So tomorrow morning little Clementine is going to wake up and be five years old. Forgive the cliché but darn she got big quick... We're at Rebecca and Tim's place near Perpignan (strangely correctly identified on the N95's GPS system) and Jed has just set up a follow-the-string treasure hunt for tomorrow morning.
You know, Billy and I have been really struggling to keep The Lecture List afloat for some time now, and we're doing it because we believe in it (the problem of course is it's impossible to get funding for a thing with no revenue stream...)
Anyway, people keep signing up and we know a bunch of people use it which is of course great. I mention this because every now and then (like when Billy got very drunk and bought Madona's tights) something fun happens that gives us a wee boost.
One such boost came our way just now when we were shopping for stuff for Clementine's birthday treasure hunt in Ceret and Billy checked his mail in the local internet café. To cut a long ramble short, Alex James told Ohna, Billy's wife that we could have some tickets to a thing he's doing next week and we just got confirmation from the publisher that it was OK to offer the tickets as a competition on the Lecture List.
So there you go, if you want some tickets, get yourself over to the Lecture List and answer the question:-)
Alex James | a bit of a blur is at Blackwells next week. The competition for free tickets is on the home page
So David has decided to get stuff done on Tuesdays. He's christened them Doesdays and you can join his Facebook group, check out the blog or just keep an eye on him over at Twitter
I'm feeling more productive already...
This photo really doesn't do the quality of the repro or indeed the quality of the original photograph justice. It's taken with a Nokia 6300 in the Paris Metro.
France may not be a force for innovation right now but I keep spotting print ads in the Metro that are just beautiful. There's an ongoing campaign for the Bon Marché department store which has classic-but-mesmerising photography (and repro)... The campaigns tend to be very 'old fashioned' in the sense that the ads obey 1960's ad rules (the headline and visual take on a new meaning when seen in partnership and neither repeats the other as in "think small" or "so here's a tart on a bar" etc).
The above ad for the Guide du Routard is a case in point, the headline reads "notre guide on l'écrit avec nos pieds" which I guess would translate to "we write our guide with our feet". No paradigms being redefined, but lovely, quiet work:-)
I closed my Zopa account yesterday and requested the paypal funds I had invested be returned to my Paypal account. The folk on the phone were helpful and courteous but I can't help feeling a bit amazed by the experience (Zopa is supposed to be a great site, so perhaps my expectations were inflated).
I'm reluctant to pointlessly hurl vitriol at the company because on balance, while the experience ultimately sucked, there were some very good bits as well as bad to the service.
It's this last problem that pushed this Zopa customer over the edge. It's interesting to see how superficially minor problems in the user interface can have such a large impact.
The interface really is very beautiful, but it degrades quickly once you start clicking around. To be fair, I wasn't able to explore the whole service, and in particular I never got to the 'magic moment' of actually lending or borrowing funds (I did try). But the journey I did manage was a rough one. The problems seem to arise from the site's scripts.
Two items caused me to fail my tasks. The first is a javascript validator that prevented me from successfully choosing and saving my security details (this should be really easy to fix) and the second is a series of redirects and cookie-setting choices that mean I didn't get feedback as to where I was in the lending process (I got as far as getting cash to lend into the system but never managed to set up a loan).
The Javascript thing makes an interesting example of how things can go wrong.
Step one--I tried to complete the logon form like this:
Which returned this screen:
Now I always assume I've done something wrong when a form comes back like this so I also tried this:
and this:
and this:
and even, after taking a long look at the "dd/MM/yyyy" prompt:
All of these returned the message:
Oops, please check that the memorable date is correctly formatted and between the years 1753 and 9999
(I did finally get in by typing the numerical equivalent of asdfasdf which of course meant I couldn't retype the date when later prompted for it)
Option one, the bare minimum. Change the text of the error message so that it contains an imperative. It should read "do this and achieve that" not "this might be wrong".
Option two, if the date range is so important (remember the original error that specified a range from 1753 to 9999) then don't allow the user to input an out of range date. Give them a select statement which only contains valid years.
Option three, make the error message specific to what is wrong and suggest a correct alternative. Offer links to fix the problem.
Finally, as I was about to hang up from my last call with the nice folk in customer support, I was told that the system didn't work in Firefox and that I needed to use Internet Explorer. Yes, she actually, really, did said that...
It’s all just people lobbing rocks into a bottomless pit. Maybe that is a kind of community. But, given the lack of social interaction that’s going on I wonder how important some of this is...
people lobbing rocks into a bottomless pit can I say that has to be the most pertinent and beautifully expressed assessement of YouTube I've read to date.
I used to wonder if the criptic items people were hurling at each other over the PS3 launch films I posted constituted a conversation but I guess I would have to say not;-)
So I managed to read through Adam Buxton's website for ages before I realised it was Adam as in Adam and Joe Adam ohhhhh righhhhht...
Thanks DutchAsHell
I just wanted to say thanks to Gavin at Mac Upgrades for a really great job.
If you've got a Mac that isn't old enough to give to the kids but is starting to act up you could do a lot worse than give these chaps a call. They will upgrade just about anything with anything and they keep a large stock of second-hand parts which could save you an expensive trip to Cuppertino.
They've just mended a powermac, upgraded my production powerbook and replaced the monitor strip in Nick's iBook. The work was done quickly and the price is very reasonable, I can't recommend them highly enough:-)
Finally, I you do head up there with a bootful of old kit, can I suggest the cooked breakfast at the World Famous Comfort Café Fourwentways, Little Abington, Cambridge, CB1 6AP (tel 01223 837 891)
OK, so could someone be real nice and do some explaining re the translation of Je t'aime, moi non plus in the Karen Elson/Cat Power version on Mr. Gainsbourg revisited
Specifically, I need an assessment of the slider position between irony and sloppy. Or, in other words, is the translation brilliant as it literally (almost) follows the original text which introduces both quirkiness and humor (and has the phrasing benefit of of having Elson pause on "come")?
Is "I retain myself" from both Power and Elson's mouth sort of extremely kinky which is of course in keeping with the original...
...or is it crap?
I'm sending myself back to irony school because I love the track and love the crappy translation, but as I'm always the last one to get the joke around here i thought I'd better check;-)
Well, I'm glad I'm not the only consultant out there to get into trouble with Tagged.com. The more I look, the more I find people sharing similar experiences
So here's a public service anouncement.
If you're pissed off at receiving the damn emails, why not threaten, or at least hurl abuse at, the VCs behind tagged.com? Here are some bits to get you started:
| Phone: | (650) 854-5560 |
| Address: | Mayfield Fund |
| 2800 Sand Hill Road, Suite 250 | |
| Menlo Park, CA 94025 | |
| Fax: | (650) 854-5712 |
| Emails: | info@mayfield.com |
| busplans@mayfield.com | |
| kramani@mayfield.com |
enjoy :-)
I couldn't help noticing that James Governor picked up on my post about tagged.com he states:
I am always a bit surprised by how willing people are to programmatically share their address book. I tend to be a lot more cautious with my network’s details because I don't feel I own them
He is referring to my comment about testing the use of gmail's address book api. He brings up a few interesting considerations...
From the first start, I've always felt that the internet was a give-to-get sort of space. A place where without the assumption of innocence, collaboration couldn't happen and the whole thing would fall apart.
In the early days of the net, smtp relays and dns servers were openly shared, the very principle of the network of networks relies on everybody freely relaying everybody else's traffic.
There was in principle no built-in ring fencing, emails were like postcards and everybody just accepted the idea that this life-changing wonder called the internet was just so great it didn't matter if a few bad guys misused stuff.
Well, we've come a long way... I use a geo-redundant file system, your postcard can now be encrypted via pgp and you can, if you really want to, access your webmail over ssl. Demon told me I couldn't use their dns servers anymore when I was off their network and in most companies I work with, this blog is banned by aggressive security filtering.
So how does this relate to James' comments? Well, I guess he's right. As the custodian of my address book's contents I have a responsibly to do my best to prevent the names and addresses therein from being inappropriately distributed.
And I do share his belief that just because these details are in my address book I don't own them.
However, I need to believe that the original spirit of the network is still with us. It's just too depressing to consider, if we've moved to some new and nastier thing then I need to find a different job:-( For the collaborative web to work, we have to assume that when a site offers an api mashup that it's been done in the spirit of collaborative contribution and for the equal benefit of both the mashup's creator and its users.
When we launched the lecture list we had to convince organisers that it was worth their while to go through the laborious process of posting their events. Most agreed that as well as the direct benefit to their organisations of a high Google placement, the presence of the lecture listings data online would be beneficial to all.
If sites like the Lecture List (or Etsy or Flickr or Linkedin) had to prove their trustworthiness before they had been populated, no users would ever give their contact details and it would be next to impossible to build online communities.
Now I'm not saying we should programmatically share our address books with everyone at the drop of a hat, but I do hope that the fear of spammers and phishers doesn't grow to the point were it prevents the birth of community...
Oh, and if you can think of a sensible title for this post please do let me know.
I thought I'd mention for those boring enough to be interested in such things that the comma-separated list of tags under each post no longer ends with a comma. Until last weekend, the lists looked something like this:
Notice that last comma after "services"? Thats because in the spirit of standards compliance and platform neutrality, the list of links to tag data is marked up as a list of links. In other words, the commas aren't hard-coded in any way. The source for the list should look like this (default MT classes and hrefs removed for simplicity):
<ul> <li><a href="#" rel="tag">monitoring</a></li> <li><a href="#" rel="tag">server</a></li> <li><a href="#" rel="tag">services</a></li> </ul>
Without banging on too much, the commas are appended in the css using the li:after {content:",";} construct. The problem is, the last-child selector in most browser's implementation of css doesn't work so there's no way to say "apply commas to all li tags except the last one".
The solution is to apply a class to the last <li> in the list so you get something like this:
<ul> <li><a href="#" rel="tag">monitoring</a></li> <li><a href="#" rel="tag">server</a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#" rel="tag">services</a></li> </ul>
But that is totally bogus, it dirties up what is nice simple semantic markup and what do you do with dynamically generated lists? That's a lot of struggling and a lot of extra code.
I knew I could dynamically assign the class with javascript, or for that matter I could even dynamically assign the comma itself, getting over the fact that IE doesn't support the :before and ":after" pseudo classes (well, IE7 might, but I haven't checked) but I just couldn't be bothered working out the script to do all that DOM traversal.
So yeah, this post is actually about jQuery, the write less do more javascript library.
With jQuery I can do the DOM traversal in one line of code. Here's the code that grabs all the last <li> tags and applies the class "last" to them:
$("li:last-child").addClass('last');
Let me say that again. This is ALL the custom code I use on the page to do this. I just can't help thinking this is wonderful. Imaging what I could do if I actually knew how to code:-)
Anyways, the library is 19k so go grab yerself a copy.
Oh, and while I'm on the subject of exactly how wonderful an extremely powerful library that fits in 19k is, check out this example. You want a groovy carousel interface to select from your application icons as part of an interface you're designing. BUT, you also want the interface to work in text only, that is, you want the xhtml code that creates it to be standards-compliant. What do you do? I'm still trying to work it out, but the source code for the following example looks something like this:
<div id="carousel"> <a href="#a" title="email" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw1.jpg" width="100%" /></a> <a href="#b" title="contacts" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw2.jpg" width="100%" /></a> <a href="#c" title="calendar" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw3.jpg" width="100%" /></a> <a href="#d" title="sms" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_lights1.jpg" width="100%" /></a> </div>
So not entirely perfect. Not a UL which would have been nicer and no text separation between adjacent links which will cause a WAI validator to barf on the code but still, a screen-reader can deal with a bunch of links with title attributes defined so this definitely could work.
The example is over on the jQuery interface plugins site. This one is called Carousel view the demo page now
Once you've got that, try turning javascript off. You get a static display of images with links to each image. This is very cool from an accessibility point of view. It hints at what we can do with modern javascript libraries like jQuery to enhance our customer experiences without loosing on the disability compliance, future-proofing and ease of code maintenace that good quality semantic markup gives us.
If I find the time to properly finish that last example (I have to modify the author's css as it currently creates superimposed images when you turn JS off which of course isn't the idea) I'll post it here...
If you get an email with a subject something like "[New Challenges] Soandso has Tagged you! :)" delete it quickly. I can't say for sure whether the company (tagged.com) is the next generation of sploggers or spammers gone social or if what happened to me this morning was just a cock-up on my part.
So I got the email this morning. As I follow Web2.0 stuff as part of my job I tend to register for everything to see what's what...
...at which point everyone in my gmail address book receives a "you've been tagged" email. This is great, I of course relish the chance to be incredibly rude to friends and strangers alike while looking completely stupid at the same time.
As Tim said in his angry response "Dug, this is a terrible service". Tim, I couldn't agree more.
And finally, dear gmail address book folk, sorry about my invading your inbox this morning:-(
When it comes to open source (and, I imagine in pretty much every other issue) John Kozubik puts his money where his mouth is.
His offsite backup business, rsync.net (which I use and can highly recommend) has just launched the 2007 Code Bounties which is a fantastic way to create pots of cash attached to issues that the OS community feels need resolving. The listed pots are:
As well as just wanting to mention a generally great idea, I wanted to send some linkage to rsync.net--in particular i wanted to mention a service I use which is the Geo-Redundant Filesystem.
The rsync.net philosophy is partly to protect your data (including low-level stuff like log data) from the prying eyes of the US or other governments. With a strong and flexible technology to support you, you are better able to make fair use of your freedoms.
You can store and publish information that your government might not want you to and you can circumvent onerous or restrictive interpretations of international law by any given state. In effect, with a geo-redundant file system, your information is, at least theoretically, never under one governments jurisdiction.
Of course, not living in Pyongyang, I have yet to test the sharp end of this feature in anger of course...
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://www.donkeyontheedge.com/i/fsf.png){kind=small}
