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Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

The avatar fun

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

I’ve had a Gravatar account for some time now but there’s a problem with it – I don’t always want to leave the same email on all blogs. There’s another problem with the service – it’s offline currently, not accepting new users. Another problem and probably one of the reasons the service went down is also the centralized hosting of images.

For the reasons above I think Pavatar is a better solution. The idea is to retrieve the avatar image from the URL, not the email. You have a few options to provide a Pavatar link (http header, link in the html or simply /pavatar.png). The image is always downloaded from your site which might be a partybreaker if you’re a heavy commenter but better since you control the image at all time.

Today I stumbled upon MonsterID as a fallback for Gravatars. I loved it. I had to do something with it. I downloaded the script written by Andreas Gohr, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and changed it a bit. Well actually a lot. I added local caching and the possibility of adding other templates – I work at an interactive agency so I think I’ll be able to find a few characterbuilding image sets lying around.

The MonsterID service is here for anybody to use. It’s probably going to be as popular as the Pingerator.

Posted in general, monsterid, php, services, technology | 2 Comments »

Accessibility and standards

Friday, January 19th, 2007

The Dutch are embracing web standards. Since all the ministries in our country “just” got new pages we could easily pass a law like this. At least the next iteration would be standards compliant.

Currently the pages boast:

invalid HTML 4.01 Transitional,
tables for layout,
images for titles (some without alt attributes),
spacer images,
font tags (<font face=”verdana” size=”1″>),
noindex tags,
HTML attributes for styling (bgcolor=”#D6E1EC”),
inline CSS (style=”margin:0 0 0 0;”),
inline scripts (href=”javascript:linkTo_UnCryptMailto(‘nbjmup jogp/naaAhpw/tj’);”),
documents in closed file formats (doc),
…and more.

Posted in technology, thoughts | 1 Comment »

Ethernet power on switch

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

Dear internet,

After my laptop’s screen has died I’m looking for an ethernet power switch (one you plug into the ethernet port and uses wake-on-lan to turn on the computer). If you know where to buy one or you are capable of creating it please leave a comment.

Thanks.

UPDATE: It seems that wake-on-ring is much easier since you only need 5V between pin 5 (ground) and pin 9 (ring indicator) to wake the computer up. I got instructions from an expert (thanks!) and will now try to create a prototype.

Posted in blurps, general, technology, thoughts | 1 Comment »

There once was…

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

A few years back there was this web agency that had a sister company that was into online advertising. At about the same time a lot of changes were happening in the advertising market and some innovations were needed. There was also a young web developer that was eager to create something impressive. Something cross-browser which wasn’t as easy then as it is today with YUI and others.

The developer took on a challenge of creating a new banner format that was already being used on some foreign sites. With a twist – the idea was to make it work on more than just the most popular browser. It was possible but some advance testing and expert “guessing” needed to be done. The challenge proved to be difficult but not unsolvable.

Since the script were to be used on advertising sites that already had their own JavaScript the functions needed to be ‘namespaced’ in order to avoid clashes. The developer wasn’t going to create an object but instead prefixed all his functions with an acronym. The acronym was chosen as an experiment – its meaning was hidden to see if others would just adopt it.

Every now and then I still get a floating banner to implement to a site. Not my primary focus anymore but still. And I always get a smile on my face when I see that the closing function is called “praHide” – “pra” is the acronym and it stands for “Parsek Rich Ad”. The code has changed since the first implementation and different agencies have different JavaScript functions. The name stayed the same though. I guess it became a sort of a standard. As has the 500×500 which we started using back in the day…

Posted in general, javascript, technology, thoughts | 2 Comments »

Dying out

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

Today my laptop decided that it had enough of being carried around and working nicely as it should. The screen now displays a limited number of pixels so it seems the most fragile part of the computer – the only movable part – went sour. When the same happened to my last mobile phone I decided not to buy clamshell phones ever again. Unfortunately with laptops I have no such option.

Hopefully the hardware experts can extend the life of my loyal friend for a few months since this is not really the best time to buy a new one. Until then I’ll only be using the external monitor.

Fortunatelly I’ve been thinking ahead.

Posted in general, technology, thoughts | 1 Comment »

The panel

Monday, December 11th, 2006

My first panel – about authentication – went surprisingly well. Surprisingly because as many have told me before the panel (but after the announcement) the panelists were a bit “exotic”.

The panel consisted of a technical part and a non-technical part. The second part being there to point out that authentication is not really (just) a technical problem. The number of visitors was quite big – supporting both camps on stage. Starting off with a bit of personal thoughts about authentication and its meaning to the panelists we touched a few issues that could as well have gotten their own talks. The questions went well but in retrospect left me a bit disappointed.

I expected the non-technical part of the audience to address more questions to the technical part. What I didn’t expect was that the technical part of the audience would address no questions to the non-technical part. In a way I understand this but what I hoped for was a bit more sense that this is a trust issue that has very little to do with technology and a lot with the way we perceive security and the exchange of information.

Thanks to everybody who came to the panel, I hope you learned something new. If you didn’t I hope it was at least interesting to see what other people think about the issue. Thanks to the panelists for being great, for coming and for sharing their views and expertise.

As the moderator I learned a few things I might point out in a post somewhere in the future.

Posted in events, spletne urice, technology | No Comments »

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