn't looking for them in order - it's matching on the names to know which should go into each row. i.e. "Test name identifier 1" should be the same in all test files for matching tests for that function.
2. The first parameter of addTests should be the name you gave the script in the Woosh.libs command, so Woosh can find your script.
3. The first parameter of woosh.Test is the number of times a test is to be run. This should be the same for sets of tests for the same thing. If it's not, Woosh will flag up the test as being unfair.

Saving tests

The hard work

Another thing to note is that you'll still need to run all of these tests in all of the browsers you want to optimise for. You'll find massive varience in some cases and it'll be up to you to decide where to keep the speed. Jake's Full Frontal presentation covers some of the things to look out for, so that's definitely worth a look over (most importantly, make sure you're not running developer tools like Firebug when running your tests, since it'll skew your results quite heavily).

Further reading

The full API has been documented for Woosh, too, although I believe that might be an exclusive as I cannot see reference to it from the github docs at the moment. I recommend taking a look through those to see about running async tests and preparing your code with setup functionality using $preTest, as well as a few other features you might find useful.

On another testing topic, Mat Hampson published an article on A-B testing on the new BBC Web Developer blog.

As with last year, I kept a list of cinema visits for the year.

Films (at the cinema, in seen order):

1. The Spirit
2. New Shorts: Funny Shit
3. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. Frost/Nixon
6. Better Things
7. Revolutionary Road
8. Hansel and Gretel
9. Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes)
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
11. Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys)
12. Role Models
13. Tokyo Sonata
14. Gran Torino
15. Surveillance
16. Franklyn
17. Flame & Citron
18. Watchmen
19. The International
20. Bronson
21. In The City of Sylvia
22. The Boat That Rocked
23. Two Lovers
24. Cherry Blossoms
25. Martyrs
26. Let The Right One In
27. Monsters Vs Aliens
28. Knowing
29. In The Loop
30. Star Trek
31. The Grocer's Son
32. London Sci-Fi Film festival Blink of An Eye Shorts Programme 1
33. Kurôn wa kokyô wo mezasu
34. Eyeborgs
35. The City of Lost Children (with Marc Caro)
36. London Sci-Fi Film festival Blink of An Eye Long Shorts/Short Longs
37. London Sci-Fi Film festival Blink of An Eye Shorts Programme 2
38. Synecdoche, New York
39. Coraline
40. Observe and Report
41. Drag Me To Hell
42. Terminator Salvation
43. Brüno
44. Public Enemies
45. Sunshine Cleaning
46. Moon
47. Inglorious Basterds
48. The Hurt Locker
49. Jetsam
50. District 9
51. Away We Go
52. Antichrist
53. Surrogates
54. Up
55. Adventureland
56. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
57. Fantastic Mr Fox
58. 9
59. An Education
60. The Men Who Stare At Goats
61. Cold Souls
62. Coco Avant Chanel
63. A Serious Man
64. Paranormal Activity
65. Where The Wild Things Are
66. Avatar
67. Sherlock Holmes
68. Thirst
69. Fish Tank
70. Unmade Beds

Bonus

Knowing about films can win you prizes! At least, it did for me. The Sonic Tonic had a halloween special podcast, which included snippets from horror flicks in between tracks. Whoever could identify the most won a t-shirt. I got all of them but one. Go me! As promised to the ST guys, here's my best myspace-esque photo of my winnings. Props to Paul Cripps for the tip-off and to my mum for always letting me stay up past my bedtime to watch scary films.

This year, I also recorded all the films I saw via oo5, which is Mike Stenhouse's twitter app for ratings stuff, so all of the films above have a score out of 5.

Best

The start of the year had some really amazing films such as Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino. Let The Right One In, which I was hugely anticipating and felt rewarded for doing so, was brilliant, and Away We Go, A Serious Man and happily quite few others kept the year going with some real treats. However, my two favourites this year were sci-fis. The first is an obvious instant classic; Moon. It's 70's-esque styling and Sam Rockwell's staggering performance put it up there with 2001, in my mind.

My other favourite, that I rated fairly averagely initially, is Timecrimes. It's a Spanish language film about time-travel, but it's not your usual showy film about changing the past and getting into a mess by accidentally shooting your aunt or butterfly or something, but a more subtle, accidental story that still has all the clever complexities you'd expect for the genre. I don't want to ruin it, but it's just such a neat film made on a tiny budget. It's shot beautifully and the surprises last right up until the end. I really can't recommend it enough.

Worst

Well, there were quite a few. Some failed because I'd built them up and expected a lot more, such as Hansel and Gretel, Franklyn and Martyrs. Others were just plain stinkers, such as Surrogates, Unmade Beds, Knowing and The Boat That Rocked (the last much more astutely criticised by Patrick over on Talking Animal).

Paranormal Activity took the biscuit for me, though. I'd fallen into the hype trap and seen the trailers and the chatter about it (on twitter, of all places to take seriously) and actually thought that it could be the new Blair Witch. How stupid of me. I'm astounded that anyone thinks that film is good. It's 81 minutes of a hell-of-a-lot of nothing - mostly a couple of pretty terrible actors whimpering and arguing with each other and unconvincingly never leaving their house to, you know, go to school or have jobs, but film every dull moment of their lives up until the final 5 minutes where there's a bit of genuine, well almost, thrill. As with the massively underwhelming Google Wave, it's the hype-machine success of the year that leaves you muttering "...is that it?".

Books

I somewhat failed at reading this year. I'm blaming my commute going from around 40 minutes spent on a tube to get to work to about 10 minutes. It's barely enough time to read your email and scowl at a few commuters, let alone open a book and really get into it. I did read The Outsider, The Road to Serfdom, the new Scott Pilgrim (which I rather nerdily now keep in it's plastic wrapper due to having a limited edition signed inlay plate), Let The Right One In and a couple more K. Dicks. I didn't really think to record what I read, so there is probably others. Must try harder this year.