False Positives

• Divs instead of tables - to paraphrase : “Use the div, Luke.”
• or, if you do have a list of some kind, then maybe you should be using <ol>/<ul> and <li>’s rather than all the div’s? see A CSS layout that does not rely on DIV, FLOAT, CLEAR nor structural HACK! for more
• ModalBox a (Web 2.0-style) modal dialogs or even wizards (sequences of dialogs) without using conventional popups and page reloads using Prototype JavaScript Framework, script.aculo.us and valid XHTML/CSS.
• Do You Want To Do That With CSS? - Multiple Column Lists :how to make a list display as multiple columns of list items, rather than as a single column or horizontal row.
• Most used CSS tricks and 10 best CSS hacks current CSS hacks to help.
• IBM has a good piece on Where and when to use Ajax in your applications, before you go wild.

Technorati Tags: ajax, css, design, Prototype, scriptaculous, web, web2.0, webdesign

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Via Michael Geist comes word that an fable in “Hill Times (a weekly newspaper for Ottawa’s “savvy political and government insider”) written by Michael Eisen (Microsoft Canada’s Chief Legal Officer) misleads in the service of the “Prentice Canadian DMCA” act it wants to get passed so as justify the digital locks (that don’t work) to wants sell.

2 years ago we went through the Sarmite Bulte CopyRight for Sale un-election and yet this continues. Thankfully, opposition grows

Technorati Tags: canada copyright law microsoft

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extisp.icio.us 2008

generated by extisp.icio.us based on my Del.icio.us bookmarks, and added to the flickr extispicious pool

This is the 4th year I’ve done this.

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In a lazyweb “fools seldom differ” moment, my post The Real Reason for Increased productivity behind Scripting Languages (commenting on a XKCD comic) has been riffed on by Bart of “Moves on Rails” : The new programmers excuse for slacking of:

.

(no, I’m not doings a “Zed”, now please excuse us while we hide from the ruby/rails/rspec mobs….

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This is what is Weird Wonderful Web for January 26th through January 27th:

• Still, or even more, relevant today: The Heavenly Jukebox from The Atlantic Monthly article on digital music from 2000. (no longer locked behind the paywall)

- business economics internet MusicBiz music mp3

• In E-mail and the Problem (blackrimglasses.com Ethan Kaplan), Ethan makes a lazy web request : “a bayesian clustering algorithm .. auto-group threads of messages and group those threads according to implicit thematics.” Preferably with going all SkyNet. Ethan see “AideRss.com” for the RSS part of the problem.

- email RSS Startup

• TheFunded is Creating Database of VC Term Sheets - users to upload term sheets so that people can compare and contrast individual terms from each VC. The transparency is great for Entrepreneurs. VC’s? Not so much.

- Startup business

• WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites - a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. not just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site!

- tagging del.icio.us firefox Firefox+extensions Extensions

• How to Communicate (Part II) | Mark Evans - Communications 101updated for early 2008 : Twitter, Facebook, email, phone Video-Conferencing, meat

- facebook email comunication im

• Best of Independent Toronto - David Crow, Mark Kuznicki, Will Pate, Joey deVilla, Amber Mac. Toronto is a better place for having these people (and some other equally kind and generous souls) around. (vote early/late/often)

- Toronto demoCamp technology Startup

• The Sledge-maker’s Daughter by Alastair Reynolds - This story, from Interzone issue 209, has been shortlisted for the 2007 BSFA Award (as noted a few days ago)

- SciFi

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First up we have TechCunch’s Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success (which I had written up but not posted) which had a number of points (10 actually) :

● 1 Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea.● 2 Share your idea. ● 3 Build a community.● 4 Listen to your community.● 5 Gather a great team.● 6 Be the first to recognize a problem.● 7 Don’t spend time on market research.● 8 Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. ● 9 Don’t plan a big marketing effort.● 10 Focus on your users.

I would lump 2, 3, 4, and 6 under one item aka the ClueTrain Manifesto “Markets are conversations” rule. i.e. talk and listen. Items 1, 7, 8 and 9 are really all the same thing : make it good / different enough ; make your mistakes early (and cheap) ; adjust according to what works; Item 10 is gold.

Loic’s new startup is Seesmic (closed Beta) and there Community is a Loic TV, and his own blog.

So, now we have Loren Feldman ripping them a hole as only he can (via Tech Crunch), in his funny accent. Loren makes some valid comments in his usual funny and very colourful style.

Nobody said that all the “conversations” where going to be happy ones.

---

We also have “Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea” from Evan Williams (of Blogger, Odeo and Twitter fame) making some very good points : Tractability; Obviousness ; Deepness; Wideness; Discoverability; Monetizability; Personally Compelling.Be prepare to address these points in your gut and figure how your going to resolve them. You need to scoring high, for at least a well defined niche, for >50% of these. (Otherwise, without a huge possible “Monetizabilty”, or even with, the opportunity is not -yet- ripe. Wait a cycle to re-evaluate.)

Evan’s “Personally Compelling” is a key point in that if your not obsessed (and or passionate about ) about the product area you are not going to hang in there the first time someone makes fun of you (see above, Loren), or do the hard work. Being “obsessed” can be a good substitute for more traditional “market research”. “Discoverability” can replace a big (expensive) marketing effort. Deepness & Wideness addresses the question “is this a product or a feature”. Tractability is about “how long do I live on Ramen” (or KD or pb&j sandwiches - pick your poison). Obviousness is about can your sell it in an elevator pitch to your target users?

It is also worth re-reading Tim Bray’s Message From the Web (Centralization is a bug; Good-enough today beats complete next year; Getting started should be free. Convince the developers. Management will go along. Try to lock them in and they’ll walk away ·Some popular tools will be Open Source ·To make money, give things away (”Monetization at the point of value.”), and the reaction, in light of the above.

So use Evan’s taste test, Listen to the web’s Message, and get that Startup out and ruling (and then show it at DemoCamp!).

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• 9 CSS Ethics Every Designer Should Have - Writing a CSS Stylesheet That is Easy to Maintain is really easy, just by following these 9 “ethics”: Indent descendant ;Grouping and commenting;Break into sheets; Reset;color scheme refrence; Keep a library of helpful CSS classes.    just do it.

- css

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This Lotus Notes Domino “Show and Tell Thursday” was promoted by Paul Harrison’s new blog and his sntt post on SnTT: Notes Document Structured Text Export. (Welcome Paul, and thank you!) My current nightmare involves a lot of Multilingual madness. Within Notes/Domino is not a big deal (it’s all auto-magical) , but getting it in and out can be tough.

So a couple of observations to Paul’s posting (if only to remind my future self) :

• Under (for R7) “File”, “Preferences”, User Preferences” , there is a Tab for “International” and a setting for “”Import/Export characters.” I’m using “Unicode (UTF-8)”.
• Microsoft Excel (2000) CSV imports and “Save as..” does not handle UTF-8, although there is a “Save as..” “Unicode Text”. (there maybe a option to respect UTF-8 in there, and it maybe handled by Excel 2003 or Excel 2007, but that’s what I have!)
• Open Office’s (2.3) Calc asks me what Character set to Import the csv file with. Calc also asks me the character set to use in the creation of CSV files.

It’s also worth highlighting Kevin Pettitt’s recent post : Free Tools for Importing Excel Data Into Notes and the (new to me, and free) tool from AGE Computer Consultancy. Very nicely done.

The code in my previously written Export any Lotus Notes View to CSV or Excel, automagically post can easily be modified to (in particular the “Open” statement for the CSV export) to allow for a “UTF-8″ character set.

Update :  For importing text into Notes, what I’ve found works best for me is: “save as” CVS from Open Office Calc, and make sure your saving as UTF-8, no double quotes (”) for the text delimiter, and a ~ rather than a coma (,) for field delimiter (because the text can content coma’s); create a .COL file; Import in the Notes Client as Tabular Text (rename the .csv file to a .txt file).

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• Stu Downes : Effective Collaboration Arrow - “why some projects - in the same organizations, with the same tools - manage collaboration better than others.” As I’ve been saying for (at least) 15 years : “Technology is Tough but he Culture is Critical”
• My Physics engine beats your Physics engine : Astrophysicist replaces supercomputer with eight PlayStation’s - Dr. Khanna figured out that for less than the price of one session on a Super Computer, he could build his own massively parallel computer that he could run indefinitley using Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and wrote some custom Linux code to optimize the Cell processor found inside the PlayStation. (- MultiCore FutureTech physics )
• Another piece of the Google social net - - mathewingram.com/work - could GoogleBook be the glue of GoogleSpace? (google social_networking )
• How Google Works - (What you mean their are no squirrels!!) Otherwise a very good presentation on Google search.
• Google Code Blog: New GData JavaScript library enables full read and write access for your mashups - that allows you to do a lot more with Calendar GData mashups.
• Here Come the Cloud Computers - “So how how long before the first Google-Apple Cloud Computer appears? I would say it’s months, not years.” We have the (finally) iPhone sdk, the rumoured Apple “slim” (could that be a super size iTouch e-Reader under the iBook brand?), and the current the Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, plus the Nokia S60 Touch UI video. Mobile computer is posed to take a big leap. Getting eInk displays is one of the last missing pieces (if only to improve battery life x 10+).
• Three Hot Defensive Firefox Extensions AND How to Turn Your Browser Into a Weapon - Add these extensions to Firefox when you’re looking to do some hacking. or development. (duel use, don’t you know!)
• Will Twine be my new backup brain? - - mathewingram.com/work - could this be the social networking for the Enterprise 2.0? or groupware / “knowledge management” 2.0. Even as a personal exo-cortex it would be handy.
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers - this advice is applicable to any employee (or Consultant) , who wishes to be effective: Know your limits; Listen first before speaking; Ask “Why?” not “What?”; Be decisive (and credible); Be responsive; Communicate frequently; Manage passion;
• Past Events - Future of Web Apps - presentations (slides and or mp3’s) from the “Future of Web Apps” in London (england) October 2007 and last February 2007.
• Information R/evolution Video (from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University) A great video presentation with historical perspective on how things have changed everything that we once thought about information.

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The Problem here is if your list of data generated radio button html yields only one value. All the standard solutions / samples that a google yields assume the there are 2 or more choices.

This is not unreasonable for radio buttons, but if your list of choices is not hand built then you may not have control over that.

Code is not reasonable and neither is Life.

And in that unreasonable use case those solutions fail, because if you have one one element in the radio button list then “f.choiceview.length = undefined” (assuming the html input tag name=”choiceview” ). Then the real fun begins…

How to fix this? The solution is simple if not obvious : the single element becomes a ordinary input tag type of element and you use the .checked and .value methods, as below….


function getSelected () {
var Selected = "";
var f = document.forms[0];
if(f.choiceview.checked) { // one element to fetch
Selected = f.view.value;
}
else {
for (var i = 0; i < f.choiceview.length; i ++) { //loop thur array
if (f.view[i].checked) { // test to see if checked
Selected = f.view[i].value;
}
}
}
if (Selected == "") {
alert("Nothing selected");
}
else {
alert(Selected + ' Selected'); // report back
}
}

Where would you use this? Mostly for form validation, or to grab user choices to drive other processing.

The same issue and solution applies to html CheckBox elements.

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