vanderwal.net

DC Metro Scene

The DC Metro Red Line was a mess as usual today, but it was hot and muggy to add to the usual fun. When we arrived at Metro Center the train was packed and many people we trying to get out and one older guy in a suit was pushing to get on. People started yelling at the guy in the suit to let people off before trying to get on (this is the proper Metro etiquette, as is moving to the center of the train).

Older guy: [yelling back] You can't stop me from getting on the train.
Passenger: Who do you think you are, the Vice President?
Older man: No, I suppose you think you are the President.
Passenger: I am not dumb enough to choose you.

Web Standards Opening

Are you looking to practice and hone your standards compliant web design craft? Are you looking for an environment that is Web Standards friendly and want to join solid Web development team? You now have found a possible match. Does your vernacular include: "Zeldman, Eric, Tantek, Bowman, Christopher, Shea, and/or Molly said..."? Are you looking to get recognized for your Standards work? Can you make Photoshop purr? Do you know the bugs in Dreamweaver's rendering engine? Can you live with just one table in your layout? Are you proud of your craft and want to hone it more?

If you answered yes and are looking for a change of scenery read the following and send me an e-mail (see contact above).

We are looking to hire a strong Web Designer who has strong experience with hand-coding Web Standards (HTML, XHTML, and CSS) that validate. The designer must also have experience with accessibility (Section 508) and have solid web graphic design skills. Experience with information architecture and user-centered design processes are very helpful (wireframes, usability testing, etc). Experience with leading design and redesign processes is very helpful. Strong communication skills, including design documentation is essential. We design with Dreamweaver and Homesite and use Adobe and Macromedia graphics applications. [INDUS Corporation Web Designer Job Listing]

Now Delicious

Time has been very thin of late. In the past six months or so started noticing an increasing number of links from del.icio.us and started pulling the feeds of some folks I like to follow their reading list into my site feed aggregator. I had about four or five del.icio.us feeds in my aggregator (meta aggregation of other's meta aggregations - MetaAg MetaAg). This past week I was taking medicine that tweaked by sleep patterns so I had some free awake time after midnight and I finally set up my own vanderwal del.icio.us feed.

I like having the ability to pull [meta] tags aggregations that others have used, like security, which is a great help during the day at work. I can also track some topics I keep finding myself at the periphery and ever more interested in as they tie to some personal projects.

I did consider something similar with Feedster, but it was down for updating recently when I had the tiny bit of time to fiddle with setting something up. By the way, Feedster is now Standards-based (not fully valid, but rather close) and it loads very quickly (most of the time).

Gmail Simplifies Email

Since I have been playing with Gmail I have been greatly enjoying the greatly improved means of labeling and archiving of e-mail as opposed to throwing them in folders. Many e-mails are hard to singularly classify with one label that folders force us to use. The ability to drive the sorting of e-mail by label that allows the e-mail to sit accessibly under a filter named with the label make things much easier. An e-mail discussing CSS, XHTML, and IA for two different projects now can be easily accessed under a filter for each of these five attributes.

Dan Brown has written a wonderful article The Information Architecture of Email that dig a little deeper. Dan ponders if users will adopt the changed interface. Hearing many user frustrations with e-mail buried in their Outlook or other e-mail application, I think the improved interface may draw quite a bit of interest. As Apple is going this way for its file structure in Tiger (the next OS upgrade) with Spotlight it seems Gmail is a peak at the future and a good means to start thinking about easier to find information that the use can actually manage.

Web Standards and IA Process Married

Nate Koechley posts his WebVision 2004 presentation on Web Standards and IA. This flat out rocks as it echos what I have been doing and refining for the last three years or more. The development team at work has been using this nearly exclusively for about couple years now on redesigns and new designs. This process makes things very easy to draft in simple wireframe. Then move to functional wireframes with named content objects in the CSS as well as clickable. The next step is building the visual presentation with colors and images.

This process has eased the lack of content problem (no content no site no matter how pretty one thinks it is) often held up by "more purple and make it bigger" contingents. This practice has cut down development and design time in more than half and greatly decreases maintenance time. One of the best attributes is the decreased documentation time as using the Web Developer Extension toolbar in Firefox exposes the class and id attributes that provide semantic structure (among many other things this great tool provides). When the structure is exposed documentation becomes a breeze. I can not think of how or why we ever did anything differently.

Best Web Development Practices

Those of you looking for a relatively short article or essay on current best Web practices should look no further than the Best Web Development Practices provided by Apple. Yes, this focusses on web standards, but what best practice does not as it is the cornerstone of accessibility as well as makes the same content usable on mobile devices (one caveat the article will not print on 8.5 by 11 inch paper).

Tantek Mulls Contact Info Updating

Tantek mulls a means to keep contact info upto date. This should be much easier than Tantek has made out. This could be as easy as publishing one's own vcard that is pointed to with RSS. When the vcard changes the RSS feed notifies the contact info repositories and they grab the vcard and update the repository's content. This is essentially pulling content information into the user's Personal InfoCloud. (Contact info updating and applications are a favorite subject of mine to mull over.)

Why vcard? It is a standard sharing structure that all contact information applications (repositories understand). Most of us have more than one contact repository: Outlook at work; Lotus Organizer on the workstation at home; Apple Address Book and Entourage on the laptop; Palm on the Cellphone PDA; and Addresses in iPod. All of these applications should synch and perfectly update each other (deleting and updating when needed), but they do not. Keeping vcard field names and order constant should permit the info to have corrective properties. The vCard RDF W3C specifications seem to layout existing standards that should be adopted for a centralized endeavor.

What not Plaxo? Plaxo is limited to applications I do not run everywhere (for their download version) and its Web version is impractical as when I need contact information I am most often not in front of a terminal, I am using a Treo or pulling the information out of my iPod.

While Tantek's solution is good and somewhat usable it is not universal as a vCard RDF would be with an application that pinged the XML file to check for an update daily or every few days.

Thinking about Thinking

This past Saturday morning I finished the Steven Johnson book Mind Wide Open. I really enjoyed the book and may go back and pull out parts to store in my own notes.

But, there is one thing that kept niggling me as I read past the section on neurofeedback, which was used to improve concentration and attentive focus. I kept wondering if I am pulling all this information in, how it gets synthesized. The book did bring out some answers as many often focus on differences from what is already stored in the mind. I completely agree with that and I often work in that mode. But, as I read, my mind drifts to memories or to related items. This drifting is where it seems to get stored in memory and I will pull out the information weeks, months, or years later. This drifting is also where I often find unique answers and view problems or current solutions and find improved was of doing the same thing. This is also why I tend to read broadly across topics as well as deeply in areas I am passionate about.

The problem with improving focus is how would my synthesizing take place. Do others read in the same way? In college I had an office hours discussion with a professor complaining that I often had to reread paragraphs and pages as I had found my mind drifting, which was inspired by what I was reading. The professor and his office mate felt this drifting was a very good thing as it lead to better examination of what is known to one's self as well as fostering creative solutions. All more to think about.

What Goes In Your Ears

Tim Bray brings to life a point I recently discovered, compression on MP3 is rather poor sound quality. I unintentionally ripped a disk this past week at the lossless sound quality in Apple iTunes and ended up with 23 MB to 30 MB files in the Apple file format. I dumped the songs in my iPod and hit the road. That evening on my way home I listened to my disk I ripped, Danny Wilson's Meet Danny Wilson, and was utterly blown away by the lush tones finding their way to my ears through the Sony in-ear fontopia headset. I have been ripping my collection over the past couple years at 160 bits in the Apple format or in MP3 and getting 4 to 5 MB per song. Since my experience I am now ripping at 192 bits, but still not getting the lush sounds, although the quality is improved. I will run out of space at some point, but I will have much better sounding bits to listen.

Not everything needs the better sound quality, but there are many things in my collection that I may go back and re-rip so I have better travel versions with me.

Le Tour 2004

It is Le Tour time again and we are following Oskar's Tour updates and his Tour links. Here in the U.S. we are following the Tour on OLN. It may finally be time we got Tivo so we don't miss a bit of the peddling.

The summer is the time we turn our focus to Europe to watch the tennis Grand Slam's of French Open and Wimbledon (these were the calming influence when we had horrible reverse culture shock in 1988). But, it is the Tour that brings back memories of Hinault, LeMond, Roche (watching him ride into Paris in person), Indurain, and Armstrong. Le Tour is summer as it has been since the 70s in our memories. It is always a reminder how little we are on our bike, even the years we were putting well over 2,000 miles under our peddles.

Highlighting Text in IE 6 Now Available Here

Thanks to a heads up from Nick, we have modified our site so that it will allow highlighting text so it can be copied and pasted. All browsers allowed this highlighting functionality, except for IE 6 on Windows, which had a bug that blocked proper functionality.

It took a little bit of digging to sort out the problem. The problem was a result of using absolute positioning in the CSS. Once we changed the positioning from absolute to static everything was fine. Fortunately, we did not need to be using absolute for layout as this was the wrapper for the main content under the menu. This is a foolish bug to have in a browser and to have go unfixed (although minor compared to the severe security holes that are pervasive in the same browser).

Now our content here can be highlighted in all modern browsers to ease reading or copy and pasting. This important so that we may help others grab information for their Personal InfoCloud and reuse the information to help purposes.

Tweaking the Botox Pixels

We have made some minor tweaks to the presentation of the site. The menu bar has had the underlining removed on hover. Each of the items in the menu now has borders that change with hover and selection to create a little cleaner look.

The date bar in the weblog has been padded and has a slight border to off set it from the page and make the date more readable, the date has bugged me for a long time.

The permalink (comments) page now has a title of the entry. The entry titles have been added to the monthly archive pages also.

Lastly, the link to the Quick Link RSS feed has been added next to the Quick link title. This should make it easier to follow those links, should you wish. The Quick Links get updated far more regularly of late and there are some good gems that get nestled in there.

One Less Browser Option?

The talk on Metro this evening between a few folks was whether they would be able to use Internet Explorer the following day at work. The security hole in the browsers have been very problematic over the years, with this past year being particularly bad. This newest security hole permits your keystrokes to be copied by another party with out the user ever knowing. The warnings have been for banks, but it has spread to any log on, password, credit card number, or any information imaginable secure or wide-open, it does not matter.

Molly's WaSP Buzz entry outlining mainstream publications advising user to stop using the browser and Slate's "Are the Browser Wars Back? How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer" article frame the problems and options well.

My personal favorite browser on Windows is Firefox, which is one of the Mozilla browsers (it is the makers of the guts of the newest Netscape browser. On Mac I am a fan of Safari and Firefox and have both running at all times. You have options for browsing. Hopefully your bank and other purveyors of information were not foolish enough to build to just one browser.