If, for example, you have a date input field, and you are going to automatically enter the separators between month, day, and year, just don’t allow the user to insert extras, only use the numeric keys entered, and ignore any extra key strokes. This is not rocket science people, seriously.
Archive for the ‘tech stuff’ Category
Think about your inputs
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Twitter and ustream = ipad fail
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012If you try to follow a link to a u-stream video feed, from the Twitter app, it basically locks up the entire iPad. Had to completely power it down, as it had stopped responding to double-home, so I couldn’t even just kill the offending app.
So that is why…
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012I only check my twitter feed about once a day, so sometimes I miss the beginnings of things. Like when a local jazz place started retweeting a bunch of #stoprush emails, it took some digging to find out they’d had an ad accidentally run during a Rush Limbaugh show. Without context, it seemed kind of odd.
Context is hard in 140 characters.
Scratch that, spelling and grammar are hard in 140 characters. Nuance and context are nigh impossible. Unless you are Emily Dickinson. Then you can do both. Most people on twitter are not Emily. Quite possibly 100%, if rumors of her death have not been exaggerated. Twain could probably twit a good tweet, too. But again, rumors of death are likely not exaggerated at this time, prior occasions not withstanding.
The end is here (for gmail)
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012The old look seems to have been well and truly kilt. While I have at least one account still signed in with the classic look, another account has been forced into the new look and no longer has the option of going back. Will there be a massive wailing and gnashing of teeth, or is this truly the non-issue that Larry thinks it is?
Ironically, for all the time they spent ‘fixing’ it before they forced it out, it’s still is broken and dysfunctional. Lines of text that are supposed to be at the bottom of the page, are instead showing up about 2/3′rds of the way down, leaving a massive ugly block of whitespace.
MySQL unexpected improvement of the day
Friday, April 13th, 2012I’m working on flattening my old blog, having made a local copy of the DB on a machine at home, to work on my export program in private. I’m doing a lot of poking around in mysql, querying the DB’s structure, because I haven’t touched it in so long, I forget all the details, though the original vision is still clear in my mind.
Anywho, my big discovery of the day is that mysql’s shell-editor supports tab completion for columns, tables, indexes, etc. Seems like that might be useful over time, as I learn to remember it is there.
You are not helping
Thursday, April 5th, 2012Me: I need you to move this call to fnX(), because it calls GWT.create, into the view layer, instead of the presenter layer.
Dev: Here, I replaced the call to fnX() with a direct call to GWT.create, still in the presenter layer.
How useful of you (AIX)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012Turns out you can re-size (at least if your are only growing) partitions on a live system, under AIX 7.1, even stuff like / and /var . Color me surprised.
Distorting Reality
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012There’s a distorting influence, within the realm of last.fm, if you are just about the only person who listens to a selection of musicians. The system marks them as similar, because you alone listen to them, even though there’s radical differences in actual style between the actual artists. So it’s amusing to see it say that Academy of St Martin in the Fields is a similar artist to Capone. I suppose they are both European.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012I’d seen the hype, but wasn’t planning on getting around to reading it any time soon, until a friend put it on their top-10 of the year list. Ready Player One