Yahoo, the great and the good

Today I had some PHP training from Rasmus Lerdorf while he is in London. Rasmus invented the PHP language, and now he works for Yahoo!.

The training was very interesting, although a little theoretical in places. He talked a lot about performance, and demoed the new features in PHP 5.2. This is one of the reasons I really love working for Yahoo!, some of the best and the brightest work for us. But it’s not just that, he is a really zealot for performance. I love that.

There is that great episode of The Simpsons with the Chuck Garabedian Mega-Savings Seminar. You’ve got to squeeze every penny! That is how I think of Rasmus and performance. It was really interesting to see how he optimised a near hundred-fold performance increase in a simple application. While I don’t expect to see that in production, I can imagine it would be possible to see a 5 or even 10 fold speed increase.

I’m looking forward to learning about security tomorrow.

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Web Development, php, rasmuslerdorf, yahoo

Werewolf Cards

There was a lot of Werewolf playing at BarCampLondon2 as one would expect. There was also some talk of starting a Flickr group with CC licences. These could then be printed to Moo cards.

While I know some people want to do illustrated or CGI graphics I don’t have any of those skills. I do however have a lot of imagination. In that spirit I decided some of our favourite British web-tech celebrities should be turned into Werewolf cards. My suggestions are:

Werewolves

Jeremy Keith

Andy Budd

Tom Coates

Seer

Mark Norm Francis

Villagers

Simon Willison

Ian Forrestor

Who else should be on there where? And does anyone have the photoshop skills to make this happen? Write me!

N.B. I’m aiming for 4 Werewolves, 1 Seer, 1 Healer and 19 Villagers. This would make a 25 card set which would be a ¼ of a set of Moo cards. So a set of Moo cards could have 4 decks and be perfect for a conference.

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Games, barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon2, unconference, werewolf

Microformats and the Semanitc Web

Today was interesting, there was a bit of sparing going on between the Semantic Web and Microformats. While all in good fun, it did make me think a lot about perceptions.

It felt like even though it had clearly been said that Microformats was better presented and marketed, people still wanted it to be ‘better’ than Semantic Web technology. The technology arguments mostly melted away in a sea of perceptions and confusion.

The solution that Tom Morris and I have decided to pursue is a very siloed version of the Semantic Web. We aim to remove a lot of the stigma associated with Semantic Web complexity by choosing a small subset to work with. It’s been said that Microformats does 80% of cases, well we want to make an RDF based equivalent covering those same cases.

Our solution will require some serious branding. I thought the name Macroformats might work quite nicely. However we have also banned any names based on acronyms from being involved. Other than that lots of sexy logos Web 2.0 and rounded corners so add some ‘bling’. We plan to limit the scope to simple cases that are easy to use and apply. This will make the concepts very accessible. This isn’t different from Microformats, it’s just doing the same thing in a way which opens it up with the power of RDF.

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barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon2, semanticweb, microformats, macroformats

BarCampLondon

Tom Morris did a great presentation on how to use eRDF to markup Semantic Web in a Microformats kinda way. I’m going to see if I can steal his code example and add it to this post later.

Update! Tom has added his slides on Semantic Web:
A Quick But Detailed Introduction. I love the eRDF examples. Microformats eat your heart out.

Dave Verwer did a great presentation on using a greasemonkey script to act as an accessibility aide. By altering the way forms and the focused element is rendered he hoped to improve help usability for some user groups. His presentation led to a great discussion, and people were really interested in creating a library of scripts which could address specific users needs. I look forward to helping with that.

More thoughts on what’s going on later.

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Javascript, Web Development, Accessibility, barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon2, londonevents, semanticweb, microformats

My wife is great

When I’m down, she encourages me, when I need a bit of a push she is there using both hands. I know it’s pretty soon after valentines day for such sopiness, but I’m truly lucky.

It’s not graceful or enhancing this progression is just degrading

So I have a problem. It’s a bit of a corker, and it seems like everyone who uses AJAX suffers from it. That means, me, and probably you.

The problem is AJAX is not accessible. Gez and Steve improved the situation, but again AJAX is not accessible. I know I’m being rather alarmist, but the situation is starting to eat at me.

Right now, we have a solution which works for JAWS 7.1 and for the latest version of Windows Eyes. But what about users using screen readers older than that? The problem is the massive amounts of mixed messages and myth.

1. Most blind people use JAWS
2. Progressive enhancement / Graceful Degradation will protect users from functionality they can’t use
3. We can’t be expected to support all versions of user agents

1. Most blind people use JAWS

We have a solution for JAWS. Yet, there are no published figures with any authority I have ever seen that show percentages of users that use which screen readers. It is largely, and informally, accepted that Freedom Scientific are the leading vendor. However, Windows Eyes and Hal are not to be discounted as well as the other readers around on the market.

2. Progressive enhancement / Graceful Degradation will protect users from functionality they can’t use

Many version of screen readers now support JavaScript. A lot of screen readers are based on the MSAA using Internet Explorer. In order to access non interactive elements of the page to interact with they have to implement a “virtual buffer”. The problem? The javascript is being supported by the browser, so the progressive enhancement is progressing and the graceful degradation isn’t degrading. The problem, is in fact, that the virtual buffer isn’t refreshing and the user doesn’t know.

3. We can’t be expected to support all versions of user agents

Most user agents are free. Assistive technology isn’t. In fact, assistive technology is pretty expensive, as much as a new computer. More than that, it is well established that people with disabilities tend to have significantly lower incomes than the national average. That does sound like constant upgrades might be an issue.

So where do we draw the line? At what point does a browser become un-supportable? Well the main issue is that our normal techniques for excluding a browser based on functionality doesn’t work. This combined with the unusual economics of Assistive Technology mean a new selecting the bottom line must be found. A little research shows that there have been 7 versions of JAWS and 4 version of Windows Eyes since 2001. However finding quality information on the capabilities of screen readers is hard without actually having them.

Solutions?

The ideal solution would support all assistive technology which can run JavaScript. That minimum level would allow the progressive/graceful enhancement/degredation to kick in. The problem is I don’t have a solution. What I really need right now is lots and lots of screen readers. I have access to the latest version of JAWS, and Windows Eyes. I need access to anything else I can get my mitts on in all versions possible. If you can help please contact me.

In terms of raw ideas, the best I have right now is to use Flash to detect MSAA support and disable the AJAX. For JAWS it may be possible to use an Active X component (remember until JAWS 7.0 only Internet Explorer was supported) to hotwire older versions using JAWS scripting. But that’s about it, and it ain’t a whole lot.

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AJAX, Domscripting, Javascript, IE, Web Development, Accessibility, Screen Readers, JAWS, Windows Eyes

Technical Problems!

Doh! I realised that MarsEdit hasn’t been sending my posts to my blog for a couple of days

However it does seem like this is my fault not that software. So, I am going to damn and curse myself while editing all the time stamps and uploading my posts. I hate to spoil the spirit of my one post a day for the sake of my own, apparent, ineptitude.

Sorry for any confusion!

Stomp for your Valentine

This year I decided to do something sane. I bought tickets to Stomp for my wife, but not on valentines day. I love my wife every day, and I hope I show it every day too. With all the silliness around making the most of that one day a year, I think people forget that a relationship is about all the time. If you need a special day to remind you to be nice, then something is wrong.

That said, it’s still nice to have a day to expect pleasant surprises (birthdays, Christmas, etc) so this is what she gets. Tickets to Stomp, but not on the double the price 14th February performance.

So show your partner that you love them, today, tomorrow and every other day between now and next valentines day.

I love you Rosemarie, I am yours.

Getting back into GTD

So I haven’t properly being doing GTD recently. However I still really believe in the system. My new copy of the book arrived last week, after I gave Dad my copy. I’m convinced that with a few bits and bobs this system would be very achievable using the technology I have around me day to day.

I’ve looked at some of the systems out there like Midnight Beep’s Inbox and kinkless Getting Things Done (kGTD). However they still don’t do quite what I need. What I’m missing is a better level of support between my S60 cell phone and my Mac.

This is where learning Cocoa comes in. Something else I believe is that Applescript makes awesome GUI glue. It provides something akin to Perl or Shell Scripting does on the command line. However Apple, in it’s infinite wisdom, didn’t see fit to extend Applescript support to the bluetooth helper apps in OS X. This means that without Cocoa you can’t extend your working environment to include your mobile phone.

The next step for me, and the one that I think will ultimately make GTD work within my lifestyle, is syncing my To-do lists with my phone. Whilst my phone is not the most convenient of collection devices, it is with me constantly. This means I can easily check my To-dos for a context by looking at my phone, and collect if I need to. When I am at my computer it then takes over the functions the phone was performing, but also makes sure it regularly syncs. The important of bluetooth is that I am not required to remember to sync the phone, plug it in or anything else. It just exchanges information with the computer every 30 minutes or so.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to write a new cocoa app to manage my To-dos, use kGTD or Inbox, or just plain ole text files. And, of course, I still need to figure out the phone end. Being an S60 phone I have the pyS60 language at my disposal. Alternatively the Notes program talks textfiles.

All in all there is a lot to consider but if I can get it right I think this would be the most complete GTD system I could possibly need.

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Mac, Productivity, gtd, gettingthingsdone

I want a pony!!

Yesterday Rosemarie and a group of my work friends and their wives and partners went walking in Osterley Park. We had a lovely day, and it reminds me why I like living among the green of West London.

I have to say I thoroughly recommend becoming better friends with the people you work with by enjoying the company outside of work. It also turns out the people I work with share their lives with some awesome folks (obviously like-minded people attract I guess).

Here is a picture of Matt, Rosemarie and I with a Pony!

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pony, osterleypark