Tuesday 30 January 2007

Rest in peace

We never gave you another chance, but I think twenty years was enough.
You fucked up bigtime, and now your children no longer care.

How did it feel to lose everyone in your life? For your family and
friends to stay away?
How did it feel to be the most intelligent man in your family, but the
only one to die alone?

You considered me dead ten years ago. And I saw you likewise.
But now I don't need to do any considering anymore.

I don't like myself at this very moment. Gloating. Relieved. Almost thankful.
I am not a good human being right now. I loathe myself this very second.

I do not want to feel this way. But I feel it still. You made me so.

Jose Gonzalez: Love Will Tear Us Apart

I don't know what it is, but he's got it. He doesn't seem to be as burdened with the legacy of this song. The New Order version just has too much fucking baggage, and inevitably triggers all these comparisons with the original. How could it not?

This guy just goes and does it, almost as if he's in a hurry, with a voice that reminds me a little of Ian Curtis - deep, and monotonous - the kind of voice you'd expect announcing the arrival of a new train, or paging somebody on the hotel PA.

I must admit, if it was Ian Curtis's voice announcing the coming train, maybe I wouldn't get on it.





R.I.P. to the ones who have left without joy from this world.

Thursday 18 January 2007

Interesting book on website accessibility

http://joeclark.org/book/

Found while doing a search on a problem I've been having with a page
containing two forms, and they both have an input textbox with
tabindex="1".

The problem: One form on the page contains a search box, and the other
is a form for posting comments. Now what happens is when I'm in the
comment form, at the first textbox, when I press tab to get to the
next textbox, I end up going to the search box instead, I think
because it has tabindex="1" also.

And his advice is:

http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter12.html

"Of course, if there's a search field on every page but the content of
the page in question consists of a separate form not duplicated
elsewhere, then that big form is what takes precedence."

Though there's no advice on what to do about the conflicting tabindex
values. Maybe I should just experiment and see how it works out. Hmm..
interesting idea.

I like what he has to say about "Reset" buttons:

"In general, Reset buttons are a miserable idea. Real-world visitors
are quite likely to hit the button by accident and wipe out everything
they have entered in the form. Web developers seem to include Reset
buttons because HTML makes it easy. I've been online since before
there even was a Web and I can tell you categorically that I have
never once found a Reset button that truly needed to be there."

Friday 12 January 2007

Taking Back Sunday: 12 Days of Christmas (animation)

This video actually got me thinking about the song, and how weird those gifts really are! Imagine, you get birds for the first four days, then jewellery, then geese, swans, maids, dancers, lords, pipers, drummers. I'm surprised they thought the geese were "laying", as in getting it on. Birds lay eggs! What are kids thinking these days.

If this was made in the early 20th century, you'd probably call this "surrealist". But these days, we just say NIIIIIIIIICE. Watch for cameos from Jerry Garcia and Gollum.

Sunday 7 January 2007

New Year's resolution?

I'm not in the habit of making New Year's resolutions, but if I was, I might include this:

Babies laughing - always cute, always works!

Found the perfect vid to cheer me up after my despairing rant about h8rs on YouTube:



Turn up the volume, for best cheering up effect!

Wanted: YouTube h8r cancelbots/ crowd-moderation

YouTube, til recently a cause of great joy and wonder, is now turning into an embarrassment and cause for despair. Why? "leet h8rz" speech. Almost *any* post that gets popular enough is certain to receive shitloads of hateful comments. You can't call it criticism, and "comments" is giving it too much weight. It's more like cowardly sniping by morons, hiding behind their usernames.

David Pogue on the NY Times wrote something recently about the decline of Netiquette, so the issue's been lingering in my head and I'm wondering if this is all just being alarmist or if it's actually getting worse.

I was just looking at a video of a baby smiling after it farted (it was a YouTube Featured video okay, I didn't look for it!) and it has received a 1million views and around 2000 comments. Most of the comments consist of - "ugh! this is so gay", "faaaake!", "this baby should've been aborted", "ignorant white trash dads". Oh come on! Whatever happened to babies being cute and adorable and undeserving of such trash talk?



Then I clicked on a similar vid, of a Spanish baby making farty noises with its mouth (it's a whole new genre for short film!), and what do we get? Racist taunts about Mexican immigration! Fucking hell. Doesn't take long to get the rats coming out of the woodwork.




Was looking at another one where this Vietnamese-Australian girl was complaining about "bogans" causing a disturbance on public transport , and sure enough, after a day or two, out comes the comments along the lines of "If you don't like it, go back to your country", "Your ancestors were savages in rice paddies", "Me love you long time suckee suckee".



I think there should be another law similar to Godwin's law, a YouTube version of it, stating that "As the number of comment pages on a video goes past 4 and there's any indication that the person in the video is not a white American, the probabilty of a racist comment approaches 1."

Anonymity is the reason why juvenile idiots, racist scum, and plain old jerks are able to pour out their hate (and I use that word repeatedly because that's what it is) without any regard for the consequences of their speech. I'm pretty sure people would at least think twice before spewing this much bile and filth if they had to use their real names to make a post.

Of course, those with underdeveloped IQs and potty mouths would be doing it - but how long would you persist if you knew that everyone in the world, or at least everyone you would ever meet from that point on - friends, future schools, universities, employers, would-be lovers - would be able to Google your name and see what an asshole you really are.

I can't see why Google, having spent truckloads of money to buy YouTube, would just sit by and let it get clogged with all these moronic, hateful comments. Given the collective IQ at that place, can't they find a way to institute some form of self-policing by the public, or have a system where certain users can get responsibility for controlling the comment flood. Slashdot and Digg have crowd-moderated systems, and WikiPedia still seem to be successful with a system that everyone can still edit - so what's YouTube gonna do?

This is the user-generated content that Time voted as "Man of the Year"? Nice one.

Friday 5 January 2007

Preventing a page from reloading when using onClick event in a HREF

The hyperlink is often used instead of a button to run a javascript method using the onClick() event of a link with a value of "#"

<a href="#" onclick="someMethod();">This Does Something</a>

However this also reloads the page, which may result in loss of some changes performed by someMethod(). For example, if someMethod() changes the display of page elements -- a page reload will result in the page looking like it was *before* someMethod() was called.

To prevent this, it's good practice to return false to the onclick event, similar to the way we return false to onsubmit event in a form, where we don't want the form to submit.
so we either:

1. Modify someMethod() to return a value of false and change our HREF to:
<a href="#" onclick="return someMethod();">This Does Something</a>

2. Or add a return false; after calling someMethod(), like so:
<a href="#" onclick="someMethod(); return false;">This Does Something</a>