Which YUI Event Listener?

The Accessibility toolbar for Firefox has a feature for developers that presents a list of the event handler attributes for each element on the page. The problem is that using attributes to set events is nasty and the YUI Event library instead attaches a singleton listener to the window which isn’t shown. This main YUI listener then delegates to YUI Event listeners which are created.

In order to get something like the functionality in the accessibility toolbar for YUI Event library listeners I’ve made a bookmarklet that uses some of the functionality of the YUI Event library. The YUI Event List Bookmarklet will show you a list of all the elements on the page that have listeners attached and what those listeners are. You can also view the functions that will be called when the event fires. It’s perfect for tracking down that elusive listener that’s using event propagation to hook onto stuff.

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yui, javascript, yahoo, web development, event listener

Our Energy is Now Green Energy

So Rosemarie and I have finally switched over to green power. Yay! The companies we are using are Good Energy for the Electricity and Utilita for gas.

I like Good Energy especially, they don’t supply gas, everything they do is 100% renewable. It was surprisingly cheap and should save us a little bit from British Gas. One of the the things Good Energy impressed me with was their work with micro-generation. They will actually pay you to generate your own power even if you don’t sell it back to the grid, which I assume is them making a government offsetting scheme available to the little guys.

Utilia are also good, for us it’s because they are offsetting our Gas usage. However, although they do use fossil fuels in part, they have a much better balance than most energy companies. They are investing in more green power than the government requires. They advocate energy saving quite well with schemes to award you free energy saving items such as loft insulation and light bulbs.

A cute little site called The Nag helped me switch with some great advice on which green tariffs really weren’t green. Some of the bug players in the market simply charge you more to switch to a green tariff getting energy from renewable sources. This is even though the government requires them to provide a percentage of their energy from renewable sources.

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green, energy, goodenergy, thenag, britishgas, utilia

As Chinese is to English, Regular Expressions are to…

Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.

I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of thousands of characters to learn, however once each is known the brain can easily scan and read it. However with English there seems to be much more decoding happening. Words are formed from letters which means that the brain has to recognise each letter in turn. Or at least enough to make a sensible guess.

It occurred to me this is somewhat like Regular Expressions. Regex is notoriously difficult to master, and yet once it is offers a powerful, concise way to express what could take many lines of conventional code.

I don’t think there is a lesson here, but I do find it interesting that there are a couple of approaches to both reading and programming with different advantages. One offers a low barrier to entry but repeatedly extracts a cost in efficiency, the other offers more prohibitive learning curve, but yields high gains once the threshold is reached.

I really love Regex, maybe I should learn Chinese so I can read more quickly.

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chinese, language, informationprocessing, cathyma

Shawn Lawton-Henry on YUI Theatre

After a little bit of pain with video editing and writing transcripts (man that’s hard work) Shawn’s video of her talk at Yahoo’s offices London is now available. She talks about the new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and some of the other W3C accessibility standards. You can see the video and the transcript on the YUI blog.

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accessibility, video, yui, shawn lawton henry, yahoo, wcag, atag, w3c, wai

Paranoia for GTDers

43Folders has a great guest post about how to protect your iGTD trusted system. One of the running jokes about GTDers is that you can fuck with them by messing with their trusted system. Where did this task for ‘give Tom £10′ come from? Oh well it must be true… That kind of thing.

I think the more I come to rely on GTD the more I need to be careful. Even losing 1 days GTD would have me in a hell of a mess. I’m going to look at hourly syncs with some off site location. Once I get iGTD to sync with my phone that will also make a massive difference.

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gtd, backups

Steve jobs and Bill Gates on not much

A bit later than the rest of the world I dusted off the video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in conversation at the D5 conference. I found it really interesting that neither Bill Gates or Steve Jobs mentioned any start-ups at D5. I realise that anything they say would probably inflate the stock price of the company, but still. I wonder if these guys are only really aware of companies on the acquisition radar. I would love to hear someone like these two talk about Twitter or Jaiku.

Following on from that I was very disappointed with their response to the question about next generation user interfaces. What it came down to I can’t tell you from Steve Jobs and 3D and speech from Bill Gates. I mean really, with all the people at Apple and Microsoft that’s the best they have? Where is the out of the box thinking?

It’s good that these two significant men do interviews and the video is well worth watching (it’s available on iTunes) I just wish they would be a little more transparent.

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stevejobs, billgates, interview, apple, microsoft, d5

Not everything Apple is golden

One of the nice things about Macs is the ability to drag and drop stuff anywhere and it just figures out what you meant. I use iMovie to create training videos of presentations at Yahoo. Part of that means overlaying slides on top of video.

The obvious thing to do would be to drop the Keynote presentation into iMovie. iMovie doesn’t like that. Instead you have to export the Keynote presentation as images and then drop those in. Not very intuitive. The most important thing for me, the thing that really makes you feel like everything is perfect with a computer is flawless work-flow. When I can switch from app to app without trouble I know things are right.

Apple’s drag and drop isn’t quite the Pipe of the GUI yet apparently.

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apple, osx, drag and drop, drag n drop, pipe, unix, imovie, keynote, gui, user interface

Mosh; Latest Beta Social Network = Another channel for (UGC) porn

So I signed up for Mosh to check it out. One of the first things I did when I landed was take a look at the interface. There were some interesting entires in the tags section.

Why is it that within 24 hours of anything being released on the internet someone is trying to use it as a porn distribution channel? That said, user generated might really be the way forward in this market! If there is one thing people like more than talking about sex, it’s having it.

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mosh, nokia, porn, ugc, user generated content, web20

Micro-markets

I had an interesting conversation earlier with Neil and Steve. We were talking about how companies treat small discrete markets and how that affects their larger markets.

My example Google is that have Ad Sense rolled out to many many markets. While many of those markets probably don’t generate much revenue individually as a group the time to integrate into those markets probably pays for itself. However I see two more distinct advantages.

By being an early mover into a market you help to invigorated it to stimulate growth and, of course, get the first mover advantage of hearts and minds. In an area where the product offerings are very similar this is a distinct advantage, since unless there is an actual problem inertia sets in and people generally don’t switch providers.

The next advantage is ubiquity. Ad Sense is everywhere. This makes it more attractive to both advertisers and sites that show advertising (let’s call them partners). Since wherever you go partner sites carry Ad Sense advertisers are more happy to use the service because there is a better likelihood that their ads will be shown to the right user group to generate the best click-throughs. This of course means there are better advertisers for the partners who like getting the ads shown on their site and getting the highest click through rates.

More than that users like that the ubiquity makes Ad Sense non threatening now, because they’ve seen it hundreds of times before. So they are more willing to click. All in all this makes for a very tidy circle.

My thought is simple; The internet is global. If you can launch a lightweight product to as many markets as you can you will gain market share not only in the smaller markets, which will grow, but across all your markets.

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google, adsense, web, internet, ubiquity, globalisation, emerging markets

Stonehenge

Wow. Stonehenge is an amazing place. It could be seen as just a pile of rocks but it’s so much more. Rosemarie and I took a coach trip with a private viewing a month or so back. Just us and 50 or so of our fellow discerning tourist.

Walking around the circle, being able to touch the stones is a dramatically different experience than following the path around the edge. You begin to feel the history of the place, and the effort. The stones tower over you, and yet you know that you can see only 2/3 of the stone. I can’t imagine the level of motivation to move a hundred or more of these 20ft stones to make the completed circle that was.

I’ll update with photos soon.

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stonehenge