That bloke

The man who killed George Floyd is a murderer. How could it be otherwise? Imagine if the roles were reversed, and a member of the public had knelt on police officer's neck until they died. But if you're on the official side, the rules don't usually apply. The police in the US kill about a thousand people a year. How many even lose their jobs, never mind get convicted of anything? But I suppose that one conviction is a small step in the right direction.

In the UK, a minister is out of government because he wanted to protect soldiers against prosecution for things that happened in Northern Ireland. It seems that even though he's gone, they're going to give the protection anyway. Again, imagine if the roles were reversed. No one would be campaigning for civilians who killed soldiers to avoid prosecution. Why should someone be exempt from the law because they're wearing a uniform?

Maven is a the big thing in Java build tools. At one time it was Ant, and now some people use Gradle. My view would be to use anything but Maven because there are so many things about it that are annoying and stupid. Today I came rediscovered one such thing.

Maven wants you to put things in certain places, and it wants you to define a bunch of stuff in pom.xml, and I knew that for a new project Maven has archetypes as a way of setting up some of that boilerplate. Hmm, what's the syntax for that? I guessed a couple of times and it didn't work. A bit of searching found me a simple archetype which does the bare minimum - sounds like what I want. But the syntax to do that is

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-simple -DarchetypeVersion=1.4

WTF?

Edit: subsidiary rant - this simple archetype generates 81 lines of xml. WTF?

I use Spotify but I don't have it on my phone because I can't choose a song ( it's a "premium" feature on the phone app). So I was looking at alternatives.I went through this process before, but that wasn't on my phone.

I came across the same issue there is with almost everything on line. You have to create an account. Imagine if you went into a shop for something, but before you can buy it they want your email address, and you have to come up with a password, and you have to respond to a confirmation of your email address, and you have to agree to their terms and conditions and I JUST WANT TO BUY SOMETHING!

What I'd really like is to listen to a song that I feel like hearing, and I'm happy to listen to an advert to pay for that, but then we're done. If the service works, I'll be back, and often.

Why is there no Back button in Outlook?

Quite often the message you want to see again is the one you were just looking at. You can't just hit "Back". Why? particularly as the search is so abysmal.

I have a theory about advertising: products that are heavily advertised are more likely to disappear. OK, I don't have any stats, but that won't stop me.

Radion washing powder was very heavily advertised, and supermarkets were stuffed with it. Then it disappeared. Endless brands of toothpaste appear in adverts. Recent trips to buy some show only Colgate in the shelf. Then there's Shake'n'Vac.

Maybe the reason is that some products need the help. No one will buy that shoddy crap unless it's advertised. In which case, advertising is showing you things you shouldn't buy.

Anyway, someone could get a PhD doing the stats and writing it up properly. Couldn't they?

I've never worked anywhere where people told the truth on their timesheets. Everyone at the coal face knows this, but managers still use timesheets for stats. At some point when minions get more responsibility, they must forget. Or they're leant on by someone higher up, so they choose to forget.

In the old world, TV adverts tried to sell you generic things like washing powder. Who doesn't like clean clothes? I didn't grasp the new world of targeted internet adverts until I was talking to a teenager about Spotify - isn't it annoying to hear the same ad for Jaguar again and again? He looked at me blankly, and said he only got sexual consent ads, and resented the implication that he might be a rapist.

I only recently got a smart phone, and I was dismayed at the amount of my life that I'm giving up to Google. I opted out of a load of their data gathering, and they said "Are you sure you want to do this, because we won't be able to show you relevant advertising!" I said "Why would I want that?"

I've been on various social media things over the years. There's a pattern. They start out being fun, inclusive and interactive. But things go wrong. There's a participation problem even at the beginning. Then the novelty wears off, shiny things appear elsewhere, and participation wanes. The people running it forget the social part, think about money, and the users become the product to be sold to advertisers and political campaigns.

So I like things that don't belong to anyone: email, SMS, telephone calls.

And I'm aware of the delight of using unpopular things like Dreamwidth. I can shout into the emptiness. No one's really listening.

We all know how to use the web nowadays, don't we? We follow links to other pages. This isn't news to anyone.

It's well known that you shouldn't say "For info on foo, click here" because it makes more sense to link the description ("foo" or "info on foo") particularly if there's any chance that a visually impaired person will load your page (hint: they will).

So today I was amused to receive an email saying "Please utilize the link below to view the current status or add additional comments" followed by "LINK". Maybe the well known advice isn't so well known after all.

Any way, enough complaining. My favourite web usability fact is that Jakob Neilsen has been inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame because (as far as I can discover) he's the only person in that hall.

I saw his books when I was small
I did not like his books at all
His sentence style was overweening
Lots of rhyme and little meaning

The drawings were all scary-weird
Nightmare scenes that made me feared
I'd close the book in self defence
Nothing there made any sense!

His very name will fool the reader
Just look it up on Wikipedia
I do not like him now I'm tall
I do not like his books at all

I work in London. This means that I might be blown to pieces by a terrorist. It hasn't happened yet.

What can I do? The country is on a high terror alert, but I still go to work. As I came into the building, I was asked to show my security pass for the first time today. But I'm still more likely to be killed crossing the street.

I'm puzzled by terrorism. What do bombers hope to achieve? Everyone carries on as if nothing happened, but with extra security checks. Nothing changes. The IRA, the Nazis, religious fundamentalists - none of them have thought this through.

Anyway, if I get killed in an attack, please blow a big raspberry at whoever did it (profanities are optional, but satisfying) and carry on as normal. Play 20th Century Boy at my funeral, and no religion please.