afongen

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the Committee to Save Merry Christmas. I did not have kind words but didn’t write much because I thought that if we ignored them they might go away. I mean seriously, people, get over yourselves. But no: conservative Christians have picked up the meme with a vengeance. In response, Saint Paul Pioneer Press columnist Laura Billings has been going to town. Her last two columns, “Partisan shoppers dreaming of a Red and Blue Christmas” and “‘Merry Christmas’ needs no help” are spot on. I am tempted to pull out quotations to entice you, but they’re worth reading in full. (They’ll probably end up behind a ridiculous subscription requirement, so keep BugMeNot close by.)

Steve Ross wrote something on The Gutless Pacifist, one of those thoughts that makes me get up and dance around because it speaks so clearly to what I’m thinking:

I have a few points of reference for these folks:

• When store clerks say “happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas,” you are not being persecuted. When you are tossed into prison for saying “Merry Christmas,” you are.
• When the government is barred from putting nativity scenes on government property, you are not being persecuted. When you are sentenced to hard labor for belonging to a house church not sanctioned by the government, you are.
• When you are not allowed to say a Christian prayer over the loudspeaker at a public high school graduation, you are not being persecuted. When you are killed by an angry mob for leading someone in prayer to Jesus, you are.

I’ve got a few more Gmail invitations if anyone’s interested. Drop me a line at gmail-invite@afongen.com

Update: the invitations are gone.

Crazy. On the way into work today, I dropped two DVDs in the mail to Netflix. The mailbox said that mail is picked up at 2:00. I just checked my Netflix RSS feed and see that they received the DVDs at 7:00.

It’s nice to have a local warehouse. It’s also nice that the post office isn’t too busy this time of year.

I don’t always remember to check the Perl Advent Calendar on a daily basis. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore, as I finally noticed the RSS feeds.

More things that have been in my bookmarks too long.

• National Weather Service data using web services.
• Nominees for the Best Software Essays of 2004.
• Jared Spool: Three Important Benefits of Personas.
• There is evidence that FDR knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming.
• Perilous Times guest blog chez Lessig, on the suppression of dissent and restriction of civil liberties in tme of war. Fascinating history.
• Cross-browser tooltips.
• Software factories backlash.

Noted Cocoa Programmer Contemplates Switch to Java. I’m delighted to see that Apple plays a prominent role. Although…

The only cloud that darkened the otherwise illuminating visit occurred when the topic of Java 5 and Mac OS X came up. Santa’s brows furrowed, and he reached for a rather imposing PDA. It was difficult to see clearly, but it appears he placed coal icons next to several names.

It’s funny, nowhere in that article do they mention how they use Perl. Depends on who you talk to, I guess. It shouldn’t be too surprising that upper management is all about the Java, while the software engineers admit that they also use Perl extensively to help get the job done. Santa’s workshop is no exception in its diversity of languages and platforms.

Practical mod_perl is now available under a CreativeCommons Attribution Share-Alike License, which in appropriately practical terms means that it’s a free download and that under certain conditions you can distribute the book and even make derivative works.

I love Practical mod_perl. I bought it when I still thought there was a reasonable chance that we might expand our use of mod_perl at work and I needed solid guidance on how to configure and use mod_perl more effectively. I’d read, reread, and thoroughly enjoyed the mod_perl Developer’s Cookbook, which nicely filled major gaps in my knowledge but didn’t help enough with topics like server setup strategies. Practical mod_perl fits that bill. If you are a mod_perl developer, keep both these essential books nearby. Especially Practical mod_perl, because if you have to reach too far for it you’ll strain something: it’s huge!

If you are considering mod_perl, the release of the book as a free download should help you get a feel for what it’s like and what it can do for you. Try the book, then buy it.

Sadly, at one point I looked around and realized that I was the only mod_perl developer at work and that I probably always would be. With great reluctance, wailing and gnashing of teeth, I abandoned the platform. Bloody shame, too, since the alternative at the time was PHP. Don’t get me wrong, I like PHP for a certain class of problems, but at the time working with things like web services (be they SOAP, XML-RPC, or REST) was so much more pleasant in Perl than PHP. mod_perl’s tight integration with Apache opens up so many doors and is so exciting and fun it leaves me speechless.

Now, of course, I’m working with Java. Don’t even get me started.

I was wondering when they’d start doing this, given the address completion in Gmail (which admittedly has a much smaller scope): Google Suggest. Very nice indeed. If you’re curious how it’s done, Simon Willison gives a quick rundown. I think he’s right: this is just the tip of the iceburg.

Google is raising the bar on what people can expect from a web application. Until a year or two ago, when someone asked me to write something like this, I said no. Just no. It was possible with available remote scripting libraries, but inconsistently enough that it wouldn’t be worth it to the people asking me to build the feature. When asked more recently, I’ve hemmed and hawed. Yes, I could do it, and believe me it would be fun and I’d like to, but again: not worth it for what they asked me to do and the timeframes in which they wanted it done. The few times I did suggest remote scripting, it was turned down. No one expects that from a web application, after all. :-)

Now, though, Google is demonstrating to the world the sort of thing that can be done. Others like Oddpost have paved the way, of course, but a large company like Google is bringing it to the masses. Good thing, too, since I’m now in a position of having to demonstrate that yes, a web application can be responsive and do more than most people have seen.

And you know what else? It’s making me excited to work with JavaScript again.

Good times.

Update: Drew McLellan expands on this idea far more usefully than I.

Fangs is a screen reader simulator for Firefox that generates a textual representation of a page similar to how a screen reader would read it.

I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, because Fangs is a simulator, for many issues you’ll still need to test with real screen reader. We know about problems with Fahrner Image Replacement only because of testing with actual screen readers. For issues that don’t require a real screen reader to test, what does Fangs offer that we can’t get with a text-only browser like lynx or a tool like WAVE? It’s early yet, maybe we’ll see. It’s an interesting and potentially useful project.

Good news for JAWS users: a JAWS Screen Reader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox.

Objective: The goal of the Sharkware Development team is to create compatibility between Freedom Scientific’s JAWS Screen Reader and the Mozilla Firefox next generation browser.

The JAWS Screen Reader Adaptation project is aimed at making JAWS more compatible for the Mozilla Firefox Next Generation Browser so that users of JAWS and those dependent on low-vision tools have a choice other than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Description: This project has resulted in a JAWS script and a Firefox extension that enable JAWS to function with Mozilla Firefox in a similar manner to how JAWS functions with Internet Explorer. Our product gives support for simple navigational functions as well as more complex functions that allow for alt text reading, link recognition, etc.

Excellent. Truly excellent.

Via Tristan Nitot [fr].