Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 24, 2007 in
Personal Seems like London went mad for 3 inches of snow today. Even I went a little mad, my flickr stream had a frenzy of activity as people posted the snow near them. Mostly it was pretty similar to the snow near me (thin on the ground and quickly going slushy).
So while I may sound like an old grouch, I am actually quite pleased that so many people found a little bit of childlike wonder in what may be the weather event of the season.
One of my snow snapsshots. The view over Osterly Park from my balcony.
The rest of my snow pics are on Flickr.
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london, snow
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 23, 2007 in
Mac Steve says to me on IM
Disable menu icon for GowlTunes
defaults write com.growl.growltunes GrowlTunesWithoutMenu -bool YES
¹
Nice find Steve, we don’t use the GrowlTunes icon, we just want the growl of, well, tunes.
¹Just run that last line in a terminal window and restart GrowlTunes.
Technorati Tags:
Mac, Productivity, growl, growltunes
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 23, 2007 in
London Events I signed up for BarCampLondon2 yesterday. Yet when I checked my mail this morning I had an email from Bethen. Bethen seems to work for a company called Octane PR who, unsurprisingly, represent BT. Bethen reminded me that the details of the event had been updated and maybe I wanted to check the page.
This maybe doesn’t sound too bad, until you realise that I never signed up with this email address, as far as I know it isn’t really listed any place any more. If that wasn’t a bit annoying at the bottom of the email was a “News Alert” :
January 23, 2007
BT BACKS INNOVATION BY SPONSORING BARCAMP LONDON
As part of its commitment to driving innovation in technology at every level, BT has announced it’s the lead sponsor of BarCamp London 2007.
The event, which will be held at BT Centre, London, on February 17 and 18, 2007, is the second to be held in London and is part of a worldwide programme of conferences that includes Los Angeles, Montreal and Seoul.
BarCamp London brings together the UK’s technology community to share ideas and learn about technology in an open environment. These include attendees from design, usability, marketing/PR, digital agency work and venture capital backgrounds, as well as developers and programmers.
The BarCamp rules are very clear and create an environment where there are no spectators, only participants: everyone who attends is expected to present, give a demo, lead a session or support the event in some way. This helps to get everyone involved, but also creates more of a community atmosphere. First time attendees have to make a presentation or lead a discussion.
Gavin Patterson, group managing director consumer at BT Retail said: “As a company, we’re driving innovation in the technology sector, both for businesses and consumers. BarCamp is at the heart of this and brings together some of the most talented people in the industry, creating an environment where they can share, discuss and develop the latest technology and services, which is why we’re sponsoring the latest event in London.”
Obviously, I work for Yahoo! who hosted the last BarCampLondon. However, I don’t remember us making such a fuss about it. We were part of the write up in .net magazine, which was nice but I thought we let the event take it’s course. BT have already upset me with this, I really hope they don’t try and stamp any more corporateness on the event. I’ve been to a few BT hosted events which have been fine, so fingers crossed.
And, if it is just me not seeing Yahoo’s own PR machine, let me know. I do care if I’m wrong, I work for them, they don’t own me.
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barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon2, londonevents
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 22, 2007 in
London Events Title sez it all, register at the BarCampLondon2 twiki page.
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barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon2, londonevents
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 21, 2007 in
Photos The sky is a bitch
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Humour, jigsaw
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 21, 2007 in
General So I have my tax forms ready to post, and I thought I would look at doing it online, just for the experience. So I go to the tax office web site and there is a nice bit that says “Self Assessment Online; Register and enrol in time to do it online”. I follow the link and get:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0046'
Permission denied
/control/SAPortalController.asp, line 35
Computer says no!. Useless.
Technorati Tags:
Humour, tax, inlandrevenue
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 20, 2007 in
General So I just signed up to Paypal mobile because they sent me an email saying that if I sign-up and send 25p to the charity Shelter I could win a year’s worth of rent payments. Aside from the fact I like giving random acts of kindness when I can, no rent for a year would be nice too. (I promise this is going somewhere)
So I login to the site and activate my account. To do this I choose a pin and Paypal call me, not text. Surprising, thought I. More surprising, though, was the quintessentially British (but clearly automated) voice talking at me. “Please enter your mobile pin and then press hash”, no pound keys in my country!. The best bit though, in response to my pin “Just a sec while a look that up”, something more British I have never heard. Internationalised to the max!
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Humour, paypal, internationalisation
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 20, 2007 in
Mac It’s no surprise that I scrum, given my previous posts about scrumming. While I like using Quicksilver to make notes, using the Quicksilver logger was proving too much to remember. Instead I am back to using an application I have used before.
Onlife poles a list of the applications you are running to ask them what they are doing through out the day. It then displays this in a handy graph. 
You can click on individual items to see that item in a pane (for example emails or web pages) or hover to get a summary of what it was you were doing. The current version has excellent Applescript support, so you can extend Onlife to log anything which is available via Applescript. This is really useful because I can see what I did during the day, and at least feel guilty about time wasting, even if I don’t do anything about it.
My tip, though, don’t show your boss what you do. That’s probably not going to help you.
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Scrum, Mac, Productivity, onlife, gtd, gettingthingsdone
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 19, 2007 in
Accessibility I really loved Gez and Steve’s original post on AJAX and JAWS, they have just added an update that covers methods to force updates to the JAWS virtual buffer.
This information is invaluable as it allows developers to write AJAX application which work in the audio rendering mode which most JAWS users use. My current fears about the use of Javascript, are the disparity between screen readers (and other assistive technology) and regular user agents, and web developer knowledge of the additions people with disabilities need within their scripts.
To look at the first issue, Steve and Gez have shown that screen readers may work with Javascript slightly differently to other user agents. Event may not behave in the way which a developer imagines. The obvious and now documented example is that of the non-refreshing DOM. However, I would not be suprised if there are more examples. This leads me to my second point.
Developers are not assistive technology experts. Asking them to test their code in assistive technology will just lead to false conclusions. Instead what we need is quality information which explains how assisitve technology works on a theoretical level, and then how is functions in practice. Through these explanations and expirement a body of work can be built up to give developers the tools to build for assistive technology without having to test for themselves. We come back to accessibility patterns.
In order to help developers understand they need to use events which work with keyboards, in order to help them understand when they need to focus on dynamically updated content, we need some patterns. Developers shouldn’t and can’t be expected to understand assitive technology, but they do love simple and easy to apply best practices they can apply to their own programming challenges.
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Web Development, Accessibility, Screen Readers, Accessibility Patterns, Gez Lemon, Steve Faulkner
Posted by sh1mmer on Jan 18, 2007 in
London Events Great evening at Pub Standards this evening. If you live in or around London it’s well worth a look in. In case there is any confusion; No one talks about the standard of Pubs (especially our usual, The Bricklayer’s Arms) people may, however, talk about Web Standards.
With such a great crowd of people again, I wonder if we can’t put them to work. Mike posted about the second day at form camp. As each day goes past <insert something useful here> camp seems more an more attractive to me. You may see me attempting to organise something shortly.
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londonevents, unconference, formcamp, pubstandards