The Blog of Lucien Stals

I just found this code in the site I maintain…

<h2><strong>Can’t find the answer to your question? </strong></h2>

closley followed by this one…

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…

OMG! It gets better. Closer to the end of the same document…

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I’m speachless.

I just read a blog about browser testing and thought I’d jump on the band wagon. It’s especially relevant since I’m currently testing a project.

First and foremost, I develop on Firefox. There’s just too many great development tools available for it like Firebug and the Web Developers toolbar. I have both a Mac and a Windows PC, and I tend to use both in the development process, but mainly I develop on the Windows PC. Why? Windows + 21″ LCD = developer heaven. Mac + 12″ display = frustrated developer. ’nuff said?

As part of development I’m constantly testing, but once I think I’m done, I’ll still try to test in FF on both Mac and PC.

Then, on the Windows box, I’ll test IE7. After that is IE6 (Damn. Just found a bug in IE6. More work fixing stuff.) and Opera.

No, I don’t test IE5. I don’t even have a copy. Although if somebody does have a copy, I’d love to get it just for the fun of it. But I doubt I’d test with it.

On the Mac, I’ll test Safari, the nightly build of Webkit, Camino and Opera.
I’m thinking I should add a couple more browsers to my Mac list. OmniWeb seems popular on Macs, but I’ve never used it. Maybe it’s time? (What?!? I have to pay for it? I don’t think so!)

Then if I have time, I’ll test on Ubuntu. It’s not that I don’t respect Linux, but the reality is that market share is small enough that it’s not worth my time bug fixing just for that platform. And from my experience, any projects developed to standards seem to work fine anyway, apart from the poor fonts.

There is a debug menu in Apples Safari browser which is not enabled by default.

To enable it, type the following command while Safari is closed.

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

I haven’t played around with it yet, but it looks like it provides many of the features that Firebug brings to Firefox.

Happy debugging

I’m not in customer service, but I found this Joel on Software post about customer service great!

Hang on.

I’m not in customer service?

I meet with clients every week to try to figure out their needs, then I write web pages they want. Or I get them talking to somebody else who can help them.

Isn’t that customer service?

We might not be all be front line tech/customer support. But in the end, unless you’re writing me ware, it all about the customers in the end. That article make good reading for us all

I just saw this article on the ABC news site.

Can there realy be much doubt that climate change is happening and that we need to take action to preserve our way of life?

Even John Howard and George W. Bush are grudgingly admitting something is going on.

As the article says:

“Unfortunately I think as human beings, it doesn’t matter really what it is, but we only deal well with crisis.”

Do we want to wait that long? Do we want to wait until we have reached crisis point?

Maybe all the climate scientists are wrong. It’s possible. But wouldn’t you rather do something about it now, and risk being wrong, than not do anything and have them be right when it’s too late?

Our government here in Australia is talking about recyling water. This week at work we ran out of water for the water cooler for the second time this year. Okay, that’s not linked to climate change, just poor office managment processes. But it got me thinking: Where do they get all that water from? How long is it going to last?

I over heard one of the delivery guys a few weeks ago talking on his phone to head office saying: “I’ve got a problem with my water. There’s dead spiders in all the bottles.”

What?

And one of the guys at work left a glass of water on his desk over the weekend and it had mould growing on it by monday. Mouldy water? In two days?

What the f**k are we drinking?

As we move into more severe climate change, and in Australia it’s predicted to get dryer, we are going to rely more and more on the water we just take for granted.

If you by a bottle of water in the shops, it’s still more expensive than petrol. You know? That fossil fuel we’re buring that coudl just be a huge part of the climate change problem? Yeah, that stuff is still cheaper than a bottle of water. And how much proccessing goes into bottled water?

I wonder how expensive water is going to become?

In a triumph of *not* hitting it harder, I just saved myself from what could have been a costly morning by taking the time to think through the problem first.

I was working on a web job this morning. The site is complete except for some last minute edits to the content the client wanted. Easy to do and I should have been finished this weekend.

I went out of the room and when I came back, the computer was off. I pushed the power button and nothing happened.

Uh oh.

My first thought was that the power supply had blown and that I’d need to get a new one. And if I was going to do that, I might as well get a new case. One of those cases with the BIG fan in the top. Good cooling *and* it’s quiet.

Nice

Expensive

On inspection, the fuse in the power supply was fine. I plugged it all back in and noticed that the little light on the mother board was on. So there was power. But still nothing happened when I pushed the button.

I sat there srcatching my head for a bit.

I pushed the button again. Hello! The computer came alive. But I could see the heat sink fan wasn’t running. So the CPU had over heated and shut the system down. Great, so all I need is a new heatsink and fan for the CPU. Hey, what about one of the big ass Orb ones? They are supposed to be quiet.

(Have you noticed the “quiet” theme? My box is *far* too noisy.)

So I’m looking at the bog standard intel heatsink in mu box, wondering how it comes off, and I notice the power cable for the heatsinks fan isn’t plugged in. What the …?

I plug in back in (I have no idea how it came off) and everything worked fine.

So in the end, I didn’t have to buy anything. Just plug one little cable back in.

Triumph of the simple solution over the big solution

I just saw an interesting post on the Wired site about the Sound Of Traffic.

It’s about a Java app that analyses network traffic and represents the data as sound. The person posting the article says it’s fun, but not very useful.

I haven’t played with that program yet, but it seems to me that a program that could be used to visualise, or in this case I suppose it’s “conceptualise” since you can’t see sound, could be *very* useful. It’s a great way to make sense out of what could be a lot of overwhelming data.

On the 456 Berea Street web site, there is a post about the worst code ever.

My favourite so far is:

<B style=“font-weight:normal”>…

It’s like a terrible kind of CSS Haiku.

I was recently reading some of the Joel on Software posts about Task Switching and I was thinking about how so much of my job has been jumping from one thing to the next. In an average day, I reckon I spend up to an hour or two just figure out what I’m supposed to be doing because I switch task so often. I’m trying to get it so that I can at least break the day into only two parts: the AM and the PM. That means only switching task once during the day, after lunch which is an interruption anyway.

The reason why I’m posting this now is that I was on a roll this afternoon. Since lunch, I had been plowing through the web site, making pages validate. It’s the same goofie error on each page, but I can’t just do a find/replace in case it messes something else up. I was going great, then my mobile rang.

This never happens. I only have the thing in case of emergencies. I fact there’s probably only a handful of people who know the number. I don’t think my own Mom knows the number. And the bloody thing rang. I grabbed it, wondering what was wrong, and there’s some idiot from Vodafone wanting to know if I like my plan!?!

“Do you have any questions about your service?”

YES! WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME AT WORK ABOUT THIS?

Argh.

And now it’s nearly time to go home and I’m wondering if I *really* want to go back to fixing up crap code.

I know I don’t teach in ICT anymore, but if I did, I’d be wanting to have a look at the book being writen by Kevin Yank. Sounds like it’s exactly what we need.

As previously mentioned, I was at that WSG talk as well and I found it quite inspirational. I love what AJAX can do, but I’ve been concerned about it’s accessabilty from the start.

But it’s just the latest in a long line of cool technologies to hit the web. And whenever something new comes out, it’s cool and does amazing things, but comes at a price. So we mull it over, see a hundred bad examples of it’s use, and after a while learn to figure out how to use it properly.

The browser wars are (mainly) over. At least there is more agreement on standards than there is disagreement. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it was in the IE5 era.

Flash has had it’s share of critacism, but who talks about it these days? Most of us have learned how to use it appropriatley, so it’s just not a big issue any more.

Now it’s AJAX’s turn. And I think it’s already simmering down. In the year (or so) that’s it’s been a buzz word, we are already starting to understand how to, and how not to, use AJAX. I hope that is a sign of maturity in the industry itself. I think so.