What sort of fucking error message is this? Despite my firm conviction that Twitter is, well, pointless, I am beginning to use it more because it’s less mundane and tedious than my average day at my current contract. This morning I was greeted by this error message. All well and good and it’s nice that they’ve bothered to put an error message up.

BUT

Read what it says: “The site should kick itself back into gear in a few seconds”. I don’t know what time the site went down and I’m guessing that it only went back up again a short while ago (seeing as how Pix’s first twitter was “stops twitching and commence twittering” entered not so long ago). That means that, in fact, it’s been at least 3 hours - possibly more - since it became unavailable. Saying that it will be up “in a few seconds” and even providing a link to click on to try to reload the page is bad form. Very bad form. It is misleading at best and manipulative at worst.

I don’t care that the site was unavailable - I just don’t like inappropriate messages like that which are blatantly untrue. There’s nothing wrong with saying “available soon” or “until further notice”. A message saying “click here to get in now” when it’s simply not possible is just heinous.

That is all.

Okay, so I threw in some stuff to give this page a little more content. I’ve even reinstated my blogroll which is a partial list as there’s a bug with importing the OPML file containing my Bloglines feed list from my local drive. Just to keep Matt happy, I’ve added his blog too. It is only a fraction of what I generally try to read every day (although my bloglines list is probably in need of some deadheading) but I’ll sort that out some other time.

The teeth have gone. Annie should be pleased.

Twittering: this has been added because I can. Also because when I do my walk, I will probably attempt to provide updates on the move. Because I can.

Last.FM: I rarely use this because I’m invariably doing something else with my PC and have music on the stereo. Or everyone’s asleep in the house so I don’t have any music on at all.

Flickr: because you have to. It’s the law. Not overly keen on the flash badge but again, until I sort something else out, it will have to do.

At some stage I will have to install some new plugins. Last comments (which will no doubt remain empty most of the time), gravatars (possibly) and perhaps some other stuff. Might have to work out the whole paging and announcement thing too.

After that, the next overhaul will be content!

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is very friendly. She’s a chatterbot, designed to process natural language and respond to it. The program has won awards, specifically the Loebner prize (claiming top spot in 2000, 2001 and 2004) which is awarded to the most humanlike chatterbot entered. We were recently discussing artificial intelligence and it turns out that no-one in the office had heard of the Alicebot so we had a look and, appropriately, a quick chat.

Realising that anybody who could write this type of program was obviously a bit of geek, I asked what I figured would be a very geeky question, namely “What is your Prime Directive?” (ref. Star Trek and Robocop amongst others). This was the resulting, slightly surreal and disturbing conversation:

As far as programming languages go, I’ve never really got into Ruby on Rails. Not surprising really. It’s shit. A much better language than Ruby is currently in development and standards are being agreed on right this minute (well, not this minute but you know what I mean, don’t you.) The language in question is LOLCODE and there are currently compilers being written in .Net, Java, C and Python amongst others. The goal is to develop the ultimate standard in web languages - LOLCODE ON MONORAIL.

I think they’re on the right tracks. Check out this simple Hello World program:

HAI
   CAN HAS STDIO?
   VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE


Getting user input is pretty straight forward:

HAI
   CAN HAS STDIO?
   I HAS A VAR
   GIMMEH VAR
   VISIBLE "You said " N VAR N " !!"
KTHXBYE


Looping is in there too:


HAI
   CAN HAS STDIO?
   I HAS A VAR
   IM IN YR LOOP
      UP VAR!!1
      VISIBLE VAR
      IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
   IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE


Conditional statements (and use of the commenting keyword - BTW)


HAI
   CAN HAS STDIO?
   I HAS A VAR
   GIMMEH VAR
   IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
      YARLY
         BTW this is true
         VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
      NOWAI
         BTW this is false
         VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
   KTHX
KTHXBYE


There are some standards I disagree with and suggestions on the F13 forums so far have included replacing STDIO with IM, looping through a set of numbers should be more like “IM IN YR LOOP COUNTIN MY NUMZ FROM ZERO 2 TEN”. Not sure I like the use of VISIBLE as an output command either. True being YARLY and false being NOWAI is genius though.

KTHXBYE!

Does anyone have any links to a good cheat sheet for making a website accessible to W3C WCAG - AA Compliance standards? I’m using Bobby as a testing tool but want a crib sheet or similar that’s not full of the WAI legalese and is easy for a simple minded developer like myself to understand.

In my further delvings into social networking sites (okay, web 2.0 sites - it’s just that, well, that term is so, you know, bah!), I resurrected my account with upcoming.org. I haven’t looked at it for quite some time - such a long time, in fact, that I couldn’t even remember the URL (or should that be URI?) Fortunately the only person I know who appears to use it regularly is Mike so I always know where I can find a link. What’s more useful is that, as he mentioned here a while ago, he’s going to be reviewing the Neubauten gig in Nottingham at the end of April so woohoo, I can add myself to that event. Great, smashing, super.
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So I’ve been thinking about Twitter some more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the applications of social networking technology this week including why corporations would encourage staff to blog, what the hell myspace is useful for and, obviously, why do we twitter.

It occurred to me later on that one useful application of twitter is, for example, to use it as a way of maintaining a training diary on a blog. So I signed up to mess around and see what can be done and what can be exported. Some of the data is exposed through XML but the main feed that would be useful includes both my entries and those of anyone I’ve added as a friend. This is less than desirable and I would have to write exception loops when parsing the XML to filter out my posts. On the other hand, a simpler solution would be to not add people as friends. I don’t want to add a “badge” because it’s either a prestyled flash badge or a css customisable javascript one. Anyway, I will investigate.

One of the things I deliberately did was make sure that my entries didn’t go into the public timeline. But while looking at the various people scratching their arses and idly wondering if people like them, I had another idea. So I set up another twitter account, one I can have fun with. One that, suprisingly, is still available. One that I really hope I can be bothered to keep updating every now and then.

You can view that one here.

I know for sure I’m not the last person on earth who isn’t twittering - my grandmother and my great aunt are very likely to be filling those slots. However, as much as I feel I should because, well, then I’ll know what I’m talking about, this is reason enough not to.

I’ve got to say that I’m with Darren Barefoot when it comes to wanting people to know where I am, what I’m doing and what I’m thinking. What am I doing? None of your fucking business is what I’m doing!

Still, Matt points out, quite rightly, that with contemporary technology, it is quite cool to be able to see something happen, take a picture on your mobile, moblog it to flickr and then sms it to twitter. It does fall into the geek classification of kewl. I would take exception with his example of a truck falling into the river - if I saw him moblog and twitter that, the first thing I’d be wondering is why on earth didn’t he try to help! There could be a discussion here about how we’re becoming a generation of bystanders - happy to watch and comment while events take place around us but that’s too heavy for right this minute.

I don’t know. Twitter isn’t for me. It’s too, I don’t know, ephemeral. On the plus side, at least it’s not Twittr!

We all love AJAX, don’t we. It’s so cool to get bits of your webpage updated without having to refresh the whole damn thing. And what about all those nifty extras like colour fades and animated gifs showing update progress that some people use. There’s a great big, super dooper raft of sexy goodness in the things you can do with AJAX.

The guys at Lotus have cottoned on to this. I went to a one day conference yesterday which was held for all the people who were too poor/tight fisted/busy to go to Lotusphere in January as a Speedy Gonzales summarial review of the highlights of the main event. The new products that they’re introducing are all geared around “social networking” which essentially means that they’re creating blogging, wiki, bookmarking and profiling software for use in corporate environments. Now I’ve got more thoughts on this (and on the awful, awful name they’ve used to rebrand one piece of their software which is no longer called Quickplace but is now to be known as Quickr. See what they’ve done there? If Flickr and Frappr and all the other _r sites which escape me now are so popular, let’s hurl ourselves under the wheels of bandwagon! Come on! It’s so 2005!) but those thoughts are going to have to wait. But I’m making a considerable digression. The point is that they kept pointing at these new features of the new toys and saying “Look! See that! That’s because we’re using AJAX! Isn’t it kewl!”

All I kept thinking was “Yeah, it might be cool. But is it accessible?”

I’m building a site for a client at the moment and one of the stipulations is that it has to be AA compliant with the WAI accessibilty standards. My simplified understanding of what meeting priority 1 and priority 2 checkpoints includes the basic stipulation that javascript cannot be used to deliver content. AJAX, in particular, can’t be used because screen reader technology currently can’t highlight when only part of the page has been updated (or at least, not the last time I checked!)

So, the question is - how accessible is the new Lotus product going to be?

(This post can be considered a bit of a brain dump as it’s not really headed where I wanted it to go which was towards a discussion about AJAX and accessibility. I will be moving it all to a new blog that I’m starting up which will concentrate more on development and work and what I do to earn a living. More about that later.)

After my graphics card debacle last year* I’ve been running on an old 64Mb card which has adequately suited my needs for a bit although the factory sealed plastic wrapping on the copy of Prey I bought is gathering dust and both F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 are waiting for me to complete them (and may continue to wait for a while as I’m useless at returning to games to finish them).

Over the weekend, I downloaded all 3Gb worth of the Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (to give it it’s full title) Beta client. There’s been some good reports about it and I was curious to see what it was like. Plus Turbine/Codemasters who are releasing it are doing an offer for all Beta players: if they preorder then they get a once off oppurtunity to spend £99 for a subscription that will last the lifetime of the game (which is very good value if you consider that Everquest has been running for several millennia but very poor value if it only lasts as long as Asheron’s Call 2.)
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