And... gone

meh.
removed it - dont know what im talking about.

Currently I amuse myself with the Apache Wicket project.

Check out the wicket framework if ur a java dude. Its sweet!

A long time between drinks!

So.. maintaining a blog is apparently not for me.. at least most of the time. It's been over a year since I wrote anything.. sure.. some fun and interesting things have happened in that year.. but I'm not going to play catchup.

What I do find quite amusing... is that I won the JQuery icon competition after 10 minutes of photoshop!



Check out this gem of icon (and the competition) further at the
JQuery button contest winners announcement!

For those that don't know, JQuery fken rocks :) It's an "everything you practically need" javascript library... and its beautiful!

Check out the official JQuery site and the visual JQuery site for info and examples of this great javascript package.

Political Quizness. Are you evil?

So.. I've just filled in a political quiz thing after reading about it breifly on Andy's blog.

Hmm.. we aren't so different, and perhaps thats why we get along. :)

I've ditched the graph and content because the HTML was so horrendous.
The graph

Check it out :) It'd be interesting to know where people fit in this graph.

From looking at the photo on the homepage of the political test if you are to the right of centre, you're cool. If not... my goodness... what a shame, you should seriously be embarassed. Have your own views... just dont push them on me as law or make my society more dangerous.

Ned thunkit

I've just come back from the Web Essentials 05 conference in Sydney.

The conference was awesome :)

It's comforting knowing that so many people out there care about standards, and the quality of their work. It's also nice to know that the gurus are people too, and that the Next Big Thing is something the community (or members of) will invent.

I really enjoyed Dougs - Zooming Out from the Trenches. Very inspirational... :).. All the sessions were good, but Dougs stood out.

The session that shocked me the most was the Steve Faulkners "The Title Attribute: What is it good for?"

He presented a server side technique using XSLT parsing the XHTML to put a title attribute after links. This used only 2 full pages of code, and has issues. The screen reader software companies really need to pull their finger out.

My notes from that session consisted of "screen readers suck".

What did I bring away from the conference? Well... I'm involved with some of the "bad" sites from John Allsop's top 83 (and it doesn't feel great ;)). I've been tryin to get the political issues blocking the quality of these sites fixed for a couple years now. I keep having pushback from "those above". I feel reinvigorated to argue for a better web.

One last thing... its amazing just how much beer computer geeks can drink (and I think Melbourne needs to invent the schooner). On the start of the second day, I woke up at 5am, still blind drunk. I managed to pull myself together in time for Tanteks 7:30 breakfast... albiet smelling of cigarettes and beer.

Warcraft kicks it :)

In the World that is Warcraft, Shneeky and Drainy have been owning it up big time on Bloodscalp recently.

I played an Undead Warlock called Starva during the beta (he had no jaw and no doubt would be ever hungry). It was a blast. I then got suckered into playing a Rogue, which was also pretty cool for a while... then the coolness petered out. But now... Drainy... gnomish engineering warlock is owning it up in WSG battlegrounds, and generally kicking ass. Its good to have the lock back :)

I'm a big fan of the warlock. Every encounter I'm surprised at how powerful and beefy the stumpy gnome is. He's the ugliest thing on the planet. Vomiting on his head would be an effective way of beautifying him.

And... a little message to my single reader... I'm wearing the pants of anger, and t-shirt of singletness. (no... not really but... my solitary reader.. do not think for one second I dont know who you are!)

Grumpy Thursdays

I feel I'm not utilised effectively. My expertise is acknowledged, but seems to only help other people and their tasks. This isn't all bad, at least something's getting done.

Just once... ONCE... I want to do something amazing without having to be bottled up behind archaic, unfinished, uncommented, convoluted work that's so simple in principle, but unplanned and bordering on unsalvagable.

I had a discussion recently about the development complexities between applications and web applications. My view is that, in general, web applications are easier to build than non web, but harder to build well. I guess thats come about by the sloppy non standard "everyone and their dog can write it" language we call HTML.

I dislike working on stuff that consists of string concatenated messes of unreadable crap mixing client code, server code, layout and even application state etc into this "structured" heap that will never get rewritten, and will not evolve in a cost effective manner.

Programmers... what are they?

Some are stubborn and are beyond help.
Some are niche geniuses
Some are condescending and believe their work is beyond flaw, and its just the rest of the world who doesn't get it.
Some are inexperienced but eager to learn.
Some are lazy.
Some are stupid.
And the smallest minority can build good web pages.

I fit into all of these categories to some degree :). I'm sure their are other categories.

I'm good at what I'm good at. Simple, powerful, understandable, feature rich, accessible standards complaint blah blah blah. Oh.. and design (not the graphicy one)

I'm self taught. I used to think there was this mythical world of programming where you could write some fancy mathematical formulas over a few nights and have such amazing code that it could solve any problem you had. After a while, you realise how simple it is and why it doesn't need to be convoluted, and that all the errors occur when someones trying to be to clever for the sake of being clever.

Of course there are uber programmers out there (eg. Carmack) who are on some other elemental plane compared with the rest of us mortals. I'm not going to be involved in that ever :)

I don't know where I'm going with this :) I'm not a writer, but god damn I've had a shitty day.

Happy Happy YAY

So... my birthday's just been (27th July). WOoHOO. Im a spritely young 26.

I got another monkey shirt from Tracey. Its the best, a cute little gorilla with a snowboard.

I now have 7 monkey shirts :) One for each day of the week.

I've also got a brand new crumpler barney rustle blanket bag. Its the business :D

Tuesday Blerghing

Well... Weeks go quickly..

I'm turning 26 in a week. Getting older, fatter, wiser and grumpier. I'd hoped to use this blog as an output of humour and technology, but I find myself mentally crushed after a day of "work", and all I feel like doing is chillin in front of the TV. Blergh!

The Ruby on Rails camp have... Barely redeemed themselves with 0.13.1 after pushing 0.13 out the door with some poor bugs. Fortunately, the framework is good enough to overlook this sloppy style release.... Once.
That was a couple of weeks ago.

While Rails rocks, Im somewhat sceptical of the way David Heinemeier Hansson talks about it. Sure, he's obviously smart, but he's a bit too "OH WOW.. look at this OH WOW.. look at this OH WOW OK". Its probably very effective for the marketing of rails, but grates slightly.

I plan on checking out DJANGO soon. Its got some tasty features. The one that I like the most is defining data models in code. Now that is full Stack.