Tangential Ramblings

Opening the BBC News site today brought nothing but pleasure. Here's why.

First of all, a comparison of the old and the new. Here's yesterday's site:

...and here's today's:

Both of the above pictures are the same relative size. So the first obvious point of note is that the new site is wider. Both are fixed-width, not scaling with the browser, but the new one is designed for optimal use on a 1,024-pixel screen. Any less, and the left-hand side will be chopped off. So the new site is 995 pixels wide including margins, 973 without, leaving space for the browser's left and right-side display, scrollbar included.

It's quite a brave move for such a wide-reaching organisation. W3 Schools, whose work I only know because they always come top in Google's rankings when you search for browser statistics, informs us that as of January 2007, 80% of people had browsers 1,024 pixels wide or greater, six percentage points of the remainder having an "unknown" screen size. That leaves 14% of people unable to view the BBC's new offering. This number will have reduced in the ensuing 14 months, but is also probably low anyway because it's informed by techies, who are generally ahead of the technology curve.

At a width of 800 pixels in Firefox, the user gets the words "Bodies recovered" in the first link in the right-hand column, but no more.

But fortunately, my screen is wider than 800 pixels—a mighty 1280—so I see everything. And it's all centred on the page, much more pleasing to the eye than the old, left-aligned version.

And it's much cleaner, with lovely attention to detail. The left-hand navigation has a much nicer feel to it. It doesn't feel crammed in, instead extending further down the page with appealing levels of separation between the elements.

In the body of content itself, there is a better level of separation
between the content elements. Much of the additional width available is dedicated to the right-hand modules, almost at the detriment of the main body of content (the right-hand column is now 66% of the width of the main body, compared to 49% of its width in the old site), but this allows for bigger text and hopefully more meaningful headlines.

The graphic at the top of the page is a lot more professional, the solid red and orange highlight bars further down the page give a strong sense of location. And the unconventional footer, complete with the Roman year, caps off a wonderful page.

I'm not a user experience expert by any stretch, but I am a user, and I know what I like. And I like this new offering. It's the third style of the BBC News site that I've known. The second one threw me for quite a while after its launch. This one is less of a step-change, but is a natural progression, in my head at least.

Mum on Underground platform: stand back.
Four year-old daughter: why?
Mum: because the train's coming and if you go over there, you'll get killed.

I saw a private coach in Vauxhall on Friday advertising that it was headed for "Snodland and Darnley", including the quotes, via its orange, digital display.

I noted it because of the ludicrous destination names, both of them. But on looking them up later, I noticed two things:

• They are both real places in the UK
• From Vauxhall, the journey to the two places is ludicrous.

Assuming it was visiting the two locations in display order, which makes sense (given that it was travelling east along the south bank of the Thames), it would be heading 32 miles east to Snodland, Kent, before turning back towards London, rounding the M25 and heading 451 miles north west to Darnley in Glasgow, Scotland.

Rather bizarre.

Their t-shirts should read "Drug dealer". For that's what they are, at the end of the day.

Let's assume you have some analogue clocks, all of which are set at a random time. Assuming they're all wrong by the minimum amount (i.e. if the clock is set at eleven o'clock and the actual time is 4am, it's five hours slow rather than being seven hours fast), the average of all the clocks' times will tend to the correct time as the number of clocks tends to infinity.

Nice.

In February, 21 people happened upon my site by searching for the string SUMPRODUCTIF. They would have got to this post, which is surfaced as the top result in Google. Hopefully I'm helping some people, which satisfies me hugely.

I have two grammatical questions to which I need answers:

• If I end a sentence with a bracketed clause that itself ends in a period-demanding abbreviation, should there be an additional period after the closing parenthesis?
• If a sentence ends with an ellipsis, should this be succeeded by a terminating period, given that the ellipsis merely signifies missing words?

My style of choice (is this a matter of style?) is to double up on the period in the first conundrum, while refraining from adding a fourth dot in the second. My argument for the former is that I wouldn't omit a question mark, so why should I omit a period, an argument that should also apply to the latter, but somehow doesn't.

Thought? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone

This morning's random ordering of my five-starred tunes on my iPod started as follows:

• Take That's Shine (actively selected)
• The Libertines' Time For Heroes
• Dolly Parton's 9 to 5
• Talking Heads' And She Was
• The Streets' Dry your Eyes
• Eta James' At Last
• Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth
• Blur's Charmless Man
• Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now
• The Ramones' Baby, I Love You
• Westlife's World Of Our Own

Not a pup among them. ;-) On which note, I've now responded to my previous post about embarrassing iPod tunes.

Throughout a project, the PMO should record the project's beard quotient, calculated as the total number of unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. Actually, to avoid any possible mis-interpretation, the total number of male unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. (This qualifier saves the possibility of a quotient over 100%.)

I'm not sure what the quotient means yet, but I'm convinced it is correlated to the RAG (red/amber/gren) status (it may even be a predictor of future RAG). Any suggestions?

What a ridiculous turn of phrase (no pun intended), that of rotating tyres. I understand the principle, but given that rotating is what tyres are best at (with the possible exception of supporting children as swings in playgrounds in their post-driving afterlife), surely they could have thought of something less open to confusion.

Tonight I sat in a rib bar in Clapham, drinking a Sam Adams and watching March Madness on ESPN. It's moments like these that bring it home how much I miss America sometimes.

Four years ago, I did some analysis of the voting of US states by their average IQ. It found that John Kerry won the 16 most "intelligent" US states, while George W. won the 26 least intelligent.

A similar analysis of the Democratic voting this time around is less conclusive. Of the 25 states that Barack Obama has won to date, the average IQ ranking is 24.6, compared to 21.7 for the 16 that Hillary Clinton has won. (The averages for Bush and Kerry were 34.7 and 10.5 respectively in 2004.)

Obama won Connecticut, the "most intelligent" state, the next four intelligent states being taken by Clinton (Massachusetts, Jersey, New York and Rhode Island). The top ten for which elections have taken place have been evenly divided between the two candidates.

At the bottom end, of the states whose elections have taken place, Obama has won the four least intelligent states (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, South Carolina) and seven of the bottom ten.

Obama now needs to walk away with at least 44.5% of the remaining delegates to reach the 2,025 winning post, this being the lowest this figure has been in the entire election. Should be an exciting run home.

I read an article this morning about a new type of clock rivalling the world's most accurate clocks. But when clocks become more accurate than their predecessors, how can you measure their accuracy? Surely, the fact that you can measure that the new clock is more accurate than the old clock means that you had a mechanism for calculating the inaccuracy of the old clock beforehand, which surely means you had a mechanism, physical or otherwise, for providing a more refined time.

At the time of writing, my clock's saying 07:41:57 GMT. Make that 58, 59...

King's Cross is slowly becoming Kings Cross. More and more establishments, some of them well-respected, are ignoring what I assume is the ownership of the cross by the King, deciding instead to imply an anger shared by a whole host of kings.

The recent movement of the King's Cross Thameslink connection to St. Pancras has prompted whatever company is responsible to erect associated, apostrophe-free signage diverting its customers accordingly. I genuinely believe the trend is down to ignorance rather than defiance.

It will be another bitter blow to punctuation if and when London Underground adopts the trend, removing the apostrophe from the blue bar across its logo. I'm confident that this move is a long way off.

There are two big problems with most risks and issues registers:

• They're difficult to read
• They're difficult to maintain.

Let's start with the readability. Usually, they're a lifeless grid in a tiny font with lots of columns and, depending on your project/programme, lots of rows. There is nothing to distinguish between the rows other than the contents of the eight-point type in each of the cells. Risk or issue titles are unnecessarily verbose, and it's often not clear what an item represents by reading it.

To solve this problem, include a Headline column in 14-point bold. Maximum of ten words to give a high-level description of what the row is all about. People will read it and say "Ah, yes. I know that one". And make sure all of the columns are absolutely necessary. Nugatory columns are a pain to fill in, and deflect from the important columns when viewed.

Use 90° text alignment for the short fields like who raised it and assignee to save width for the columns containing important textual information.

Now some pointers to make your registers more manageable.

Don't hive off closed items. Just close them in the status field. It's important that you keep them for posterity and completeness, but use Excel's Custom Views to make sure you don't see them unless you have to.

Have a single register to house both risks and issues. This is a biggie that I can't stress enough (or indeed too much). Although some of the columns for each register are subtly different, there are quite a few that are consistent between the two. Keep two registers and your reference numbers get cumbersome, and cutting and pasting from one to another when risks come to fruition is a right pain.

If a column for risks is sufficiently similar in nature to an issues column, then combine the two. Have three heading rows, one for risks, one for issues and one for a combined view. Again, use Custom Views to hide the two title rows that are redundant for a particular view. If you're showing risks, hide the issues and combined titles, for example.

If columns are being used to determine the Custom View via filtering (e.g. Status: Open; Type: Risk), then hide these two columns in that view—they're redundant. Instead, include a cell above the title row saying "Open risks" that can be displayed for that view. For each view, have a dedicated row above the title rows purely for this function, summarising the view. This can be printed on every sheet through repeated titles. And if you want, you can succeed it with the number of such records.

A few other points worth making.

• Unless you're using some shared web interface, use Excel. Don't consider anything else.
• For the risk or issue titles, word your items as statements of fact. Risks should be phrased as if they've happened. Issues similarly, because they have. "There is no environment available for performance testing," for example
• Keep update summaries brief, and archive old updates into a separate, hidden column in four-point. This is for audit purposes and is rarely referenced. Its font can be increased as and when you need to read it
• By combining your risks and issues, you can have generic reference numbers that support both
• Build Custom Views for: open risks; open issues; open items; all items. You can add more complex views if necessary, such as: imminent risks; high-impact issues; escalated items
• Use conditional formatting to work out how to colour items, but only colour the rating cell and make it narrow

Boring post, but necessary. Comments welcome.

A friend from work today pointed me to tenbyten.org, a site designed to surface 100 identically-sized pictures every hour (displayed in a ten by ten rectangle) that best summarise the news of that hour, each with a short news snippet available on clicking the picture. (On first reading the url, I thought it might be a site dedicated to ten wrongly tried people from South Wales.)

His proposal to me was to develop an algorithm that could use the relative traffic of the pictures to determine their relative size, and to display them similarly as a continuous rectangle, complete with edges smoth as a jigsaw.

It's a conundrum that I've often thought about, sparked by puzzles popular with children and indeed the Krypton Factor, where you have to fit various shapes into a fixed, two-dimensional square. But those puzzles were designed for the pieces to fit neatly into the solution. The problem posed is open to the vagueries caused by pictures whose relative sizes are beyond our control. Unless you're willing to accept some undesirable gaps, or similarly unacceptable raggedy edges, it can't be done I'm afraid. Unless you're very lucky with your traffic volumes.

There was an article surfaced on the BBC News site recently with the following title and surfaced summary:

F1: Prost backs Hamilton
Fernando Alonso tells the BBC that his former McLaren team-mate Lewis Hamilton could win the title in 2008.

I read the article twice to confirm that Alonso wasn't bigging up (a phrase used purely to prompt comment from Rob) the chances of his bitter rival for the 2008 Championship. Very odd to read, and a strange mistake to make.

When the board of a football team says that it is 100% behind its manager, I'm keen to understand whether the question was asked of them, or whether the information was volunteered. Surely the latter scenario is more worrying for the manager in question.

I'd also like to know the average length of time between a board proferring this support and the manager's subsequent departure date.

What's the most embarrassing song on your portable music player of choice that you feel compelled to listen to in its entirety upon hearing its introductory bars?