Archive for January 2003

I looked at the Car park photo before reading the details. Which button would you press to lift the barrier (or gate)? I thought green since it means Go in this here parts. As I understand it, that also applies in England. A simple case of two buttons equals a lesson in bad usability.

Are you up to speed on the latest news lexicon? Get a quick tune up with E-cyclopedia’s glossary of 2002. I’ve never seen archery defined that way before. Audit workship? Sounds like something that’s been going on for years. Blogger also made the cut — but isn’t that *so* 2001 or 2002?

I happen to be at palm.com to do e-book research when I learned there is a Palm Desktop update for downloading. There aren’t drastic changes, but it’s always nice to have a few extra features including the ability to search for duplicate records and more desktop color options. The color choices aren’t a big deal as I stuck with the one I had before. Some were too hard or bright on the eyes.

There is another exclusive excerpt from Andy King’s Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization. This is the conclusion of Chapter 10, Optimizing Javascript for Execution Speed. It talks about an optimized duff’s device for faster loop unrolling, expression tuning, and Flash actionscript optimization.

Looping through variables, while critical to the success of most programs, can be a significant performance drain if not handled properly. In this excerpt, the book discovers how to tune JavaScript loops for the highest possible speed.

I nearly fell out of my chair when I came across this news item: Web consortium captures captioning. The fact that W3C is getting involved is a big deal.

Long ago, I accepted the fact there are going to be plenty of video games, Web sites, and TV programs that I wouldn’t experience for myself because it’s tough to caption everything and to fund it. Since W3C is chartering a new group known as TTWG (Timed Text Working Group), it means business.

Tried to see if there was a similar workgroup for the visually or mobility impaired. Haven’t found it yet.

SXSW Tech Report Interview with Joshua Davis. I can honestly say this was one of the scariest interviews I’ve conducted because many in the Web design world are in awe of him and it’s easy to see why.

I’ve been talking about redesigning this place for exactly a year now and got no where as many other things jumped ahead of the redesign by way of priority.

When I got stuck reviewing a chapter of a technical book, I started working on the redesign. I couldn’t handle the chapter anymore and I needed to get rid of hard to read background on this site.

After bravely inviting a few helpful souls to review the first and current draft, I’m ready to share, I think.

The meryl.net redesign uses CSS and XHTML. It’s not perfect since I plan to add more accessibility code and a style switcher. It was too much work to try to do it all at once. Slowly, I’ll be switching to the new design and I hope to move it to a new server because this damned server can’t handle rebuilding this blog anymore.

OK, criticize away.

This is a good kind of diet. Over at J-Log, find how I balance my daily newstrition. Others like J.D. Lasica have done the same in previous issues.

In the USA, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. on the third Monday of the month, which happens to fall on my birthday this year. Couldn’t ask for a better holiday to share on the annual personal day.

Appropriately, on the day we honor differences, I received Ukranian birthday wishes from Oleksiy Kolisnychenko. The note says, “Here, in Ukraine, people wish each other on their birthdays luck, happiness and more creative ideas, so I want to wish you vdachi, schastya ta tworchikh uspikhiv. "Happy birthday to you" will sound "Z dnem narodzhennya tebe" in Ukrainian.” That’s what I love about the ‘net, it’s a great way to learn about other cultures.

The baby pool is officially open at B-Day Blog. No worries about cheaters — we don’t know the gender, but we can tell you it’s a boy or a girl.