Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have been going back and forth and back again about accessibility and in particular the SVG images on Sam’s blog. In Mark’s latest post he explains the somewhat crazy world of access enablement:

Long answer: As far as I know, none of the commercially available screenreaders support svg in any way, much less reading the title of an svg image included inline in an xhtml page (as opposed to, say, linked from the src attribute of an <img> element, or embedded in an <object> element). Nonetheless, you have provided a text alternative for the image, and theoretically, that could be presented to a user in place of (or in addition to) the image. You have therefore fulfilled your moral duty, even though no one actually benefits from it. Welcome to the wacky world of access enablement. Mark’s right – in many companies and other organizations you have to tick the boxes for accessibility rules and they are quite often just plain stupid. Mark calls that access enablement, I call it beurocracy or perhaps more kindly, the only effective way to get a large organization to meet difficult to understand objectives.

I’ve been fiddling with my blog again. I’ve enabled a couple of plugins – one to allow comment preview and one to add OpenID authentication when commenting. OpenID authenticated comments skip the moderation step. All working quite nicely – the OpenID plugin even lets me run my own OpenID server instead of using Verisign.

The problem is, to set up the OpenID server, the plugin adds two meta tags to each page:

So Microsoft has provided handy instructions for upgrading Java which is nice of them – especially since IE 8 doesn’t play nice with versions of Java before 1.6.0_11. Step 6 suggests installing the MSN toolbar along with Java though:

In addition to Java, you can also install the MSN Toolbar. The MSN Toolbar offers headlines, news alerts, and search tools from Microsoft. For more information see the MSN Toolbar home page. To install the toolbar, click the Terms of Use or Privacy Statement buttons and then read the statements. If you don’t want to install the toolbar, clear the Install the new MSN Toolbar check box. The odd thing is, last time I installed Java (this morning) it was the Yahoo toolbar that Java tried to install along the way. I guess Sun will give kick backs to whoever sends them traffic…

I’ve done a fair bit of train travel today to get oitto a meeting. The trip was easy enough to pln online and even buy the tickets in advance but there were a few simple failings that made the trip more difficult than it should have been. Firstly the website conveniently allows you to reserve seats online but it makes you reserve seats in both directions or not at all. If you’re not sure when you’ll be returning you’re left with pot luck as to whether you get a table and power point on that busy morning train. Oh well. Then you get a handy little urinary for the trip showing which stations you change at when you arrive at each and when you depart again. Sadly all the signs at the station show the final destination of the train instead of the stop you want. So the 8:40 train to Banbury you’re looking for doesn’t exist. You need to go to each platform to fin the more detailed sign that lists all the stops. The key lesson is to make sure that you sync up the information you’re providing rather than just showing the minimum required information. In this case the final destination actually really important to know purely because that’s how the train was most commonly identified. Still, I made it just with a little extra excercise going up and down the overpass stairs.

The upgrade process from Portal 6.0 to 6.1 is really overly complex for a simple little one server deployment like I’m managing. To save myself that pain I’ve manually migrated a bunch of components and written a script to bring over all the content.

Firstly, it’s been a lot of fun playing with Java’s ObjectOutputStream and designing stuff to work well with that. Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but just a few little tricks like when you want to serialize a list of objects:

A little while back Charles Nutter posted about his progress at getting the JRuby bug list under control:

Roughly around September, we crossed an important threshold: 500 open bugs. They dated as far back as 2006 (we moved to Codehaus in 2006), and across the entire release sequence of JRuby; there were even some bug reports against pre-1.0 versions. From September until about mid-January, we worked to keep the number of open bugs below 500. Sometimes it would peek above, but we were generally successful.

Ok seriously, we’ve got to stop this tabs on top thing before it spreads any further.  That top bit of a window – it’s for dragging the window around and I really don’t want to have to watch carefully to see where I’m clicking in case I accidentally change tabs or grab a tab and throw it headlong into it’s own window. With Chrome I told myself it was justifiable because all the tabs are separate processes so clearly each process rendered it’s own toolbar and UI so essentially the tabs had to be at the top.  This justification is of course rubbish but it made me feel better.  Besides, Chrome is a Windows-only browser and they do all kinds of stupid things like that over there. Clearly that would never fly on Mac…

I have far more tabs open in NetNewsWire than I can handle, so here’s all the stuff that’s open more so I can find them again if I need them than because I actually want to comment on them or do something with them right now:

When Can I Use? – Useful page for getting a rough idea of the current state of support for web stuff in browsers.  Not perfect but definitely a very good starting point.

This one should be obvious but well, it wasn’t… When you upgrade to the latest Debian stable (Lenny at time of writing which was released 14 Feb 2009), it will upgrade PAM and a few other really important login-type modules.  At the time it will tell you that you have to restart any services that use PAM or they mightn’t authenticate properly and offer to restart a number of services for you so everything seems happy.

A while back a migrated my personal FeedBurner account over to using a Google account as a test run before migrating the Ephox feeds. Unfortunately, I then forgot about it and in the mean time Google added a self-serve migration tool that now requires you to set up an Adsense account to migrate to.

They have huge reams of documentation talking about how much better the monitization of your feed will be now that it’s with Google and they even suggest a few times that it’s possible to migrate to Google without adding advertising into your feed. Sadly, I’ve been unable to find a document that describes how to migrate feeds and make sure that ads don’t get inserted.

CMSWire – Web Content Management and Recession — Unlikely Duo?

Forrester’s Stephen Powers in the Q4 2008 Web Content Management Survey predicts that Web CMS industry will continue to grow despite the global economical difficulties, because it is an investment companies must make to remain competitive. Interesting survey results, particularly notable that 72% of respondents plant to increase their Web Content Management investment. The feeling I get right now, is that people are uncertain and are delaying many purchasing decisions or simply taking longer to make decisions, but not outright cancelling purchasing plans.

Sam Ruby notes that the White House feed contains a fair bit of debris:

Also noted in the process: the feed itself contains a fair amount of debris.  A sytle attribute?  A meta tag?  o:p is common in content carelessly copy/pasted from Microsoft Word. Ah the good old o:p crud from Word.  I know a fantastic html editor they could use that would fix that up for them. Clean copy and paste from Word is probably the most popular feature in EditLive!