Peterbe.com

Great little resource for laughs and ideas on tele-marketing calls.

What is interesting isn't just the original blog post but all the following comments on that page. If you don't have the time to read them all you can at least read a handful.

I'm a fan of good web development ideas. At least different ones because they help us understand what works and what doesn't.

Then I found this website called HumanPosture.com which uses a documentation-like navigation to present all information on the website. From the front page there's a link in the bottom right hand corner that lures you into going to the next page. Before you know it you've clicked through on all 10 (or so) pages and finally returned back to the home page. These next links really work I think.

The whole navigation works like an online documentation site like for example this tutorial but the interesting thing is that the HumanPosture.com website isn't a documentation. It's a webpage filled with information like any other webpage. Notice also that there are no other distracting links anywhere. Unvisited links are blue, visited ones are purple and the logo is clearly located where it's supposed to be.

Well done HumanPosture.com! If I only had more time I'd read it too and not just focus on the web design :)

I'm so glad to see this! Being a big Calvin & Hobbes fan and especially the snowmen that Calvin makes I'm more than delighted to see that someone (else) took these things out into the snowy reality. The quality is surprisingly good; just a shame the blood-red-colour came out as pink.

A bit further down on the page are some contributions from other people. If I only had some snow, time and a park here in London then I'd contribute too.

An incredibly entertaining little site where they list all the best death scenes in movies of all times. From the website:

"Total Film Magazine (in the UK), in their July 2004 issue, provided an article on the 50 Greatest Movie Deaths throughout cinematic history. Their results below, based on a non-scientific poll taken from interviews with film critics, listed the 50 most highly-rated death scenes."

I must admit that they're all pretty good. Some films I haven't even seen. Personally I think the number 2 should have been number 1.

I seen to have totally missed this new Google service called Google Video. They

"Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows." The about page

I'll find this quite useful for searching info on my favorite TV show Seinfeld but the screenshots seem to pick up far too many adverts and other fluff. Look at this one for example.

As a web developer you have to balance how flash your site is going to be and how useable it is going to be to disabled people. Blind people are disabled, so when they surf the web, navigational and content hints that are hidden in the colour and layout is completely missed.

More importantly, these blind users often use a different computer setup which is very different. Some people use screen readers (e.g. Jaws) and some people use "basic" web browsers like Lynx or Links. These web browsers usually ignore all the added sugar to web pages and drills down straight to the content.

In recent code in the IssueTrackerProduct I needed to have a cgi parameter called remember-filterlogic so the URL might look like this: ListIssues?rememeber-filterlogic=no&Filterlogic=show. Because I want the cgi parameters to look human I had to write the following little utility function:

def niceboolean(value):
   falseness = ('','no','off','false','none','0', 'f')
   return str(value).lower().strip() not in falseness

It basically converts what you say to what you mean. In Python "f" is a one letter string and would normally mean True, but since humans are involved here it from means something else for a moment. What do you think?

I needed to write this little function because I need to add some parameters to a URL that I was going to open with urllib2. The benefit with this script is that it can combine a any URL with some structured parameters. The URL could potentially already contain a query string (aka CGI parameters). Here's how to use it if it was placed in a file called 'urlfixer.py':

>>> from urlfixer import parametrize_url
>>> parametrize_url('https://www.peterbe.com?some=thing',
                    any='one', tv="b b c")
'https://www.peterbe.com?some=thing&tv=b+b+c&any=one'
>>> 

I have all my emails duplicated, one sent to my POP3 box and one to my Gmail account. The POP3 box is checked from home using Thunderbird and when I'm at work I use Gmail. The problem with this set up is that it says, twice, that certain emails are unread which in reality they're not. I can live with this for the moment.

Until the other day I had not been using Thunderbird for a long time and when I returned I had 224 unread filtered messages in my inbox. Most of them I had read already on Gmail but several were new. This alerted me to a big flaw in Gmail: it's anti-spam filter.

First of all, let me tell you about CSS Zen Garden. It's a global community effort to showcase the power of design by CSS (Cascading StyleSheet). The HTML (XTML Strict for HTML-non-novice) is the same for everybody but every person who choose to do a design gets to define their own stylsheet. This is a wonderful addition to the whole Web Standards movement where the principle is simple: HTML for content, CSS for layout and design.

Now, this zengarden instance called Geocities 1996 by Bruce Lawson. You can read more about the design on his site. Bruce claims to get his inspiration from this site but I suspect that that site, like Bruce's, is a joke.