``The_Laptop's Domain'' Re-Design

I've had my personal domain for the upwards of five-ish years now, and it felt like it was high time for a re-design. There were a few reasons why this was so:

1. The content is getting increasingly haphazard and hard to manage---I hand-code every page without the use of any CMS to make the loading speed as fast as possible and the hosting costs as low as possible.
2. XHTML 1.0 Strict was starting to feel very limiting when I tried to write up some online tools/games.
3. I was using enough of the ``reverse chronologically ordered list'' to demand the use of reversed in the list tags, but that was not supported in XHTML 1.0.
4. Did I mention that maintenance was a nightmare?

So with that in mind, a re-design was definitely in order. I chose to use HTML5 and CSS3 this time partly because they are easier to maintain, and partly because they allow further exploration of the hypertext medium that old HTML and XHTML cannot provide.

When I first started on my own website back in late 2009/early 2010, I did not have much of a structure to begin with. It was simplistic to say the least. But as time went by, I added more and more unrelated content items, some of them necessary, some of them merely for padding (remember the White Noise and Pink Noise under Digital Music?). This made the flat structure that I was using untenable.

And then there was the whole shebang I did to make things mobile friendly. I won't go into the details here (See here for the gory details), but suffice to say, the script I wrote was not scalable to a richer set up. Thus it was the first thing I rewrote.

Then I looked into the design itself. I didn't like the fact that navigation was particularly frumpy, and that there were many horizontal lines breaking things up. I found it unnecessary especially since I am already relying on variations in size of the text to segregate information. Speaking of fonts, I was also getting appalled at the rather unreadableness of Candara (ironic since this blog is using Candara now), and so had to do something.

The result is what you now see at http://thelaptop.info/. I have retained the colour scheme from the past, tweaked the layout, updated the font to use Open Sans (self-hosted because I know some folks don't really like the fact that Google can track their web access patterns through the resource pull), and overhauled much of the words used. Here are some sample screen shots comparing the old and the new design:

Here we see the much more compact yet loose layout on the home page. When JavaScript is enabled, additional left and right arrows to jump backward and forward in history are provided.

Now we look at samples of really long prose in both the old and new designs. The text is slightly larger but is definitely more readable.

I have removed as much of the ``toggle the list'' tags by conflating them into the ellipsis metaphor that I use everywhere to collapse away objects.

Tables also see a light adjustment to sit more comfortably in the middle.

The single most fun thing about using HTML5: reverse numbered lists to better represent the reverse chronological order.

At this point I can say that the basic skeleton of the new website is in place. Professional credentials, writing, reading and shopping lists are already ported, as well as the grandfathered in tuning layer I wrote for Nyquist---I did not attempt to convert that one to the new format, and it is the only part of the old site that is retained wholesale. Stubs for the new categories are put in place, and I will slowly port over the old material over as and when they are relevant.

I had also done quite a bit of magic in .htaccess to reduce the amount of changes I need to effect outside of the domain, so for the most part everything ought to be transparent.

I can go on, but I think that's as much as I want to really convey.

Go forth and enjoy the new website design!

An Observation

This has been a long coming entry.

Recently there were a couple of comments made with respect to... various social observations. Comments that one can easily finger as being out of touch with reality at best and frivolous lip service at worst.

It made me start to think about the unsteady balance between criticisms/comments from an ``expert'' and the same from ``common sense''.

On the one hand, the ``expert'' is a person who has spent lots of time and effort studying the particular social observation. He/she has probably formulated various formal hypotheses and done some testing on them to confirm/deny the cause of the said observation. He/she has staked his/her entire career into looking deeply into such matters under his/her domain of expertise, and therefore whatever he/she says regarding their domain of expertise should not be taken lightly, since it is generally well considered.

On the other hand, the ``expert'' may be systematically biased due to the prevailing dogma present in their domain, causing tunnel vision that is compatible with said dogma. Such tunnel vision can lead to the ``expert'' missing the entire point of the true causes of the social observation since the systematic biases disallow any alternative explanations for the observation. Under such circumstances, the ``common sense'' perspective is likely to provide a better intuition of what is going on, and can be a good source for further research follow up in the way the Ig Nobel Prizes try to reward.

But proving ``common sense'' is not as glamorous as advancing a dogmatic theory, or if the ``expert'' is lucky, a completely new perspective that no one has seen. Thus much of the ``expert'' population ends up ignoring ``common sense'' as much as possible, which leads to... interesting pronouncements that are simultaneously prognostic and vague.

All in all, if the purpose is merely to explain, I think we can stop right here and be done. The problem arises when actual public policies are to be crafted based on such social observations and their causes to address a particular concern. At what point should ``common sense'' be a strong enough voice to demonstrate that the prevailing ``expert'' opinion is completely inapplicable?

I think that is one of the fundamental problems that affect the way modern democracies and republics are run.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2015:

1. 22 poems posted here
2. 39 essays/rants posted here
3. 3 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 65 articles, down from the 280 articles in 2014.

That's an average of 0.18 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.77 last year. It's a little low, but I think that it is representative of the new normal for me, where I no longer have the steady supply of stimulating events (both good and bad) that come from intensive social interactions that come from being in a pure academic environment.

The past year itself passed by with very little lows, much to my satisfaction. I now have a steady companion who will be transferring her base of operations back into Singapore, and she has reminded me of a life that I had once denied myself of because I had been hurt quite badly due to my naïveté in thinking that people can and will change, not to mention the whole loss of trust in people due to... let's not talk about it here since it is already in the past.

Last year saw the whole marketing hubbub that was ``SG50'', the year-long government-supported marketing blitz to celebrate Singapore's 50 years of independence. Despite my interpretation of just how tacky that sounded, I was probably involved in more events relating to SG50 than I would care to admit. My interest in my music has heightened and levelled up, partly because of the co-influence of my companion and partner, partly from an exposure to the ``real'' world of professional music through a collaboration or two, and partly from a candid realisation of the trials and tribulations to pursue an ideal. I reaffirmed my love of music not as a means of bragging about my prowess, but as a means of expression, which goes as far as standing up for my own thoughts and views against the establishment.

No regrets there.

I am starting to enjoy the new-found feeling of assertion. Unlike the past where I was subjugated in one form or another and always having to play toady to ensure survival, being older now and a working adult has given me more leeway and conviction to assert myself, that I can think and am willing to think, and am unwilling to let anyone cow me to follow their own perspective of rightness and wrongness without having a convincing argument. I find that I am clearer in my values, and am more willing to assert my values in the face of opposition, mostly because I am now less beholden to many external parties.

In short, I am fast learning how to be my own man.

The value of a good mentor is often understated, and my interaction with an elder is the reason why there is sudden clarity in many things. There is no shame to ask for help and advice when one needs it---it is when one has doubts and yet refuse to seek advice despite spending time thinking through that one is the fool.

Much of my free time not spent on practising on my 笛子 or piccolo/flute was spent on reading. My martial arts training had been slackening from the haze and general laziness, and I will be bringing them back on track this year. Like my companion says, there will be some big and wonderful things happening in the year ahead, and like her, I am looking forward to them as well.

To the future and beyond!