So not only will I be a speaker, I'll be a local. Albeit a local whose feet have barely touched the ground...
At this point all I can really think of to say is 'moving interstate is an utter pain in the arse'. Not the most eloquent sentiment, but true nonetheless :)
Browser School Daze - Yahoo! News sums it up in an amusing way:
So, it's time for teacher to hand out the grades, and some final words.
Opera 9.0: You're doing fantastic work—it's good to see you back in form. Grade: A+.
Firefox 2.0 Beta 1: You're not working up to your usual level. You're still looking good, but I would like to see you try harder. Grade: B+.
IE 7 Beta 3: Great job. It's good to see you applying yourself, finally. I knew you had it in you. Grade: B.
I've already said it on this Digg post: digg - Blackboard wins patent for LMS/e-Learning technology Learning Management System vendor Blackboard Inc has been granted a patent for ...well, just about anything resembling an online learning system or student-focused groupware solution. Coupled with Bb's acquisition of WebCT in 2005, this fuels concerns over Bb's dominance of the education market.
(Digg users feel free to go Digg it :)).
Blackboard's press release says the patent is for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods
...which is broad language, to say the least. The US patent (6,988,138) is, if anything, even worse: A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet.
Just in case there were any doubts as to what they might do with the patent, Blackboard has already launched a lawsuit against a competitor (Desire2Learn).
Keep in mind Blackboard already acquired its biggest commercial competitor, WebCT. In addition to suing their remaining competitors, there's some speculation that the new patent might be used to attack open source products like Atutor, Moodle and Sakai.
This is a major concern for accessibility and web standards in the higher education sector, since Blackboard (v6) doesn't validate and isn't accessible. There were some noises that the WebCT merger would result in an all-new product which does meet industry standards, but people in the know don't seem confident that it's going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, there are already some coordinated efforts to collate information about prior art (and there's a lot of it). Stephen Downes has posted a raft of links to the various reactions to news of the patent. A series of tubes has already turned up :)
As with most overly-broad patents, I guess we'll wait and see what happens.
Web Standards Group - August meeting (Brisbane), Thursday 31 August, 2006. Presentation 1: A blind users experience of the web. Presentation 2: The Influence of Ajax on Web 2.0.
It has been a bad day for spam. In one day, the first of my formerly pristine 200ok emails started receiving spam (I feel so violated, it was never even publically posted); then this weblog got a sudden influx of comment spam.
My options with blogger are to moderate all comments or enable the CAPTCHA. I've gone with the CAPTCHA as the lesser of two evils (it has an audio alternative so it's not too bad - not perfect, but not too bad).
Occasionally I wonder how the net survives under the extraordinary weight of spam that clogs it at every opportunity. If we got 15 telemarketing calls every day, we'd unplug the phone. Why do we endure email spam?
How do we keep in touch with friends when we have to abandon email addresses due to spam? How do we do business when our email gateways are being hammered by spam? How do we have meaningful comment threads when we have to put in CAPTCHAs just to filter out the morons trying to sell stupid stuff?
Does everyone just get used to wading through spam? I guess I was lucky. I had a year off after getting my own domain. It was awesome. I guess the honeymoon is over.
The latest product of Google labs shows Google managing to do the right thing and the wrong thing at the same time: Google Accessible Search. It's kind of spectacular that Google can produce a search specifically for accessible resources and still not make a best-practice search form or results page.
It's a pity to see Google miss such a great opportunity to prove they understand accessibility. The pages are a mass of tables and font tags just like any other Google product (ok, so the FAQ does at least use semantic tags, even if it skips the DOCTYPE). Then to cap it off, they promote "accessibility" but only talk about vision impairment. A trap for young players, perhaps; but Google is not a young player.
The service does at least show that it is possible to rank accessible sites higher than tag soup; perhaps we should by lobbying Google to add this to their general search. Creating a separate search reinforces the perception that disabled users should be segregated; or that accessibility is somehow incompatible with "normal" sites.
Now, I know that Google's search page is so simple that effectively it's probably "accessible enough". Similarly, the results pages are probably usable despite being sloppy markup. The problem is that it's only by accident that these pages are still accessible. If you're doing something wrong, getting away with it doesn't turn it into doing something right.
To really compound the problem, people use Google's non-compliance as "evidence" that accessibility doesn't matter. They say If Google doesn't do it, why should I bother? That's about the time when accessibility advocates think briefly of belting them one, then instead smile and do their best to explain their point of view ;)
I have no doubt that individuals at Google understand accessibility and web standards. However Google the corporation can only be judged by its actions.
Google's refusal to use web standards or meet accessibility guidelines helps perpetuate bad practice across the web. Regardless of cute slogans that may have been scribbled on a whiteboard at Google once... through inaction on standards and accessibility, Google does a little evil every day.
Computer lab only has IE? No problem! Bring your own browser. Most labs let you use USB drives, so use them to run software...
So what software do you use on your thumb drive?