afongen

I am very out of touch with whatever the mythical average American might be, but Nick Coleman’s latest column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune gives me pause. Coleman spent time talking with patrons of a bar near Anoka Technical College, where John Kerry recently paid a visit.

In a place full of carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics, factory workers and other blue-collar guys who used to vote for Democrats almost as devoutly as they used to drink beer (most were sipping soft drinks), I could only turn up one John Kerry voter.

The rest plan to vote for George W. Bush.

It’s a telling story, full of outrageous conspiracy theories (“[Teresa Heinz Kerry] seized the Heinz fortune and uses it to support radicals and international terrorists”). and unsupported assertions (“He tries to come off as a hunter. But he’s not a hunter. He’s a phony.”) that leave me flabbergasted.

The kicker: “To say that about him on TV, well, they must have the proof of it, or else they wouldn’t air it.”

Right. It’s on TV, so it must be true. Of course TV networks screen political ads for accuracy.

[Brief pause while I shake with violent incredulity.]

People believe this shit, or give it enough credence to make them hesitate, which is why I fear George Bush will win. “Are there any morons?” Tim McGuire once asked. “Why can’t the political parties get down and talk about the issues and assume everyone is capable of processing the information.” Because, Tim, the lies and moronic statements are more effective. I keep wanting not to believe it, but I keep being bitch-slapped by reality.

One niggling, almost unrelated point: it’s no longer Anoka Hennepin Technical College, and hasn’t been for some time. It’s just Anoka Technical College. I never saw any of the press get this right in stories about Kerry’s visit, and it perturbs me.

Alleviate RSI the Hacker Way. A few years ago when she was teaching strings, Kiara did serious and permanent damage to her hands and wrists by tuning 100 violins a day. I should have learned from her experience, but I still have poor habits that I need to break. Posture’s my big problem, far more than keyboard or mouse misuse. Fortunately, I’ve yet to experience any serious RSI symptoms, and if I keep stumbling into little reminders like this article, maybe I never will.

Fantastic (and long) interview with Alistair Cockburn. It turns out to be a very good overview of agile software development.

Buried in my bookmarks is an inconspicuous folder where I keep links to articles and essays that have significantly influenced my way of thinking. It’s fun to look back at what I was reading four or six years ago and thinking, “that kicks ass!” A quick sampling:

• Tim O’Reilly: Where the Web Leads Us
• The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock
• The Ideology of Ease
• Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002: Free Culture
• John Ousterhout’s landmark Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century

And now there’s a new one to add, to follow up on Ousterhout: David Ascher’s Dynamic Languages-ready for the next challenges, by design. Not so much because it’s changed the way I think, but because it’s so right.

And on a similar note, Getting Groovy with XML.

Via Simon St. Laurent, I’ve started playing with an Apple ][ emulator, Virtual ][. Ah, for the good old days. There’s a whole host of Apple ][ emulators, as it turns out. I think I just figured out what I’m doing this weekend. :)

Believe it or not, I generally try not to feed the FUD too much, but Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’s recent measured rant about why to stop using IE is too good to pass up.

Why? Because Internet Explorer, like Outlook, has finally become, to my mind, a permanent security hole that masquerades as a useful application.

The recent IE/IIS exploit really is a bit over the top.

Via Tim Bray, Peter Korn’s comments on CSUN 2004. Apparently there’s quite a bit of accessibility activity in the free/open software and UNIX worlds: the GNOME Accessibility Project, for instance, and the Gnopernicus screen reader & magnifier. And Eclipse. I had no idea. Pity I didn’t know this a few weeks ago.

I recently took part in two panel discussions about technology and disabilities. Panelists included Earle Harrison from the Minnesota STAR Program, Deb Proctor from Minnesota Online (whose doctoral dissertation is on technology and accessibility issues for students with disabilities), student disability coordinators from several local colleges, and myself.

In retrospect, I probably should not have agreed to participate: although it’s still critical to my work, I’m a little tired of talking about web accessibility, especially in the general terms necessitated by our decidedly non-technical audience. I was far more interested in hearing my co-panelists describe how technology has helped and hindered our students and employees with disabilities. Regrettably, in both sessions, web accessibility dominated discussion. Attendees were clearly interested and walked away with solid messages, so it’s not all bad. I was just a bit personally disappointed to see the conversation settle there.

We didn’t just talk about the web, though. Earle, who’s blind, demonstrated some of the technology that he uses every day, including a PAC Mate, essentially a Bluetooth-enabled “Pocket” PC as big as a full-size keyboard. All told, it runs over $5000; assistive technology ain’t cheap. The disability coordinators had some very valuable things to say about the need for textbooks in alternative formats, as well as cautioning us against setting the technical bar too high when moving courses online.

We also talked about the need to consider accessibility in technology procurement. I think that by now it’s standard fare in contracts, but I fear that too often purchasers rely on vendor assurances rather than doing their own assessment. What I didn’t say but wish I had was that it’s important to actually check the vendors’ claims. Consider it due diligence to google around a bit, if nothing else. I’m thinking of one large software vendor in particular whose materials repeatedly claim Section 508 compliance, with no more demonstration or explanation than “programmed to meet standards.” From what I’ve seen (and no, I haven’t done a formal review), I wouldn’t agree with that assertion. So it’s important to push for more information.

Earle brought up Apple’s upcoming spoken interface and accessibility APIs and suggested something that I hadn’t considered: this is a threat to companies like Freedom Scientific, as it moves the capabilities of software like JAWS to the operating system. I’m not sure why, but I have a hunch that Mac OS X apps are more likely to comply with Apple’s user interface guidelines than Windows apps take advantage of Microsoft’s accessibility APIs. Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft has done a lot to enable accessibility. I just think it a shame that developers don’t leverage that work and am excited about Apple’s approach and hope that I understand it correctly.

One final note: the Minnesota STAR Program produces a monthly webcast “radio” program called “Where’s it AT” that discusses assistive technology issues. Good stuff.

• Dale Dougherty handily dispenses with Eolas’s attempts to rewrite history to suit their patent claims.
• Dave Hyatt: “Testing Page Load Speed”.
• Rephlux, a continuous integration tool for PHP.
• Federal Programmers Get Agile.
• Getting ready for Perl 6: Periodic Table of the Operators.
• Passogva, “a collection of FIPS-181 Automated Password Generator implementations” to generate pronounceable passwords. Not my favorite thing in the world, but a password that people can remember is more secure than one that they need to write on a post-it on their monitor.
• Another password generator that I like a bit better but whose passwords are harder for most people to remember, even with the “show phonetics” option.
• How Tomcat Works. 45% discount if you order from the author’s company’s site.

I’ve got to start writing here again.

MACCAWS has released a white paper, “The Way Forward with Web Standards” and a companion non-technical primer. It’s so strange that we’re still fighting this battle. Why is it that we can be in a rush to meet standards like J2EE — which is difficult to understand & implement and is often overkill — but meet such formidable resistance to the suggestion that we meet basic web standards, which are easy to understand & implement and have such clear benefits? Marketing, I suppose. I face this all the time:

• “Of course we should strive for accessibility, but we shouldn’t spend extra time on it.” Never mind that if we do it right in the first place (i.e. employ web standards), accessibility pretty much falls into place with no extra effort.
• “What does it matter that this CMS doesn’t generate valid HTML? It still looks fine to me.” Sigh.

Hopefully the MACCAWS project will help.

Kathy Sierra is right: Pair Programming is NOT always a choice. Some people are work best alone. This reminds me of something that really got on my nerves during a keynote speech at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium. The speaker’s message was that if pessimists only tried a little harder and improved their attitude, they could be optimists, too. What a load of crock. His assumption that pessimists even want to be optimists is not only seriously flawedflat-out wrong, it’s insulting.