“Many gamers only play their Nintendo DS games at home—in bed, in front of the TV while their parents or spouse watch something they’re not interested in.” - http://bit.ly/dBuRNf
I play mine while I’m at the PC waiting for games to load, or while doing something in EVE and there is no action. Gaming while waiting for games.
I’ll have to file a bug report for this, since it is so interesting, though more investigation is required to see how pervasive it is.
Generally, when I use Wicket, I don’t use a FeedbackPanel to display error messages to the user. Instead, I use a FormComponent.IVisitor that walks through all the FormComponents for the form that was submitted (via AJAX, natch). Each component is check to see if it is failed, enabled, and required, and then pulls the error message from the component.
That message is then fed back to the browser via the AjaxRequestTarget as a call to a JavaScript method that’ll pop up an error, or whatever special sauce I require. Usually I pass back the ID of the failed element and the message, and then use jQuery to build some sort of error bubble.
While implementing the above, I ran into an interesting bug - this part gets a bit technical, so I forgive you if you click away. I have a Wizard that renders a form containing DynamicWizardStep. The DWS then has a RadioGroup with a DropDownChoice embedded within it.
Here’s the bug: if I hit the “next” button on my wizard, both (required) components fail. That’s expected - the unexpected part is that the RadioGroup error message is… null! If I move the DropDownChoice outside of the RadioGroup, both work properly again.
Now, it isn’t great design to nest one within the other (I did fix that part), but the lack of validation message is just weird. It does fire the validation, just loses the error.
I wonder if I can make a quickstart for that…
My HTML 5 tweet needs a bit of expanding - one that 140 characters won’t allow for.
One of the blogs I follow is Dive into HTML5 as it provides some great insight and explores some of the new features that HTML5 provides. The most recent entry (that I read) was called A Form of Madness, detailing the new input types that will be brought to the table. As a (terrible) web designer, these fields interest and excite me - it’d be great to have the browser take care of stuff for me.
However, that is where the problem lies - relying on the browser, especially on the browser supporting the feature. Having it degrade nicely is awesome, but the fact that apparently no browser with a large market share (Firefox or IE) supports any of the HTML5 features (in a production release) means that I just don’t have the energy to bother. As you read the article, you’ll see that there are little boxes showing the different browsers currently available, and their level of support for the HTML5 feature/field - notice that the only ones that support them are Safari 4, Chrome (which version?) or Opera (again, which version?). Combined, let us say that they cover 15% of the market (and I’d say I’m being generous with that) - that means that 85% of the people visiting your website will have a completely different experience. So, as always, the question is: cool technology, or building my site so that the majority all see the same thing.
Age old conundrum, I know.
On a side note, would it be wrong to suggest that the people running Chrome/Opera/Safari are the ones ahead of the curve and usually the people you don’t have to worry about? Ah, the joys of stereotypes! I don’t use any of those browsers - I’m still using Firefox 3.5 quite happily, since I’m ever so plugin happy.
The new µTorrent UI just doesn’t do it for me; replacing the ‘play’ start button with that weird up-down icon, the other icons, the menu bar style itself - they just don’t fit well together. Changing a UI to make it more functional is one thing, but breaking something that was pretty perfect makes no sense to me.
If Ana leaves point A at 9AM and Micheal leaves point A at 9:50AM, what speed is Ana’s fist moving at when she hits Michael for arriving at point B at the exact same moment?
Last night, as I wrestled with Monday night insomnia, I was thinking about how I prefer reading a dead tree to trying to scan pixels on a screen. My thought process usually ends there - I accepted my preference and moved on. Last night I happened to have a lot of time to kill, so I pondered the root cause - why do I find it difficult to process information from an eBook.
After a while, it finally clicked! I have a very specific reading style - I’m not linear in any way. When I open a book, I’m actually looking at two pages at the same time, taking all of it in. I don’t so much read each word as take a snapshot of the pages. I also flip around - when something catches my eye, I’ll stick my finger into the book as a placeholder, and search for more information about whatever I noticed.
An eBook is a different beast - if I want to be able to read the text, I can only see a paragraph or two on screen at the same time. When I want to see the full page, I have to zoom out so far that the text might as well be hieroglyphics - certainly doesn’t enable me to see two pages at the same time.
Based on that, I’ve decided to try to fiddle around with Acrobat and try to re-create my preferred knowledge hoovering style. I’ll see if I can shrink/widen thing, maybe rotate a monitor or two, maximize across multiple monitors, etc. Unfortunately, dead tree printing won’t be around forever, and all signs point to eBooks in one form or another. Time to adapt.
All of this came about because I snagged a few books about Drools and jBPM - the physical medium had the virtual as a bonus. While I’m waiting for my books to arrive, I’m trying to glean some knowledge from the digital edition.
You know what - yes, I was printing a big ole’ document. You wanted to do something using the same multifunction device at the same time? Guess what, you didn’t have to cancel what I was doing! It can scan AND print at the same time! I know that it is a pretty crazy scenario, but still. Next time, just let it go - I promise we can both be happy.
Apparently there is another Michael Laccetti in the world - seems he lives in the US and went to UAlbany. I can still claim to be somewhat unique as Michael is my anglicized name, but still. The interesting part is that it would appear that he is donates money to UAlbany.
How do I know this? Well, this is where the fun comes in - Google is screwing up pretty hard. You see, I have michael.laccetti -at- gmail.com, and it would seem that my counterpart has michaellaccetti -at- gmail.com. Google is busy sending me his e-mail.
I actually thought it was spam, until I realized it was thinking me for a donation, not asking for one. I looked at the message headers, and yup, it is actually coming from the right place. That means that Google cannot figure out that an e-mail with a period goes to me, and without goes to him.
Seems to be a pretty big problem entirely a feature.
Edit:
As it has been pointed out (some times more politely than others - I don’t quite understand why people miss out on being polite, costs nothing), this isn’t actually Google’s fault. Their MTA actually does this on purpose. Yip yay Google. Just means that whomever donated to UAlbany forgot their e-mail address.
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“We’re working against opponents who make politics personal—who distort and deny the truth and put partisan gain ahead of the national interest.”
— Michael Ignatieff
