supersonic feet

Or at least one small part of Sony anyway. Much has been made recently of Sony’s increasingly apparent loss of understanding of their target market over the Playstation 3, with rumours of stuff like overly-stringent DRM and licensing rights to use rather than selling games (not to mention the huge price of the PS3) and their never-ending trend of focussing on proprietary formats, but it looks like the latter might be loosening ever-so-slightly.

I was just browsing the Sony site again looking to see if there’s any sign of the W950i phone coming out and came across a big ad for a new Sony camera, the a100. I thought I’d check it out through curiosity and it turned out to be a D-SLR (Sony’s first I think?).

My next thought was that it would probably be stuck using Sony’s proprietary Memory Sticks given their track record on such things, but it turns out they’ve actually been sensible and used a Compact Flash slot instead (though still providing an adapter for Memory Stick Pro Duos). I don’t follow the photography scene, but it seems Sony have bought Konica-Minolta or something along those lines, so perhaps that’s the reason - the camera was mostly developed already with CF.

The other camera specs look pretty good too - a 10.2MP sensor, quick auto-focus and image stabilizing within the camera and a price point of $900 for the body only (about £515). I haven’t read any reviews yet, but if they’re good then perhaps my good friend Ken, who just ordered a Nikon D70s at the weekend, should have waited a bit

UPDATE: Seems Sony have just entered a partnership to jointly develop D-SLRs with Konica-Minolta.

On my daily browsing of the CSS galleries today, I clicked on a thumbnail for a site that looked like it had a nice, clean layout, not looking at the name of the site.

As the page loaded, it turned out to be the new website of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and rather nice it looks too. It’s not flashy, it just looks very clean and professional which is nice to see of an American politician when the outside world sees a lot of US politicians as brash and showy (I should point out that I have no idea whether this website actually reflects Sen. Kennedy’s personality as I live in the UK, but it’s the impression given from the website).

The site is even coded well, with a good tableless, CSS-based design. It also has some ‘constituent services’ (often termed eGov by the UK government websites) to provide services online to the senator’s constituency. They’re not earth-shattering offerings to be honest, but it’s at least nice to see a move in the direction of opening services up online. I was particularly amused by the form to request a congratulatory letter from the Senator if you’ve done something special or for a special occasion such as birthday or anniversary.

An idea of how good this website is for a politician can be gained by having a look at Kennedy’s fellow Massachusetts Democratic senator, John Kerry’s website. This a guy who ran for president not long ago and his website looks like it was made in 1997 (maybe it was?). The site doesn’t have valid code, has a table-based layout and send disabled users off to a text-only version of the site. At least they’ve made some effort for disabled users, but how about just making the one site accessible instead of segregating people?

So kudos to Sen. Kennedy for having a pretty smooth, accessible website. I’d go and look for an equivalent Republican senator’s site, but this post isn’t about political ideologies so I won’t bother.

Since I went on the MASER MIGLIA 8 last year, I’ve been getting a bit more involved with The Maserati Club (TMC) by helping redevelop their aging website. Through this, Seymour Pond (outgoing club president and editor of the club’s award-winning magazine, iL TRIDENTE) saw my photos from MM8 on flickr and decided to use a couple in the iL TRIDENTE article on the event.

I’m honoured that any of my photos were deemed worthy of printing in the magazine and last night I got a copy of the new issue from my Dad with the two photos in it. The first is a small one of the landscape surrounding the Grand Canyon framed with the doorframe of the Maserati Bora Paul Muizelaar kindly loaned my Dad for the trip.

The second was printed full-page and is the one I actually posted on this blog when I returned from the trip. It’s great to see one of your own photos printed full-page in a glossy magazine, so I’m quite proud of myself hehe.

I’ll try to post a picture of the magazine itself at some point.

On the website front, development of the spiffy new TMC site is still ongoing. The design is pretty much finalized now and club members at the dinner in the Panini Collection in Modena last month got a look at a recent revision. I’ve been working on the design with Andy Katz, with Seymour providing creative input as well and it’s been a great process to get such good suggestions and feedback from two guys with plenty of experience in design.

We’re now waiting for the structure and functionality of the website to be completed before I get to start building a system to run it all. I’ll refrain from posting a sneak-peek of the new design as I’d like to keep it a surprise for most of the members, so anyone who wasn’t in Modena gets to wait a month or two (or three looking at the list of great features to be developed!) for the site to launch.

We’re pitching to an existing client at the moment to develop a website for a new venture he’s starting and so I got handed a draft proposal to check over. As it’s not a high-value project, the idea put forward was to use existing shopping cart software we have a developer licence for and pull out the payment side which wasn’t wanted by the client (it’s just to generate enquiries which they’ll then deal with personally).

It seemed to me that it was going to involve a fair bit of re-working of this PHP software in order to get it working the way the client needed and that it might be easier to develop a system from scratch in Rails as the site doesn’t actually need to be very complicated. To get an idea, I went about quickly creating a basic database structure to model the site and then ran a bunch of Rails scaffold generators. After linking the models together and some mild tweaking of links and data display, I had the basics of the site working (and I do mean the basics - no style or more advanced features like search) and I’d spent under an hour doing it.

We can now offer the client a solution entirely tailored to their needs on the (reasonably) safe assumption that the coding isn’t going to involve more time than the client can afford to pay for. If the client does go for the Rails-based custom site, I believe both ’sides’ win. The client gets a truly bespoke system that’s tailored to their needs and their needs only, while we should be able to do that within the budget specified and provide a more maintainable, extensible system so it’s easier for us to support.

As much as I love PHP and have written my own frameworks for more complex systems over the past 6 years coding PHP, there’s nothing to match Rails for super-fast prototyping and then quick development after that, aided in no small part by the way Ruby itself works.

The only things in Rails that immediately spring to mind as being a bit more hassle than I’ve handled in my own PHP apps are form handling and theme/template switching, though there’s no great difficulty in adding these to a Rails app. I’ve already done a basic theme switcher for the first app I wrote while working through the Agile Web Development with Rails book, a forum.

I still need to really sit down and learn more of Ruby’s intricacies, but the Ruby on Rails combo is already proving great for quickly developing all kinds of web apps, from simple websites with a little bit of dynamic content to full content management systems (what I’m working on in my spare time).

At work we’re just about to launch a new disability products shop, Disability Warehouse, and so I did a quick run through Silktide Sitescore as it gives a good overview of any major problems with a website. Obviously it got an abysmal 3.2/10 for marketing as we haven’t actually told anyone it exists yet, but I was surprised to see that it though the site didn’t have valid HTML.I ran the site through the actual w3c validator, which complained about two inputs not being inside a suitable container such as a div or fieldset. Looking at my code, the two inputs were indeed inside fieldsets (and the first was inside a div as well), so why is the validator deciding otherwise?

The one thing I did notice in the error is a PHPSESSID - it turns out that with PHP’s session.use_trans_sid set to 1, it adds the PHPSESSID as a hidden input right after the form tag, breaking validity. I’d come across the problems with it adding the PHPSESSID in links before, which can usually be gotten around with php_value arg_separator.output “&” (although again not on this site as we use friendly URLs so the PHPSESSID is after a ?), but not this hidden field.

In the end I’ve just turned use_trans_sid to 0 as it’s not really necessary these days anyway. People will just need to have cookies on to log in. Being a disability products site though, we’ll have to see if that causes problems with some screen readers down the line, in which case we’ll need another solution or to just make do with invalid PHPSESSID references when the validator looks at the site.

The joys of making sites both valid and accessible eh? While many would talk as though accessibility and valid code are one and the same, there’s so much more to it and irritating little things like this, where the programming language hasn’t quite handled it in a modern, accessible fashion, a compromise is required.

After utilising Pragmatic Programmers‘ Beta Book program a second time, my Rails Recipes book should finally be on its way ’some time next week’.

Rails Recipes expands on the Agile Web Development with Rails book, offering a series of ‘recipes’ for little tricks and methods to use in your Rails apps, such as how to handle in-place AJAX editing or connecting to multiple databases. I’ve been using the various beta PDFs of the book for a while (when I’ve actually had time to continue playing with Rails), but it’ll be infinitely better once I get the paper copy in my hands. For all the convenience of immediate download and reading of a PDF, I still find it uncomfortable actually reading books on a computer screen. Flicking through a ‘real’ book is easier for me and I prefer picking up a hard copy when searching for a quick section in a reference book like this, though if I’ve really lost what I’m after having the PDF provides the best of both worlds with search functionality.

Anyway, the book’s cool so if you’ve read the first one and fancy moving up a notch, check out Rails Recipes.

I’ve been using WordPress on this site and a couple of others for quite a while now and something that pleases me every time I use it is the login page. The page’s simplicity and clarity (not always one and the same) make it extremely obvious what you need to be doing and where, removing unnecessary clutter from the page - you don’t see the actual application interface until you have successfull logged in.

I’m sure plenty of people who have used WP will have already noticed this, it just struck me that it’s still a pleasant entry to the application even having been using it for so long and that’s something that’s hard to do. The over-sized input boxes play a large part in helping to focus on the purpose of the page (logging in), while still having plenty of escape routes (”back to blog”, “register” and “forgot your password?”) available at the bottom of the box.

There isn’t any great point to this, just some well-earned kudos to WordPress

I missed this while I was away on holiday, but going through recent posts on the Web Standards Project, I found mention of the successor to FrontPage (*spit*), Expression Web Designer - a completely CSS-based WYSIWYG editor. The standardistas seem quite positive on it so far and there’s now a free beta version available for download.

I’m downloading the trial at the moment to see for myself. Although I haven’t used WYSIWYG editors for a few years, it’d be nice to finally have one that you can reasonably safely recommend to less techy people and be confident it won’t result in tag soup. Here’s hoping…