theTechnophile

I’m having a crisis. Maybe I’m losing my will to technophile?? No that can’t be it, I’m probably just feeling more guilty about it as I get older. That happens, doesn’t it? As you get older life has given you both wisdom to think about what you’ve done and an ever increasing collection of things consider. Anyway, this particular crisis is environmental in nature.

We use too much.

I’ve always been aware of our global environment and the fact that we all share responsibility for its well being. It’s also been evident to me from an early age that we’ve not done the best job of it so far.

The official targets are full of promises to halt or even reduce the overall emission of CO₂, thereby putting a stop to climate change. This supposes that climate change is entirely dependent on CO₂, an assertion that is far from bullet-proof. Attaining these targets must require the global economy, population and… dear God I can hardly think it… even the supporting technology to substantially reduce its rate of growth. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the world is confidently waiting for this same technology to solve all its problems: like the fat guy, I’m not slim so I can say this, expecting the next pseudo-science diet to shed that excess weight when he really just needs to eat less and exercise more. The same basic principle applies to our environment: if we want reduce our impact we need to use less stuff!

Is my life environmentally friendly?

Now this is the focus of the crisis in question. Can being a technophile, or just working and living, ever be reconciled with this principle. I’d love to say yes; but, I just don’t know. Clare and I gave up commuting for personal reasons, one of which was its clear environmental impact. Doing this just about halved our household income and not everyone can afford that type of compromise: However, doing the majority of my work from home using broadband should be possible, especially in IT. The question is does it help?

Some maths.

My equipment uses a lot of electricity and there’s no doubt that our domestic utility bills have generally gone up whilst I’ve been around the house. But it has to be offset against the effect of using my car: assuming Petrol/Gasoline has an energy density of 9.5 kWh per litre, I used to commute 15,000 miles each year at a good average fuel consumption of 40 miles to the UK gallon; or about 8.8 miles per litre, it’s a small car. I made that an annual energy consumption of around 16,190 kWh. I’ve measured, remember I’m a technophile, an average increase in electricity use of 280 Watts whilst I’ve been at home. I make that an increased energy usage of about 2,500 kWh each year, nowhere near that used for commuting. Doubtless I’m using more of the other utilities but, looking from an environmental perspective, I used at least the same whilst at my employers premises. So, at a relatively superficial level I’m obviously doing the right thing.

Think of the toys!

What concerns me is that this lifestyle is supported by the use of lots of high-tech gadgets. These become redundant much too quickly to be sustainable, despite the claims of some manufacturer to be producing what they call ‘Carbon Neutral’ hardware. These usually consider only the energy used in running the equipment and not that consumed in design, manufacture and disposal: if they did I doubt any hardware could be carbon neutral without either generating excess energy from nothing whilst in use or planting a major forest for each chip! Don’t get me wrong, I think that any green initiative is to be supported, but don’t let the marketing men get too close.

Getting fewer toys.

Applying my principle to this issue, it follows that equipment, or any physical possession, should be designed to be as reusable and long-lived as possible. This means choosing your toys in the expectation that nothing particularly new is going to come along for sometime, and if it does you can’t buy it until your old one is well and truly broken. This isn’t a good thing if you hold stock in the companies producing this stuff. The problem is that I probably do and I like getting new toys, hence the crisis.

Using less power.

One upside is the fact that the focus of the computing industry appears to have shifted from ever increasing processor speed to maximising processing speed to power consumption ratio. I suspect this is mainly due to the temperature problems the waste heat was causing the old processors rather than to a green conscience, but the final effect is much the same: it fits nicely with the ‘use less’ principle. Less waste heat improves processor efficiency and reduced the power demands for cooling, both in the machine and often building air conditioning.

Change is possible.

The real problem is that society and the environment share a common trait: inertial. Changes implemented today won’t have quantifiable effects on either for decades. Basing policy on the belief that consumption and population are going to fall in the next few years is clearly crazy. But climate change is only one facet of the threat to the environment. There are a range of other ethical issues that need to be addressed and some of these could see change in a shorter time-scale. In the end, it’s mostly a state of mind. Forcing people to comply with a set of hastily implemented rules rarely results is real change. People actually do things that they personally believe in and at best pay lip service to rules. I guess I just need to make the effort to figure out in what I truly believe. I hope others choose to do the same.

OK… I changed my mind about the layout. Once I started redesigning the theme I found that I couldn’t stop. You see, I’ve never really had a flair for what I would call graphic design. I’m more of a nuts and bolts type of a guy, but my browser did it to me again! Whilst surfing I accidentally, and I don’t know what possessed me, typed ‘typography’ into Google. The result was the start of a journey through a series of online articles about the importance of the visual elements of web design.

Here are a couple of the most interesting sources.

• Articles by Mark Boulton
• A practical guide to web typography

Putting it into practice.

… so this is the result. I’ve tried to follow the advice on text formatting including a logical hierarchy in titles and optimising line spacing and column width for legibility. This is all done with CSS of course and I’ve used the max-width property to limit the size of the content column in inline with the legibility guidelines in these articles.

I’ve tried to maintain the liquid or elastic layout, still not sure which is which. I still believe that this provides a better use of the screen space and smoother control when the text is scaled. However, I’ve changed to a three column layout to accommodate the generally narrower central column with the left menu containing blog specific links and my new right-hand column for all those extra links and comments.

No guarantees.

Whilst I’m much happier with the look and feel of the site, now I’m gaining an ever increasing interest in graphic design. Therefore, I’m not guaranteeing there won’t be more changes.

The web and printed material I used whilst researching this topic has made it evident how important these elements of design are in everyday life and how much I’ve tended to take it for granted. In the past I’ve just wondered why my sites don’t feel as good as others without really considering the obvious. I’ve still a long way to go, but hopefully the quality of my output is on the up. Incidentally, that same web research showed me that I’m not the only one who needs to take the time to think about graphic design!

Guess what I’ve been doing lately.

That’s right, it’s the new theme!

I think the title says it all really. I’ve completed the first phase of the new look for theTechnophile, I say the first phase because when is a website ever really finished. It is now very loosely based on the Wordpress default, hence some of the element names remain the same, but I’ve changed the whole structure to what I believe is known as a liquid layout.

The basic idea was to be able to maintain the look and feel of the site whilst using all of the available screen real estate. This is accomplished through the use of positioning in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). My two main element blocks, the header and mainbody, are positioned relative to each other. The column elements, sidebar and content, within the mainbody block maintain an absolute position from their respective sides. It took a bit of getting my head round since my CSS turned out to be quite rusty and I found HTML Dog to be a useful reference.

Another key feature of liquid layout is that it copes much more smoothly with changes in the default browser font size, thus improving accessibility. Finally, it allows you to put the important content elements much nearer the top of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents than in conventional designs. This way the content appears at the top of your screen if CSS are turned off or not supported.

Why does Internet Explorer have to be different?

I’d forgotten just what a pain Internet Explorer (IE) can be. You see I use Mozilla Firefox, Safari and occasionally Opera browsers and even when I kept all of these happy IE had to object. I found this fantastic new graphics application called Inkscape and used it to generate the logo for the site as a semi-transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file. Seriously, if you like playing with graphics you should give Inkscape a go, especially since it’s open source. The other browsers are fine with this, but IE was not interested. The positioning worked fine on the others, but IE? The text size rendering looked great, but on IE… yes, you guessed it! Still I think I managed to find a solution that keeps all these browsers relatively content with a little help from Position is Everything, identifying a number of interesting bugs.

Still I did have to concede that the lack of transparent PNG support on IE was a solid boundary. So, a little PHP script to introduce extra CSS code allowed me to take advantage of their cascading nature. The result? A more IE friendly, if not so pretty, presentation without transparent graphics. If your using IE to read this, I’m really sorry but it looks genuinely better in other browsers, try it.

What’s next?

First I need to let the new look settle in for a while. Then I would like to introduce a bit of script to allow the user to choose which side they want the menu sidebar. This shouldn’t be too difficult due to the layout technique being used, but then again it could be a case of famous last words.

I may try writing an article to spell out what I did in much more detail. I’d like to be sure I understand it before that though! I have another website which needs a lot more work doing on it and which could be the appropriate place for the above article once completed. This is going to task my Java skills… gulp!