From the Maidenhead Advertiser:

Look out for a giant pink fluffy testicle gracing the nation’s top sporting events this summer. Raising awareness of testicular cancer – good on him and best of luck to him:

“I’m going to go to whatever I can, but no doubt most of it will be sport-related. Tennis, football, cricket – whatever I can get to. I’ll be using public transport so I’m sure I’ll get well-noticed.” I’m sure he will…

Note to self: the nu.validator has a really handy looking SAX handler that serializes the XML.

Hat tip to Henri Sivonen for pointing this out along with a bunch of other useful XML generating tips.

I hadn’t realized this until Rob Weir pointed it out, but Windows XP moves to the “extended support” phase of it’s life cycle (also Office 2003) after today. So for most consumers, that means XP is now dead – though still more popular than Vista1{#footlink1:1239695774478.footnote}.

I have a lot of demo VMs set up with XP and I really don’t want to migrate them to Vista (let alone pay for that), but a demo on Linux just isn’t going to cut it with clients who use Windows exclusively. Demoing on OS X works but is too hard to control the environment since it can’t be a virtual machine. I do a lot of webinars so it’s really useful to have the VM set to 1024×768 without having to actually resize the screen down and unplug the second monitor.

Recently John Gruber started an uproar against the Diggbar – an URL shortening service that also adds frames. Frames are one of the most annoying inventions ever to come to HTML, even when used by the original site author. When used by third party’s they have a major impact on the usability for readers who can no longer bookmark, copy URLs or see where they actually are. Back in the 90s when frames were accepted practice, nearly every site would have a link saying something like “stuck in frames? click here” to help users get out.

Gianugo Rabellino, among a bunch of interesting stuff on Agile and Open-source development:

do-ocracy and his French-speaking twin JFDI I really must remember that phrase – just brilliant. Doug, you’d probably be interested in Gianugo’s thoughts as well.

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages:

• openmotif
• compat-libstdc++

Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage.

Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks:

Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets.

The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time. In fact, as the article mentions, the Commonwealth Bank had previously tried to jump on the mobile banking wagon as early as 1999 via a WAP interface. So what’s changed and what does this have to do with accessibility?

When I wrote my post on accessibility the other day, what I really meant to say is what basically what Rob Foster wrote. Very roughly summarized, accessibility is about real people, not checklists.

The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around.

…

Here’s my point–if your brother or sister had a disability, you would give a crap. But you don’t have to have a sibling in a wheelchair to genuinely care, even if it’s only in your work.

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…