Ripoff software Unicode support

We're currently upgrading from v3 to v4 of a well-known application for authoring, scheduling, delivering and reporting online assessments, namely Perception.

v4 supports Unicode.

Yay! :-)

v4 has 2 licenses, one supporting less than one-tenth of one percent of the Unicode gamut, and the other supporting all of it.

Boo! :-(

This seems a little strange because if you support ASCII and your browser supports Unicode then you can do Unicode for free with ASCII by using HTML entities!

OK, you might think: I'll just use ASCII and HTML entities and at least I can see what the additional expense gets me -- built-in Unicode, so I'm happy to struggle along with entities until such time as it becomes worth the expense. (So for instance, I wanted an em-dash "—", which is — in any modern browser.)

Enter the ripoff: Their software's editor permits you to enter HTML entities directly (yay!) but as soon as you exit "raw HTML mode" it parses them into Unicode characters (vaguely sensible if you support Unicode, I suppose.) However the kicker is that you cannot then publish an assessment item containing the character that started life as an ASCII-encoded HTML entity unless you buy the expensive Unicode-complete license! ARGH! ... and my bet is that the difference in cost between licenses is not trivial :-(

(Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, does not reflect the opinion of my employer and could easily have been written by terrifying space monkeys ... YMMV!)

Comments & criticism: Woo-hoo! or Uh-oh?

I've just noticed a comment on a post I made about accessibility where I criticised a web site for its mark-up (<span> and <div> galore; no meaningful HTML elements except <a>) and I was sooo excited & responded straightaway...

Now I'm nervous: The commenter identified himself as "Steve Bailey" and a quick Google for "steve bailey hyfinity" highlights a potential link -- is the person posting the comment "chief e-business architect" at the company whose web site I was critical of?

So perhaps now is a good time to give a caveat: Anything appearing on this blog is my opinion and is in no way associated with my employer!

I'm not retracting anything -- what I said in Feb. 2005 was correct then & it's correct now: Building a page out of meaningless span and div elements with meaningful class names is not the right way to do it! Screen readers, mobile browser (who may lose CSS), anyone in text mode or not getting the visual emphasis derived from such classitis can't see information conveyed visually by lists, paragraphs and headings unless they're marked-up as such with the correct HTML elements.

Maths terrorism

This is going around the email humour circuit & I just had to share it as I'm a maths (& computing) lecturer:

London 16th August:

A public school teacher was arrested today at Gatwick Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Home Secretary John Reid said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement.

He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the Met Police with carrying weapons of maths instruction.

"Al-gebra is a problem for us," Reid said.

"They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute values.

They use secret code names like x and y and refer to themselves as unknowns, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with co-ordinates in every country.

As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle".

When asked to comment on the arrest, Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking from his holiday resort before the planes stopped flying, said, "If God had wanted us to have better Weapons of Maths Instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

<grin>

iTunes 7: Stay away!

I'm afraid I, like many people (see Apple's new iTunes version branded a lemon) have upgraded to iTunes version 7 only to find playback from my iPod all of a sudden pops and skips when CPU load is significant ... and, hey, I'm participating in climateprediction.net and mersenne.org (GIMPS) so that sucks!!! My advice: Stay away unless you need the damn new features...

Pilot Error and Space Invaders

Here's some fun research into human behaviour & mistakes using Space Invaders as a research tool: cs4fn: Pilot Error and Space Invaders. I've mentioned it because a similar approach to this was adopted by an M.Sc. by Research student here in 2002/3: He created a random web crawler where the crawler derived its random sample from users of a Flash-based front-end Space Invaders game where the invaders represented web pages to be crawled when killed (as described in this publication).

Banana Stew: Deconstructing Blogger Beta HTML Template Editing

Great guide for the technically-minded to Blogger beta's templating language: Banana Stew: Deconstructing Blogger Beta HTML Template Editing. However until I can figure out post title links I'll be sticking with this blog (not my beta version 2).

Flickr & Yahoo maps

OK, so it's probably not that exciting but this portion of Flickr Maps caught my eye -- a jet pictured flying over the Thames near Gunnersbury in west London.

How to cheat good

I love this because it just proves (along with the comments) that it's not just us (me) in the UK who have to deal with dumbass idiots who are so lazy that they won't even apply the intelligence they undoubtedly have to the problem of "I can't be bothered to work hard on the assignment. How can I get a decent grade?"

From the comments section:

Many of the worst cases of plagiarism are executed so poorly that they reveal the incompetence, ignorance and stupidity of the writer. So perhaps teachers should just fail such students for incompetence and ignorance, instead of trying to convict them...

Sadly, where I work we are not allowed to fail someone whose work satisfies the requirements (I teach computing and maths, both subjects that tend to favour well-defined requirements) as (I feel) we're not trusted to exercise judgement; it's a full-blown plagiarism hearing or nothing!

MicroMemo voice recorder for iPod is here!

Finally the MicroMemo has arrived :-) and it's pretty groovy:

• It records well using a dodgy old lapel microphone as well as the supplied mic-on-a-stick in quite high-fidelity.
• The "Voice Memos" appear in iTunes as stereo WAV PCM files at 22kHz or 44kHz and can be copied by iTunes into the iTunes music folder under unknown Album & Artist. They're unsuitable for my purposes (informal podcasting for lectures) but I can easily use Audacity and LAME to downsize them to MP3 (e.g. the file linked from the title of this post was created with lame.exe -m m -h --resample 22 -v.)
• The built-in speaker works, although it's quite quiet.
• The supplied mic-on-a-stick effectively turns the iPod+µMemo into a recorder that would be stable and reasonably unobtrusive on a desk.

Downsides

Can't think of much except:

• Please can we have a level meter when recording? Presumably that's a software update -- XtremeMac or Apple please!
• 16bit 22kHz mono is a bit too good for my purposes: 1.25Mb for 30s? What about an hour's lecture? 150Mb! It would be nice to have a range of quality settings and support for more than PCM WAV format (ADPCM at least would be nice.)
• Related niggle: The manual says it'll record in stereo from a stereo source. This seems to only happen in "high quality" mode (44kHz 16bit stereo PCM, even more space-hungry!) Why is stereo not an option?

So overall: Good. Does pretty-much what it says on the tin. Could be improved and I hope that in future the iPod software will be ... optimist? I waited 6 months for the µMemo ...

Update 25Aug06:

Unfortunately there is not a way to display a level meter. The reason there are only two recording formats is because this is the most that the iPod itself can support.

Customer Service Representative
XtremeMac

Boo...

Malboro.com: Inaccessible cigarettes

(Via The Daily WTF:) malboro.com has a bizarre way of selecting who to advertise cigarettes to! Their home page contains the following HTML and JavaScript (below). The headline WTF is that it doesn't work in any browser other than Internet Explorer since the JavaScript redirection relies on using MS's click() method (rather than the rest-of-the-world's onclick) ... but it's also completely inaccessible without JavaScript because it not only relies on IE-specific code to do the redirection but also encodes the redirection URL in the script ... so the link isn't even clickable! Non-IE users are presented with a blank page. The really crazy thing is the <meta> tag, which suggests that the redirecting home page was generated automatically by server-side code using Microsoft .Net! The days when pages were deliberately written to abuse specific browsers (e.g. Opera and the MSN-bork) are not gone they're just refining the technique so that it's exceptional ;-)

<html>
<head>
<meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">
<title>Coupons and special offers from Marlboro</title>

 <meta name="keywords" content="marlboro cigarettes, marlboro miles" />
 <meta name="description" content="" />
</head>
<script language=javascript>
<!--
function redirect()
{
 var anchorObj = document.getElementById("target1");
 anchorObj.href = "http://smokersignup.com/signup/index.jsp?pc=MAR2006";
 anchorObj.click();
}
//-->
</script>

<body onload="javascript:redirect();">
 <a id="target1" href="#"></a>


</body>
</html>

Perhaps it's deliberate? Only IE-users need cigarette advertising. Are non-IE users considered too intelligent to be fooled by it, or maybe they're all assumed to smoke Marlboro® anyway?!

V for Vendetta

Jeremy Keith has posted an excellent review of the Wachowski Brothers' film V for Vendetta, proving that as well as being a great JavaScript proponent (and an excellent speaker!) he's also thoughtful and literate … of course it helps that I agree wholesale with what he says ;-) but could not match his expressiveness! One thing to add: For me the central character of "V" was defined by his voice and as such it was an excellent performance by Hugo Weaving -- fantastic! (Unlike Jeremy I did see it in the cinema, where it was spectacular, and the audio at my local Odeon brought this to the fore. Some great friends just bought me the DVD for my birthday: many thanks, Jon+Katie!!)

Blackboard patent furore

What a surprise! (Not...) Blackboard merges-with/takes-over WebCT and lo! the company with the monopoly starts legal proceedings against its rivals ... It's a sickening situation: We rely on Blackboard's software to support teaching so we're "safe" as we're using software supplied by the monopolist but I can't help but worry that Blackboard's eponymous LMS, which is a definite "Web 1.0" application, will continue to develop ever-so slowly while the company stifles competition until there are no competitors (commercial or open source), whereupon Blackboard's development will stop :-(

At least there's an apparent groundswell of support for the defendants & room for some black humour that I quite enjoyed...

Update@11AM Apparently, according to an article in the Chronicle of HE referenced in wikipedia, Blackboard won't go after open source LMS's...

Microformats: So subtle, so light, so try some!

Ted Drake (from Yahoo! is that a cool, innovating company or what?) hits the nail on the head:  Microformats are so easy the only excuse for not using them is not knowing how to!

I've used PHP-driven vCards before but that's heavy ... in contrast, hCard is sooo easy, light on the mark-up and with something like Tails it becomes easily discoverable and usable! And if Steve Martin can use it it must be cool ;-)

Incidentally, Steve's provides an answer to a topic raised at @media2006: What about privacy? Simply ensure that only the information that you want to share with "the world" is in the hCard ... most is optional. Update 14Aug: And in response to something I heard about identity theft, mine no-longer contains my birth date 'cos (apparently) all someone needs is your full name, address and date of birth to do some mischief!

MicroMemo voice recorder for iPod

Argh!!! XtremeMac iPod Audio Accessories: MicroMemo for iPod with video how long must I wait??

It's been mentioned on Gizmodo twice now and the manufacturer's site currently says shipping this summer :'-( When I first got excited about it in January it was due in spring, then in June it was early July now it's f******g summer <groan> I've even pre-ordered one, I'm that keen...

Update: Hurrah! Mine arrived today, August 24^th & I'll make a more detailed post later...

@media 2006 feedback

Now that I've had time to take a breather, recover from my recent hectic schedule and the mad-rush of the "results period" has almost gone at work I've come up with some specific comments about @media, other than it being excellent ;-):

• Jeffrey Veen used a neat example of the presentation of information as part of his talk (e.g. see this photo by Jan Brasna on Flickr) where he progressed from an unsemantic table of meteorological data to an application allowing users to explore the data. As a meteorologist <grin> I refrained from commenting at the time that the final step, where the rainfall data values were replaced by graphics, was a bad idea (from my pov) ... but it depends on who your users are/what the data/application is for: I preferred seeing the values in the web app.; others might prefer the raindrop symbols, depending on the purpose. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't sacrifice accuracy at the expense of simplicity -- e.g. make it the user's choice whether they see the graphics or data...
• In the final panel session it was suggested that few, if any, educational institutions were sufficiently fast at adapting courses to reflect the latest trends in web development. Whilst I agree with that in general (typical approval processes mean it takes more than a year to get a new course up and running in the UK -- e.g. a colleague here is just starting to look at "Web 2.0" for a master's level course and it might be approved to start in September 2007!), modules on established courses can adapt quickly and so:
  1. my 2^nd year JavaScript module is up-to-date in that it teaches how to write scripts using DOM methods;
  2. my 3^rd year "advanced web design" module this year covered things like accessibility, unobtrusive JavaScript, CSS-based layout and content negotiation;
  3. new this year we started a 3^rd year module on XML, including XSLT, XMLDOM.
  Admittedly this is because there are a few standards enthusiasts in my Faculty, but that'd be the same everywhere ... So at least one institution in the UK offers a half-field in Computing that uses web standards in a majority of modules :-D [There are more of us out there! Check out this SimpleBits post...]

XHR progress towards standardisation?

Thanks to Jeremy Keith on domscripting.org for pointing this out: The W3C has published a draft for a specification standardising the XMLHTTPRequest object (upon which Ajax, Hijax, Lojax etc are based [in fact I thought I was making the latter up, but not so!])

Prompted by talking to Andy at @media, after a quick skim-read I can't see that they're standardising the this keyword inside event handlers :-( According to Flanagan (page 365), DOM2 doesn't so I guess we're stuck...

Bloody weather!

OK, I know us Brit's have a reputation for being weather-bores but I am a meteorologist ;-) so feel I should have some leeway: Bloody weather! It's too hot, I must work, we have lots of critical meetings at this time of year, virtually no air-conditioning, so it's been bad enough being too hot. Today, after the excellent thunderstorms (fab just being able to stand in the rain getting wet...) my damn optical mouse is sticking to the desk! Everything seems to be conspiring to make it difficult to work :-(

Meme: Web development skill levels ;-)

Kinda pointless but what's your level? My self-assessment is:

Levels of HTML knowledge

HTML Level 5

Levels of CSS knowledge

CSS Level 5

Levels of JavaScript knowledge

JavaScript Level 4½: Woohoo! with Jeremy Keith! :-D

JavaScript Level 4½ -- my definition:

var button = document.getElementById("hello");
button.onclick=function(event) {
    hello(WORLD);
}

Research: EuResist

Recently I've become involved with an EU research project entitled EuResist, which is an international collaborative effort whose goal is to create a system to predict patient response to HIV -- a radical direction change from my usual meteorology/statistics research! As it happens, I joined a multidisciplinary team here at Kingston University (KU) where I'm the "technical" guy (general databases, statistics, software, maths) in a team containing a microbiologist, a social/sports scientist and a statistician plus a PhD student doing the work. The social scientist was responsible for getting KU involved in the project; we three joined at the last minute when the project started and she realised she couldn't do the work alone.

The project had a successful meeting in Stockholm last week (beautiful city) where the microbiologist and myself presented the preliminary work done by the student, but primarily we were asking for clarification as to what our role in the project is. Happily we now know and will be able to make progress...

So why mention this here? Because (a) it's an example of the pressure lecturers are under to do collaborative research in addition to a full teaching load and (b) it happens to provide a bad example of cooperation & leadership for me to moan about  :

Our coordinator, the social scientist, accepted the project in summer 2005. It was only in January 2006 that she realised she needed a team to provide the necessary skills, so at the last minute (literally, 3 days over a weekend before the initial "kickoff" meeting) she asked the microbiologist, who asked me and I asked the statistician to join in. We (3 newbies) refused to rush to the kickoff meeting unprepared, and she refused to go too, so the team at KU was pretty-much left to our own devices until last week.

Moreover, 3 weeks ago the social scientist mentioned in a meeting with the PhD student how she "had been trying to get rid of the project since August"! (a) How demotivating for the student and (b) how underhand -- she never mentioned this when she roped us in but wants to step back, keep the kudos of having brought in the project, presumably get her name on publications, but do no work plus leave the administration for the remaining 3 of us to do!

As I said, bad cooperation and leadership; we'll see what we can do to keep her involved...

@media 2006

Five words are sufficient to describe this year's @media conference: even better than last year! Let's leave it at that for now...

Marking hell 2006

I've been too busy to blog for ages (too much work!) but had to 'share' this: It's that time of year again (marking hell: 2004, 2005), now 2006 but rather than moan about how much I have to do (I do!) I was momentarily amused by some indecipherable hand writing in my Databases and the Web exam ... what the student wrote is "this stage is about the layingaut the links" and what amused me was that he was probably thinking "laying out" but wrote using joined-up letters "layingaut" which is probably exactly as he'd pronounce it! OK, I am sad...

(Reminds me of my dad's favourite anecdote from years of A-level marking: One paper a couple of years ago had the same squiggle at the end of many lines. After pondering what the student was trying to say he realised that at the end of every sentence rather than finishing with a full-stop/period character the student wrote innit! I kid you not...)

The First Smiley :-)

Who says Microsoft staff don't have a nerdy sense of humour -- they found the first smiley :-) !

Now, who's wasted more money with this: them, for doing the research, or me for posting to my blog? Considering my salary & the industrial dispute surrounding it ;-) I reckon it's them!

The BFG, your cat's handy home-helper (Dr Fun)

There are times when only a Big Fraggin Gun will do ;-) [df20060426.jpg]

Activate electromagnet LOL

UserFriendly: Google must hand over all emails...

Boagworld Podcast 28: Understanding accessibility guidelines

Useful introductory explanation of the WCAG 1 guidelines: Podcast 28: Understanding accessibility guidelines ... Boagworld's a good podcast to subscribe to!

Plagiarism this year

(Apologies -- bad language ahead!)

Sadly we've just wasted a few more hours of valuable time (student+staff) convicting 9 students of plagiarism: They (or the person who did the work for them) copied it off the web.

So 9 students wasted ¼ of the 1^st term of their 2^nd year plus I (in my zeal or refusal to let them get away with it) wasted many hours of my time building cases and wasted several hours for each of 3 other staff members in and after the hearings themselves. Stupid!

Next year? No more bloody coursework!! Sorry, I know that continuous assessment is supposed to cater for diversity but in doing-so opens the door to those too lazy to learn the stuff and too cowardly to admit they don't know it and accept a poor grade (is an honest "F" better than an academic misconduct "Z"?!) So next year the coursework will be assessed using a computer-based test & I apologise in advance to those that are disadvantaged by this ...

Stop press! Some dumbass who was in my class in the 1st term has submitted 2nd term coursework instructions verbatim to rentacoder.com -- including the submission instructions! Cretin.

There was much wailing & gnashing of teeth & moaning & rude, disrespectful behaviour when my colleague announced the paper coursework would be assessed in a computer-based test as a result. Admittedly they'd had a shock but it's weeks before the deadline so lots of time to prepare & no excuse for being rude or disrespectful.

Horrifyingly, I think they don't even care that if we didn't do something about it there'd be a cheat getting an "A" dishonestly when they get whatever grade they deserve ... they just want to pass :-( Increase your self respect! Raise your expectations! Help us to not let the cheating fuckers devalue everyone's degree!

Another PhD in my School :-D

Congratulations to Rosie who (after a long struggle, overcoming lots of obstacles) got her PhD yesterday -- must celebrate in a more prolonged fashion than last night's quick trip to the pub ;-)

Miaow: Students bemoan 'unhip' lecturers

OK, I'm not "hip", cannot say "safe" in a convincing way, dislike the use of "mate" and have no idea what other "modern" slang I'm missing out on (ouch -- I'm mid-thirties and no-longer modern ;-) but this report from the BBC seems a bit sour-grapes: Students bemoan 'unhip' lecturers.

It's pretty funny that the BBC's CMS also brings-up a related article under "See also", now 3 years old, where lecturers were getting image consultants. "Give a firm handshake and look them in the eye" that'll solve all the problems we have with today's students? Well, you let me know how that goes ;-)

Choosing your subject: Avoid facts at all costs!

Stumbled upon this whilst checking-out MIT's amazing open courseware ... jolly nerdy fun :-) Sadly it seems to reflect the apparent trend towards A-Level subjects like Sociology and away from "hard" subjects like Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology!

@media 2006

Thanks to my mate Andy I heard about @media 2006 even before the email went out to those who attended @media 2005 and so I hope to go again this year :-D ... hope to convince the Dean that it's a valuable "curriculum development" opportunity (I learnt loads last year and am teaching a new module on standards-based, accessible web design in the coming term as a result.)

Firefox 1.5

Yippee! Firefox 1.5 supports SVG natively ... at last I'll be able to add SVG to my web technologies module next year (2006/7) :-D

Yes, I appreciate I'm slow off the mark ... it's a busy time of year! As penance, here's a link to a blog post stating that SVG is dead (on the desktop) ... and be sure to read the follow-up article ;-)