Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Last Day and A Thought

    The panel today went really well today. Bert showed of Cesar’s really cool Advanced Layout demo, Andy Clarke did a great presentation about the responsibility we have as web developers, and I did my CSS for Syndicated Content, which went pretty well. I got some good questions, and I don’t remember anyone walking out in disgust.\
    Andy and I got a sandwich afterwards, and had a good talk about a bunch of web-nerd topics.\
    Now, I’m back in the hotel, really tired (happens after every presentation), and just waiting for Big Brother to come on (can’t help myself), and IM’ing with folks. While doing that, I had a thought. Next time I travel, I’m taking a headphone-jack-to-RCA audio cable, and an s-video-to-RCA cable, so I can hook the Powerbook up to the hotel TV and watch all the crap I bring with me. My room has a perfectly nice DVD player in it, but it’s region 2, and all my DVD’s are region 1 (right now, it’s Homicide season one and the first two seasons of Buffy). I don’t want to sit at the desk and watch stuff, so it goes unwatched. But, if I could hook the Powerbook up to the TV, ta-da, whatever I want to watch on the big screen.\
    Just sayin’… next time, I’m bringing even more cables with me.

  • Presenting to The Webfather

    I just did my first presentation at WWW on our microformat, and who was in the audience, but Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web. There was a moment, sitting at the front of the room, waiting for my turn to present, that I got really nervous. I’m not normally nervous before I speak in front of a fairly small group (less than 100). This time, I was. I had a thirty minute presentation that I had to compress into 10, which didn’t help.\
    I think Friday’s will be easier. I get to talk about CSS, on stage with two people I know fairly well, and I have my full time. If you’re at the conference, Friday’s Style and Layout panel should be a lot of fun. I get to talk about the guidelines we set up for CSS in modules and themes in AIM Pages, and how that process has worked out for us so far.

  • Special delivery!

    I ordered Chinese food for dinner tonight and when I opened the door to collect it, there was a bouquet of flowers waiting for me. They were sent by my husband’s work thanking me for lending him to them during all of those late nights and weekends.\
    So thanks, husband’s work, for the flowers! It was very thoughtful and much appreciated.

  • WWW2006 and Me

    I’m headin’ to Scotland tomorrow for WWW2006, where I’ll be presenting twice:

  • AIM Pages and Safari

    I’ve seen this now a couple places, and figured I’d comment on it (not in an official way, but in a “I feel your pain” way). The current falderal is about AIM Pages and Safari and how it doesn’t work yet. We tried, honest we did. But, Safari has certain “issues” with its DOM support (it’s a standard, ya know) and other javascript features. We did our best to work around them and get things working, but when it came down to crunch time, we had to concentrate on the big two (Firefox and IE). We will support Safari. We’re actually very close, just have a few annoying things to work around and it’ll be done. We love Safari. All us Mac users on the team were really sad that we had to drop it for the first release. But, we had to.\
    It actually has very little to do with standards compliance. No modern browser is fully DOM 2 compliant. No modern browser is fully CSS 2.1 compliant. They all have quirks. We’ve found more one-line crash-causing javascript commands working on this project than I can count. We’ve found things to hate in all the browsers.\
    I used to think that browsers were in a pretty good place, especially Firefox and Safari. I was wrong. They’re all too slow, too quirky and aren’t reliable enough. They all crash too easily, take too much work to do things the “right” way, and in most cases, it’s actually better to do things the wrong way because that’s the way the browsers “like” it. For example, it’s way faster, takes less code and uses less CPU to use innerHTML than creating DOM nodes and appending them. If the right way’s not the right way, it’s the wrong way. Until the browsers actually reward using the standard, there isn’t much point. The rewards for using semantic and valid markup, and good CSS are well known. There aren’t a lot of rewards right now for using the DOM.\
    But, where was I? Oh yeah, Safari… we’re working on it.

  • Green!! House!! Widget!!!

    In other news, the two dashboard widgets I built last year and never got to release are up on the new AOL Greenhouse. When I get some more time, I might build some more. They’re not really polished (remember, I’m not a designer), but they work. If someone wants to give me a swanky design for either, I’d appreciate it. Cindy?

  • AIM Pages

    We’ve launched!! Hooray!! You can go check it out for yourself over here. If you want to create a profile, you can do that too. All you need is an AIM screen name (and who doesn’t have one of those?) to get started.\
    This project has been more fun than anything else I’ve done in my \~11 years at AOL. It was full of huge technical challenges, was a great place for us to try out new things, and the team was probably the best I’ve ever worked with. From product management to QA to Operations and the rest of the developers, everyone pitched in, went the extra mile, pushed themselves to find the best (or at least the one that worked) solution, and kept a good sense of humor about it all.\
    I started on this thing as a “consultant” and wasn’t supposed to write any code. I ended up:

    • joining the team responsible for it
    • writing a site’s worth of documentation
    • creating a microformat
    • coming up with a set of rules for writing CSS to accomodate modules, themes and user styles
    • writing almost a dozen modules (only some of which are actually live)
    • helping with dozens more, writing a bunch of themes, and making sure that over 60 themes were ready for launch.
    • spent late nights and weekends at the office debugging javascript
    • worked on convincing developers, management and design that web standards are the way to go
    • and discovered several one-line crashers for Internet Explorer (and one or two ways to make Firefox REALLY unhappy as well).\
      It’s not done, not by a long shot. There are still dozens of bugs and hundreds of features still to come. But, it’s a start. It’s all kinds of fun, not just for end users, but for developers too. One of my “secret” goals at the beginning of this project was to make module development easy enough that even “normals” could do it. And just this morning, sitting around a big conference table, there were three product managers talking about their modules. And my other secret goals? Here they are:
    • Get more people to learn the “right” way to write CSS.
    • Help microformats go mainstream.
    • Show the outside world that AOL can do innovative stuff, and that we support Open Source (we’re using the hell out of Dojo).
    • Show the outside world, and the internal development community, that using web standards don’t limit you. They help you. Creating modules for our product is so much easier than creating them for live.com, dashboard or Google Homepage. Why? Because microformats are “just” HTML.\
      There you go. Go play. And while you’re at it, check out my profile.\
      Oh, and for all you Digg folks, I Am Alpha is not AIM Pages.

  • Just to Clarify

    If you’re coming here from Digg, you may have the wrong idea about me. I’m not the “leader” of anything. I’m a contributor to the project and helped design the nerdy bits behind a lot of it. But, I’m not in charge of nothin’. I’m just a nerd who loves web standards (I designed the microformat behind the modules), and who hasn’t gotten enough sleep in the past two months to say more than that without doing irreparable to my employment status.\
    Oh, and if you’re looking at I Am Alpha, that’s not the real thing. It’s just a place to test out modules. It’s not meant for consumers, and we periodically nuke the pages created there (especially when we roll out new code).\
    The Paid Content article has a lot more detail about what’s coming and says more than I can right now.\
    Stay tuned for more info. After we launch the real thing, I’ll be able to talk a lot more about it.

  • Weekend Update

    Max had another soccer game on Saturday. He has so much fun there, I have to recommend it to all parents of young children. It is so much more interactive and physically demanding than tee-ball or little league. (It’s practically non-stop running for an hour, instead of standing around waiting to bat or for someone to hit the ball your way.) It’s kind of hard to watch though, because he tends to stop paying attention. Which is fine since he is only 6, except I want him to pay attention and get better. But I don’t want to be one of those overzealous parents you hear so much about. In practice all of the boys seem to be getting better at the basic skills, but come game time, they just kind of do a “Lord of the Dance” imitation when they get near the ball. If the teams kept score, you’d note that they are relatively high-scoring though because 1) we don’t use goalies and 2) once a kid makes a good kick, he can usually follow it through to the goal because there is almost no defense on the field.\
    Yesterday was the first day in nearly a week that I didn’t have a horrible headache plaguing me all day. Also, Kevin only worked 11 hours. Coincidence? I think not.\
    Tonight is the series finale of 7th Heaven. Sniff. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on this horribly written and horribly acted show. The fans will miss the many non-interesting story lines filled with hypocrisy, manipulation, backstabbing, and outright lying. I guess they’ll just have to pay more attention to the Bush Administration to get their fill from now on.\
    In Brian news, he has been wearing only one sandal for almost 2 hours. I don’t know why.\
    Kevin told me he gets teased by coworkers about my numerous Veronica Mars posts. Hmm, I guess this means I shouldn’t post my thoughts on under-wire bras.

  • Notes to Self

    • Things that are funny at 11:30 at night, in the office, after working 12 hours a day, seven days a week for over a month, are not funny during the day.
    • Things that are funny on a Sunday afternoon when you’re in the office for the 19th day in a row really shouldn’t ever be repeated again.
    • And those impressions? Not funny. Actually, they’re probably really offensive.
    • Oh, and no more caffeine for you. That headache? That’s why.
    • And eat some freakin’ vegetables, maybe some fiber. You’re a mess.