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I should really put this in my link roll but I consider it to be of great import. I think you should read on how to recover a hard disk.

I totally recommend the Applegeeks website if you like a good humorous comic.

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Waizilla, a compound name taken from WAI at the W3C, and Zilla from Mozilla. The project is aimed at producing a cross platform web-site accessibility testing tool (source - Waizilla project page). This concept fascinates me because I was being asked, the other day, by my business partner: what tools do we use to evaluate accessibility. My response was, human analysis of standards. I'd be very interested to see the capabilities of the tool. Hopefully allowing others to see what I see when I view-sourceon a page.

There is also a Waizilla forum on the accessify forums. I'm interested to know what people will think

It seems that the project isn't going anywhere. This is saddening as it seemed a worthy idea.

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Just searching through my blogroll and I saw, on Tantek's blog, an article about semi-permeable blogging. This was spurred on by concerns that people can use our publicly available thoughts to form prejudicial opinions on our habits and desires.

I'm quite interested by this issue. Should we be concerned by the release of our inhibitions online? I, personally, don't reveal anything too intimate. This is a personal act however. No doubt some people use anonymity to protect themselves. Others do nothing at all. This reminds me of a high school student somewhere in the USA who posted desires to kill his parents and teachers. He was discovered and had to go and see a psychiatrist. Two points really:

• Don't be surprised that you are seeing a psychiatrist. If she'd have read your (paper) diary she probably would have been concerned still,
• don't get caught saying stuff like that, you don't know who's reading you.

Beyond this there are no real measures to protecting your thoughts other than using the online services of LiveJournal or one of the other community blog systems.

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Aujourd'hui, pendant je lisais des journales sur l'internet, j’ai découvert un article qui a parlé de les troupes de Redmond et leur amour pour un navigateur qui n'est pas Microsoft Internet Explorer. Il s'appelle Firefox. L'article s'appelle Microsoft aime Firefox, c'est un article par Tristan Nitot.

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In other news, I am amazed and bewondered about galactic movements. I'd love to see what happens when our galaxy strikes another galaxy. Scientists have been observing other celestial objects and attempting to predict what the effects may be. I found the most interesting part to be at the bottom of the article:

The Milky Way is also part of a galactic cluster. We are heading for the Virgo cluster, it seems, and will ram straight into it in around two billion years time. Make a note in your diaries.

Taken from Galaxies rent asunder in huge cosmic collision.

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So I'm reading a few blogs today and I come across Rich talking about custom music cd-r. He linked to a page about buying Green Day cd-r so I checked it out. It's a nice idea. This is where the music industry should go.

Rich said, I like the idea, but, WTF, I could just order the cd?

Yeah the price is a little much, said I.

They should sell them individually and say, 'burn your greenday mp3 collection which you got from gnutella onto a greenday cd. £2.'

Haha

And do it for all artists and bands.

I'd love to burn my beatles mp3 collection onto a stylish Beatles cd-r. A collection which i paid for myself.

If they just did randomly elite looking CDRs itd be cool.

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You are unknown to me.
Your camera's memory card was in a taxi; I have it now.
I am going to post one of your pictures each day.
I will also narrate as if I were you.
Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life.

Found at - I Found Some of Your Life

I was looking through my news today when I came across this. I love the spread of memes so I saw fit to mention this one. Somebody had left their digi-cam memory card in the back of a taxi. Somebody else had found it. The person is now posting a picture a day from the memory card and narrating it as if it were his/her real life. Hopefully it will lead the original owner to the website where he/she will be able to reclaim the photographs

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So i decided that I needed a mouse. It wasn't a desperate requirement but for my pleasure and for the purposes of playing iSketch, the sketching game, I decided to invest in a chic, stylish mouse. I opted for the S+ARCK which had a design which paralleled my Powerbook G4. Looking at it from a HCI perspective takes a bit of remembering.

I want to use a slightly analytical angle without going too in-depth for this blog. I'll use a very basic terminology in case it gets too ridiculous.

Ergonomics

• The mouse is like a half-egg.
• The shell has two halves which form the buttons with a glowing blue stripe down the middle with the scroll-wheel sitting towards the front.
• The shape is smooth and fits my hand perfectly. It is suitable for two or three fingered use. If I have caused confusion, two or three fingered refers to the number of fingers you place on top of the mouse whilst you use it. I personally use only two fingers - my middle and index finger - and use my index finger to scroll with.

Familiarity

This is one of my favourite terms. I like to spin on about familiarity. It is based upon the premise that consistency breeds efficiency and intuitiveness. By knowing how a similar object works, you are more likely to grow used to the item in use. Akin to getting a new car, using a new mouse is a case of getting used to the new curves and bends. Knowing the delicacy and sensitivity of each button and movement takes a little time. As such, I got used to this mouse instantly. I enjoy sensitive and smooth mouses mice.

Other things of note

• The size has already been mentioned. It fits my hand just right. Any smaller and my fingers would be dragging on the table. Mice which are too big are sometimes cumbersome. This design has found a comfortable compromise in the middle.
• I find the blue groove to be a soothing colour. In the dark, I often struggle to locate my input devices and the groove offers a comforting light when I'm aiming for some mouse intervention.
• I sometimes find myself clicking a button when i didn't intend to. The buttons are sometimes too sensitive for me. I know I'll get used to it after prolonged use and I'll become an inexperienced trackpad user again. I love the Powerbook trackpad though and I shall miss it.

I haven't much more to say about this mouse. It is available for sale at the Apple (UK) Store.

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So I went for an eye-test. I had a bad week the other week you see. My girlfriend stepped on my glasses and they snapped. That was fine, I had my contact lenses as a backup. So I wore my contact lenses until Monday evening (two weeks back) when one of them dropped out and flew off into the ether. So I'm buggered.

Anyway. The eye-test. I went in, late as usual, for my test. All hi-tech and everything. I put my eye in a load of weird gadgets and they flashed and puffed at me. Not what I was used to at all. After this began the test proper. 1 or 2. 3 or 4 were the words and numbers whispered from my optician. Just how I remember it.

During the test he brought up, on his PC, images of my eyes which was flipping excellent. I said, if only you could email them to me. He looked at me and said, I can put them on a CD for you. So here you have them. My eyes.

After the test I looked around for some new glasses. The woman, Helen, who helped me look for a new pair was very helpful and very friendly. She even sold me up to getting thinner lenses for a bit of a higher price. It was a fairly reasonable price but I'll have to stay blind for longer before I can see.

I even have the results from my new prescription which you can look at:

For those of you wondering what the information means:

Sphere

The amount of long or short sightedness. It always has a plus (+) or a minus (-) sign in front or above it. There will always be a value for SPH, even if it is just zero (written as 0.00, Plano, Pl?) If the vision in one eye is very poor, the word 'balance' or 'bal' may be written.

Cylinder (Astigmatism)

This is the measure for astigmatism. Again, there is always a plus (+) or minus (-) sign present. There may not be a value of cylinder in your prescription.

Axis

This will only appear if there is a value for cylinder, as it relates to the cylindrical lens and denotes a reference point that indicates the direction of the power of the cylindrical lens. It will be a number between 1 and 180. It may or may not be written with a degree 'o' symbol after the number. In some prescriptions, the axis value is indicated on a semi- circular scale. This should be read to the nearest 5 degrees.

Information taken from How to read your sunglasses prescriptions

Oh and the opticians was Specsavers

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I was reading a post, last night, called Links in new windows considered harmful on Anne's weblog. Several people commented their approval of Anne's opinion, as did I. A few did not. I made a reply to Juriaan's comment:

Actually a good example of why I personally don't like it is Anne's website. In the articles there are a lot of links, many of them to external blogs or websites.
Juriaan.

And my response was:

There are many issues at hand here but the key to this is user choice. A user should have the right to decide how their browsing experience should pan out. Just because you wish to let the user keep your website open doesn't automatically follow that they wish to.

I disagree with this whole uneducated user angle. If a driver causes a crash because he/she was driving in the right-hand lane (UK). Do we say its ok because they didn't know their Highway Code (UK driving document indicating legal requirements) well enough? People should be reading software documentation. I care not for people who say they haven't the time to learn. That's preposterous. People who don't read documentation, warnings with their medication, or small-print on a contract, are simply ignorant and/or asking for trouble.

We should be catering for users who know how to operate their software and hardware. I'm not saying that we should ignore the needs of the uneducated but rather not force personal standards upon people to ensure repeat business.

I am interested by your point about external links on Anne's posts. In my browser I find Command+Left click opens a link in a new tab. There are options for many browsers to make new windows and tabs open through key/mouse combinations, By reading documentation, people will discover these things. I also know when a link is external because the address appears in my status bar. I believe it appears in a tooltip in Opera for Windows.

There were a number of comments made which supplemented mine also:

I'd like to echo Mr. Connolley's opinion: it's all about user choice. Employing no special target, you leave the user a choice of either following the hyperlink within the context of their current history progression, or start a new history progression.

If you force a target, there is no choice, and it's quite difficult for a user to get that choice back. It's certainly magnitudes more difficult than learning how to create new windows/documents/tabs/etc via your agent's UI.

J. King

If you'll indulge me, Anne, I'd also like to supplement something else Paul said:

I also know when a link is external because the address appears in my status bar. I believe it appears in a tooltip in Opera for Windows.

URI and title do indeed appear in a tooltip (which can be turned off) in Opera. I think it's worth noting, also, that's it's not hard for an author to note "external" resources without forcing any particular behaviour. All it takes is some good, descriptive title text. If you use a title like "David Baron: 'Intranet mode?'", it should be apparent if not obvious that the resource the hyperlink points to is not a part of Anne's Web log.

If you get into a habit of writing title text for every hyperlink that isn't entirely self-descriptive (ie. just about anything that isn't site navigation), then you can not only denote external resources, but also give the user a bit of an idea as to what is waiting for them.

J. King

Anne, I thought the same thing when I first read that article. My blog wasn't up and running then, or I would have written about this very topic. The article is targeted (pun intended) towards validation and completely misses the point: accessibility.

Whether to open a link in the same window, a new window or a new tab should be my choice.

A usability study made by IBM actually showed that opening external sites in new windows increased the likelihood of non-power users getting lost. When a new, maximised window overlay the previous one, they thought the link had opened in the same window. And then, of course, the back button didn't work.

Anyone who thinks they need to force their visitors to stay on their site should focus on writing more interesting copy rather than spawning windows left and right. If it happens to me, I usually think, pathetic buggers and close the now extraneous original window with a sigh.

Tommy Olsson

There we have it. Incontendable. Don't use the target attribute.