Opera is 15 years old! I first started using the browser back in 1997 or so when I was working at OU doing support and web design for the financial departments there. I had gotten interested in web design in 1994 or so and was completely self-taught, but I had become interested in CSS and standards as soon as I’d learned about them. After I moved here to Norway in 1999 and was looking for a job, I checked out Opera’s website for job opportunities, and lo and behold, they were looking for a webmaster. I applied and had an interview with Jon and Håkon. They seemed to be impressed by my code, which was a major ego boost for me, given who they were and what they represented.

I got the job. I think I was their 26th employee. I was 22, and I felt like my career was really getting off to a good start—this was just the kind of work I wanted to do, and Opera was really the place to be for someone interested in standards. It still is! It was a really fun, informal environment and I enjoyed working there.

Just a few months thereafter, however, my grandmother died, and I fell into a seriously disabling depression. I was on sick leave for a year, and tried to come back to work after that on “active sick leave”, but didn’t manage to make it work out, so I had to quit. That’s still upsetting to me to this day, almost 10 years later, as I see the direction they’re gone in and how it still mirrors my interests in usability and standards. It was such a missed opportunity. I’m trying to get back into the workforce now, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance to make a difference as I might have had working for Opera.

After Firefox, and after Chrome, people have been quick to predict Opera’s demise, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Opera’s rock-solid grounding in and commitment to usability and standards—both on desktop environments and other platforms—ensure it a place in the game for a long time to come. Their research in these areas and promotion of these values is still sorely needed. Here’s to another 15 years—I look forward to seeing what they do next.

Most people have heard about the issue with Amazon labeling books with GLBT themes as “adult”, and thus no longer displaying them in search results or sales rankings. Last night when I did a search for “homosexuality”, the only results I got were anti-gay propaganda; “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” is the #1 result. There are three theories about what happened: it was a “hack”, a glitch, or a policy decision.

I contacted Amazon via their web form:

I am extremely disappointed to read that you have labeled all literature with homosexual themes as “adult”, thereby making it unsearchable. I have been a customer of your company for 10 years and have spent many thousands of dollars at your store. If this is truly a corporate decision and not a glitch, and if it is not rectified, I will no longer be doing business with your company.

And today received the following response:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

I hope they’re telling the truth. Thus far the search results look the same as they did last night.

I’ve learned an important lesson the hard way this year: addressing a problem too generically is setting yourself up for failure.

I don’t consider myself a programmer, but given who my husband is, I’ve been steeped in agile philosophies for nearly a decade, and most definitely consider myself a proponent of such ideas. I can see how they can be applied to almost any aspect of life, but I was really looking forward to giving them a whirl when I took a contract earlier this year that I’d decided to solve using JavaScript. The script ended up being a lot more work than I’d expected, and while it worked perfectly, the amount of DOM interaction it required made it entirely too sluggish to be practically useful. In the end I had some ideas about how to speed it up, but since I’d been working on a fixed price (something Johannes had thoroughly castigated me for) I figured it was best just to deliver it how it was.

Why did the script end up being so much work? I’d been hired to do a specific job–to adapt tables in a web application to fit the size of the viewport, with the table header remaining fixed while the table contents scrolled if the table was too large to fit within the viewport. In order to do that, I’d set the scipt up to gather information about the original table, process it, then write the new, adapted table into the document.

The stupid decision on my part was the first part of that equation: gathering information about the original table from the document. Stupid because, in an earlier contract, I’d been the one who styled the original table in the first place! Without even having thought about it, I’d defined the problem too generally. My job had not been to create a solution to turn a standard table into a fluid one. My job had been to turn those specific tables into fluid tables. If I’d been clear-sighted enough to solve that problem in the first place, the script would have taken a lot less time and have (hopefully) been fast enough to be usable.

The problems we’re given are specified by the existential quantifier (∃), not the universal quantifier (∀). Theoretical and practical aspects of falsifiability are addressed in computer science classes and tied to real-world examples, right? From talking to Johannes I’ve learned that defining the problem too generally is frequently a problem for developers, however. I think people somehow feel it’s cheating to solve a problem only for specific circumstances. In reality, it’s the only thing that’s possible. We can save a lot of time, energy, frustration, and cash if we keep that in mind.

This explains why I never get to dance anymore. I guess there’s an attitude here that you don’t dance unless you’re drunk. So pathetic and sad! Seeing as how I don’t drink and I try to avoid drunk people like the plague, it’s not surprising that I never get to dance. Blå is a pretty cool place–maybe I’ll make a trip down there next Wednesaday, but I’ll have to leave my friends behind. ‘Cause my friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well, they’re no friends of mine.

Aftenposten had a good editorial by Zakaria Saaliti about double-standards in the current debate about whether or not women in the police force should be allowed to wear the hijab. For those who don’t read Norwegian, the main points were:

1. Those against allowing police to wear the hijab claim that the hijab is a tool for repression. If Norwegian society forbids the hijab in the police force, then it’s Norwegian society, rather than Muslim men, that is repressing Muslim women.
2. Those against allowing police to wear the hijab claim that this could lead to violence. This is analogous to the argument that women who wear provocative clothing are responsible for any sexual harassment or violence they experience. Based on this argumentation, the caricatures of Mohammed that caused such an uproar in 2006 should never have been printed for fear of how Muslims would react.
3. Society looks to examples from other countries only when those examples support its views, in this case ignoring the examples set by Swedish, British, Australian, and American society. Women have likewise had the right to wear the hijab in the military in Norway for two decades with no negative results.
4. Norwegian society ostensibly wants its police force to mirror its population, yet excludes a large demographic by forbidding the use of the hijab by its police force. This is especially ridiculous given that the police have long had problems with recruiting immigrants, and female immigrants in particular.

Another paradoxical argument I’d personally like to illuminate is that the hijab will prevent women from performing the duties required of a police officer, for example potentially making it difficult for them to enter mosques. While it’s possible that this is the case, I’d say that the potential negatives are far outweighed by the potential positives, not the least of which is that Muslim women would feel much more comfortable asking a hijab-clad police officer for help than they would any other officer. Given that this is a group particularly at risk for violence, that’s a benefit society should be loath to dismiss.

They both look friendly to me, but if you were a muslima who had need of a police officer, who would you feel most comfortable dealing with?

Saaliti concludes his editorial by stating that the signal Norwegian society sends to immigrants is that if we want to participate in Norwegian society, we have to look like Norwegians, think like Norwegians, and act like Norwegians–Norwegian society’s claim that it is pro-integration is in reality only lip service. Even though I primarily get a pass on these issues given that I don’t look so different from ethnic Norwegians and come from another Western country, I frequently experience the feeling that Norwegian society’s self-proclaimed goal of integration is merely dissemblance. I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be for hijabis, the very women who are informed by seemingly well-intentioned Norwegians that they are subjugated by Muslim men and Muslim society, to experience an analogous form of subjugation at the hands of their would-be liberators. I’m far from a moral relativist, but this kind of self-righteous paternalism perpetrated by Norwegian society towards groups they perceive to be less morally enlightened than themselves has got to stop.

I submitted some pics of Ada to the lol Builder on the Cheezburger network. Some of the results were really clever—this one actually got chosen to appear on their site. I’ll post more of the results here over time.

Some Norwegian authors have signed a statement against allowing police to wear the hijab.

Fucking idiots! This really makes me mad. Norway is hardly the most equal land in the world if it refuses to allow women to wear a headscarf on the job. And this is so typical for what passes for equal rights in Norway–everyone must be the same in order to be allowed to have those equal rights. That attitude is, in fact, incredibly discriminatory. It’s discriminatory towards everyone who doesn’t easily fit into Norwegian society’s idea of what a person “should” be like–the very people who most need to have their right to equality protected by the law!

And I am so sick of people in one group (e.g. self-righteous ethnic Norwegians) telling the people of another group (e.g. Muslim women) what their actions and symbols mean (e.g. that the hijab is a symbol of subjugation). I am so sick of the unquestioned Norwegian attitude that their way is best, that assimilation is the only option for people who are different. If hijabis can do the damned job, then they should be allowed to do it!

This reminds me a lot of another issue that got my hackles up recently: some people want to git rid of homework because it supposedly reinforces differences among students (the comments there are particularly interesting). Some in Norwegian society are so afraid of the idea that people are different, and especially that some people can be better at something than others, that they want to prevent smart kids from excelling. (Of course, this attitude doesn’t apply to sports.) When will people learn that ideology removed from reality never leads to good things?

People are different, period. To deny that fact implies that you believe that people who are different are somehow less valuable as human beings. In reality, the fact that people are different is a wonderful, wonderful thing! We do everyone in a society a service if we celebrate those differences rather than suppress them.

Gulesider has a “skråfoto” option for its maps. I’ve used this several times to not just find out where I’m going, but to see a picture of a place so I know what I’m looking for.

I particularly like this picture of the building we live in:

You can even see the tram going by. This kind of photo gives a lot better sense of a place than your typical top-down satellite photo.

Johannes og jeg så Max Manus på Ringen Kino i går kveld. Ringen Kino var ikke noe spesielt, men filmen kan jeg anbefale på det høyeste, særlig til andre innvandrerer. Den gir mye innsikt i norsk kultur and historie, men ikke i det minst er den en engasjerende og rørende film i seg selv. Ringen og Gimle Kino har dessuten filmen i en tekstet versjon–tekstet på norsk–noe som kan gjøre det mye lettere for folk som ikke har norsk som morsmål å få utbytte fra filmen, men jeg hadde ingen problemer med å forstå dialogen.

I kveld ser jeg Død Snø. Jeg regner med at det blir litt mindre intenst.

FOTO: PATRICK BAZ/AFP

Munitions expert Per Nergaard from Norsk Folkehjelp believes that it’s almost certain that Israel is using DIME weapons in Gaza.

DIME weapons contain tungsten, which, in addition to providing the smaller but much more intense blast radius that’s in demand now due to the trend toward warfare in more densely populated areas, is also a known carcinogen.

Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, the two Norwegian doctors who came back from Gaza yesterday, reported seeing dismemberments of the kind caused by these weapons. Gilbert expressed concern that Gaza is being used as a test lab for new weapons. At a press conference at Gardermoen earlier today, he said, “We’re not thin-skinned when it comes to war injuries, but these amputations are really extremely horrifying, and unsurvivable for many of the patients”.

2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict: Casulaties and Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Casualties are interesting links.