Older blog entries for dorward (starting at number 61)

Flash continues to suck (possibly)

A Flash developer on the subject of touchscreens:

The only potential “solutions” to the mouseover problem are terrible ones:

A) The best case: every Flash app on every site is re-thought by its designers and re-coded by its programmers (if they’re even still available), just for touchscreens.

Really? Are you seriously telling me that every Flash application out there is entirely dependent on being able to point the mouse at things without clicking?

Even if you ignore touch screens, that still violates WCAG 2.0 2.1 by being inaccessible to keyboards.

I have trouble believing that every single Flash developer is that bad.

Syndicated 2010-02-22 09:45:22 from David Dorward

When SEO fails

Syndicated 2010-01-20 11:37:00 from David Dorward

HSBC don't want me to be their customer

The British are more likely to get divorced than switch their bank, but HSBC are doing a fantastic job of driving me away.

At the start of December I endured the annual round of “There is a possibility your card might have been cloned, we’re going to cancel it and send you a new one — which will take 5–10 working days.”

This was irritating the first time (especially as I had just reached that stage where I had memorised every detail of the card and no longer needed to pull it out to make online transactions).

The second time was just as bad.

This year, they decided to do it just as I was about to start my Christmas shopping.

That was the point where I applied for a new credit card, with a different bank (it was approved today).

Being the end of the year, I thought I had better order myself a season ticket for my rail travel for next year (before the fares are hiked by the rail companies). So, I duly fill out all the forms (including the fun of working out how I’m supposed to enter the photocard id code — hint: The spaces that are printed on the card aren’t in the code you have to type in).

Remember, this is an order for a physical ticket that will be posted to the address where my credit card is registered.

Then I get to the payment page where I enter:

• Everything on the front of the card
• Everything on the back of the card
• My postal address
• My Masterphish (the Mastercard implementation of 3D secure, aka Phished by Visa) password

At that point, my transaction is declined.

Did I misremember the Masterphish password? What has gone wrong?

My phone starts buzzing, but diverts to voicemail before I remember that I left it on the other side of the room.

Time to hit the “Call last number” button:

You were called by HSBC, no further action is required by yourself, and there is no need to return the call.

That isn’t very helpful.

I dig out the number for card services and call them back anyway. After a lot of rigmarole, where I inevitably wanted the last menu option, and wasn’t allowed to hear the first menu until I had listed to my balance report, I got to speak to a human … who had to transfer me to another department which made me say “Yes, I did spent that money” for every transaction I made in the last two days (quite a lot, I’m preparing for a party) before believing that I really wanted to spend a large sum on money on an annual train ticket.

Then I got to deal with my railway company’s order system again (naturally, I had to start from scratch).

As I wrote this, I received a voice mail (sadly, there is significant lag on the O2 voicemail system):

Good afternoon, my name is something incomprehensible in an accent from another continent and I am calling from the bank HSBC and have a prerecorded message for you.

Oh joy, the human touch. I feel so loved.

The HSBC theme tune

Sorry. I’m not thinking of HSBC as a superhero right now. This theme tune serves only to annoy. Especially as it reminds me of earlier this month when I spent ten minutes listening to it on a loop.

Please urgently call HSBC on …

Excuse me? “Urgently call”? How does that square with “there is no need to return the call”?

HSBC have been my bank for a decade and a half. I have a credit card from a different bank in the post. Next year I shall look around for a new current account.

Syndicated 2009-12-31 17:05:00 from David Dorward

Screen readers and top posting Vs Mutt

Syndicated 2009-11-23 20:20:00 from David Dorward

CMSs that are too much work

Did I mention that my CMS system was too much effort? Yes, I did, and the evidence is in — I wrote a blog post a month ago and it still isn’t on my main website. I’ll have to run an update tonight (which will probably involve manually fixing a parse error I have with some data I’m importing).

Syndicated 2009-11-20 18:44:00 from David Dorward

Three Levels of Expression

Russell said in “In praise of fragments” that “blogging is about momentum and ‘more considered’ makes momentum harder” and I’m with him on that.

I have a system, albeit one suffering from some technical issues (my production CMS was designed to generation static files and never got a decent admin interface) which I hope to resolve soon (I have Catalyst running on my production server, and I have the software almost written to take over a couple of bits of my website).

Tweets are transitory, and short. I have ideas that can’t fit into 140 characters, and I feel guilty if I spill over into multiple tweets.

So, to blogging. Blogging needs a front end, it gets squished into Atom, and squished into webpages and squished into content’s pages. I’ve using Tumblr as an interface between me & my blog. I am going to replace it with some Catalyst (removing the need to boot the laptop which currently hosts my CMS and tell it to suck down from Tumblr, rebuild and push out — the legacy of moving between systems and not investing the time in cleaning up the mess sooner).

Where was I? Oh yes. A front end makes it easy to bash some content out, to let ideas flow, and to stop holding on to thoughts until you can find the time to express them the way you really want.

Then we come to the polish. I want to be able to express some ideas with polish. I want to include example pages. I don’t want the publication date to be considered highly important. I don’t want the content to drift down into the depths just because it was written a long time ago. My documents about basic CSS centring and inheritance account for over a third of the hits to my website by themselves.

Perhaps Twitter is my in and out trays, blogging is my file cabinet and I’m left wanting a bookcase to show off the things I really care about.

And perhaps, just perhaps, I should take a leaf out of “The death of the boring blog post?” and stop being quite so consistent with how I format that stuff which I care about.

As the new CMS takes over, I think I may be looking at alternative ways to handle the articles section of my site.

Syndicated 2009-11-20 17:17:05 from David Dorward

Netbooks are PCs

Syndicated 2009-10-20 16:23:05 from David Dorward

Amazon comes through (as usual)

Any guesses as to which personal project I shall be returning to in that rare thing known as “my free time”?

Syndicated 2009-09-21 19:48:35 from David Dorward

On the dangers of opening one's mouth

I am now the primary maintainer of Catalyst::View::ContentNegotiation::XHTML. This is not one of the things I expected to happen when I woke up yesterday morning.

1. Every five seconds, someone is wrong on the Internet, and often they are wrong about content negotiation.

2. A fondness for simple markup rules (as found in XML) combined with a nagging dislike of Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification (which makes the rules complicated again) and an interest in markup validation has led me to find out more than most people about HTTP.

3. I like Perl and I like Catalyst

When you combine these bits of information, it was almost inevitable that I would get myself involved with getting content negotiation Done Right in Catalyst.

The Perl motto is “There’s more than one way to do it” but, thanks to the CPAN, it could easily be “Someone has already done it for you” and so it is useful to think out loud in the Perl community (or to think into an IRC channel in this case).

Just as I was about to start learning how to write a Catalyst View module from scratch, Tomas Doran pointed me at his module, and it was pretty good.

Nothing is perfect though, so I contributed some tests and patches and it was better.

Time passed. Work continued. It got better without me. I took another look at it and found another possible improvement.

It turned out that providing too much help can be a little dangerous.

15:22 < t0m> Dorward: well volunteered, what was your CPAN id again?
15:23 < Dorward> Eeek
15:23 < Dorward> What have I done?!
15:23 < Penfold> made it better
15:23 < Penfold> be porud
15:23 <+mdk> t0m: nice one ++
15:23 < t0m> Made DORWARD primary maintainer of Catalyst::View::ContentNegotiation::XHTML.
15:23 < t0m> Made DORWARD primary maintainer of Catalyst::View::TT::XHTML.

This wasn’t quite how I planned getting my first CPAN commit, but it has made it through the PAUSE queue and should be available at a mirror near you soon.

Please feel free to take a look, give it a try (give Catalyst a try if you aren’t already), and submit comments and bug reports.

Syndicated 2009-09-18 03:47:13 from David Dorward

CSS Class (a phrase I hate)

I keep seeing the term “CSS Class” crop up, but it doesn’t have any official meaning. It doesn’t even have a consistent unofficial meaning. I’ve seen the phrase “CSS Class” applied to mean all of the following:

• HTML class
• CSS class selector
• Any CSS selector
• A CSS rule set

Often it is possible to work out what people really mean, but that isn’t always the case. This is an appeal — if you find yourself saying or writing “CSS Class”, please think about what you actually mean.

Syndicated 2009-09-14 14:27:43 from David Dorward