Who You Calling A Jesse?

Next week (December 4th) sees two pretty exciting campus conferences happening. The first is WatITis – a one day conference for IT staff at the University of Waterloo. Would you believe there are just over 300 IT staff at Waterloo working in dozens of different departments? This will be the first year I am not presenting (current job’s stuff isn’t presentation ready yet) and I am not sure I will have time to attend… but it is a really good event.

The following day is the Power of IDEAS conference. This one is open to anyone for a really low price (below $100 for off campus folks, free to on campus people) and focusing on inclusive learning strategies, usability, and accessibility. Derek Featherstone did the keynote for the first one in the summer of 2006, this year he returns for the closing keynote. I will be presenting on building usable web applications and will offer a glimpse of what I am doing in the lower level of the TC as well as some reflection on other higher education home pages and other applications I have worked on over the years.

Keep an eye on the Power of IDEAS conference. Lead by the Office for Persons with Disabilities office, it will only grow (this year there are over 90 people from off campus registered, last year we had around 20). I think it is just great that a conference dedicated to promoting accessibility and usability.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)

In what is probably the silliest post I have seen on 37Signals blog, they ask Is formal education important? The response?

“We’re more interested in someone’s experience, real work, and point of view than we are with their diploma, degree, or GPA. Formal education is probably last on our list of qualities we feel make someone qualified to work at 37signals.”

They aren’t saying a formal education doesn’t count but they do under state the value of higher education. I think it’s a common misunderstanding that higher education is about specific skills training. But I suppose higher education means different things to different people.

To me it’s about thinking outside of your comfort zone, meeting different people with radically different beliefs/values/etc, and gaining strategies/techniques that enable effective life long learning. Is it for everyone? No. You can certainly gain a similar value through work experience. But that takes some luck.

Update: What I do want to point out is that if you are up for a job against some one with the similar personality, same experience, skill, and passion and they have a degree and you don’t… guess who will likely get the job?

Last night (but dated today) an article on how the iPhone comes with a cost for Rogers appeared on the Globe and Mail web site. The article points out how Apple was able to simplify the silly billing practices of mobile carriers in the US and the EU (the iPhone launching in the EU November 9th). They compare the equivalent bill in Canada for the unlimited data/voice at $70 a month (leaving out the AT&T monthly charge with the exchange rate is actually lower in the US). Sadly in Canada if you try to use the data people have been seeing on their iPhone you could go well over $1000 a month. In theory, that is why Apple has not released the iPhone in Canada yet.

I know of a few people with an iPhone in Canada. Some not using their data, others lucky (or silly for paying that premium for so long) enough to have kept the old Fido (a GSM carrier that didn’t have long term contracts then either) unlimited data plan that was around in 2000 before the phones that would use said data were really in use.

Personally I think the iPhone is cool but the lack of iPhone in Canada doesn’t mean the carriers suck. It is the fact they refuse to have phones that are less than a year on the market in the US (never mind Europe), have wifi, with a two year plan still costs hundreds of dollars, and don’t in reality cost close to $150 a month if you actually use them for talking, texting, etc. Their inability to change this practice when the profits of AT&T, likely in part thanks to the iPhone, are stated is what makes them suck. Then of course there is the possibility that Canadians think both Bell and Rogers (CDMA and GSM carriers and our only real choice) are terrible companies in terms of customer service and technology adoption/reliability and that alone means they suck. They could be happy with the money they are making and fear change but that should mean the CRTC needs to stop protecting them and open up the market, now!

I have seen it stated before but I will say it here too… Apple’s big coup with the iPhone is not the technology, it is taking the position to tell the carriers to stuff it and change or loose out on the coolest technology out there (according to Apple’s marketing machine). One lesser mentioned observation I have had is that Nokia (and Motorola) is also sending a message to carriers but in a more subtle way, they are selling their phones unlocked for a decent price in North America (at least). With the US/CDN exchange rate just drop into a Nokia store in any trendy US mall ;) You will still be screwed on the data plans but you can always just use wifi where you can, maybe a little VoIP.

I can’t believe this but apparently if you are working some PHP or ASP files that have some HTML in them Dreamweaver CS3 is not going to like you. Adobe has a Tech Note on the issue and it only effects Windows users with CS3. I simply can’t imagine why that would do anything… but if you are swearing at Dreamweaver CS3 crashing after the time change, this is why.

Just a short post to mention my software set up. It involves running Leopard with VMware (which I now find better than Parallels) on top running Vista. Where it gets fun is with Leopard’s Spaces. I have one space for Vista and snap back to the other spaces with other stuff.

What I have found hard to get use to with Spaces is that if you have an application (browser) in one space, then you can’t really create a new one in another space. Clicking on the icons in the dock fling you back to the original spot. It takes some getting use to but I really like it.

Running Vista on VMware works really well in its own space. You can use the ctrl arrow keys still and apps like Office 2007 seem to run just as they do on a Dell laptop.

Overall a good experience with Leopard so far. It is a nice update…