Interesting Links for 04-12-2013

• Scotland top of UK for maths and reading
  (tags: education uk scotland )
• UK education: Average won't do (Not enough autonomy, or emphasis on the underprivileged)
  (tags: uk education )
• The War on the War on Death Begins
  (tags: death health society research )
• ‘Record IQ is just another talent’ - the happy "failure" of a genius.
  (tags: iq genius intelligence korea happiness )
• A Child Is Worth More Than A Cartoon Dog
  (tags: cancer children familyguy charity )
• Never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh? (on the social workers/ceasarean case)
  (tags: uk children socialwork mentalhealth law )
• Reasons why Harry Potter did not get put in Ravenclaw (the Sirius one made me snort tea out my nose)
  (tags: harrypotter funny )
• Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance
  (tags: school education crime usa )
• Spotify finally reveal how they calculate their payouts to artists.
  (tags: music money business spotify )
• This Swedish mall is a gorgeous piece of architecture.
  (tags: architecture glass sweden )
• The Reality of Veterinary Medicine
  (tags: animals viaSkreidle )
• We should look at the content of the Snowden files – not the messenger
  (tags: surveillance media uk politics spying )

Nobody hates computers more than someone who works with them.

Although in this case I'm at home, having great fun, having taken a day off.

I'm still trying to make computers do things though - in this case I'm getting more stuff with AngularJS working. So far it's much, much better than doing things directly with JS/HTML - it feels like what HTML _should_ be if you're going to write proper applications in it - declarative statements about what data should be displayed where, and how to format it, which then get filled in automatically.

This, for instance, is a combobox/select, with the contents of a list in it:
<select ng-model="currentInput" ng-options="input.userName+'@'+input.siteName for input in data.inputs"></select>
so that I get a list of inputs, each formatted nicely, with the currently selected one stored in "currentInput". So much easier than the standard way of working with it.

Oh, and it supports transclusion, so I can split my HTML into small parts that are loaded on demand, rather than stuffing everything into one file. Magic!

Of course, I got completely stuck a few days ago, trying to work out why on earth my dialog boxes weren't working. Dialogs aren't part of the base Angular functionality - but they are part of the Angular UI collection, rebuilding Twitter Bootstrap in Angular-speak, so that you only need the Bootstrap CSS, not all of its JS and nomenclature. So I loaded in the code, started working through things, and hit a brick wall. A brick wall I just leaped happily over when I discovered that I was using Bootstrap CSS 3.0.2 and Angular Bootstrap only supports version 2.3. Switch over to the old version of the CSS and magically everything starts working...

It's these kinds of things that turn a half-day task into a three-day one. *sigh*