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I've had lots of questions recently and no time to really get answers and post them up here.  If I haven't answered you question it's because I don't know the answer and haven't had enough time to get to the bottom of it yet.

First of all I had a couple of questions on MSAS which I don't know that much about.

Can I tell which tuner is being used when a recording takes place using MSAS? No, you can not.  What you can do, which may or may not help is use OnTVRecordStateChange from a background add-in which will give you a GUID and you could track which was in use - this won't help if a tuner is being used for live TV though.  Here's a code snippet on how to use OnTVRecordStateChange:

void IAddInEntryPoint.Launch(AddInHost host)
{

host.Television.OnTVRecordStateChange += new Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeDelegate(TvRecordStateChangedHandler);

...

}

public void TvRecordStateChangedHandler(object obj, Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeArgs TVArgs) {

if (TVArgs.Started)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording started on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

else if (TVArgs.Stopped)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording stopped on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

}

Can I use remote desktop to connect to a Media Center PC? Yes.  You can even use Media Center, but it won't play video over a RDP connection

Can I use animated backgrounds in an HTML page? Not really a media center question, but I don't see why not, use an animated gif.

Could I create an add-in that played a selection of WAV files with a gap between them? Yes, using Playmedia and Playrate you could contstruct an addin to do this - waiting until the playrate was stopped, then wating however long you want before playing the next file.  You could also use More With This  to make this work with any folder of audio files.

Can I use ASP.NET for development?  Yes.  You can use any web technology that outputs HTML.

Can I use WinForms for development?  Yes, but if you're running as a .exe you won't have access to Media Center APIs.  If you're running as a .NET applet in a webpage you'll have access to the Media Center APIs from the HTML page and will have to communicate between the page and the .NET applet to use the Media Center APIs - non-trivial to do, but not hard.

• BBFoomp Update.
  
• tcl-bb 2.4.8.2.
  
• BBInterface Updates.
  

• xPaintClass Testing Modules Beta State!.
  

• REAPER v0.976.
  
• Butler 4.1.2.
  
• k23 productions Team update.
  
• 5th kCon Notes.
  
• Gimmie 0.1.1.
  
• FileZilla 2.2.25.
  
• Miranda IM v0.5 Test Build #59.
  

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MARINE WEATHER STATEMENT

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LOS ANGELES/OXNARD CA158 PM PDT SUN OCT 1 2006

PZZ650-655-670-673-676-020400-/X.CON.KLOX.MA.S.0024.000000T0000Z-061002T0400Z/EAST SANTA BARBARA CHANNEL FROM PT. CONCEPTION TO PT. MUGUINCLUDING SANTA CRUZ AND ANACAPA ISLANDS-INNER WATERS FROM POINT MUGU TO SAN MATEO PT. CA INCLUDING SANTACATALINA AND SANTA BARBARA ISLANDS-WATERS FROM PT. PIEDRAS BLANCAS TO PT. ARGUELLO AND WESTWARD60 NM-WATERS FROM PT. ARGUELLO TO SANTA CRUZ ISLAND CA AND WESTWARD60 NM INCLUDING SAN MIGUEL AND SANTA ROSA ISLANDS-OUTER WATERS FROM SANTA CRUZ ISLAND TO SAN CLEMENTE ISLAND TO60 NM OFFSHORE INCLUDING SAN NICOLAS ISLAND-158 PM PDT SUN OCT 1 2006

THERE WILL CONTINUE TO BE A SLIGHT CHANCE OF THUNDERSTORMS ACROSSTHE COASTAL WATERS THROUGH EARLY THIS EVENING.

AN UPPER LOW COUPLED WITH A STRONG JET STREAM WILL PRODUCECONDITIONS FAVORABLE FOR THUNDERSTORM DEVELOPMENT. THE STORMSWILL MOVE FROM THE SOUTHWEST TO THE NORTHEAST.

[more]

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Questions to ask before hiring a web developer. 

SEOmoz recently posted some questions that they would ask when interviewing web developers. Figured I'd have a go at the questions and let you know where I stand:

1. What Industry sites and blogs do you read regularly? I consistently read Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny , Jim Boykin , and Brue Clay . I also have some other favorites like Shoemoney , 9-rules (Design) , Aaron Wall , SEOmoz , Devlounge , and Stuntdubl .
2. Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Alone, unless I can find a competent team. I've known too many "experts" that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
3. How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? What, you mean people don't normally do that? We do everything by hand because of the control it gives over the code.
4. What is the w3c? World Wide Web Consortium. They are the group that is trying to bring standards to the web (although there are way too many that don't listen.)
   
5. Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code? Yes. and Yes to a point. If we don't put an alt tag on every image, we are still good people.
6. What are a few of your favorite development tools and why? I like Textpad for coding, Photoshop for image editing, and HeidiSQL for database interaction.
7. Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment. (not really necessary in my opinion, SQL knowledge would be a bigger requirement)
   % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
   Too many ('s.
8. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning? Right now I'm looking more at DOM scripting. With AJAX going mainstream and more and more UI's expecting more dynamic interaction, I expect to learn even more about javascript (DOM) and CSS interaction.
9. Show me your portfolio. OK. Take a look at my portfolio .
10. What size websites have you worked on in the past? Everything from one pagers to 100% user defined dynamic websites with hundreds of pages.
11. Show me your code. OK. Right click, view source.
12. What are a few sites you admire and why? 2Advanced. They have amazing flash design. 9rules. Great community. Good Organization. Nice clean straightforward look.
13. Fix this code, please. Haven't I already told you about all the "expert web developers" I've interacted with (or that my previous clients had interacted with before they found me.) Been there, fixed that.
14. I just pulled up a website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
1. Did you type the URL correctly?
2. Do other pages from the same site show up?
3. Are other site that are on the same machine available?
4. Does it show up in a different browser?
5. Can you view the source?
15. What is your favorite development language and why? PHP. Open source. Simple, yet powerful. Good documentation.
16. Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating? I never really cared for C (I liked C++ much better). I'm quite interested in what the "up and coming" technology is. I just find there isn't as much time to explore all of them to figure out which one is going to be beneficial.
17. HTML, CSS, WYSIWYG? Hyper Text Markup Language. Cascading Style Sheet, What you see is what you get (plus normally a lot more code than you wanted)
18. What web browser do you use? Firefox 2.0 for normal browsing. IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox for most testing.
19. What are a few personal web projects you've got going on? Constantly updating, tweaking, and improving the websites I oversee.

For the next few months I will be on a combination of parental leave and vacation. Well, that isn't completely true since I still have one week of work to get through, but when June comes around it's time to switch off and unplug my computer.

That isn't entirely true either. I won't actually be unplugging my computer all the time, but I will not be checking my email regularly (i.e. don't expect a response if you send me email) and I will try hard to avoid reading any blogs or keeping up with what's new in the world of web design and development.

The current plan is to return some time in September, but don't take that as a promise. Neither do I promise not to break the silence if something that calls for a quick post shows up ;-).

See you later, hope you stay subscribed, and thanks for reading.

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Posted in Life.

Draft

After missing 2006, the year in review returns for 2007. These are the trends that most seemed to effect my little part of the Interweb during the past 12 months.

Social Media

Sure, the social networks have proliferated over the years, but it wasn't until May 24 of this year that the landscape really came into shape.

Facebook's launch of its developer platform heralded in a new area of speculation and rapid growth. Watching its evolution was like watching the Web’s own growth over the past 10 years, but accelerated at an exponential rate. Geeks create some clever applications that attract tens of thousands of dedicated users, and then an entire new business stream develops. Quickly, Facebook faced competition from an alliance of services lead by Google. And even more money comes pouring into the sphere.

With Facebook becoming a platform, some smaller social networks started getting some attention: the Digg crew launched Pownce, Google bought Jaiku, and Twitter became the de facto micro-blogging tool.

All of this led to some smart people trying to figure out how to allow the social relationships defined in each of these networks to be shared amongst all the networks. Tim Berners-Lee defined this as the GGG and advocated the complex XML, while others like Tantek Celik argued for the simpler microformat approach.

Mobile Web

The announcement, and then release of Apple ’s iPhone created shock waves amongst fan-boys, UI experts, phone manufacturers and carriers, and at least one search engine. It even inspired me to finally get a cellphone. From the perspective of Web development, the iPhone introduced a concept for displaying Web pages that is provoking discussion in that community: it takes sites designed for a desktop and shrinks the display to fit on its screen. Other mobile browsers, notably the Opera flavours, relied on the a separate style sheet to render an optimized version of a given site.

With the iPhone and Google’s “gPhone” system, Android, mobile Web browsing is becoming far more common — even Canadian carriers have deigned to lower their rates for 1Gb of data from $2,400/month to $100/month.

Multi-Touch

The iPhone’s big feature was undoubtedly the use of the first consumer friendly multi-touch screen. Effectively, a couple of fingers and some natural gestures replaced the stylus and keyboard. Almost immediately, Microsoft introduced Surface, which is table that uses the multi-touch interface to act as a sales unit, a waiter, a photo album, or a paint canvas.

By the end of the year, other mobile devices were appearing with a multi-touch screen, and speculation is rampant that Apple will introduce a multi-touch laptop or desktop in the coming months

Apple reworked the JavaScript engine of it’s Safari browser to create new event observers specifically designed to react to finger swipes and pinches. ECMAScript 4.0 may even incorporate such observers into the final specification.

HTML Rebirth

After years of lobbying, the W3C decided to reopen development of the lingua franca of the Web. The consortium promised to make the development of the new HTML standard open and transparent, and quickly, hundreds of passionate Web developers signed-on to participate. Many of those were members of the alternate HTML standard group, WHATWG; and as a result WHATWG’s proposals have become the draft recommendation.

What that draft contains, however, is quite contentious, and the Web standard community is splitting over both its proposal and the methods used to come to said proposal.

No matter what the final recommendation, practical implementation may occur faster than many expect. Already parts of the draft have been built into beta releases Opera, Safari, and Firefox.

• SharpE:
  
  
  
  • SharpE Beta Release - 0.7.0.1.
    
  
  
• Litestep:
  
  
  
  • xPaintClass 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
    
  • Losi Theme Contest at ls-themes.org.
    
  
  
• BB4Win:
  
  
  
  • BBInterface 0.9.89.
    
  • bbFoomp 1.5, bbFoomp 1.6.
    
  
  
• Geoshell:
  
  
  
  • Future Development Goals forum thread.
    
  
  

• Inkscape 0.44.
  
• VLC Media Player 0.8.5.
  
• ScummVM 0.9.0.
  
• Opera 9.
  
• Crystal Cursor 0.2alpha.
  

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Roughly eight years ago I bought myself a welder.  I was restoring the 1950 Bantam Jeep Trailer I had purchased and it needed a new floor and some other things welded up.  The costs for hiring it out were roughly half of the cost of a small 110V MIG welder so I figured it was time to make the investment in a new tool and new skillset.

Since then the welder has proven quite handy - I was able install the new floor in the trailer, and have also been able to create a tandem bike for my kids:

And a piece of artwork for our mantle:

Over the years I’ve also used the welder to make repairs and add-ons on the 1964 CJ6 Jeep that I’m working on, as well as small repairs for friends, relatives and neighbors.

So - what I’m thinking now is that if this web development gig doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I’ll be able to go apply for any welding job because I have eight years of experience welding.

Wait - why are you rolling your eyes like that?  And what was that small huffing sound you just made?

Well, OK.  You’re right.  Picking up a small welder and dabbling in it periodically doesn’t really add up to 8 years of experience that an employer would be interested in, does it?  I have a friend who is a certified welding inspector - he owns a business that does metal fabrication so he employs professional welders and has to inspect their work.  He likes to wander around my projects and point out which welds would and wouldn’t be acceptable to him - and I usually feel good if I shoot 20%.

Yet - I see this pitching of hobby work and playing around as “experience” in the web design and development world and it seems like people fall for it in a way they wouldn’t with my welding experience.  A few weeks back I was contacted by a person who just took on a internship with a client that I had done a site for.  The project included a new custom design and deployment on a content management system so all content on the site could be updated or changed without them needing to know HTML.  It was the perfect fit for them as a business because they are small and not in a field of business where they’d naturally have people on staff with web skills. The site was immediately beneficial to them - with their previous site you couldn’t Google their name directly and get their site in the results, and the new site got them in #1 spot for their own name in short order.

However it was the classic case of having all the available tools at hand and never taking the time.  The site has sat, relatively unchanged, since we launched it roughly 4 years ago.  Then here comes the new college intern who assures me that he has been “designing websites for about 8 years now” so I wouldn’t “need to be concerned that he would end up damaging the site.”

Right.

I went to look at it yesterday and sure enough - the main navigation has been moved, the nice little main nav icons that tied into the company’s business area (and they paid for) are gone, and in the place of the main nav is now a “doesn’t quite fit in that space” blurb for “latest news”.  Latest news - for a company that had nothing new to say over 4 years time.  All the new content could have been integrated without requiring the design changes.

Specifics aside - what bothers me is my former client probably heard the same “8 years experience” line and, even though it’s coming from a college senior and therefore means that this persons “experience” started in roughly the 8th grade, gladly handed over their most prominent piece of business marketing to this person.

So business people - listen up:  Periodically noodling around with web technologies as a hobby doesn’t equal “experience”.  Sites built out of that context are rarely based on any real-world constraints of time, budget, or business requirements.  When someone uses the word “experience”, what they should be implying is “I spent a considerable portion of my day for that period of time working with this stuff” and (ideally) “people paid me for it”.

You wouldn’t look at my welding projects and hire me on to do structural, mission critical welding.  Don’t do the same with your website.

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Well, this is a first for me—I’m pleased to announce the relaunch of a site that I relaunched in the past - http://www.burcoinc.com.

When I first started Boyink Interactive some six years ago now, Burco was one of my first clients.  The site was done - by client request - in MS Frontpage.  Their hope at the time was that they’d be able to make changes to it internally, but as time went on that never really happened.  The intermingling of content and design in the FrontPage interface was both overwhelming to get through and risky - one wrong mouse click and you could delete the entire navigation bar from that page.

So I was happy to re-pitch the project and catch them up to current technology when it comes to small business sites, and get them implemented on a database-driven site using ExpressionEngine.

The design was provided by Burco’s current graphics designer, and Boyink Interactive did the ExpressionEngine implementation.  The site is driven by 8 EE weblogs, and all navigation is created through the use of EE’s relationships.  The locations functionality and the online catalog are handled through the use of an iFrame - this approach let us build and host the site externally while leaving some current business applications and work processes in place.

Currently in development is a consumer-oriented version of the site, which will use ExpressionEngine’s Multi-Site Manager to allow Burco to manage both sites from one EE install.

Thanks to a concerted education effort by key Web designers, as well as a few prominent accessibility and usability experts, the Web development industry has begun to form its own best practices. These are built on top of of Web standards, are informed by human-centered design, and honed through nearly a decade of trial and error. While the routines of those best practices vary depending on the site and team focus, but at their core they all share the same philosophy.

Some may call it usability, others visitor loyalty, others rich content, but the goal of the vast majority of Web sites is to become a routine for its visitors, and to do that, the users needs are primal; no matter what the papers say, you don’t own your site, your users do.

This is an overview of these notable best practices — future installments will delve deeper into specific topics an areas of interest.

Be helpful

 

People want your advice, show them what you can offer

Know both your users and the purpose of the site, and provide two or three clear paths that enable visitors to easily achieve their goals (which, in turn, should map to the purpose of the site itself). Imagine a concierge.

 

Inspire curiosity to encourage exploration and discovery

With rare exceptions (i.e., a task requiring the completion of a fixed goal) each path should provide branches for visitors to take, thereby exposing them to parts of the site they are interested in, but didn’t necessarily come for. Think “serendipity”

 

Without wayfinding, you’re telling visitors to get lost

On every single page of the site, the visitor should be able to see where they are, where that item is within the site, and where they can go to. This can be explicit, like breadcrumbs; implicit like friendly Web addresses and design hints; or both. This is the “Wikipedia Effect”

Be flexible

 

Technology shouldn’t be a limiting experience

There should be no such thing as an “unsupported browser” in the sense that any visitor should be able to access the content you offer, even if its not optimally presented. The site should embrace the three pillars of open Web standards, accessibility, and device-independence.

 

Welcome the outside in and let the inside out

The Internet is built on the exchange of information, and sites are rewarded the more they reach out beyond their domain. Encouraging visitor participation builds both loyalty; enabling others to easily access the site’s contents helps market its services; and pointing to other sites, even competitors, enhance the site’s own authority. This is the “Yahoo Effect”

 

Being nimble means being adaptable

In everything from business strategy to technology choices, being able to quickly bring to market a new feature allows the site to adjust to changing conditions, saving money while maintaining the current audience. If the feature doesn’t work after a reasonable period, quickly admit to it, remove it, and continue forward. Think “fail faster”

Beware

 

Even in anarchy, there are rules

After nearly a decade-and-a-half of Web-based development, combined with its profound integration with mainstream society, there are unspoken conventions that nearly every user understands. Ignoring them creates a sense of discomfort amongst visitors; relying on them creates a solid foundation to explore from. Think: “green means go”

 

The tea leaves reveal what you want them to

The online world offers a universe of metrics to quickly draw upon: visitor surveys, site analytics, revenue patterns, and market analysis. But their easy availability obscures their unreliable nature; use them a background source to inform, not to define, plans and goals. Think “Deepthroat”

 

Technology will fail you in proportion to the faith you put into it

As a means to an end, choosing the right technology for the purpose at hand requires careful forethought, but there is no perfect solution. Understand the limitations, but know that the what is developed is only as good as the process and people that developed it. This is the “Messenger Effect”

On Monday and Tuesday of this week a number of analysts and consultants gathered with IBM at an intellectual property briefing in Greenwich, Connecticut. Not as glamorous as the meeting in Rome but exceptionally interesting. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that the subject matter is a product of the mind and that legal rights to the "IP" are protected in the same way as any other form of property. IP is a vital issue for many companies but probably no company has as much influence in this area as IBM. IP is a broad and deep subject but one of the key elements is patents.

The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. Earlier this year the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM exceeded 3,000 four years in a row and last year had 1,100 more than anybody else. IBM has a portfolio of more than 40,000 patents globally and has another 21,000 U.S. patent applications pending. Potentially more significant than IBM's leadership in creating inventions is the fact that it is giving away thousands of patents. See Patent Commons (January 2005).

The industrial age focused on proprietary innovation and patents became the key differentiator for technology companies such as IBM. In the 1970's and 1980's there was a lot of cross-licensing to provide freedom of action; e.g. IBM cross-licensed with many other technology companies so that it could be able to ship it's products without any concerns about patent infringement. Since IBM's inventiveness created a lot more patent licensing income than licensing expense, the IP business became a major source of income -- to the tune of a $1 billion per year and mostly profit. Now that the industrial age has given over to a knowledge economy based on collaborative innovation, IBM has begun to re-evaluate it's IP strategy and begin to leverage IP as a new source of business growth.

Since IBM has a very large group of engineers and scientists who are prolific inventors, the patent portfolio is sure to grow and the income from it will be significant for quite some time. The company has more than 1,000 active licenses whereby companies pay IBM to use it's patents -- that represents about a third of IBM's IP income. Another third comes from joint development; e.g. with Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung where the companies work together on a project and then share the results. A prominent example was the development of the Cell processor which is used in the new Sony PS3 game console. A final third of IBM's IP income is from the assignment of patents for things that IBM invented but does not want to pursue on it's own -- digital cameras, liquid crystal displays, the laser used in eye surgery, setup boxes, and many other things.

Technologists working in healthcare and education cheered the move by IBM to allow them royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. If new application software is developed in these key industries, society is better off and IBM will get it's fair share of the hardware, software and services opportunity. Very smart. To leverage internal ideas, IBM has created ThinkPlace -- a next generation suggestion program where employees don't just submit an idea and hope to get an award but where they tee up an idea and enable others to build upon the idea and collaborate to take it to the next level. IBM is also leveraging it's IP by using it to solve problems for it's clients through services engagements. For example, a group of PhD's from IBM Research helped a limousine company optimize the routes of it's cars to minimize wait time and fuel costs

The world of patents has become ever more complex across the spectrum of collaboration and competition as the world has moved from proprietary to open -- as the world has gotten flat. Patents issued have skyrocketed in the past dozen years -- more than 150,000 patents issued in 2000, and so have patent suits. The thousands of suits are taking a huge economic toll and in many cases are stifling innovation. Patent reform has become urgent. IBM is not waiting on the sidelines. It is taking a leadership role and encouraging progressive changes. For example, it has launched initiatives to improve the quality of patents by developing and proposing an index to evaluate if a patent meets the standards of patentability -- in other words, to test if the patent is really legitimate. These efforts are not just for IBM but for the entire economy. Hopefully the politicians, many of whom have links to trial lawyer associations, won't kill the pending patent reform legislation.  

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Last week Robert Nyman updated the DOMAssistant JavaScript library to version 2.6. As always with a new version of anything there are a number of new features and performance enhancements, but this release also marks a couple of other changes for DOMAssistant.

First a couple of words about performance. In DOMAssistant 2.6, the performance of CSS selectors has been improved a lot – run the SlickSpeed Selectors Test to see just how fast it is. Opinions on the usefulness of the SlickSpeed test vary, but no matter how you spin it, DOMAssistant's CSS selectors are really fast.

A new feature is support for plugins, which among other things will enable people to add stuff like animations and superfluous visual bling bling. The plugin model can of course be used to add useful functionality as well :-).

In order to make DOMAssistant a little less of a one man show and more of a community, Robert also asked a few people, including myself, to join the DOMAssistant Team. Sure, the community around DOMAssistant is still small when compared to that of the major JavaScript libraries on the market. I don't think that's a problem really, since I'm not so sure that massive amounts of forum or mailing list traffic automatically means that something is good.

For Robert's own, more detailed, description of the news and changes in DOMAssistant 2.6, read his post on the DOMAssistant development blog: Releasing DOMAssistant 2.6 - overall fastest CSS selectors, plugins and more.

If you're like me and are more interested in building websites than trying to emulate desktop applications in the browser, DOMAssistant should appeal to you. Give it a try. If you like it, great! If you prefer another library or framework, good for you. Just be aware of the options.

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Posted in JavaScript.

It took nearly two years, but two days ago on 26 February 2008, version 1.0 of the WCAG Samurai Errata for WCAG 1.0 were finally published. As stated in the Introduction, this version is also likely to be the final version.

A quick summary for anyone who is not familiar with the WCAG Samuari or their WCAG 1.0 errata: The WCAG Samurai consisted of a group of accessibility and standards-aware web developers brought together by Joe Clark in 2006. The group's goal was to create a document that provides corrections and updates for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0.

The reason to provide corrections is that since WCAG 1.0 was originally published by the W3C in 1999, both web browsers and assistive technologies have evolved. At the same time, accessibility-aware web developers have learned and invented a lot of techniques for building accessible websites. Developers have also learned that some of the techniques that were useful in the past are no longer needed or even cause problems for users.

The WCAG Samurai errata thus removes, rephrases, and adds information that makes WCAG 1.0 more applicable to today's Web. You might also want to read Joe Clark's WCAG Samurai errata released, where he talks a bit more about the errata and the development process used.

So do the WCAG Samurai Errata actually contain any improvements? Yes, definitely. I don't agree one hundred percent with every word in the errata, but all in all I think they make a lot of sense and match what I strive for in my daily work.

Note that you can't use the WCAG Samurai Errata as a standalone document. It should be used in combination with W3C's WCAG 1.0.

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Posted in Accessibility.

When I hold workshops for people who want to learn more about web standards and accessibility, I often notice that the attendants really have tried to improve their accessibility knowledge. But they get overwhelmed when they go to the official documentation from the W3C and try to understand it.

Mike Cherim brings this up in Making Web Accessibility Accessible, an article that is over a year old but still just as relevant. He notes that accessibility is harder to get into than it should be for several reasons, one of which being that the documentation (WCAG 1.0) is hard to understand. And it doesn't look like things will get much easier when WCAG 2.0 is released and becomes the norm.

In addition to the documentation problem, Mike also mentions the unhelpful attitude held by some people who seem like they don't want to help the less experienced, the misguided or the misinformed, and instead choose to criticise them. I see it too sometimes, and I have probably been guilty of doing that myself. But I really try to help where I can by sharing what I've learned about web accessibility so far. And I'm still learning, so I really appreciate when other people share their knowledge.

Over the years I've spent countless hours writing articles, responding to email and comments, and participating on discussion forums. No matter how much I would like to, there is no time for me to do more unless I quit my dayjob. And since my dayjob is how I pay the mortgage, well, that's not very likely. Writing articles takes lots of time, for me anyway.

Going back to Mike's article, he suggests a few things to think about when you talk about accessibility with other people who work in the fields of web design and development:

• Be a translator: Learn the specs and translate them into English.
• Be willing to give back: If somebody asks for your help, try to find time to respond.
• Accessibility is happy: Give accessibility a smiling face.
• Encourage don't admonish: When somebody makes progress, acknowledge that instead of criticising what they do wrong.

Good suggestions, Mike. I will try to get better at each of them. For instance, I guess I could be a little less grumpy sometimes when I come across bad examples or implementations. But not always... ;-).

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For many of us, leaving our alma maters was a relief or even a good riddance -- what a joy to graduate and move on. Over the years the primary connection to the campus may have been sports related without much thought about academic roots. As time goes on that feeling changes and in fact some of us not only began to recall our college days but actually go back to visit in a more serious way and even get involved. Financial support of alumni is critical but involvement and sharing of experience is even more valuable.

At the engineering advisory board meeting today at Lehigh University, I was quite impressed with my colleagues' intense interest in what is going on at the university. In addition to getting an update from Dean Wu, there was a lot of discussion about future directions and how the extended family of alumni could collaborate to help out.

In the 1960's, Lehigh was primarily an engineering school and it was 100% male. Today engineering is a third of the university and women represent more than 40% of the nearly 7,000 students. When I graduated 39 years ago, there were no women at Lehigh (although there were many nearby, including my wife at St. Luke's School of Nursing), and last week Dr. Alice P. Gast, a world-renowned researcher with a passion for teaching, was named Lehigh University’s 13th president.

One area of focus for the college of engineering is to provide degree programs in which students can develop horizontally as well as vertically. Over time, a top student can be an ultimate techie but can also be outstanding as a business or arts student. This will mean they will be able to move from their undergrad experience to enter law school or medical school or join the ranks of business management or consulting with an edge because of their broader perspective. An engineer uses creativity, technology, and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. What about communicating the solution to the problem and working with global multi-disciplinary colleagues to implement the solution? That is where Lehigh's thrust toward integrated programs comes in.

The Integrated Business & Engineering degree (IBE) is an innovative example of the potential of more diverse education. The program prepares students to assume leadership roles in industrial research and development, entrepreneurial initiatives, management consulting, high-tech ventures, and innovative technology. I have no doubt that this integrated approach to engineering will produce some future leaders for the world's top businesses.