Wednesday, January 7

Hello 2009

In what seems to be becoming a trend, I am going to summarize the last year and make some (probably empty) promises about the year to come.

Since my last recap back in June, I haven't had many exciting experiences as in the first part of 2008, except to take Charlotte to Venice for her birthday (which was pretty awesome, actually :-)).

Venice

I did some things worth a quick mention, though:

This year, I hope I can crank up the WIN - it's looking good so far, as I'm off to Finland in a couple of weeks to do some skiing :-D

posted by Andy at 4:16 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 26

Open Source

I've been coding since I was 7, when my mum got me a Sinclair Spectrum +3 which had a BASIC interpreter built in. I wrote text adventure games :-)

Just the other day, I created an account on Github and added my latest coding project to it: Minim. This is the first time I've ever had my code open to the public - and I'm actually a bit nervous. What will people think of it?

Putting my code on Github also gives public access to all my revisions, revealing some things that I hadn't intended:

It's all out there now, so let's just see what happens...

Wednesday, November 12

Progressive Enhancement; you're doing it wrong

Progressive enhancement is the concept of adding interface niceness through JavaScript to a page that functions (albeit perhaps not very fluidly) without it.

One common accessibility/usability oriented UI enhancement is the "form field with internal label", eg:

This text is supposed to disappear as soon as you start typing. The progressive enhancement way to do this, is to use Javascript to take the normal, external label out of the page and place the text inside the field. If the label is already in the field's HTML tag value attribute, as in the example above, then when a user without JavaScript comes to the page, the label gets in the way of the user's typing.

This site is doing it wrong.

If you're wondering why anyone would have JavaScript disabled these days, I can think of several, not least of which being my running the NoScript Firefox extension for security

Aargh! As I wrote this, I discovered that Blogger provides no submit button for the Create Post form when JavaScript is disabled. Blogger, you have failed me for the last time - I'm moving to my own system ASAP!

Friday, June 13

The heat death of the blogosphere

Yes, I'm still here, and the site is still naked :-o

Blogs are apparently losing out to the likes of twitter, facebook and tumblr. I must admit that I post to my twitter stream a lot more than I post here (not that difficult, considering the frequency of my posts here ;)

I don't think I'll change from the blog style format for this site, though - I have some ideas which I hope I'll find the time to implement soon.

In the meantime, here's what I've been up to since I last posted:

  • Charlotte and I traveled up the west coast of Australia, from Perth to Broome. It was spectacular and I took a lot of photos
  • I started working at GCap Interactive on the XFM radio website - we just launched Festivals and Gigs!
  • I finally got my new kitchen installed :)

    Photo of my new kitchen, hosted on flickr.com

  • I took my first helicopter flying lesson, thanks to Charlotte :)

The first half of this year has gone by so quickly, and I've done lots of exciting things already - let's see if we can keep it going!

Tuesday, March 25

A change is as good as a rest

Yes, still alive, although this blog has seen better days.

I just got back from a trip to the US, with many sights seen and dollars won at the Blackjack tables in Vegas (and Tahoe) - check out the photos on Flickr.

Big news: I quit Yahoo! - decided to move on, because I feel like I'm being held back, not earning enough and it's getting a little unstable what with the Microsoft thing and the shares continuing to fall.

After I leave, I'm heading straight to Australia again, to see Charlotte and travel the Western territories.

When I get back, I shall be working at GCAP, the parent company of several radio stations, including Capital FM and XFM.

I'm looking forward to some exciting times ahead!