Neatly Sliced

Django Reinhardt was a gypsy jazz guitarist active in the 30′s and 40′s. He played his amazingly fast paced guitar solos with only two fingers (due to injury, the other two were unusable).

WordPress 3.1 is named Reinhardt in honor of Django.

In honor of the release, and in pure cheezburger fashion, I present you our very own Django – the magical cat.

Django was a wonderful stray cat who came around begging for food and affection. He purred on contact and was overall a wonderful fellow. He was named after Django Reinhardt for his interesting mustachio.

When winter began to rear its ugly head, the mail lady took him away and sent him to a nearby stray cat farm, replete with a shelter for warmth and lots of short-legged mice.

We miss you, Djangs.

I discovered this post of notes in my overflowing drafts folder. It is from when I attended An Event Apart Chicago in August, 2007.

The content from Zeldman’s talk rings true. I apologize for the slide references with no visuals – years have passed and those files have long ago bit the dust.

I took many more notes at that conference. Unfortunately, I have no clue where they are. Secrets of the CSS Jedi notes can be found referred to on this table of contents page for the Monday session.

Enjoy!

Writing the User Interface

By Jeffrey Zeldman

• Freshness counts more than looks
  • Bad code + bad design + bad IA = WHO CARES… if the content is fresh, these things do not matter. Case in point, MySpace.
• “Design helps people read less”. A “humane” feature.
• Hypertext: a different kind of narrative experience. It is an experience created by the user – hyperlinks, etc.
• Copy: easy and cheap to fix, and v. important (a brand opportunity).
• Guide Copy: the content explaining the site/content on the site
  • Blogger features fantastic guide copy (see slide): “Create in 3 easy steps: 1,2,3, create blog.”
  • Veer: “Preview type before you buy.” v. brief, and a good tone.
  • TimesSelect: “To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect” (“Okay” copy)
    • To continue reading this article, subscribe to TimesSelect (and make subscribe to TimesSelect a hyperlink – guide copy should enable you to continue your hypertext experience).
    • Someone from NY Times heard this talk of Zeldman’s and now, there is a link on Times’ site.
  • Must be brief to be effective
  • Audience appropriate
  • Site for girls (see slide) – copy can be neutral, and the design can be audience appropriate
  • Audience appropriate may mean “not inappropriate”
  • “Understanding your Medicare Benefits: you must have JavaScript and Flash enabled”
    • Obviously, look at your audience and the general capabilities of said audience. Those needing to understand Medicare Benefits will not understand Flash and JavaScript.
    • There may be no “appropriate” content for this audience, but certainly avoid the innappropriate
  • Basecamp login (see slide): log in screen – “Please log in first and then we’ll send you right along”
    • Very clear, very friendly, and the “first” should not be overlooked. It gives that subconscious reminder of a to-do list before able to accomplish your goal. Plus, it’s so friendly that it reminds us that fun can be had in your project management day.
    • Gain on the user side with simple, friendly copy (versus plain-old-jane “Sign In)
  • Brand Appropriate

Microformats are the smile of the internet.

You should follow me on twitter here.

I recently got a new MacBook Pro, and in doing so I have the joys of Snow Leopard for the first time. Snow Leopard comes installed with Safari 5, and it had been so long since I had enabled the developer menu that I had forgotten how to do so.

Apple makes it crazy easy and after a few seconds of looking around I had my cache disabled and checking my user experience for JavaScript disabled browsers.

How to enable the develop menu

1. Access Safari’s preferences under the Safari menu
2. Select the Advanced tab
3. Check "Show Develop menu in menu bar"
   

The develop menu will appear between Bookmarks and Window. "Show Web Inspector" and "Disable Caches" are the options I select most often.

What about you? What do you use the Develop menu for in Safari?

I looked at my phone and saw a missed call and a text message from a blank phone number. I was incredibly confused!

Soon thereafter, I checked the voice mail, and I got another text message from blank phone number, with blank content!

It looked a little something like this:

December 31, 1969 5:59 PM? September 4, 2012 6:10 PM? I feel like I’m being given a secret code!

I googled to no avail. But, I searched MacRumors, and according to a post in a thread regarding this very topic:

The network sends a notification from the tower to the phone to send a v-mail notification and then when you check your voice mail it sends another notification to your phone and then it would say on your iPhone that you no longer have a new vmail. but because of the fact thats its not a TMOBILE PHONE that the signal is sent differently to there exclusive phones. So not only the iPhone will be affected other unlocked phones will have similar problems.

Update:
A user at the hackint0sh forum called T-Mobile in a thread:

Apparently they have been making updates to their software in the T-mobile system over the past few weeks. Part of the updates they did were to the speed up the internet on the network, but in the process they screwed up the voicemail notifier settings. They told me it is not a priority to fix it since the problem is only happening on phones they do not currently offer.
…
The only solution for the time being is to have T-mobile disable the voicemail notification. In this case you will no longer receive any text messages or a dot indicator when you receive a voicemail.

Apparently, T-Mobile is working on this issue. Ack! Hope this helps, and that they can fix it soon!

Have you had any fun messages or a different timestamp? Have you found another thread mentioning this issue? Have you called T-Mobile? Let everyone know here in the comment section!

Continued confusion Current lifestamp: April 28, 2009, 9:20PM. Awaiting future self to discover content based texts, rather than blank whispers into the void.
We know that December 31, 1969 is the birth of UNIX timestamps (corresponding to the UNIX timestamp “1″). But what is the significance of September 4, 2012? My precise timestamp above converts to 1240971028. I’ve continued to receive Voicemail texts – all for September 4, 2012, but at more times: 7:14 PM, 10:04 PM, 11:16 PM – with no correlation to the actual time of either receipt of voicemail or checking. And, my initial message is the only one from 1969.

It also seems that if you had a voicemail red dot prior to the text messaging weirdness, you cannot get rid of it. Whatever voicemail state you were, you continue to be. This is because these blank texts are your voicemail notifications – and your iPhone doesn’t know how to process the new T-Mobile notifications. Anyone know how to get rid of the red dot, just for the sake of aesthetics? Let us know.

A quandary, no doubt. Lots of conspiracies in the comments. Any to add?

Good news!
I received missed call and voicemail at 11:52AM Central Time on April 30, 2009, and I received a Voicemail dot! That means no text message! And the Voicemail dot went away when I checked it. So looks like situation normal. Everyone rejoice.

Hey ladies, need some bling to show off your nerdy feminine side? There’s an awesome @ symbol necklace and an ampersand necklace on amazon right now.

¡Lo quiero! Too cute! The only question now is… & or @?

Don’t worry, fellas. I wouldn’t forget about you. Zazzle has these incredible CSS mugs that I want to buy to my very core.

CSS IS AWESOME mug with overflow: visible; by stevenfrank

CSS is Awesome mug with Overflow: Hidden; by redglobe

CSS is Awesome mug with Overflow: Scroll; by redglobe

What more could I want as a developer?

User Controls in ASP.NET are a great tool - they allow you to consolidate sections of code into a reusable piece that you can use anywhere on your site - or even copy the control to a different site.

The only issue I had with user controls was that you had to register the code on every.single.page that you wanted to use it on before you could use it. So, that meant something like this at the top of every.single.page:

Oi! The frustration! There has to be a better way!

Some googling resulted in finding the wondeful haacked.com, with the article listing my answer. ASP.NET 2.0 allows for registering controls in web.config, thus making it available for all pages and eliminating a potential very long list of controls on every page.

The listings go inside the <controls> tag, within the <pages> section, such as follows:

You'll note I have Ektron listed in there as well. This is because I was tired of adding the Controls assembly to every page - so not only can you add your own user controls, but assemblies as well. What a life-saver! Your resulting code does not change at all, but you have just eliminated that page heading overhead.

Have you found another item to register in web.config? Leave a comment and share the wealth!