Author Jeremy Sydik has posted some additional information about photosensitivity and web design—not only how to avoid causing seizures in your readers. He also covers how to prevent greifers from using your site to launch attacks on others, and offers some suggestions for those with photosensitive concerns on how to configure your browsing environment to better protect yourself.
You can read more from Jeremy here.
As if life wasn't hard enough, some lowlife, scumbag griefers have taken to deliberate assaults on people who suffer from both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epilepsy.
Wired magazine reported last month: "Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users"
"The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs."
Hopefully these dirtbags will be found and prosecuted somehow, but in the meantime their heinous actions have raised awareness of a potential problem with websites: your nifty new website effect could cause seizures in people, and you can be held accountable for it.
So as a public service, we've released a relevant tip from Jeremy Sydik's book, Design Accessible Web Sites 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms The tip It's Not Polite to Flash The Audience is now available for free for your reading pleasure. Please take a look.
Suing your best customers, as the RIAA is so fond of, is bad enough. But physically assaulting them is even worse!
In the dead of the night last week, someone delivered our new phone books, carefully wrapped in plastic bags. One large volume of White Pages, for residential listings, and one large volume of Yellow Pages, for businesses.
The kind folks in the phone directory-printing-business then called us on the phone—to make sure we’d received our phone books in good condition. They wanted to make sure we had them in hand.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the books never made it into the house. I pitched them straight into the recycling bin next to the garage.
When was the last time you ever looked up a phone number in a city-wide, paper directory? I honestly can’t remember.
There was a similar story over at ars technica last month, where a bunch of EMI (the record company) execs were holding a focus group with some willing teens. As a “thank you” for participating, they offered the kids a big pile of compact discs for free—they could just help themselves to as many of the CDs as they wanted.
None of the teens took any of the discs. Even for free. Too much hassle, I suppose.
Come to think of it, the only time of year I tend to get CDs is around Christmas, as gifts. I dutifully rip them (320kbps), take a brief but appreciative look at the cover art, and then file the CD in the Backup Box deep in the closet of death. (Ok, that’s what my family calls it; the closet with old CDs, the occasional router or Hayes Smart Modem, enough cables to restring the Golden Gate Bridge, and an amazingly odd assortment of different SCSI adaptors.)
Phone books? Don’t need ‘em. Google for most folks or businesses, AddressBook for our friends with unlisted access.
Compact discs? Dead, it appears. Can’t give ‘em away. Download is where it’s at, and vinyl is making a surprising, nostalgic resurgence. I have to admit, I miss the presence of vinyl. Many of the records I have are better engineered than the CDs—they had to be, I suppose, because of the constraints of the record cutting process.
Vinyl doesn’t offer the pinnacle of faithful audio reproduction, but it does offer a sensuous experience, with large-format artwork, the tea-ceremony like handling of the record, sleeve, and platter, followed by the heady anticipation after the needle drops.
Ad-laden phone directories don’t have any sensuous appeal. To me, anyway. They’re just awkward. Compact discs? They’re just a delivery mechanism, and not the most convenient one at that.
If you’re putting out a work solely on CD, you’re in trouble. If you’re not Googleable, and are only in the paper directory, you’re in trouble.
Agility is all about responding to change. Just remember that change isn't confined to software...
/\ndy
The most popular talks I’ve been giving over the last two years or so are Refactoring Your Wetware, Pragmatic Learning, and Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep. Folks keep asking for more info on these topics, so I thought maybe it was time to actually write this stuff down.
The first couple chapters of Refactor Your Wetware: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning are now available as a beta book. I plan to add chapters every two weeks or so throughout the beta period.
I’ve written many times that the two most important skills for a programmer (IMHO) are communications and learning. In this book, I’m taking a hard look at expertise, thinking and learning.
The fact is we have to learn new stuff all the time. Not just the new technologies (although that's a pretty big challenge right there), but we have to learn about the problem domain, about the team and organizational dynamics, about the system itself as it stumbles to life.
But what have you ever been taught about learning? If you're like most people, probably not much. Nor are we really ever taught much about how our brains work, or how to take advantage of that. But of course, in our field, all the action is in our heads. The rest is just typing :-)
These are the main chapters in the book:
The Dreyfus model, featured in my talk Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep, has long been a favored topic. It turns out to be a very useful way to begin to talk about building expertise, how to make the journey from novice to expert.
How we think, and how we think about thinking, makes a dramatic difference on your ability to solve problems and invent new solutions. Learning how the brain works (at least, part of it) can really help, so I'll tell you all about the Linear-mode (L-mode) and Rich-mode (R-mode) cognitive processes, how and when to use them, and how to harness more brain power. I know I can use all the help I can get.
I'll be posting more on these topics over the coming weeks, in the meantime, enjoy the first part of the book!
/\ndy
There’s been a lot of whining about the MacBook Air that loses sight of it’s real purpose—and no, I’m not talking about the road warrior audience.
As you probably heard, Apple announced a new super-skinny laptop at this year’s MacWorld expo. Named the MacBook Air, it’s impressively skinny and light-weight, and a few features that move in interesting and new directions:
The “wireless only” is a natural evolution; with initiatives such as Sprint’s upcoming Xohm service the age of ubiquitous WiFi is just about here. Wired is so 90’s.
The multi-touch ability is a clear progression from the interface on the existing iPhone and iPod Touch devices, but with a twist. Instead of the direct manipulation touch interface you experience on the pocket devices, you’re confined to using the traditional trackpad. It’s not part of the screen.
Then there’s the allure of the solid-state drive. No mechanical wear-and-tear (great for a portable), better battery life (no motors to spin up), and I’m guessing pretty blindingly fast speed. But that’s a hefty $999USD option.
So why did Apple bother to make this Air laptop? It’s an iteration. A middle step from the existing product line to the next.
What we really want is a tablet. Full screen multi-touch, with a large and affordable solid state drive, always connected at broadband speeds, with hassle-free backup over the air. We’re not there yet.
But there are enough road warriors who will probably buy the Air to help drive down production costs for the new bits: the new smaller die Intel chip, perhaps, as well as the solid state drive and whatever other new-fangled goodies they’ve got inside. So you make an interim product such as the Air: it will have it’s audience, and that will pave (and pay) the way for the next iteration. Gives you a chance to work out the bugs, spot new opportunities, see how people use it. That’s what an iteration is all about.
We expect our software customers to embrace iterative development, with increasing features and incremental improvement from one release to the next. Yet I hear a lot of whining about the Air that it’s not perfect, that it’s not what people want, that you’re better off with a MacBook Pro, etc.
It’s an iteration. As with any product, take the pragmatic approach: if it meets your needs now, buy it. If you’re looking at possible future needs, then wait.
And maybe think about what an iteration is all about: feedback.
Here’s a quick and easy way to generate a decent looking PDF from some simple Textile markup, using TextMate.
Voilà.
You can always add images and perhaps some CSS to tart it up a bit if you like.
It’s light, it’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s plain text—so you can put it under version control with all the rest of your quick memos, project documentation, and such. Right?
We've got a bunch of fun and cool new titles in the works (to add to our 45+ titles in print), and since most of us are using Macs these days, we've got a batch of neat Mac-focussed titles coming up as well.
Our own Daniel Steinberg will be at this year's Mac World expo next week. Be sure to track him down and say Hi, especially if you've got an idea for a possible book you'd like to write.
If you're not headed out to Mac World, you can also send us proposals to proposals@pragprog.com.
As for me, I've got my fingers crossed for some cool new laptop announcements :-).
While doing some writing this morning, I came across this quote:
“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” — Picasso
Interesting, especially when you consider that most of us probably do the opposite, constantly stretching to handle 12 things when we're really only capable of handling 10 effectively, and maybe 5 with mastery, if Pablo was right.
And I suspect that he was. We know that multitasking, in general, costs you more time than you save—perhaps 20-40% of your productivity, in fact. Interruptions that disrupt your concentration can cost you 20-30 minutes as you reload deep context.
I've talked to a number of folks who've instituted "email-free" days or half-days, where the team simply shuts down their email clients and focuses on their real work. To a person, they've found this to be an incredibly rewarding and productive experience.
So here's my first New Year's resolution: Work Below My Means.
Yeah I know, there's still a few weeks before New Year's, but there's a lot that needs fixing, so I better start now :-)
What should a manager actually do? What does multitasking really mean? What does an MBA qualify you for? Learn the answers to these and other critical questions as Johanna Rothman, author of "Manage It", explains how to really make teams go faster, and discover the importance of practice, feedback, and fun. Plus Johanna reads an except from her Schedule Games chapter, in this latest podcast.
If you’ve read Ed Burnette’s Google Web Toolkit: Taking the Pain Out of Ajax or are interested in GWT, there’s a conference coming up you might want to look at.
The Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference will take place December 3-6, 2007 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
They’ll have JavaScript and Ajax workshops, and a keynote by Josh Bloch.
Be sure to register using priority code GWT3363 at checkout for a $100 discount for Pragmatic Bookshelf readers.
Enjoy!
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•The Pragmatic Programmer
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NEW for 2008!
•Practices of An Agile Developer
Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity award
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New Second edition of this award-winning book
