Monthly Archives: January 2007

DOM Inspector – CSS Style Rules

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I have been busily working on the DOM Inspector, apart from bug 221934 I have also been working on a prototype to increase the usability of the CSS Style rules pane. I have opened bug 368783 to cover the work on it. I have also built an initial prototype which doesn’t have all of the features plugged into it, but should be good for people to comment on it’s accessibility and what people think about it.

Here is the prototype version.

Speed Limits around Roadworks

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Something I have noticed in my recent posession of a motor vehicle is the growing propensity for workmen to place the slower speed limit signs further and further up the road from the actual roadworks. It is important for the safety of the workers that people are slowing down to the required speed limit as they go past the construction, but I have a theory, that if the driver can’t see what they are slowing down for when they see the sign, the chances of them actually slowing down are very slim. This basically negates the effects of the sign. People will argue that it is still illegal to speed (which I won’t argue with) and that it shouldn’t matter (which it shouldn’t). The fact of the matter is, people generally interpret the spirit of the laws, rather than the actual letter of the law and in this case, they would normally slow down.

WordPressing my way across the Internet

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Writing a piece of software is never an easy process and the seemingly simple of strapping together a textarea, a mysql database and a HTML page to display your writing is no exception. It isn’t that hard to do the basics – I mean, displaying what you write on the page and producing RSS feeds and categories isn’t a particularly complicated process in itself but the sum of the parts is more effort than one might think. For example, writing in a clean, well designed environment is a pleasure where, writing in a poorly sized textarea with no extra features is not nearly as pleasant.

Obviously the solution to this myriad of problems, which I brought upon myself is easy. Use something else. I’ve been considering doing exactly that for quite some time. I have been following, even contributing, to the development of WordPress for quite some time and not only that, but I’ve been reccomending it to people to use for their own blogs. So I dove in and created an exporter using the WordPress Extended RSS format, (which might I add has absolutely no documentation) for my old software, hacked the importer to support tags for the Ultimate Tag Warrior and then took the plunge.

I certainly have to change the layout of this, considering just about every man and his dog has the Kubrick theme, as nice as it looks. The other thing that this change rang home, is just how long I’ve been writing on this blog, since September 2004, and I think I also had some posts on an old Movable type installation before that. That’s a long time for someone who usually has the attention span of a 4 year old.

Hopefully, I can use this change of scenery to actually start producing something meaningful on this piece of the Internet, rather than the drivel I’ve become accustomed to creating.

MYOB’s Invoice Window

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It is the most annoying interface at the best of times and I’m not sure anyone who wrote the software has ever used it. Notwithstanding, the fact that windows in MYOB Premier don’t remember how big they were last time you opened one, let alone last time you ran the program is possibly the most frustrating thing I have ever experienced on a computer.

A few other ideas to make this software remarkably more user friendly.

  • I sometimes want to alternate my search between item name and item code, I really should be able to do that.
  • If I want to go back and change the quantity of the item, before I have selected which item it’s going to be, I should be able to. Locking me into that godforsaken selection box is horrible.
  • What are the chances that I want to be able to look at an old invoice while I’m creating a new invoice? Pretty good I would say, but I can’t do it.