a MINDBLOWING article on understanding systems through abstraction, visualization, interaction and iterative development. It’s one of the most visually and interactively clever web pages I’ve seen in a long time, and makes the concepts and algorithms necessary to understand the examples given as clear as possible: Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction.
Uncategorized at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
paulcarvill.com
Hi, I'm Paul Carvill and I'm a web developer. I am Head of Interface Development at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012Can’t access any locally hosted websites on *nix machine?
Monday, April 18th, 2011sudo apachectl -t
will tell you if there’s any configuration errors in your Apache config. I spent 10 stupid minutes just now trying to figure out why nothing worked.
Video captioning soon to be required by law (in America)
Friday, August 13th, 2010Earlier this month the United states Senate passed the Twenty-First Century Video Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, which will require captioning of all online video that has previously been shown on television***.
Although the Act does not contain a schedule for captioning of online video, and still needs to be passed in to law by Barack Obama, this is an important juncture for web accessibility and will add impetus to the move towards an open standard for video captioning and implementation of that standard by all browser vendors.
Online-only content is not covered by the Act, so individual creators of content will largely remain exempt, but this Act will have massive implications for the television broadcasters. They will mostly already have access to a textual transcript of the show, which they are using to provide television captioning, so their main hurdle is providing a user-friendly mechanism for distributing online captions. Although they could presumably just plonk them all in a text file and link there from the video content, this doesn’t seem to be a very elegant solution.
Luckily, the working group maintaining the HTML standard have something to say about that: the Video Timed Track standard which has been very well defined recently by the WHATWG. Here’s Ian Hickson, the HTML spec editor, talking about his research and motivations in defining the Timed Track portion of the HTML video specification, on the WHATWG mailing list.
Although no similar Act exists in UK law explicitly covering online video, the disability Discrimination Act looks to be thorough enough to cover this area, should anyone wish to take someone to court over it. The UK Act states,
4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”
and also,
5.26 (p68): “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”
I don’t always agree that enforcing accessibility through legal mechanisms is the best way to achieve equal access to information for all. For public sector properties this method makes sense, but there’s something smelly about prescribing how privately owned companies should serve their media. But the US Act will at least have the effect of focusing media creators’ and browser vendors energies on accepting and using a commonly defined open standard.
***US television has its own rules regarding captioning. Previously, on January 1st 1998, January 1, 1998. the Federal Communications Commission effected rules which require people or companies that distribute television programs directly to home viewers to make sure those programs are captioned. Under the rules, 100 percent of nonexempt programs shown on or after January 1, 1998, must have been closed captioned by January 1, 2006, and 75 percent of nonexempt programs shown before January 1, 1998, must have been closed captioned by January 1, 2008).
I remember when Nokia and Symbian were the future, too
Monday, July 5th, 2010There was a time when I love Nokia mobile phones, the Symbian OS and, importantly, the combination of the two. Symbian felt like something approaching a platform, something I could interact with, rather than the flatness of what had been up to that point — the 2D-ness of a microchip and LCD screen.
I never got anywhere near the point of developing for Symbian. I’m writing strictly as a user. But Symbian felt like people might be able to write applications for it. I could already read documents on it. And send email. Wow.
Of course, Symbian has failed to set the mobile world alight. It is inward looking, lacks killer apps and, worst of all, feels cobbled together. There didn’t seem to be any overarching interface guidelines or interaction design — and I think Nokia’s two-button navigation system is one of the most intuitive and elegant in the mobile world..
Anyway, this isn’y much of a blogpost, just a thought that was inspired by reading this guy’s blogpost. He’s so disillusioned by Nokia and Symbian that he’s closing down his Sybian news site.. Here’s a quote, but you should go and read the whole, long article:
“To Nokia, you guys are losing. Hard. Wake the hell up. Doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I’ve been a huge Nokia fan since my 2nd cellphone, and I just can’t do it any longer. You guys aren’t competing like you once were, and everyone but you seems to see that. You used to build the world’s best smartphones, the world’s best cameras, the world’s best GPS units – you’ve lost pretty much all of that, and with nothing to show for it.”
Hello world!
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
IE6 state of play linkage
Friday, August 14th, 2009A few links to recent IE6 coverage.
Digg the Blog: Much Ado About IE6
“This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason…Giving them a message saying, ‘Hey! Upgrade!’ in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.”
BBC News | Technology: Microsoft backs long life for IE6 [support will continue until 2014, four years beyond their original deadline]
“‘Friends do not let friends use IE6,’ said Amy Barzdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer.
‘If you are in my social set and I have been to your house for dinner, you are not using IE6,’ she said. ‘But it is much more complicated when you move into a business setting.’”
blogs.msdn.com | IEBlog: The Engineering Point Of View
“The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments.”
MoD to stick with IE6 despite security concerns
“According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of [government] departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change.”
Conclusion: IE6, at least in corporate environments, isn’t going away for a few years yet.
links for 2009-02-04
Thursday, February 5th, 2009-
Google introduces Latitude, a way of sharing your location with others. I think I'll probably find myself using this more than I use FireEagle, mostly because Google own my ass right now — via apps, docs and email — so I'm much more likely to be in a position to update it regularly and closely control friend's and colleague's access to my locus.
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Turns out it’s a combination of navigational and direct text string search, presenting the user with a set of results, and progressively reducing those results through user choices.
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NYTimes.com has announced its Article Search API. It allows you to query 28 year’s worth* of information by date range, field search (e.g.title, byline) and conjunction and disjunction (AND and NOT) operations. In addition, you can order results by relevance, and date. *That’s over 2.8 million articles. And each article has 35 searchable fields.
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@medisisthriving is a Twitter feed of good news from the media industry ( a counterpoint to @themediaisdying )
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Dylan Loewe at The Huffington Post explains why Tom Daschle’s withdrawal as nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary is a shot in the foot for America.
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The Republican Party in the US has been busy — they’ve also released their GOP.gov Anywhere API. The API includes methods for members, bills, votes and documents. The documentation and examples are particularly clearly explained, and the site is a great example to governments and political parties of the value of sharing data.
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The Republican Party in the US has recently added about 40 RSS feeds to their website, including news, committee information, videos, photos and the ominous sounding ’solutions’.
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Excellent set of infographics showing how much tax notionally UK-based businesses are paying, compared to how much they should really be paying, as a result of their manipulation of the tax laws. Beautifully presented and easy to understand. This data came from serious amounts of ongoing financial research by The Guardian, and what’s amazing is that the data has been made available in XML format here: http://business.guardian.co.uk/guardiantaxdb.xml A big win for freedom of information and availability of important data.
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The Republican Party in the US has recently added about 40 RSS feeds to their website, including news, committee information, videos, photos and the ominous sounding ’solutions’.
Isn’t Anything?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008I thought I was going to see some shoegazer bands at The Boileroom. Shoegazing’s back, isn’t it? “It’s been and gone. You missed it.” my friend Ivan says. I go along anyway.
In the end the band I see are Moscow Flyer, a rambunctious, charging, unclassifiable 5-piece whose maturity and confidence belies their bumfluff. Intense vocals are tempered with the sweet swooning of a violin or cello, the whole buffeted by Arcade Fire/Killers-style doom-laden retro-synth stabs. They kept the audience engaged, and have a nice line in between-song gags.
Having been away for a while, I can confirm that the Boileroom now has crystal clear sound, more tables and pulls a pretty good pint of Guinness. Unfortunately hunger got the better of me and I left before the rest of the bill could bring memories of the very early Nineties flooding back. Still, My Bloody Valentine are playing a lengthy series of gigs this summer, which will surely herald the return of the shoegazing scene in some form, and an extended celebration of itself.
I’m back!
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008I’m back, so look forward to more activity on this website very soon…