February 2010

February 24, 2010

  • Whatever happened to the advent of personal wireless mesh networking? Nokia used to sell a wireless mesh network router, right? I wonder which is the biggest hurdle: the actual technology, security concerns or political reasons.

February 23, 2010

  • Harvard Classics. Originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot claimed that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf.
  • Color Scheme Designer 3. A neat color scheme visualizer with complements, triads, and, my favorite, accented analogic.

February 17, 2010

  • SublimeVideo. An entirely HTML5 video player by Jilion.
  • Square. Gives everyone a way to accept credit card payments. Interesting idea -- and nice looking execution: a well-utilized Iphone app, a card swipe dongle, an underlying web service. Not sure about the writing a signature with your finger, though.

February 16, 2010

  • YeeLoong. "The world's first laptop which contains completely free software. All system source files (BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free, no close firmware needed."
  • jQTouch. A Jquery plugin for mobile web development.

February 12, 2010


February 11, 2010


February 10, 2010

What’s wrong with buttons?

I had totally forgotten why I don’t use <button> elements:

  1. When using multiple buttons in a form, IE6 and IE7 sends the values of all of them
  2. IE6 and IE7 sends the innerHTML as the value of the button (ignoring the value attribute)

If you need a longer explanation, Drew McLellan has written about it.

Ilya

February 9, 2010

  • obstreperous adj.
    1. Noisily and stubbornly defiant.
    2. Aggressively boisterous.
    (As a side note: There must be a black metal band called Obstreperous.)

February 3, 2010

Pedestrian validation woes, part Nectar.com

Today I tried signing up for a Nectar card, a customer loyalty card for Sainbury’s (among other stores). Their site, Nectar.com, is nice looking, and finding where to sign up for a card was nice and easy.

However, my attempt to sign up was thwarted when, on page two, I hit a form asking me a) how many children under 18 I had living in my household (answer: 0) and b) to provide their birthdays (empty text fields). Whatever I entered — and I mean whatever — it wouldn’t let me past the javascript validation complaining about a mismatch between the number of children and their ages. I couldn’t get past it despite an attempt to create an imaginary child to get by it.

Stumped, I gave up. Figuring I’d notify them of the issue, I clicked over to their Contact us page.

But they have only three options of contacting them: chat (which requires you to have a Nectar card number), calling them, and writing them — via snail mail.

No email address or contact form!

Adding insult to injury, their footer promo content for contacting them offers an “Email us” link.

Ilya

February 2, 2010