24 Feb 2006
Microsoft are now playing ball. They’re “getting” this whole cluetrain gig, even formalising their enactment of it into a conference billed as a 72-hour conversation. They’re doing blogs. They’re lightly, if at all, moderating those blogs. And they’re responding to content on those blogs as appropriate (that is, ignoring the absolute rubbish and closed-mind-open-source-supporting-nerds).
In every way what they’re doing and what they’re changing is absolutely awesome. As an IT company maybe it’d be fair to say they’ve got a headstart on the rest of the world. They’re certainly doing better than MSM are.
Say, for example, there was a social networking/photo site to be integrated into a TV programme’s community site: one that’s meant to actually connect with viewers, and falls under “Community” in the network’s structure — not the one that mindlessly pushes top-down content. And that because of concerns about moderation — chiefly stemming from the notion that public identities are untouchable and sacred in the network eye, and the arrogance that comes as a part of that –, the only advantages (politics and free bandwidth because of deep-linked photos aside) of integrating an external photo service are negated, and users have absolutely no incentive to sign up for a wider Yahoo! sign-on (which would allow them to comment on photos at Flickr, amongst other things).
So MSM structures are still winning. I expected this would be the case. I think it’s going to take another five years before people can get over themselves enough to realise that allowing people to comment (not anonymously — that was never on the cards!) isn’t an intrinsically dangerous thing. The idea that the greater fool is the one stopping to make flippant disparaging (even just seemingly so!) remarks about people they’ve never met is, in fact, turned on its head by the recognition of such remarks. To acknowledge a fool’s power surely isn’t the most intelligent thing one could do in response.
I digress. The point is, for as long as they’re thinking they have any chance of controlling what’s going on, this isn’t going to work. Wanna stop people commenting on a photo you stuck up on Flickr? Sure thing, feel free to disable it. If the comment is of consequence they’ll blog it anyway and the damage is out there and you’ve got a hell of a lot more work to do if you want to purge that blight on your carefully-constructed-cult-of-celebrity-image from the web… and if it’s not of consequence they won’t bother to publish it anywhere else, and, in all probabilitiy, it wouldn’t have done a great deal of harm were it to be published in the photo’s comments anyway. In many ways, inline commenting is actually a more restrictive form of social interaction in the online sphere because it’s centralised. I’m advocating it here because the audience has appalling electronic literacy (which is, I take it, typical of the bulk of the Australian population still: even if the SMH writes about blogs, only people who blog will bother to read an article that has “blog” in the headline… and then they’ll go and blog about it), so the blog thing is still, probably, 5 or so years off hitting “mainstream” audiences. (Incidentally, anyone proclaiming the death of radio/rise of podcasting should similarly anticipate no-one is even knowing what they are talking about for a similar period of time — and no, the fact that iTunes has an obscure feature doesn’t help matters).
Must finish with this priceless grab from a weekly newsletter, regarding viewer-directed content chosen via an online survey: “We always say our show is your show, so I think this segment makes a lot of sense.” And yet they’d rather not give viewers a voice at all. This isn’t giving viewers a say, it’s allowing them to effectively switch meta-channels (almost, presuming they’re voting with the majority). The segment makes sense from a MSM perspective, but the farcical nature of this “openness” comes to light pretty quickly as soon as any truely multi-directional communications channels come into play.
I think it’s going to be great fun watching “them” (MSM generally) slowly come to terms with this idea over the next couple of years. MSM isn’t going away, but I think any of these “social” shows are going to flop unless they radically re-think strategies (hybrid broadcast/Internet model, anyone?) or stop pretending…
A quick note: I haven’t mentioned anything by name here because, well, no-one else is bothering to blog about the site in question (an earlier blog post is on the first page of results for a particular keyword, I’d rather not do that again!) Actually it’s kind of funny because my site + semantic markup, etc., is blitzing the network’s core site (i.e. not our ancillary community site) in search engine rankings (well, Google at least, heh), but I digress! Not that I’ve written about anything sensitive… everything here is digested public information (or will be by the time this publishes tomorrow) and is consistent with my usual rantings and opinions about social media, IT, etcetera, and my usual cynicism and disdain for commercial (primarily broadcast — print is (painting broad strokes) generally less obviously tainted) media! Good fun.
21 Feb 2006
Today I had to cook up a simple form with two input fields, so that two barcodes could be scanned into their respective fields and then submitted (the point being to link two IDs in a database that have been encoded in separate barcodes). There was one twist.
The barcode reader automatically appends a return character to the end of the string it’s read… which would, in any normal circumstance, submit the form. Obviously problematic unless we split the form over several pages, which is just yuck.
If the barcode reader hadn’t returned character 13 (return/enter/whatever you’ll call it) at the end of the string, it’d be trivial to pick up a “maxlength=x then go to next field” script off the side of the road… they’re everywhere. Not so much the case with this exact problem, though, so I thought I’d share…
[source:str javascript]function catchEnter(e){
var characterCode
if(e && e.which){
e = e
characterCode = e.which
} else {
e = event
characterCode = e.keyCode
}
if(characterCode == 13){
document.getElementById(‘cardid’).focus();
return false
} else{
return true
}
}[/script]
Note we’re not using DOM methods here… there isn’t any equivalent to which or keyCode that I’m aware of (I looked enough). keycode is the important one… which is used by the likes of Netscape 4.x and other nasties… I don’t really want to know about it, but I stole the key trap code from somewhere (lost the site) and didn’t really have a reason to intentionally break the behaviour for those browsers!
So we use one of those (probably keycode) to set characterCode, which is a numeric value that corresponds to Unicode decimal values. 13 is carriage return. Then it needs to be compared to event (the character that triggered the onkeypress event), here used as e for convenience… and if this is true, then focus will go to the next field (in this case cardid) and the character will return false to prevent the form from submitting.
I’ve got a static demo here (don’t mind the message at the top, it was an HTML mockup)… try entering something into the first field and pressing return. Then press return again, and the form will submit.
Obviously this Javascript only works for a two-field case… but you could dynamically set the element for focus to follow to by parsing that through to the function onkeypress event. The only other thing I can think of is to getElementsByTagName every input field in the form and use the array to dynamically set the “next” field… but that would have been waaaay overkill for what I had to do.
This behaviour isn’t just useful for barcode scanners, by the way. Desktop applications often exhibit this kind of behaviour, and it also goes some way to ensuring all fields are filled without doing formal validation (either JavaScript on submit, or server-side).
18 Feb 2006
Tori turned 18 yesterday and had an awesome party (even though she caught a cold the day before… apparently my fault, even though she hadn’t seen me when I was sick!). I’d post photos, but most of the half-decent ones I took are on her camera (half-decent because I can’t really ever take “party photos” with any finesse).
There was ice-cream cake. Oh was there ice-cream cake. Yum.
*ahem*
Anyway, happy birthday Tori… and get un-sick soon!
15 Feb 2006
It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.
I had to call up to find out what browsers they officially supported, only to be told that support was limited to Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both platforms. Firefox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not particularly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.
The application sniffs for a Java Virtual Machine and refuses to load without even providing an error message if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explicitly and exclusively for the Sun virtual machine… so anyone who doesn’t use that platform for whatever reason (licensing, ethical, platform) — even if they have another fully compatible virtual machine — can’t get access.
My solution? Disable Java (not JavaScript) altogether using the Web Developer’s toolbar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for this behaviour. If this fits into some perverted notion of security, I’m not comfortable having my money there. If it’s the product of an incompetent web team… well… they’re an incompetent web team. Grr.
I called up and asked why it wasn’t working, then explicitly asked for a report to be forwarded to the web team. Please lots of people do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account number during the phone call!)… this service is unneccessarily stupid at present!
On a plus side, their phone service is good fun. I couldn’t find a support number quickly, so I called the dragondirect number provided on a letter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “support”, I just hammered “9″ repeatedly. Works on a lot of PBX systems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 seconds, who then put me straight into the queue for web support. Good stuff.
15 Feb 2006
I discovered an article on setting focus on the next field after a selection is made in a select option menu thingo, which looks pretty handy to have around. It could potentially be a bad thing, too, (if the user selected the wrong option + does repeatedly), but generally speaking this looks like a handy piece of code to have around.