Spam headlines sure make for an interesting read nowadays;
For a split second they succeeded in getting my attention and I almost opened some of these mails on mere impuls. A good thing they were already classified as spam.
Blogposts on blog.futtta.be in English (mostly because these posts are republished in a non-Dutch-speaking context).
Whatever you may think about the iPhone-hype, you’ll have to admit that the fact that it doesn’t do Flash makes for great ammunition in the discussion against developing your site’s core functionality in Flash.
Next time your CEO or marketing manager wants a Flex-only website, you won’t have to talk about some obscure geek who doesn’t want to install the Flash plugin, about that poor blind woman who is not able to “read” those Flash animations or about how Google indexing SWF-files might be more of a problem then a solution. No, instead, you’ll only have to point out it won’t work on his iPhone (*). Period.
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So I bought a 2nd hand Nokia e61i which had a messed up keyboard configuration. Symbian OS does not allow you to change your keyboard settings as I had hoped for somewhat naively. The configuration is ‘hardcoded’ in the firmware and cannot be changed officially except by Nokia Service personnel. A good thing there’s Google, a nice little hacker tool and the Nokia Software Update utility.
These are the steps I followed to flash my Nokia with the correct firmware (only possible under MS Windows XP or Vista afaik);
So there you have it, not only was my keyboard mapping problem solved, I also got a free upgrade to the latest Nokia firmware. Qnd there zqs much rejoicing! 😉
WordPress 2.6 has been pushed out the door at Automattic and it contains some exiting new goodies as usual. So I fired up my trusty upgrade script, but got an ugly php-error when accessing the database update-pages:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 464
Turns out that the wp_widget_search-function in wp-includes/widgets.php included some remnants of an SVN-merge. Don’t know if it was a sync problem at my side or if the faulty code was on the SVN-server (it isn’t now), but I ended up copy/pasting the correct function from a fresh tar-ball I downloaded.
[UPDATE june 2009: this is solved in WordPress 2.8]
Having a fair amount of experience with WordPress installations and configuration, I wanted to install trusty old WP 2.5.1 on an idle desktop (winXP+xampp) at work to do some blogging on our intranet. The installation itself went smoothly (how hard can unpacking a zip-file be) but after some time the damn thing stopped working, producing nasty timeout-errors caused by a.o. wp-includes/update.php and wp-admin/includes/update.php.
The problem is that WordPress tries to open an internet-connection (using fsockopen) to see if updates are available. Great, except when you’re trying to run WordPress on an intranet behind a proxy without a (direct) connection to the internet. After some unsuccessful fiddling in multiple WordPress php-files, I ended up disabling fsockopen in php.ini (disable_functions)!
I mean, come on guys, why doesn’t WordPress provide configuration options where you can specify if and how (what type of proxy, what address to find it on, …) it should try to connect to the internet? I even made this truly amazing UI mock-up which you guys can just like copy/paste straight into your code;
_______________________________________________________________________________
How should WordPress connect to the internet to check for updates?
(*) Direct connection to the internet (default)
( ) Use a proxy:
Proxy type: (*) http ( ) socks
Proxy URL: ___________________________________________
Proxy User: ___________________________________________ (optional)
Proxy Password: ___________________________________________ (optional)
( ) No internet connection available (WordPress won't be able to warn you about updates!) ________________________________________________________________________________
A fun session as well, those usability-guys and girls know how to entertain!
My conclusion: this was not an uninteresting day, but the focus was clearly less technical then previous year’s edition. Content Management -around which much of this event was focused- is slowly but surely becoming a commodity and vendors are having a hard time differentiating themselves from their competitors. It is my feeling that the bigger changes and challenges with regards to “the web” are more on the application-front, where backend-integration (SOA, webservices, …) and RIA’s (using ajax, GWT, flex, …) are today’s hot topics. The fact that webscene2008 did not explore these new frontiers (and their implications with regards to business, marketing, usability, accesability) is a missed opportunity really. Let’s hope they reconnect with the webtech-trends next year! And maybe I’ll be there to let you know?
I went to a Dolmen-organized seminar about RIA‘s today, where some smart people talked about GWT, Flex and JavaFX. I hooked up with an old acquaintance there, he was a customer of my previous employer actually, working in banking and finance. We exchanged ideas about when and more importantly when not to use RIA-technologies. I just now received a mail from him as well, in which he wrote (roughly translated from Dutch);
I’ll keep you posted on our findings concerning RIA as well, but when I tried to visit www.parleys.com at work just now, all I saw was a black screen. In that case I prefer those PIA’s; they might not be that fancy, but they do work.
I couldn’t agree more, Poor Plain Old Internet Applications for president!
Let’s start with the results for the browsers on my Windows XP SP2 installation, ordered from slowest to fastest. Each test was executed 2 times, clicking on the results will teleport you to the detailed results where you can paste the URL’s of another test to compare.
The MSIE7-results are probably not entirely representative, as I use Tredosoft’s standalone IE7. This is a bit of a hack to have IE7 on my otherwise MSIE6-based system. Moreover my corporate Windows-installation is infested with crapware, notably McAfee OAS and Zonealarm seem to be slowing things down enormously. The codinghorror-tests indeed show significantly better results for this browser, although IE does have serious issues with string concatenation, which should be fixed in IE8.
On the same hardware, but booting in Ubuntu 8.04 (Linux) form my external USB HD (a.k.a. my ‘disktop‘), I got the following results:
Firefox 3 RC1 seems slightly slower then b5, but maybe the Ubuntu-b5-version is compiled with optimizations? Firefox is also faster on Ubuntu, but the anti-virus-bloat is probably messing with our heads here (although Opera is slower on Linux, go figure).
The general conclusion however; Firefox 3 is a huge step forward as far Javascript-performance is concerned. Users of javascript-heavy web-applications such as Gmail, Google Reader, Zoho Office and Zimbra should benefit enormously from this. It would however be very interesting to perform similar tests with regards to ‘normal page rendering’ (html/css). Does anyone know of such benchmarks?
According to Jakob Nielsen, jumping on the web2.0-bandwagon often implies adding unneeded complexity instead of getting the basics right. I tend to agree; in our quest for sexier, more responsive web-sites and -applications, we seem to easily forget boring stuff such as accessibility and sometimes even usability. How much time did it take you to find your way around the new LinkedIn-UI? Have you tried to use a web2.0-site on a PDA or smartphone? With your keyboard instead of your mouse? Using a screenreader instead of your normal display? Or with JavaScript disabled (I installed the Firefox NoScript-extension to guard against XSS and other JS-attacks)? And if you have ever tried loading Gmail on a slow connection, you’ll surely have noticed that they automatically fall back to their more accessible “Web 1.0”-version?
Lately I’ve been reading a number of interesting articles on this subject and at work we’re carefully applying some Web2.0-techniques as well. Based on that, here are a few suggestions on how to build better websites and -applications:
Off course these tips won’t guarantee you a perfectly usable and accessible website or -application, but when done right, this will help to get 80% of the way. A good functional analysis and thorough testing, both keeping usability and accessibility in mind, will push you towards 99,99%.