"QA and Javascript Libraries"
posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 8:06 pm MSTEdging (creeping?) towards implementation, I've allowed my mind to *yikes!!* ponder choices of Javascript / AJAX library / toolkit / frameworks ... dojo? Yahoo/YIU? Rico? One of my concerns was nicely treated in dean edward's "Das Bloat":
"I just had a quick look at Yahoo’s UI library. In particular, the TreeView control. I’m on a broadband connection and the demo page took 12 seconds to load the necessary JavaScript."In that context I was ?what? touched by "QA and Javascript Libraries" in Jibbering Musings:
"Three months later, and want to add a couple of new features to one of your pages, the library has had some changes, this is where the problems arrive. The 10% it doesn’t do is now 5%, but they’ve solved it differently to you did, the bugs you fixed are integrated, and so are a number of others. What do you do? If you change the library to the new one, every one of your 100 pages needs to go through QA again, the impact of changing the library code has an immense cost in time to retest everything"Didn't actually leave me jibbering, no ... nothing more than a couple of deep spasms in the back of my neck, increased pressure in my forehead, a little tick over my left eye. It's just me, myself, and I here ... and my situation is far from resource rich ... "life-cycle cost assessment" sounds high-falutin' but I simply cannot afford to be holed under the waterline. *twitch* Same old same-old, yaa?
Of note: InfoDesign: Understanding by Design - News ... items from such as BoxesAndArrows.com and UXatters.com
On the "applied" side of things: Continuing Intermittent Incoherency ? Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser (from alex.dojotoolkit.org) and mir.aculo.us. Also JotSpot Live and *blink* meebo.com.
Document Engineering Spring 2006
/academics/courses/is243/s06/ wouldn't look like much to most folk ... just an index, is all. To me? A treasure trove, vertitably ... notes and readings and lectures from a really gifted professor at a really good school. But that's just me. I guess
My first encounter with a university library was terribly traumatic. I had read most of the philosophy section of the city library, over the years. And when I was away, in the army, I had continued that reading. But there I was, registered to study philosophy, after having discovered from the inside that the military and the whole "projection of power" thing was a huge scam.
I had found my way to the lower floor of the University of Alberta's main library ... the philosophy section ... the Bs. I came out of the elevator, scanning around to locate it ... oh, Bs ahead of me. And to the left of me? Bs. And to the right? More Bs.
I staggered back against the wall and slumped to the floor in a daze ... my universe had come apart in that moment: it was manifestly evident that what the world needed was not another book of philosophy.
But I didn't cave. I had discovered that loyalty was foolish, that bourgeois sensibilities comprised a delusional state, and that "nice" usually wasn't. So this ... this was something like a coming to earth.
The reason this comes to mind in the context of techinical communications is single: in one book (by Jacques Maritain?) there was a depiction of what happens when philosphy isn't put into practice. He related how the diplomatic staff of the UN congregated to celebrate the passage of the Decleration of Human Rights. Specifically, one delegate expressed to another how he was surprised that they had accepted the terms of one section. "But why? We have no problem with X and Y!" "That astonishes me, because of M and N." "Whatever do you mean? M and N don't figure in with X and Y at all." "But of course they do, since X and Y mean A and B, so M and N come into effect there." "Oh, no, not at all ..." and away they went. They'd passed the document, they'd agreed to adopt the document, but there was no agreement on what the document meant, let alone what it entailed.Whatever the setting: if folk don't care enough to be clear on how things operationalize then folk don't care ... or they care about something that isn't explicit: their own personal agendas. And that's not on.
Technorati - tweaked, c/w tags
posted Monday, July 24, 2006 at 12:27 pm MSTLast week I let a friend know that I had received two copies of what she sent to her mail list. She replied that she and the friend who was helping her had fumbled the ball; she hadn't passed on where she'd gotten to on the list ... "on the list", get it? She and her friend were sending the message to a whole lot of folks individually ... serially ... 1 by 1. After 11 years on the web she hadn't learned about the mail-list function in her mailer. Yaaa ... like that.
Also, from a friend working in South American, a short message announcing that she had posted pictured to Ringo. Ringo is a scam. Not only did I have to register to see her pictures (which I never did), not only did I get all sorts of adware popups, but I found malware on my machine the next day.
This morning (moving right along) I got confirmation email from an opensource collaboration project. The notification read, in full "You account has been approved." That's it. No salutation or greetings, no account data, no link ... not even basic englisch grammuhr.
Moving on: NewsGator is sweet ... I'm a sucker for certain styles of interface ... I like this one. But, now, really ... why do I have to delete feeds 1 by 1, individually, reloading the whole page after each one? I just uploaded my newly edited OPML ... over 400 feeds, hand-picked and hand-sorted. But there was some duplication; not astonishing. But having to go through one by one instead of checkboxes? Or Ctrl-Click like in BlogLines.com? There's no reason for that.
For a break I headed to MyInformationWeek ... what a wierdly convoluted login procedure! Heading over to InformationWeek itself ... what a fabulous list of breaking news ... and Firefox's RSS icon has popped up ... why am I having to look through a huge page repeatedly to find tha GD feed?
But I got the stuff I wanted ... yet another fine post by Jon Udell, this time a podcast with a real tech_doc SME, Bob Glushko. (Coincidentally in another tab there was the IBM document I had loaded earlier, "Making ITIL Actionable in an IT service management environment - Tivoli software"). So liking what I saw I head to ''Doc or Die'', Glushko's blog. Schweeeeeet! [*Kevin Burton's thinking is infectious; PodCast*] I hit my technorati bookmarklet and
Gadzooks, look at the changes in the interface! And I can tag the item as I log it, too!! Fabulous!
More than just this lovely added function, it's a whole facelift ... it's gonna be fun to check this out.
Oh, wait, what's this? Technorati: BenTrem's Favorites: "Sorry, http%3A%2F%2Fdocordie.blogspot.com%2F is not a valid URL. Please try again." Well for heaven's sake!!
Awwwwwww geeeez folks ... I use that function routinely and regularly, and there's nothing odd about http://docordie.blogspot.com ... gaaaaaallllllldangit. Should I blog this? or just throw my hands up in disgust. Meh ... report/feedback/document ... this is what makes the IT world go round: unremunerated beta-testing.
Bottom line? Housebuilders know how to start with sound foundations. And interior decorators know how to change things around without breaking the furniture. Why activity surrounding software can't follow those paradigms escapes me.
I just got a "500 ... server error" while trying to get a password reminder from SourceForge. Funny, I got a very similar error on a different site about an hour ago, while trying to access the mail list archive. What's ironic is that blogger.com bombed a few times when I tried to post this item originally. Ready for prime time? *shakes head* But still, and this is the point: technorati looks great!
