Peterbe.com

If you're a web developer and care about having snappy web sites you'll know about YSlow for Firebug. I managed to get a grade A (96) but I'm suspecting that there's a bug in the YSlow analysis.

Setting an Expires header is inferior to using Cache-Control which my site was already using fine with headers like:

Cache-Control: public,max-age=3600

according to the latest documentation but YSlow kept going on about setting Expires headers. I prefer Cache-Control since you don't have to do any date formatting which eats a few excess CPU cycles. If anybody knows why it's a good idea to use both Cache-Control and Expires let me know.

In Plone 2.1 (don't know about other versions) the default date input used by the CalendarWidget uses 5 dropdowns (year, month, day, hour, minute) plus a little popup calendar which you can use to avoid flipping the dropdowns. When the underlying value is not set the dropdowns look like this:

2007/--/-- [#] --:--

where the little [#] is the popup calendar widget. The year 2007 is preselected because they assume that most of the cases you'll just be selecting a month and a day since is highly likely that the year will be that of today's year. So far so good.

I discovered something really odd today that maybe a seasoned AJAX guru already knew as a legendary bug which might even have a name. I was developing a little AJAX method on the server side that returned this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<sections>
  <section>
    <number>001</number>
    <title>PLug 1</title>
  </section>
  <section>
    <number>003</number>
    <title>PLug 3 xyz</title>
  </section>
</sections>

Note: The Content-Type used was "text/xml"

I used jQuery to kick off the AJAX call and then I loop over the document element returned with childNodes almost like this:

children = data.childNodes[0].childNodes;
for (var i=0, len=children.length; i<len; i++)
  // bla bla

It was working fine in Firefox and of course not in IE 6.0.

If you search Google for 'yogurt' www.dannon.com comes up second in the search results. Neither the title nor the URL contains any reference to the word yogurt. The word "Yogurt" is the 37st word of all (55) non-HTML English words that appear in the crappy table-inside-tables-nested piece of crap source code.

A SEO expert would immediately count Dannon.com as doomed on the search term Yogurt but clearly Google had other plans. According to my Google toolbar the Dannon website has a measly 5 out of 10 PageRank™ only, so that's not the explaination either.

So how did Google do that?

If I wanted to become a male gigolo I would probably do two things differently from this guy: 1) I wouldn't contact someone for help in a different continent and 2) I wouldn't get a Yahoo! account called "always alone":

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 11:19:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: always alone <always_alone7@yahoo.com>
Subject: become gigolo
To: ...@peterbe.com

hi i am rohit  from india i want be a gigolo plz help me out 
 thank you 
 my num +91009312337329

---------------------------------
Building a website is a piece of cake. 
Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online.

UPDATE

Writing about idiots writing to me spawned more idiots writing just a day after posting this. Here's one of them:

Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:44:00 +0100
From: kapoor_jack@....com
To: ...@peterbe.com

hi we  r two frnds we wanna be gigolos coz we need money give 
me any contact no. we r handsome guys  tall and expiernced as well

I am not a pimp!

Every week I get an email via this website from someone who wants me to help them hack something. I've written things about the subject "hacking" but that doesn't make me a hacker. I'm not a hacker. Here's this week's nutter email I got:

"Hai, im suraj from India.
Actually i want to b a computer expert.There must b nothin wth the coputer tht i cant do.so i think it can b done only wth a hacker.So can u plz help me wth this.pPleae tel me wht i hav to learn.
Than Q."

Does that make any sense?

The mac os x icon for .pyc files is a document with a background of ones and zeros but the foreground is a 16 ton weight. WTF?! What's the 16 ton got to do with anything?

Perhaps I got it all wrong. Maybe this is the icon used for many different files but I had a look around and couldn't find any other file that uses the 16 ton image in the icon.

A lot of news sites have started publishing reviews of the new iPhone by Apple. The review I chose was the Wall Street Journal column by Walter Mossberg. It's a great review from a user experience point of view too. You start by watching the video clip which is nice and then if you're interested in more details you move on to actually read the article.

One thing I appreciated about this review was that I was able to skim the article first whilst waiting for the video to first show the ad and then do the buffering. Very practical.

Oh yeah, the phone looks pretty exciting too. Shame about the Edge and being totally stuck on ATT. Don't know what that ATT deal means in terms of getting an iPhone here in Europe.

Today Pandora went into a "Day of Silence" as a protest for the fact that "an arbitration committee in Washington DC" has decided to charge excessive amounts to Internet radio stations like Pandora making it virtually impossible to afford the licenses to play music on the net effectively putting businesses like Pandora out of business.

This is sad. I've signed the petition (as a european you have to be inventive to sign it) and tried to spread the word to as many people as I possibly can.

I think it would be very sad if internet radio like Pandora would disappear since for someone like me who doesn't like Britney Spears or Michael Jackson there really isn't many good alternative sources with fresh ideas for good music. All the CDs I've bought in the last year has been by being inspired by songs played on Pandora. If the RIAA manage to close down Pandora I'm going to stop buying CDs and stubbornly only download songs from pirate bittorrent sites. There you have it!

Try to participate if you care about evil corporate organisations damaging the arts.

Today I was working on an popup input box (actually 3 input boxes) that asks the user to enter a project, a vendor or a category. The first box looks like this:

Project name: __________________________

The second looks like this:

...accounts code (optional): __________________________

I'm wondering, what's the most user friendly way of displaying that label. Is it:

...accounts code: (optional)

or is it:

...accounts code (optional):