afongen

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].

Quick links:

• Eric Meyer argues cogently for gay marriage, addressing criticisms of his earlier lament. From there, links to interesting things like The Economist’s take on the matter. I love the first line from that essay: “SO AT last it is official: George Bush is in favour of unequal rights, big-government intrusiveness and federal power rather than devolution to the states.” I do not understand how it is that those who advocate smaller, less intrusive federal government fail to see that George Bush’s policies are often antithetical to that objective.
• The Homosexual Agenda. Well, now we know.
• How to Respond to Conservatives.
• Paul Krugman in the New York Times: There is no Social Security Crisis. (via)
• Some colleagues have started using Password Safe, a secure database for passwords. I tried it a while back, but because it’s Windows-only it turned out to be far less useful to me than a PGP-encrypted file. Still, worth noting.
• The Committee to Save Merry Christmas, boycotting Macy’s and Federated department stores because they don’t post signs saying “Merry Christmas.” What a fucking ridiculous waste of time.
• Accessibility: On a shoestring.
• Accessible & usable forms.
• Common symbols, with numeric and symbolic HTML character entities, for when you can’t quite remember how to encode an em dash (—), curly quotes (“ and ”) or euro (€).
• John Lim’s list of tools for building Rich Internet Applications.
• Jon Udell looks at streaming with Quicktime and Helix. I’d never even heard of the Darwin Streaming Server.
• I keep having to dig up this link to I put it here: Douglas Bowman’s presentation, Pushing Your Limits.
• Java web framework comparison.
• Session Replication in Tomcat 5 Clusters.
• Peter Merholz, Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience:
  

  What we have seen is that small, multidisciplinary teams create the best products.

  These teams eschew departmental hand-offs and reviews. Instead, product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, and user advocates work closely on a single project. In order to succeed, it’s essential that, in this collaborative mold, the different parties are no longer bound to their departments’ distinct measures of success, but share a common goal.

  UCD can’t work as a silo department — it must be a company-wide approach. Instead of hiring UCD specialists, develop multidisciplinary teams in which every member is familiar with UCD principles.

• PureJPEG, a Win32 command line utility for filtering out unnecessary drek from JPEGs and reducing file size.

With all the hullaballoo about Firefox, you may have missed that Thunderbird 1.0 has also been released. I haven’t tried Thunderbird for a long time, might just give it another go.

OK, this is just too damn cool: “Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away.”

Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola (MOT.N), has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.

Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.

We took Owen to the Jackson Street Roundhouse on Saturday, a cool little railroad museum not far from downtown Saint Paul. Funny how after years of living in Saint Paul, I had no idea that it existed. Not that I would have been terribly interested before I had a kid to take there. They have a number of restored / preserved railroad cars on display, an impressive Lego rail village, a number of wooden train sets set up, caboose rides … lots of fun. Last Saturday and next they’ve got some Christmas activities, which is what drew us there. Owen’s really into trains, so he was in heaven.

Tip: the caboose ride is cool, but if it’s busy enough for them to add a passenger car, ride in that. You can’t see much from the caboose unless you’re lucky enough to snag a spot in the upper level.

The Vulcans stopped by while we were there, spreading the warmth and handing out buttons & coloring books. I believe that next Saturday the Winter Carnival royalty will be there around noon.

While there, we passed Santa a couple times. He beckoned to Owen, who by now knows who Santa is but wasn’t willing to just rush up to him. After a while, he warmed up to the idea and sat on Santa’s lap while Kiara took a picture. I think how we’re handling the Santa thing is just deal with it matter-of-factly, sharing stories and songs, taking advantage of the happy merging of fantasy and reality that kids at this age are blessed with. We’ll see how far that takes us. :)