Software As She’s Developed

Whereupon a new podcast series begins … As promised, a new series of Ajax pattern podcasts. This is the first of four podcasts on the Ajax programming patterns. In this 73 minute podcast, we look at the seven patterns of web services as they relate to Ajax clients. RPC Service Expose web services as Remote Procedural Calls […]

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You know, the reason I’ve been passionate about podcasting since the beginning is that I’m a bit thingy about the written word. It has its merits, but multimedia’s where it’s at for true absorbtion of concepts. It’s the way we’re wired to learn and the no.1 reason why universities survived the printing press. So I could […]

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Seen on Tech Memeorandum … Say it with me now … “Woo”. Of course, the only thing sadder than blogging the outage would be …

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Setting up a new Windows PC today and not loving the browser warnings. The messages, as I recall them: “You are about to submit the form. It’s dangerous.”, “You’re going to leave the page. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is not encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This is H20. It’s dangerous.” So my question […]

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Someone sent Don Norman a critique implying that a machine was more usable because it contained only one button. His response is interesting: Nice story, but wrong. Fewer buttons do not necessarily mean easier use … When assessing simplicity, don’t get all hung up on the number of buttons. Look at the whole picture: more is […]

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‘Tis Goud reports from Mix ‘06, Microsoft’s web bash currently happening in Vegas. One of the presentations focused on the most important thing about Ajax: Usability. The session started with referencing two sites with information on: Usabillity Patterns, Michael Mahemoff Usabillity Guidelines, Thomas Baekdal Thomas’s guidelines were the first […]

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Jeff Attwood asks, “Who’s Your Coding Hero?”. Not everyone has one, but you’re lucky if you do. For me, there’s no question about it: Philip and Alex rule. After seeing him speak (to an audience of perhaps 30-40 people!), I realised how much more there was to the web. The things you hear about Web […]

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Favicons should ideally be easy to manipulate, as easy as manipulating the web page's UI. (Favicons are the little website icons you see in the address bar, browser tabs, etc.) For example, a chat app like Meebo could signal that your buddy's trying to contact you, a mail app like GMail could indicate You [...]

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I was wrong, the third character is apparently a nine. There ought to be a Captcha gallery/blog for all these. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way. Oh well, blame the spammers. But more to the point, what's up with this Captcha brought to you by the letters "A...F"???? Hex captcha? Hey, why bother [...]

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Following from previous posts, here's my notes from the third SAG (Uni. of Illinois CS Dept) workshop/discussion on the Ajax Patterns. See the initial post for a background on this series. Note that there was a "2.5"th workshop on HTML Response, JSON Message, XML Message, etc - it happened, but there's no audio, so I decided [...]

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