Blog Standard Stuff

Following a very successful event in Birmingham a little while back (despite Bruce’s vivid imagination), the people behind Public Sector Forums have recalled the same team to put on another show in London . That team includes Bruce Lawson, Ann McMeekin, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Dan Champion and myself. We’ll be speaking at the Barbican on the 8th of August and would love to see you there.

Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!

I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.

Interested? Find out more on the PSF site and you can book your place here (and please mention ‘Accessify’ in the booking form when asked how you heard about it, even if you did read about it here – thanks!).

There’s an exellent post over on Joe Clark’s site today entitled Advice for presentations: It happens! In this lengthy piece (well, this is Joe!), Joe imparts some of his knowledge on what makes for a good presentation and how to deal with things when they go a little (or quite badly) wrong.

I’m pleased to report that I can tick most of the boxes where preparation is concerned, but I wanted to elaborate on one point that Joe makes regarding setting up browsers in advance for anything that you want to demonstrate. My advice – don’t.

In my experience, most of the conferences that offer wireless connectivity suffer almost from the word go, such that good connections – or any connection at all – cannot be guaranteed. Thankfully, it’s never happened while I’ve been presenting, but I cannot say how many times I’ve seen people presenting visibly flapping because their idea of showing off a feature of site A or site B has to be cancelled becaue they can’t connect. And even when there is a connection, the mere fact that you may have 800 eyeballs staring at you means that when you are trying to do something like fill out a form, you will make stupid mistakes, you will fumble, you will find it uncomfortable as there is silence while you wait for the browser to do something.

So, I’d like to add to Joe’s already excellent list of tips with one of my own: pre-record anything that you want to demonstrate.

In many presentations that I’ve given of late, I’ve used screencasts embedded in my slides. I can do however many takes I have the time and patience for at home, keep that video file for the presentation and re-use later. In that screencast, I make sure to allow for live explanation of what’s happening – usually accompanied with a circular motion of the mouse around the section I might want to refer to – and when presenting it, the cursor is in itself a prompt for me to describe that feature. Another advantage of this approach is that you *know* how long the demo portions will take, which makes timing as a wholemuch easier.

There’s no problem with lack of internet connection, although you have to be aware that if you rely heavily on the visuals, a hard drive failure or other similar disaster means that you will not be able to wing it using notes alone (but, again, you can prepare by having backups of slides on a key drive, and even a backup ‘pooter).

So, that’s my way of doing things, and it really makes presenting so much more stress-free :-)

And before I get flamed for that, I’m making a direct reference to one of Apple’s memorable announcements in days past, namely the time that iTunes was announced for Windows users. Mac fans around the world grumbled that their nice little music library application was being shared amongst the great unwashed but soon got over it. "They can have our iTunes, but they’ll never have our wonderful iLife apps or super-fast Safari".

Well, looks like we need to have another re-think.

So, one of the announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference in San Francisco was that Safari was going to be available for Windows users after all. The press release boasted that is is the "fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2". How reliable those claims are may be tested over the coming days.

But what does this mean to the world of web standards? The browser wars were played out a long time ago – does this mean that the ceasefire has been broken? Is it a new front being opened up or is it simply a minor skirmish that the rest of the world can turn a blind eye to?

I don’t have the answers – I was surprised as many people, blindly assuming that Safari would always and ever be a Mac-only piece of software – and I can’t claim to be massively excited about the prospect of using Safari on Windows. Or at least not until such a time as Firefox extensions, such as the indespensible Web Developer Toolbar, can be made to work in Safari but that’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But that said, I think it’s a good thing:

• No more will testing for Safari be left until the last moment (or at all) – finally developers can check their work early on
• If it really is faster to render pages, that can only be good for the user
• Mac users will benefit too, as it will become more difficult to reject support problems on Safari with a simple "Ah but that’s just a certain percentage (Safari users) of an already small percantage of users (Mac users)"

So, what’s your take on this announcement? Exciting? Will it change the browsing landscape massively? Or are you just thinking "meh, whatever".

Another silly little video of the dog. She makes some of the strangest noises – more so than any dog I have ever owned before – and when you blow on her face she goes super high pitched. Note that while she does have her mouth open here and is right up close to my face, she is *not* trying to bite me! Once again, enjoy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK7BzB-3Jbg]

[tags]fraggle, terriers, cairn terriers, squeak[/tags]

Well, the crux of this post is right there in the heading, but that’s not all I wanted to write about.

Yesterday was the day that we said our final goodbyes to dad. If you read my previous post on this blog, you’ll know that my relationship with my dad was, like the rest of my family’s relationship with him, not a typical one. Nonetheless, I wanted to be there for his funeral (or rather cremation); it was the right thing to do even if I hadn’t had much to do with him in recent years.

I allowed almost 3 hours to make the journey from Swindon to South London – plenty of time, or so I thought. I had imagined I’d be there an hour early, having a cup of coffee with my brother somewhere near the venue. But as I reached the first Reading  junction on the M4, the traffic slowed down to a crawl, with all three lands almost at a standstill and remained like that for the next 30 minutes. My ‘buffer’ was disappearing fast. When I reached the next motorway exit, I decided to come off, loop around the roundabout at the top and use that as an opportunity to get a look further ahead up the M4 to see if it cleared ahead. It didn’t (and now I know what the cause of the delay was) so I diverted to Basingstoke, took the M3 up to London, back on the M25 and then on to the M4 again taking me into central and then south London, all the while watching my estimated time of arrival (according to Satnav) slip further and further back. It went to 1:05pm (the service was at 1pm) but with my foot down I managed to squeeze it down to 1:00pm exactly. I never saw It creep back to 12:59 and once I hit central London it only started to slip back again.

I knew, in my heart of hearts, that being a bit late would not change his ‘present condition’, but I really wanted to be there to hear what my brother had to say at the service. We got there at 1:15, and walked in to the venue to the sounds of Andreas Bocelli’s "Time to Say Goodbye". I’d caught the closing credits, you could say.

Afterwards, we made our way a short way across south London to a café (it was a low-key affair), where Manda and I, my brother and partner, Sandy (one of my dad’s previous partners and someone who went through so much of the mad moments with dad) and a handful of dad’s recent friends and neighbours joined us. It wasn’t the traditional wake – there was no heavy boozing (somehow, that didn’t seem appropriate), instead we had baguettes and coffees and just talked about some of the funny moments in dad’s life, his unending wit and the crazy/dark moments he had.

Andy (my brother) has said to me in the past that we should try to write some of this stuff down for prosperity, combining it with some of the other characters he’s known in his life. And I suppose in some way I can do that here – there were some things that I hadn’t heard before that made me laugh and some that really shocked me. I heard the story about a bar he was sat at once, a bar that had underneath it some hooks to hang handbags on. He fell off his bar stool – probably not for the first or last time – but on his way down managed to catch himself on one of the hooks. By his nose! For what probably seemed like a slowed-down comedy moment to others (but a slowed-down moment of sheer agony for him), he hung there for a moment before the nostril gave way to the inevitable. Ouch. Then there was the time that Sandy answered the door to dad who had been sleeping rough for some weeks: "Can I use your toilet?" he asked, to which Sandy said yes. Some time later, Sandy went up to investigate why he was taking so long to discover him taking the side panel off the bath – he must have had a flash of inspiration weeks after last leaving the house, remembering that he’d hidden something in there: a stash of vodka. I imagine the scene as he stood there at the door asking to use the toilet, screwdriver in hand (that wasn’t how it was, I was just thinking of the absurdity of it all)! Sandy probably has so many other stories of his crazy times, due to the alcoholism. One New Year’s Eve he told her that he would be back by midnight (yeah, right) but ended up back at 2am, handcuffed to two policemen who wanted to search the house. They uncovered a gun and Sandy was not entirely sure whether they believed that she wasn’t complicit in some way! Turns out he’d tried to pull (or had pulled) off a bank robbery, for which he’d later do time. Another time after an argument, he’d threatened to shoot them both! Sandy wisely decided to go for a walk and let him cool down. When she returned she discovered holes in the wall and thought to herself "that’s a funny place to make holes for the radiator pipes", as he was in the process of fitting a radiator. Later when moving the sofa about, a couple of bullets fell to the floor. Crazy times indeed.

The weird thing is that despite the tragic aspects of his life, we were all able to sit there ourselves and have a laugh about it, even Sandy who’d witnessed some of his most bizarre behaviour. I was glad that I’d gone up to the service and the aftermath. I was also pleased to discover that regardless of his darker moments, he did have a group of people who he called his friends and who thought John was a real character, a funny guy who would, to use one of their word-for-word quotes, "be sorely missed". The truth is that it’s much easier to forgive friends and drinking acquaintances for their various foibles than it is close family. Friends can make new friends, they can decide who they wish to associate with and they can more easily overlook parts of their friends’ lives that don’t fit with their moral code. With family it’s different, it doesn’t work like that. The irony is that had dad been the funny guy who lived next door to me and who I occasionally chatted to while nipping out for a pint of milk, the old guy with the colourful past and the raft of amusing anecdotes, rather than my dad, I probably would have got on better in recent years.

So, now the deed is done. All that’s left is for us is to work out how we collectively pay for the service (not surprisingly, there is pretty much nothing in the ‘estate’ that he leaves behind, aside from letters, photos and other memorabilia) and for his ashes to be scattered. He’ll finally settle somewhere over a cliff-edge in Cornwall, a place that he loved as a young adult, when he would take us on camping trips as a family, before the various demons took hold. 

There’s the saying "You come into the world with nothing, you leave with nothing -  you can’t take anything with you" (or words to that effect). I get the sentiment, but most people do leave something behind, even if it is a bit of material wealth that is passed on . But in dad’s case, there really is nothing left behind – other than us, his children. He apparently wrote in a letter to one of his sisters in the past something along the lines of "It’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you leave behind", a bit of a twist on the earlier saying. It’s almost as if he had admitted and accepted his failures in life but acknowledged that he had indirectly left a mark, be that by his children or by the impact he may have made on friends.

And now I’m wondering quite how to finish up this entry and drawing a blank, so I’ll just leave it at that. Oh I know what else I wanted to say: do you know if there’s any way I can find out if I’ve fallen foul of any speed cameras? In my mad journey up to the crematorium, I think I may have been over the speed limit in a couple of spots as I desperately tried to make it to the crematorium. I may have to write a pleading letter or two, but for now I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Just to provide a polar opposite to my last post, here’s a silly little 40-second video of the stupid dog and her irrational fear of feathers. Enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCk-NHYVQFg]

[tags]fraggle, terriers, cairn terriers, feathers[/tags]

I wish I could say that I will miss you. I wish I could pontificate about what a great man you were, how you were an inspiration to us all and how anyone would strive to be half the man you were, but we both know that’s not the case. Sadly – for all of us.

When I heard the news that you had shuffled off this mortal coil, my initial reaction was "Oh, so it finally happened then – took yer time, didn’t you?" On one hand I felt guilty for responding like this, yet on the other hand I know that because of your actions, I couldn’t really feel any other way.

Later that day, I withdrew into myself a little, feeling sad. Not sad at losing a father as others would, but sad at what might have otherwise been, sad that I wasn’t able to really feel sad (if you catch my drift) and sad that you spent the last years of your life in what I would consider to be very sad circumstances. Yes, that was a lot of use of the word ’sad’ there, but that’s how it all ended up.

I was mentally recalling picture’s from mum’s photo album – you remember mum? She was the one you used to slap about when you first started drinking – where you were building the extension on the house in which I was born. I can see you in that photo looking all proud – you had a wife, 3 children, a good sized house and a good job. Things were only on the up, and how might things have been if that good upward curve had continued in that fashion?

My early memories of you are blocked. I cannot remember the screaming rants and the violence – either I was asleep, too young or my own mind decided to file that away in a corner somewhere never to be found again – but I know they happened. My memories of you as a child are of that person who visited when he wasn’t working out of the country somewhere exotic ( Saudi Arabia – was that for the work and money alone or did you choose to work in a ‘dry’ country on purpose?) and who always came with gifts. My first brand new bike (a Raleigh Boxer) that was from you, as was the first tape recorder, and I have to give credit for my early interest in music – I was the only person in my class at the age of 8 years who could claim to ‘be into Kraftwerk’, thanks to the pirate tapes that you used to get out there and bring back.

In later years, as I grew older and was more able to understand your illness, so did your inability to be able to deal with it despite numerous occasions where people who loved you tried their darndest to help you through. There was the accident that nearly killed you (Mr Indestructible), your cry for help dive into the River Thames, your bank robbery shenanigans and the ensuing prison terms and of course the ongoing AA meetings. We tried to help but along the way and over successive years you managed to alienate everyone until all you had left was a flat in Peckham that you didn’t own and some drinking buddies who, while perhaps not angels themselves, were well aware that you could be a problem once you had a drink inside you.

You had something about you – I’ve described it to people in recent days as ‘a spark’, perhaps a cheeky glint in your eye. You were funny and always a practical person, good with your hands (even while in Prison … learning how to use the computers to make Fake IDs that later got you in to trouble, ah such fun and games!). You were intelligent too, but obviously that was not enough to tell yourself that what you were doing was affecting you and everyone else around you, such that when you died you had little contact with any of your family. When I think of what happened on the night you died – waking from sleep with breathing difficulties, effectively drowning in your own lungs before having a heart attack – and realising that the person you called from your little one-bedroom flat was a support worker, not one of your sons, your daughter, one of your sisters or a wife/partner, it makes it seem even more sad. As we ready ourselves for a Christening this weekend for baby Freddie, I cannot help but reflect on how badly things can go wrong, that one day you were like this too, cradling a child and wishing the best for him/her (and I think we all turned out pretty well, despite anything else that might have happened). I would hate to think that anything in our lives – as in your children’s lives – could ever cause us to be in the situation that you ended up in. Actually, now I think of it you have been inspiration of sorts – you’ve showed us exactly what we should not do.

So, farewell dad. I may never understand the demons in your head that caused you to go so massively off the rails and I hope that if there is an afterlife that you get a better crack at it next time around, for you and everyone who knows you.

So Tony Blair is on his way out. Aiiiiigggght

Thank you, BBC News, for another fine piece of imagery.

That is all.

As spotted in a feed somewhere in my masses of news feeds this morning, the new AOL page – looks quite a bit like Yahoo!, doesn’t it?

Click on the thumbnail to see a comparison (it’s a 2.8mb animated gif).

[Note - I was accessing AOL's site from work and it appears to be missing some content blocked by the firewall, but you can still see the similarity]

Another fine example of BBC news editors for the website using related images without thinking beyond the obvious. In this piece about wireless security, we learn that WPA security can be cracked but only through brute force attacks (throwing all manner of words from a dictionary until you get the correct answer). So they helpfully provide this image:

The caption reads ‘Long passwords can thwart dictionary attacks’

What, long words like ‘home’ and ’straight’? or ‘home theater’? Ooh, ooh, I got it! ‘Homesteading’ – nobody will ever get that one.

Looks like a case of "We have space for a picture, just put any old crap in there", to me!