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Where is it, anyone know?

The boys at ClearLeft are organising d.Construct again this year. I had just moved to Brighton last year and missed out on the ticket sales due to lack of internet connection.

I believe tickets are all sold out now, but if you’ve got one why not come and say hi?

Ryan Carson is talking about How to build a Web App, on July 19th (a Wednesday). I thought I’d pop along. If your there as well do introduce yourself.

Myself, Ryan & Gill Carson, and Jason Santa Maria are talking about the design & development of Carson Systems new WebApp, Amigo, over at Bare Naked App.

There’s also a couple of video’s and a silly picture of me with hair.. why not stop by?

While the quality of this picture isn’t so great (taken on a later model of the v3 in a pub by Damien [thank you]), I did find it amusing: apparently it’s charging, but it’s obviously not!

Doing a Google Search for motorola v3 battery problems shows many results. Oh joy - hopefully this won’t be the beginning of more problems.

At the moment it’s been apparently charging all day long (and everytime I want to check the date I have to go to settings - "charging" overwrites it), and the battery still shows 1/3rd. Very frustrating.

Update: I turned the phone off, and charged it without booting the OS, this seemed to fix it. Just resetting the phone didn’t.

Technorati tags: motorola charging v3

(via Dean Edwards’s Faster DOM Queries)

I’ve only just got round to reading this: it’s great! Joe Hewitt has written some javascript which converts a CSS selector to an XPath query (source code). I searched and searched a few months back for something like this, and when I found nothing I made a note to write my own, however it seems Joe beat me to it just over a month ago.

I suppose my lesson is: I need to spend more time on code to release into the community- as I promised myself.

While this isn’t new code from me, I got round to cleaning it up and making it suitable for "open sourcing". This javascript allows the developer of a website to assign optional css styles to any element(s), which the user can then choose.

Jakob Nielsen said back in 2002 in his Alertbox Let Users Control Font Size

"Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site’s visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don’t recommend such a button for mainstream websites."

While not an ‘alternate style sheet’, it is an ‘alternate style’ and one of the examples I’ve included does exactly this. Head over to the alternateStyles.js page for examples, and source code.

Over the weekend I looked at getting a MacMini - only really use Safari, so doesn’t have to be powerful. The refurb deals seemed like a good option as it won’t be my primary machine.

Went back to buy one.. it seem the Apple store has all changed, now Intel MacMini’s, and no more refurb deals - either I’m missing something, or I’m really not impressed.

Update: Seems I was missing something, the refurbs were back online later on. Should arrive on the 6th.

Just incase you were wondering, yes, I’ll be there, yes, please come and find me.

I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve previously be to Carson Workshops (to see Joe Clark’s Sharing the Secrets of Web Accessibility), but this is 800 people! Wow. Well done Ryan, I’ll say it again, I’m really looking forward to this.

National Rail Enquiries’s live departure board finder has a check box labeled “Display Accessible Version?”. When I say labeled, I don’t mean that it uses the label tag.

Says to me: we do trains but not accessibility. Well, at least they seem to be trying. Maybe if I get bored I’ll look at the differences of the code.

I said a few posts ago that I keep meaning to release some open sourced code. Well, I stumbled upon a script I was using to build my xul-based Firefox extensions, and after a little bit of editing I decided it was just about suitable to be released. It’s very simple, but if you build extensions for Firefox often you’ll know it can take a lot more time for every build then should be necessary. This short bash script solves this.

This has only been tested on my machine at the moment, which runs Ubuntu Linux. I’m confident that most Linux system will be fine as long as you have ‘zip’ installed. If anyone tests this on a Mac please let me know.

If it’s your cup of tea, download buildxulextension.sh.

The guys over at Geek Dinner have got what I’m sure will be another great evening: Dave Shea Geek Dinner - January 23 2006.

Count me in!

When my mind was starting to say to me "you need a website, you need a website" I asked myself if I wanted a blog.. I mean after all; I wouldn’t need to code a new system, there are plenty of tools to use, I’m sure the list of reasons could go on. After not too much thought I decided a blog isn’t just for Christmas and I didn’t want the responsibility of being a full time blogger.

So, what did I decide?

I decided that I definitely needed some sort of web presence, regardless of the tools used or how it will be displayed. This is the result. I also set in stone the reason’s I wanted one, so in no particular order:

• Learn to write better. Although English is my mother tongue, I sometimes speak and write it so badly I surprise myself. Writing in public will force me to think twice before I publish, which in-turn will mean I’ll read my own work and learn where I make mistakes.
• Open source software. I keep meaning to do more, or even finish and release the "some" I have started. If I have somewhere to talk about it and google to index it I think I’ll find myself much more motivated.
• Learn to think/read as I type or vice-versa. This one I just noticed. My fingers and brain don’t seem to sync when I type English, guess my brain is too used to looking at code!
• Use web based services that require a website. Now I can see what all the fuss is about Google Analytics, FeedBurner, Measure Map etc. etc.
• Write in public. I’m sure there is much to be learnt and many more people to meet from writing in public. I won’t know what or who until I’ve written some more but I’m sure both the people and the learning will be interesting.

And what I don’t want to end up happening:

• Frequency. I don’t expect to be writing here daily, in fact I don’t know how often I’ll end up writing. Hopefully I’ll get into some sort of routine.
• Re-post. Too much of the web seems to be posts about posts abouts posts with no new opinion or content added these days, I want to avoid this like the plague.

Either way, if you become a regular reader I hope you enjoy the ride.