Working through

Hope you all had a rad Christmas!

It’s quiet in the office. Everyone else be holidaying whilst I be coding.
Behold, my desk at work today:

Desktop

Yep. my desk is pimped out to the macs.

I’m going down to Gisborne for a few days in the new year, so I’ll probably fall behind in Speed Racer. Oh well.

I wish you all a choice New Year. Take it easy!

Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment

Getting Better, Faster

Stephen Caver in his post, Getting Better, pooh-poohs the idea that things can get better in leaps and bounds, but rather postulates that progress is incremental.

With all due respect, (quite a bit of respect, actually, given Stephen is a recent employee of Airbag Industries LLC) I think that Stephen is wrong.

The airplane example is flawed. Sure, as with any product development, aircraft design is incremental.

But in the grand scheme of things, how long did it take for mankind to go from not flying to flying?
How long was it from when the airplane was invented to when it was a useful, commercially viable, everyday-life, kinda thing?

Not long.

And I believe the web is the same.
How long, in the lifetime of electronic communications, did it take for the WWW, from when it was first publicly available to become a part of life?
How long, in the life time of the web, did it take for web standards to become more-or-less ubiquitous?

Not long.

Things webby have been glacial, of late, but I think 2008/2009 will bring some radical changes on the web.

Leaps and bounds, people; leaps and bounds.

Posted in Commentary, Web Standards | Leave a comment

Barcamp Auckland: Liveblogging.

I know everyone is twittering, but I thought I take a half-assed attempt at some live-blogging.

We all found power sockets and introduced ourselves. A great crowd – this is going to be choice!

Session One: The future of Web Standards

First session I’m attending is Rob O’Callahan, Mozilla Corporation talking about the future of web standards.

  • Standards are necessary; balance of implementation/development.
  • Clean up existing standards. De facto vs. de jure : eg: innerHTML. Background of standards groups, etc.
  • Add new features. The open web needs to remain a competitive platform, eg. not closed flash, silverlight, etc. New stuff like SVG, video, etc.
  • WHATWG/HTML5. <video> vs. <object> client-side SQL, offline stuff, browser registration as protocol handlers. HTML5 spec
  • Video. Ogg Theora. Standards should be open.
  • ES4. What is ES4? Ah… ECMAScript; The proper name for JavaScript. Too much change, too fast? Incremental vs. complete overhaul?
  • Politics.
  • Your needs.

Development environments: ActiveState Komodo IDE, built on XULRunner. Aptana.

Morning tea = tasty muffins and sausage rolls with open sauce.

Session Two: Sending Spam

Simon Lyall.

  • InternetNZ Spam Code of Practice
  • Friend-get-friend. Overly legislated – most companies are dropping friend-get-friend just in case.
  • Test your email across a number of ISP before you send it.
  • IP reputation, Customer ranking (‘Mark as spam’), SPF, Domain keys

Session Three: DIY CSS Frameworks: CSS Design Patterns

Darren Wood (go, microformats!)

  • Blueprint, etc.
  • Reset your CSS
  • Set up some default styles
  • Set up styles for accessibility
  • font-size:62.5% = 10px or thereabouts, so then 1.2em = approx 12px, etc.
  • John Oxton’s scalable logos.
  • Pros and cons of large corporates with supplied/mandated markup/CSS; it’s tough having to implement crappy code, but conversely, you have the benefit of code handed to you on a plate.

Cheers, Darren.

Lunchtime!

Session Four: Spaghetti or Meatball?

How to design this barcamp t-shirt.

  • Designing before the fact, not after.
  • Freehand over Illustrator.
  • It’s a wear-again shirt; not your average conference t-shirt.

Much of Matt’s presentation was too tricky to type up – thought processes, rationalising, influences, feedback from others, etc.

Session Five: Charles

Karl von Randow tells us all about Charles.

  • Developing and marketing software.
  • Shareware: time is precious for developers, so there’d be a willingness to pay to remove the 30-minute time limit, etc. If you’re not using it enough to be annoyed by the time-out and the nag-screens, then you’re not using it enough to warrant purchasing it.
  • Development driven largely by user feedback/requests.
  • Leaving Charles running for your everyday HTTP requests means you see all sorts of interesting things; e.g. how to hack Mintshot.
  • Bandwidth throttling

Session Six: Demos!

Some short demonstrations of cool stuff!

  • Simon Lyall demos the Asus eee.
  • Mark Derricutt demos some DB migration Java classes.
  • Jeff demos the Mukuna gig guide changes since the last Auckland Web Meetup.
  • Demo of Vidavee’s WordPress plugin. This is worth checking out.
  • Robert O’Callahan demos in-page OpenGL 3D. Browser talks directly to the GPU – it’s really fast!
  • Karl stands up and says iPhones are cool.
  • Lugwig – the man himself – shows us an app he built: NCEA tracker.

Well, this has been barcamp – thanks everyone – it was great!

Posted in Commentary | 3 Comments

Charts and graphs and stuff

It’s funny how things come in droves.

A good friend of mine has, over the years, written a few applications that require graphing. He has written them as VB applications and when I’ve suggested he make them as web-apps, one of his fairly valid objections is that it would be tricky to create good-looking graphs with dynamic data.

Google’s Charting API

So just this morning, the Barnacle drew my attention to Google’s new Charting API (Read the Developers’ Guide). It takes some query string parameters and returns your chart as an image.

Check it out:

Line chart with unevenly spaced data points and lines in red, green and dashed blue

Line chart with a pale blue horizontal band stretching from 25 percent to 75 percent of the way up the y-axis and a thin horizontal line ten percent of the way up the x-axis Three dimensional pie chart with May, June, July, August, September and October labels for each segment

Now that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?
Although I think the data encoding, while clever, seems a little quirky.

Flot for jQuery

And so having spotted that this morning, I’m stumbling around the net this evening and discover Flot, a charting plug-in for jQuery. This is teh awesome; just check out the examples, especially the zoom!

So, while you’re waiting for other browsers to support SVG, here’s a veritable choice of quality charting goodness to satisfy the most particular of needs.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, JavaScript | 1 Comment

How to hack mintshot; the problems continue.

Here’s another post about mintshot hacks.

I’m not sure what happened to the page I linked to the other day; it seems to be down. [Edit: Here’s the google cache of that page.]

There are a few good lessons that can be learned here:

  • If you’re going to have any sort of site with user accounts, ongoing earnings, prizes, etc. and/or anything that can convert or relate to actual monetary value, then I’d recommend not using a standard open-source platform (i.e. Joomla). If there’s money involved, then you’ll quickly attract hackers.
  • Don’t attempt to do any sort of worth-related calculations client-side, returning a response via a form POST. Any savvy geek will mess with the HTTP headers (using Charles, for example) and will get rich quick.
  • Get your site a proper security audit from an outfit like security-assessment.com. It can cost a few grand, but for the sake of an embarrassing mess, I’d say it’s money well spent.

I’m interested to see what will ensue.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design | 4 Comments

Win millions of Mintshot dollars!!

Mintshot is a mess! Cheating, hacks, security flaws… Wow!

I must say, I wasn’t overly impressed with Mintshot’s shoddy layouts and presentation, but I never thought it would be so crappy underneath!!

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design | 1 Comment

Blue Beanie Day

In case you’re wondering what’s on my head today…

Douglas Vos has inaugurated Blue Beanie Day

Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

The blue beanie is, of course, in recognition of Jeffrey Zeldman‘s pioneering advocacy of Web Standards.

Digg it, if you want.

Posted in Commentary, Web Standards | 1 Comment

Frameworks. CSS and otherwise.

Jeff Croft hosts a hornets’ nest of a debate over the use (or not) of frameworks in web development.

It may pay to first read his previous post on this topic. And probably Jeff’s article on frameworks that he wrote for A List Apart.

Posted in Coding, Link, Tools | Leave a comment

Mintshop? Mintchop?

Some canny chap has caught onto the Mintshot hype, and has bought up mintshop.co.nz, mintchop.co.nz and mintshots.co.nz. The video clip he’s showing is a bit of a laugh!

Tricky stuff.

Posted in Commentary, Link, Search Engineering | 2 Comments

Mintshot

Mark Ellis and crew have launched Mintshot this week.
It’s a site that rewards Kiwis for interacting with their favourite brands.

I’m interested to see how it goes – I’m kinda in two minds – there are some good prizes, but do people really want to sit and deliberately watch advertisements?

Posted in Commentary | 3 Comments