Miles' Blog

A surprise visit from an OLPC

Miles — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:17:40 +0000

You’ve no doubt heard of the One Laptop Per Child education project, whose goal is ‘to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves’. Today the education.au office has been graced by the presence of one of the recent versions of the OLPC, thanks to one of our network admins who has an aquaintance involved with the project. So here I am, 2000km away from the office, champing at the bit to have a play with it, but alas, all I can do is look at the photos you see here…

What is your opinion on the OLPC education project? Is this the right way to be educating children in developing countries? I think only time will tell, but my completely un-philisophical opinion is that the OLPC is the perfect conduit for allowing the world wide web to continue changing the world for the better. I welcome the new participants in the global online community and look forward to seeing the wonderment in the children’s eyes, through the OLPC’s built-in webcam no less!

Keep an eye on the latest OLPC news, check out the list of software currently available with the OLPC’s Red Hat based operating system, or watch one of the numerous video demonstrations. Take note of the number of games (educational of course) already available, more than any of the other software categories! I think there’d be a few of our technical staff (including myself) who feel that games played a big part in developing their computer skills. But where is Where is Carmen Sandiego?

Thanks to Karl for bringing the OLPC into the office (even though I’m not there), and to Alana for taking the pics for me.

Opera Mini 4 beta

Miles — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:41:29 +0000

Opera Mini has opened the door to a better browsing experience, especially for Java-enabled mobile phones that can currently only access WAP content. Get Opera Mini 4 beta.

If you’ve not used Opera Mini before, it allows you to browse the web on almost any Java enabled phone, even very basic feature phones. Like Opera Mobile, it can display the regular web sites using (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript (but doesn’t include Ajax due to client server limitations). It is much more powerful than other browsers in its class, which require special WAP 2 content. This is due to it using the latest version of our
Core-2 rendering engine found in Opera Kestrel and the Nintendo Wii browser, plus our client server architecture that allows us to render the web page on the server, and send it to the browser as a compressed binary; both reducing the file size, bandwidth costs to the user, and increasing the download speed.

You can customise the pages you create by adding a handheld stylesheet, or using CSS3 Media Queries, so you have full control over the final output.

It’s even taken pride of place as my favourite browser on my Windows Mobile 5.0 device!

WaSP Education Task Force seeks input from educational professionals

Miles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:05:05 +0000

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

The WaSP Education Task Force and W3C Quality Assurance Interest Group propose the creation of a curriculum framework to help educators teach best practices in Web design and development more effectively. Upon completing modules in such a curriculum, a student should have sound knowledge of best practices and a solid foundation upon which to build.

If you are an educator or have influence over curriculum, we would like your input with regard to this subject. We have created a short survey as a first step to accomplish this task. The survey is brief and includes nine questions.

The growth of browser-based web applications has created a wave of interest in web standards, especially here in Australia. The WaSP initiative will most likely be aimed at US curriculum, however there are AU based groups such as the Web Standards Group who will hopefully be keeping a close eye on progress.

When I was studying Computer Science and Multimedia at university almost a decade ago, I have a vague recollection of the few weeks we spent on ‘Introduction to HTML publishing’. We had to make a basic page using the now prehistoric Netscape Communicator, which came bundled with a HTML editor of sorts to compliment the Navigator browser. That was pretty much the end of the HTML portion of my studies, although thankfully I was able to continue learning more from the online communities popping up all over the place. One of the communities I started taking an interest in was the Web Standards Project (WaSP), and I soon realised there was a whole lot more to HTML than tables with fluorescent backgrounds and blinking marquees! For that, I will be eternally grateful…

If you’re an education professional, please fill out the survey.

Spam statistics

Miles — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:40:16 +0000

Akismet is the spam filtering service built into Wordpress via a plugin. Their statistics on blocked comment spam is quite scary! Sometimes you have to wonder what the world would be like if the spammers actually directed their efforts at a worthwhile cause…

Searching the clouds

Miles — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:21:27 +0000

An interesting article about the proliferation of text clouds, one of many predecessors to the ubiquitous tag cloud. Here at education.au we’re developing tag cloud functionality as another discovery mechanism for large resource repositories, so it’s exciting to see them gradually appearing in a variety of applications around the web. For the benefit of semantics and standards, making the markup meaningful should be a high priority.

My Firefox add-ons

Miles — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:28:20 +0000

Continuing with Jerry’s trend, here are the Firefox add-ons I’m currently using, ordered from ‘Can’t live without’ to ‘*shrug* it’s kinda useful’:

Web Developer - this conglomeration of useful development tools replaced a large number of smaller add-ons I was using, and added even more shortcuts than I’d imagined possible! Ability to live edit CSS and HTML is a great time saver.
Firebug - Only misses out on the #1 spot due to its bugginess (no pun intended). Its power to ‘edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page’ never ceases to amaze me. Its only at 1.01 so I’m hoping it gets more stable as it matures. Regardless, I am finding I use it more than Web Developer nowadays, and bug squashing is only a Firefox restart away.
HTML Validator - On the fly validation for W3C standards. A must for any content editor working with standards-compliant websites, or developer wanting to ensure ongoing compliance when coding.
Live HTTP Headers - View HTTP headers of a page while browsing. Great for debugging session problems and other bugs that can cause rapid hair loss.
FaviconizeTab - Make persistent tabs display only the icon, saving space for the tab titles you really need to see.
Tab History - Links opened in a new tab retain their history.
Screen grab! - I loved this add-on, but unfortunately it hasn’t been updated to support more recent Firefox versions. You can save an entire page as an image (it scrolls around the page taking shots and stitches it together), just the visible portion, or the browser window. I anxiously await its return…
IETab - Lets me access some of our IE only internal sites without having to open IE. Gives me a warm feeling inside knowing that I’m stickin’ it to the man. Doesn’t always provide everything a real IE window will…
Undo Closed Tabs Button - Like Jerry, this has saved me on numerous occasions. It even remembers partially entered form content!
del.icio.us Complete - Provides numerous interface hooks into your del.icio.us bookmarks to view, add and edit. I especially like its ability to return suggested or popular tags when adding a new bookmark.
Aging Tabs - Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab. Its usefulness is dependent on your browsing behaviour, helps me to remember tabs I’ve opened but forgotten to visit.
Adblock Plus and Filter set updater - Does pretty much what the name says and hides most if not all banner ads and other random annoying stuff. Sometimes it can block something it shouldn’t, so I find myself toggling it on and off when I’m coding interfaces. Use in conjunction with the filter set updater for best results.

It’s hard to put a limit on the number of add-ons to have. There’s been times I’ve had at least 2x this list, but over time I trim it down to the ones I’m benefiting from regularly.

Web 2.0 in just under five minutes

Miles — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 05:06:49 +0000

Watch a brief history of Web 2.0 (2nd draft) by Micheal Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

Thanks to Nelly for passing this on.

Folksonomies vs Melvil Dewey

Miles — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:53:50 +0000

Searching through the non-fiction shelves of my local library is now just a tad more annoying than it used to be since perusing the results of a December 2006 survey outlining the demographics of ‘taggers’ and accompanying interview with David Weinberger.

In a forthcoming book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, describes how people are putting ideas, information and knowledge together now that the digital age has encouraged alternatives to organizing information like the Dewey Decimal system.

On this particular day I had undertaken the frustrating task of trying to locate the book, ‘The Weather Makers’ by Tim Flannery, in the library’s catalogue. Unfortunately at the time I didn’t know the name of the book, only some generic information about the subject matter. After an exhaustive search I finally managed to find the book I was looking for, then found myself searching the 3+ shelves that comprised the single Dewey decimal point I was directed to. I found it eventually, but had to agree with the author (of the article that explores the survey results) that perhaps our ever growing store of human knowledge is getting to unwieldy for traditional discovery methods.

Funnily enough, when I got home I was able to find the book’s title and author in less than 5 seconds using a tag search of a popular social bookmarking site… Fantastic read by the way, highly recommended!

HTML lives on

Miles — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 04:35:18 +0000

In the world of web standards it’s old news, but the W3C has recently announced their decision to continue work on the HTML specification. HTML is probably the oldest and most widely known specification to come out of the W3C working group, but this time its going to be a bit different:

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

The floor has been open for a few weeks and already the flood of opinions is a site to behold! Everyone from dabblers to standards-zealots can now complain about limitations, request new features and share the wealth of their years of experience with the standard that’s a household name. Now if I could just think of something to say that hasn’t already been said…

Accessible Ajax and Netscape nightmares

Miles — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 01:55:27 +0000

First of all, if you’re thinking this post is going to discuss the merits of being able to reach your cleaning products, then you should probably stop reading now or go and read about Ajax as defined by a propeller-head. If you’ve been following the meteoric rise of this asynchronous web development technique then you may have heard rumblings about it’s accessibility problems and solutions based on the idea of progressive enhancement, unoffically known as Hijax.

I’ve been playing with Ajax as much as possible in my personal endeavours, however in my work here at education.au the priority is accessibility, so any potential usability enhancements Ajax could offer occasionally fall by the wayside. Of course, the Hijax term has been coined for over a year now, and long before that the idea of using client-side scripts with a server-side failsafe has been used in everything from image manipulation to form validation.

So why haven’t I used Hijax in any projects yet? The answer lies deep in the annals of my web designer history, back when Netscape 4.x was the web designers Sword of a thousand truths and Internet Explorer a magical portal to dynamic scripting sorcery (funnily enough, the XML over HTTP control already existed then, but that’s a different story). This may sound like some magical faraway land, but it was more real than you can imagine. So real, in fact, that on many occasions I was involved in projects that ended up with two almost completely separate interface codebases: one for Netscape 4.x and one for IE 4+. All because either a client or self-hating lead developer refused to cater to the lowest common denominator.

So as much as I’d love to get excited about progressive enhancement of web applications with Hijax, the thought of building two different blocks of code, to ultimately perform the same task, gives me nightmares…