springmile’s blog

The puppetmaster or the next step in computer interface

The only time I remember Tom Cruise doing something cool was on the movie Minority Report where he interacts with a computer from the future like a puppetmaster.

Well, somebody has done it for real. The only problem I see is having room for it!

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Although not new, this is truly one of the most amazing videos I have ever seen that paints a clear picture of web 2.0 and the impact on our society.

Random background images

With the release of Firefox 3 Mozilla Europe introduced a new design. Very much my test fr this type of product.

One of the thing I like is the random background image on the home page. As I’ve been doing something similar recently for my portfolio site I was curious how the guys at Mozilla approached this.

The solution is basic but elegant and thought to share it here. “variation1″, “variation2″, “variation3″ are CSS classes with different background images.

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
// Add a class to the body tag to alternate background features
var class_options = new Array( "variation1", "variation2", "variation3" );
 
if (Math.random) {
  var choice = Math.floor(Math.random() * (class_options.length));
 
  // Just in case javascript gets carried away...
  choice = ( (choice < class_options.length)  && choice >= 0) ? choice : 0;
 
  if (document.body.className == '') {
    document.body.className = class_options[choice];
  } else {
    document.body.className += ' '+class_options[choice];
  }
}
// ]]>
</script>

The dead of the contact form

Right, let’s get this straight. The contact form hasn’t died but in the last couple of days I wanted to study its use from other perspective.

I’ve come to realise that in many websites out there it might not be needed. I, as a web user, am very lazy and I want things as straight forward as possible. When browsing in general I don’t have time to learn “new interfaces” and the like - unless they are well implemented.

But thinking about how I react to contact forms made me write this post. When I send emails I love - well, let’s say “prefer” - my email program. With it I like the fact that I can:

• track who I sent messages and recover that when needed;
• format the content;
• make use of a spacious user interface;
• avoid validation waiting time.

I’m thinking of a very basic contact form here. The fields you can expect there are name, telephone, email and message. Do I need all that?

A name would be included when somebody signs the email. You don’t need to have their middle name, do you?

Telephone: please, this field is a pain to validate and you can’t set it as required otherwise nobody would fill the form in the first place. If they wanted to talk to you they would have called you so let’s leave it out.

Email makes sense, you want to be able to respond to your visitor! But then comes the problem of users mistyping their emails. You can surely include a second field to double check but if somebody sends you an email from Outlook you’ll know you got the right address.

Finally, the message field. Visitors need to fit all what they want to say in a 300px by 200px box. Give them a rest! An email program let’s them change the size of the writing area on both dimensions. That’s usable.

Also the formating issue, they might want to express themselves better by formatting their message but we developers are only concerned with a potential client running malicious php code or a sql injection through the textarea so we strip them out of any formatting capability.

And I’m almost forgetting the new trend, the CAPTCHA field to make sure you’re human. Do you see where I’m going?

After all this I thought why not using the email link instead? With some care it can deliver quickly and effectively. You need to watch out for spam bots looking for email addresses in your code but there are ways around that.

Again, I’m not for killing the feedback form. It has been a long run from the first cgi scripts to the responsive AJAX interactions of today but we need to understand that in some cases implementing them might be a bit of an overkill.

Me, my laptop and Ubuntu

Very recently I got myself a new laptop. Last time I had one of my own it was 2001 and it didn’t perform well for too long. So I headed to my favorite parts provider and after a while, which lasted a couple of months, I bought a very affordable HP with a reasonable spec.

The main use of this toy is to simply access the web anytime, anywhere. I decided to leave design and web development to my main PC at home so I wasn’t looking to load Photoshop CS3. Just in case I added some more RAM as it turned out to be cheaper than a mouse.

The only problem of this laptop was the OS. It comes with Windows Vista Basic so my dilemma was simple: an operating system that is bloated, full of security holes and makes my computer slow or a proper OS. This choice simply meant: Windows XP or Ubuntu - don’t expect me to consider Vista at all.

So Ubuntu was the clear winner. Burned the latest copy which you can download free from their website and without starting Vista Basic not even once I loaded Ubuntu. Installation was done very quickly - Windows XP takes a minimum of 45 minutes to install, Vista apparently one full day.

Everything worked fine. Well, almost. From previous experiences with Ubuntu, my main concern was for the drivers to be recognised and I was right. The wireless card couldn’t be recognised. Not good.

It took me some time and research to find out how to fix this. Somebody out there wrote an almost perfect tutorial for my wireless card. With that and some tips on the comments from that “how to” - always read the comments! - got it working and there I was, browsing the web with my wireless laptop with Ubuntu.

I’ll write more in future entries to give more details of new challenges I’ve found with Ubuntu. The good thing’s that everything has been solved so far and Ubuntu does really deliver a great OS that with just bit of love can be an excellent option for those who just can’t be bothered with greedy software companies - no need to link, we know who they are.

Hello world!

What a predictable title for my first entry. But after all these years deliberating about how useful would be for me to blog, I’ve finally started. It always looked to me quite imperative to have a blog if you want to look trendy in the world of the interweb - that’s why I waited till most members of my family have one first!

But seriously now, if you want to become a successful blogger you need to keep writing good quality stuff and often. For that you need plenty of time so it won’t happen here.

Then it’s popularity. I’m not looking for this blog to be read by the web community - though they’re invited. It’s just a way to make some order in my mind with the stuff I’m passionate about. So if after six months blogging nobody left a comment it’s absolutely fine. I won’t feel bad about it.

Getting a bit technical now. The blog is powered by the mighty WordPress which simply put it’s the right tool for the job. This latest version, 2.5, features a clean and easy to use interface which the people from Happycog seem to be responsible of.

I’m a fan of Drupal for creating web apps most of the time but the time it took me to set a blog running in WordPress helped me to decide. Drupal is good for blogging but WordPress was built for it. So a Drupal fan but a pragmatic person!

The look and feel of this blog will come at a later stage. For now clean and simple.

And yes, I’ll blog about web development related stuff mostly and now and then some other subjects as I go by. It’s going to be a good exercise for my writing skills which are great in Spanish.

Let’s see.