JohnBs personal blog

Happy New Year everyone - let’s hope 2008 is even better than 2007, I know for me it will be - starting a new job tomorrow and getting married in September!

Just loitering on Adobe Labs and noticed that Adobe Media Player Prerelease 2 has made it out onto labs, check it out

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So after the disappoint of not being able to get a Chumby i was slightly cheered up by Google Apps adding IMAP to my account….small things eh?

Two years, two years I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a Chumby - i’ve made sure i was on the Insiders list to make sure I could get one as soon as possible. Reports have been cropping up that people have been receiving their invite emails to purchase one and then this morning when I checked my email I got the email!!! Wooohoo, immediately off to the store, added 1 to my cart and went to checkout….imagine my disappointment when i saw this;

Bah…..please, please Chumby Industries sort it out!

I just realised I haven’t posted my final entry/notes fro the FOWA conference a couple of weekes ago yet. I’ve got some good juciy notes from the Steve Souders performance workshop so I’ll aim to get them up as soon as I can.

After all conferences have normally finished, at 7:30pm a live recording of Diggnation was scheduled. I’ve never seen Diggnation before, let alone all the ‘kids’ wearing Diggnation tshirts but the auditorium was packed - several thousand people probably coming to see the recording of the show. Granted, I’ll probably subscribe because it was pretty funny but i couldn’t believe it. People were up out of their seats when it started - like a music concert! Unbelievable!

Out of sync but this session needed a posting of it’s own - a quick 35 minute session by Steve Souders (Chief Performance Yahoo!) from Yahoo about YSlow. Funnily enough I was catching up with the ColdFusion Weekly PodCast 2.26 on my commute into town on the very subject.

We’ve all seen YSlow I’m sure so don’t need to go into much detail but the short story is that our webserver performance may only account for around 5% of the total time of their ‘visit’ with other external factors coming into account - their tool YSlow highlights such things. He ran through the 14 rules/guidelines published by Yahoo - one of note was to move script files to the bottom of the page as they’d block other stuff running - don’t they need to be in the head? He also spoke about a big in Firebug on the NET tab that shows asset load responses. In a new version of YSlow (out Friday apparently) it will have a option in the options menu to patch Firebug so that the NET panel does not include locally cached objects. If you inspect a page with Firebug it will show all the objects irrespective of if they’ve come out of cache - whilst Live Headers will show the request was never made. This apparently has caused some confusion and something that Yahoo will be addressing in their next YSlow release.

And yes, even in this session someone asked what a CDN is. I’m attending a 4 hour workshop by Steve on Friday so will have much more detailed notes after that session.

Matt Mullenweg - The Architecture behind Wordpress.com

So Matt was talking about WordPress.com and how it’s become the defacto hosted blogging solution in a relatively short space of time and how they’ve structured stuff. He spoke about what he calls Matts Mini Cluster using 7 servers for load balancing, db, web servers with various Open Source tools, Pound, Wackamole and Spread for load balancing, MemCache, Apache (he said well configured) Litespeed and MySql. With MySql they’re actually using in excess of 4000 databases for their hosted solutions, geographically dispersed (all in Texas :)) in Master/Slave configurations - I need to look into this more but i guess it’s to boost performance for SQL Read/Write operations.

Heidi Pollock - Taking your Application Mobile

Now this was great - and far easier that I though it would be. Heidi has worked for Yahoo, she worked on the FIFA World Cup 06 website so know’s a thing or too and i took a heap of notes. She started by saying that people are only ever going to use your mobile app because 1. they’re bored or 2. they need to. She basically said it was a minefield when it comes to developing for the mobile web. There are in excess of 3000 phones most of which have varying browsers (some built by companies who have no idea of what makes a browser) which even differ on the same phone across providers. In the end it comes down to catering for a browser of 176px wide and 10k payloads - anything bigger can cause problems. She asked for a show of hands of WML coders (few) and said that it was best to go for the xhtml-mobile 1.0 doctype, not the 1.2 type. Tags to use are div, span, p, br, b, small, form, input, select, option, textarea, table, tr, td, img, style, class. She said avoid Lists and Select boxes (and gave the example of a drop down of countries and scrolling through 200+ countries is just not going to happen. CSS is usable but again there’s a limited range of selectors etc but even suggested as going as far as reducing element names/ids down to 1 char (if possible) to keep the file sizes small.

John Resig - Cross Platform UI

Nothing like what i expected, the guy works for Mozilla and created JQuery. But rather than talking about that talked about Javascript and Firefox. Firefox 3 is going to be supporting Js v1.8 and FF 4 will be v2 Js. He spoke of the integration of Tamarin (the Adobe JS VM donated to Mozilla) into various projects (known as the Three Monkies) along with some very interesting sounding projects for taking sites off line - Google Gears was mentioned along with Mozilla and WHATWG projects. A Question at the end of the session as to the cross paths perhaps of Adobe/Mozilla here and John answered along the lines of that Mozilla stuff will be for everyone on the web whilst AIR is purely Adobe

Tony Conrad - The Future Of Search

I’ll start now by saying that the conference titles/descriptions are nothing like what you’re expecting. This session was interesting none the less and was about a web company named Sphere that provides real time results for related context. Tough to explain but easy to show - for example, go to this article on Reuters.com. Scoll down and just after the news ends there a panel ‘Related Web News’ - this is just launched Sphere provided content on Reuters.com. What they’ve done (similar to Google Adsense) is scan the body and perform web searches for similar/related stories. To me it seems something that Google could churn out pretty quickly from their machine though, but still somewhat interesting.

Robin Christopherson - The Art of Unattractive yet usable websites.

Now this was a session I’m glad I didn’t miss. Robin is blind founded AbilityNet. I’d never ever seen a blind person using a computer, let alone the accessbility stuff built into windows - and certainly not had a blind person critiquing websites like this. He showed various sites ranging from GM, Disney to Amazon and highlighted various difficulties that Vision Impaired users have with them - even by hard coding font sizes so that users are unable to increase text size (even though this can be overriden by a toggle deap in browser options) through to sites that break horribly when the text size is increased beyond the norm. He also showed how Flash sites are incredibly difficult to use if you’re not using a mouse and having to use voice recognition to navigate round sites and you end up using a type of grid overlay which has numbered cells and by saying the cell number you can ‘click’, interesting stuff!