Growing up is optional

Over at Asterisk* there is an article about that reminds us about things that we often forget about clients:

• Communication
• We work for them

I have decided to make the content of my site available under a Creative Commons Licence. The licence I chose is the Attribution-ShareAlike licence. This means that anybody can use any of the content of this site and use it as they want. The only condition is that I get credit for it and any derivative works are under the same licence.

There is some very cool Mac only software. I wish my browsers could have history like this. Perhaps someone better than I at programming could build a Mozilla/Firefox Extension. (via Simon Willison)

I went into the bush with the kids today. We tramped to te top of Hemi Matenga. It usually takes about 40 minutes to the top, but Oscar wanted to walk part of the way (he’s only 2) so it took about 1 hour 20. The kids did quite well. Other track users were surprised to see Grace get to the top by herself (she’s 5). The view from the top is fantastic. On a clear day you can see from Taranaki to Kaikoura, but we wern’t so fortunate this time. I thought the walk might help some of the stiffness and aches from yesterday’s soccer. It didn’t.

We played Paraparaumu College today at soccer. The wind was about 25kts (that’s about 45km/h, 28m/h). We played with the wind in the first half and were up 3-1 at half time. We knew that the wind would be bad in the second half and it was. We only got into their half a few times. Luckily we did manage to score on one of them. The final score was 4 all.

Playing school kids is hard. Mostly, 17 year olds are very fit and fast. I am one of the fastest on our team (although nowhere near fit) and I could out sprint most of them head to head. However, they were significantly more agile. One got past me for their final goal (which really sucks).

I think that the reason the didn’t thrash us (as was predicted) was attitude. Our team is really positive even when we get on the back foot (at some disadvantage, a cricket metaphore for the amercan reader). More on this topic later…

…if I’m not asleep.

I used to think that my web sites were all good. I didn’t care that x% of users couldn’t see the pictures on my site. I wasn’t concerned about 25% (although it’s now closer to 5%) of users that didn’t use IE. The other 75% was enough.

However, having worked closely with some users I now see my mistakes. There are still people out there on 9600 dial-up connections, IE4 or NN4 on 486 hand-me-down PCs (no, I havn’t forgotten about macs, they just don’t get given away).

Farmers around New Zealand have to cope with all sorts of connectivity issues. I was amazed that less that 20 minutes drive from home it is virually impossible to get on the net at faster than 32000

While these people are a minority they are significant, as are visually-impaired users. The analogy that Mark Harris from the eGovernment Unit uses is a comparson of the number of legally blind people in New Zealand to the population of Hamilton (I would use Tauranga, it does’t have the same negative connotations). The Government can’t afford to ignore a population the size of Hamilton so have developed the (excellent imho) Web Guidelines.

Taking this analogy further, and applying it to business, do you know any nationwide bricks and mortar organisation that would deliberately ignore a whole city? Imagine for example if a bank closed all of its Hamilton (or Tauranga) branches.

This is why from now on all of the websites that I build, Government or not, will comply with the eGovernment guidelines.

For those that want to build a business case <isolani /> has a great starting point.

Very cool Simpsons spoof

(via BoingBoing) Check out these cool wooden computer peripherals (keyboards, mice and monitors). Wouldn’t they be cool in NZ native timber?