Firefox madness

Sometimes I wonder if I’m mad to use Firefox for anything more than development.

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mac, osx, firefox, memoryleak

How not to do RSS/Atom Feeds; Or Smart Lists NetNewsWire; Yahoo Pipes to the rescue

I love iGTD. It’s an awesome piece of software. Bartek works really hard on it and it has a thriving community. Mostly Bartek announces new releases on a thread on the iGTD forums. The forums software is PHP Bulletin Board.

However it commits a heinous crime against feeds. While I do browse the forums, I only care about announcements in my feed reader. Everything else is noise. In the last four days the forum has generated 215 items for me to read in Netnewswire. Providing global level non-specific RSS feeds sucks.

Netnewswire does have a natty feature called ‘Smart Lists’ which filters akin to an iTunes smart folder. The problem is to filter you must already have the content. So I have to subscribe to all that noise someplace in order to make a smart list which filters what I need. That’s just dumb. What I really want is a ‘smart feed’ where I can specify which kinds of items I do or don’t want to see. RSS coupled with regex basically.

Yahoo! Pipes however made it super easy to fix this. Looking at the global feed for the message board I had one release announcement saved. It was titled iGTD announcements :: iGTD 1.4.1 released. The simple format is that the topic is separated from the post title with ::. All I really need is to exclude everything not starting with iGTD announcements :: so I only get the posts which relate to announcements. This took around 15 seconds in Pipes. I saved and published the new feed of iGTD release announcements as RSS.

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iGTD, yahoo, yahoopipes, pipes, phpbb, netnewswire, rss, atom, feeds

RSS marlarkey

My feed seems to have been not feeding the last couple of days. I’ve mucked about with it a bit. Hopefully normal service is being resumed now. Sorry for the minor post flood.

49p Worth of Stupitiy; Credit and Debit Cards Make Customers Happy

So I was doing some DIY for my Wife’s next art show in a couple of weeks and I picked up some stuff from Wickes. What really got up my nose was the £5 minimum to purchase using my card. I wanted to spend £4.77 but I couldn’t purchase my items without finding another 23p. This is a bulk hardware store, almost nothing costs less than a few pounds. Screws come by hundred. In the end I found what my receipt tells me is a Fence Fixing Clip. This is the cost of using my card. What a very crappy customer experience. Did I mention having to go to the back of the long line because of finding another item?

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wickes, creditcard, debitcard, customerexpirience

N95 Bluetooth is super fast

Really busy day helping my wife with stuff so just a quick observation about my Nokia N95. The bluetooth file transfer seems super quick compared to my N80. Even though the images are bigger it seems like I’m downloading them faster. My Mac says it’s going over 100kb/s. Which isn’t half bad. Hell, I remember when I would have been jaw dropped at any kind of network that fast, let alone wirelessly with my mobile phone.

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n95, bluetooth, n80

WCAG 2.0 New call for review of updated public draft

The “final” draft of the WCAG 2 got knocked back for revisions. The working group has released its first draft after making revisions which it says address all the comments. I got an email from Judy Brewer who heads the WAI asking for comments by 27th April 2007. If you haven’t already seen this draft of WCAG and commented please do so.

I’ll be posting my thoughts on the current state of this document in the next week or so.

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accessibility, wcag, wcag2, w3c, wai

Flickr; Comment Threats; IP Protection Marketplace

There was a story which has been buzzing around this week about Flickr. This is something that has always scared my wife about using Flickr. One of the Flickr’s users, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, found that a company in Britain was printing and selling her work on Ebay without her permission. They gave her no royalties no credit, and didn’t respond to her lawyer’s letters. The only thing they did was stop using her images in the their Ebay auctions. Rebekka lives in Iceland, so there isn’t much legal recourse available to her.

What happened next was very interesting though. Rebekka posted about her experiences on Flickr (see the google cache of her Flickr post). She got hundreds (450+) of comments about it. It got dugg. Flickr deleted the post. She then posted about the deletion of her Flickr post on her blog.

What I find interesting is the reaction from Flickr and from the community. I actually think both were wrong in some ways. Let me explain. Flickr removed her post, which by my reading was reasonably innocuous. However, because the comment turned nasty (got dugg, need I say more). No company wants to get unnecessarily involved in people posting personal information and talking about revenge so Flickr, rightly, pulled the plug. Flickr is a community, yes, but it’s unfair to expect Yahoo’s sites to be soap boxes for threats. They shouldn’t have pulled the whole photo.

What amused me about the community reaction was the usual Scoble linking to a post by Thomas Hawk slagging off Flickr. I don’t blame Robert, he is just being a pundit. But Thomas, who I almost met last time I was in San Francisco, does this a lot. The disclaimer about being the CEO of Zoomr, doesn’t stop him putting in a cheap shot about Old Skool membership from the get go. It really felt like another post about big bad Yahoo! making Flickr all crappy. If only we all used Zoomr life would be rosy.

I find it really disheartening. Yahoo! is actually turning out to be pretty darn non-evil as corporate go. I say this from the inside. As soon as you have a business worth losing you don’t let people start flame wars and litigation threats on your turf. What I don’t like is the usual mentality of folks who expect everything on the web to be a free for all. It just isn’t, and shouldn’t be like that.

I think the community needs to be less tolerant of threats and malice against individuals as I’ve said previously instead of coming down against web sites that aren’t 100% free speech. In the blind rage to lash out when the post came down, how many people stopped to think why?

Flickr too could have done better though. I know Stewart addressed the issue and I agree with his thoughts. However I think Flickr should also be more proactive against the kind of abuse of its service Rebekka suffered from. Flickr makes it possible to use an API to access all kinds of material which is openly licensed for non-commercial purposes. With the ease of access some people make wonderful mash-ups. Other people no doubt steal for profit. I would like to see Flickr set up some kind of market place for Intellectual Property protection. A base of action if you think you work is being ripped off from Flickr. Something international some someone like Rebekka has a chance of facing off with people on the other side of the Atlantic. Now that would add strength to a community of photographers.

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flickr, yahoo, thomashawk, intellectualproperty
, rebekkagudleifs, , RebekkaGuðleifsdóttir

Possibly the world’s most random product

Monitizing more mad than usual. Apparently Jelly Belly my favourite (gelatine-free) jelly bean manufacturer makes perfume?!

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Humour, jellybelly

Sad; Yahoo we can do better than this

Kestrell posted something that made me really sad. Why I wish Yahoo would just stop trying to b***s*** me that they care about accessibility expresses her frustration using the Yahoo groups product.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time trying to improve the state of accessibility on the web, I find it especially disheartening that the company I work for has an upset frustrated user. However in order to fix a problem you have to know that it exists. I regularly read Kestrell’s blog, and when I saw this post I was both surprised and upset. The first thing I did was reach out to a couple of people who also work at Yahoo. I expected that same surprise and upset I had felt. Instead, I was told that they had already seen this, and were looking in to it.

Without wanting to talk about internal goings on too much, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Yahoo does care. I am part of a group of people who actively promote disability needs within the company. We admit we aren’t perfect. Our products aren’t either. However, by gum, we do care. If you need to find the right person at Yahoo contact me and I’ll find them for you.

Looking further at the points of the post CAPTCHAs are a tricky subject. My good friend Matt May wrote something a while back for the W3C about the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA. While we can’t do away with CAPTCHAs completely because of spam Kestrell notes that other forms of CAPTCHAs are ok.

Matt’s article highlights that CAPTCHAs will always exclude some people, but it’s about making that group as small as possible and improving the email/phone support we give to those users. An effectively implemented standard solution that everyone plugs into could work really well here. For example, login is a standard across all Yahoo products. The login is not something each product does differently they all just add a little branding to an existing, optimised solution. It seems like CAPTCHAs would be an excellent candidate for this as well. Whenever someone’s identity needs to be validated a standard well tested service would be employed.

This has been a bit of a random collection of thoughts and responses. However, I just want to summarise. Yahoo people do care, I am here caring right now. Yahoo have some issues that need to be sorted out, but I am recognising they exist and that Yahoo can improve. CAPTCHAs are something we need to deal with as a company and find a solution to which is massively more inclusive.

These opinions are my own, and I am not speaking for Yahoo in any official capacity.

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accessibility, yahoo, captcha

Booting Windows in Parallels via Quicksilver

Being the crack web developer I am, I regularly have to test in IE6 or IE7. To do this I use Parallels Desktop which runs a virtual machine on my Mac. Since you can’t reliably have both IE6 and IE7 running on one windows installation I have two, one for each. This is a pretty standard set-up for a Web Developer in the UK office at Yahoo.

However, since running another machine on your machine eats I whole load of resources I try not to keep Windows running for too long. Parallels is pretty good at helping you quickly start the OS you want from a menu, but I’m far too lazy for that. So, inspired by an article on The Unofficial Apple Weblog I made a quick solution to use Quicksilver.

This stuff is hardly tricky, it’s just knowing what you can do with Quicksilver if you configure it right.

Let’s start with Parallels itself. The actual files we need are in your Home directory Library in a folder called Parallels. In this folder are a number of sub-folders which contain each virtual machine.

The .pvs file in each folder is the virtual machine configuration file. For my winXP IE6 and winXP IE7 folders both of mine were originally called winxp.pvs. I changed this to be something more distinctive, ie6.pvs and ie7.pvs respectively. You may need to start Parallels and open the virtual machines again by hand after renaming them.

Quicksilver has a nice way to easily access anything you want. Go to the catalogue and pane in the Quicksilver preferences (cmd+; with the Quicksilver pane open).Hit the + at the bottom of the pane to add a new item. Choose the option for File and Folder scanner.

This should give you a new row in the custom catalogue. Select that row and press the i to get the information sidebar to appear. In source options under the path section choose select and navigate to the Parallels folder in the Library in your Home directory. Open that.

Next select it to include folder contents. If you hit rescan (the looped arrow) you should now get some items listed.

Depends how you want to use your Parallels launcher will define how you set up the next options. In each VM folder in Parallels there are a number of things. The .pvs files we renamed earlier will start Parallels with a particular VM. However, there is also a Windows Applications folder which will start coherence application (if you have it turned on). This means you can browser test really easily and start the browser you want to test with ease.

If you only want to start VMs then set the Depth to 2 and enter .pvs into types. Rescanning your catalogue should change the number of items in it (shown by the number in blue). If you also want to include coherence applications set the depth to 3 and add .app to types.

You can see what things Quicksilver will search from by selecting contents which will show you the listed items for this part of the catalogue. Simply launching any of these from Quicksilver will either open the VM or Coherence application in Parallels.

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Quicksilver, Mac, Productivity, osx, parallels, coherence, virtualmachine, tuaw, gradedbrowsersupport