Peterbe.com

It started with this letter of apology on the corporate site of jetblue.com which was quite impressive. Discarding the content I liked the design and the simplicity of the navigation.

I then tried the flight booking interface and was even more impressed. It was intelligent and fast and since I was just goofing about to test rather than to book I accidently selected 30th of February as my return date and a Javascript alert box popped up and prompted me of a my misstake and corrected it. All very impressive since so many airline booking forms suck badly these days.

Then I clicked to go to the homepage and noticed how my Firefox almost froze and started stuttering. Even though the homepage fits on one screen and hasn't got much information it took 11 seconds to download it completely! (apple.com takes 4 seconds, peterbe.com takes 2 seconds on this WiFi connection I'm at)

Has anybody used Sedo.com to try to convince a domain namn owner to sell his domain name? They charge $69 for this service but it doesn't sound like they're going to do much.

Or does anybody have some good advice for how to negotiate to buy someone else's domain name. The domain name I've got my eye on is a .co.uk and was registered recently but is not being used; just a redirect to a splash page about a new site due to be launched soon.

favicon2dots is a cute little app that converts your favicon to a "dot image" or whatever it's called.

Here's what mine looks like.

This is probably one of the funniest clips I've seen since the last one that made my laugh out loud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkD90ZV07zo

The guys is trying to write a Perl program in notepad and the Vista voice recognition program is not helping. It's amazing that they guy doesn't give up. In fact it's actually quite impressive how he continues to struggle on. Enjoy!

UPDATE

This clip has been removed from YouTube unfortunately. Does anybody know where else it can be found?

Long story short, if you need to compare floating point numbers against columns defined as REAL you need to first cast them to NUMERIC in PostgreSQL. And to compare equality between two numbers with different amount of significant figures you have to use ROUND().

cbeau.ca or "Retouche Photos Retouching" is a neat little online gallery showing what can be accomplished with photo retouching of models and other photos like that. What's interesting about the gallery is that the interface is great. It's done in Flash and I'm often disappointed and very rarely amazed by Flash interfaces. I still love Flash games as a user interaction medium and the Flash video players have worked a zillion times better than Quicktime, Windows media or Real player.

Most Flash interfaces are just annoying. Thinks flash, blink and move away from your attention. Nothing ever looks the same so you never learn how to use the interface. Also, a lot of Flash interfaces are slow to load and once loaded you rarely get content but just decorative fluff that you don't really need.

This is an exception though. They even clearly mark out which photos you've clicked on. (I guess they've read and taken in Jacob Nielsens books). The interface is fast and obvious and there is very little else of distractions from what you're there to see.

To all Flash developers out there: Keep up the good work! Don't use Flash when HTML is better even if it's less fun to develop. Look at sites like this for inspiration.

I've wanted to Gzip the static content (CSS & Javascript) on my sites for a long time but never found a good enough solution. mod_gzip is out of the question because as far as I've understood it it does a compression on the fly, every time you request the file.

Other solutions have disappointed me because enabling gzip compression has been for all content. I don't want my HTML files gzipped because they're rendered on the fly based on business logic plus by compressing the HTML files. Long story short my yet-to-be-released app now serves the following files from Zope but are only compressed and whitespace slimmed once per server restart:

FILE               ORIG SIZE  NEW SIZE   REDUCTION
screen.css             15224      2738   556%
print.css               2633       885   298%
jquery-latest.js*      57712     18130   318%
jquery-latest.pack.js  20461     10513   195%
common.js               3803      1131   336%
complete-expense.js    18184      2847   639%
Total                 118017     36244   326%

* only used in debug mode

Clearly from watching these stats about cameras used on Flickr Canon and Sony Ericsson rule. Canon is totally dominating the usage of Point & Shoot cameras which doesn't surprise me. Even if I'm a Nikon user I still recommend the Canons for Point & Shoot if people ask me.

By far, the most popular SLR is the Canon EOS Rebel XT as you can see. It doesn't surprise me that much. It is a great camera. I had sort of hoped that my camera, the Nikon D70, would be more popular but perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Another interesting observation is how cool pictures people take with the Sony Ericsson cameras. It's amazing what can be done if you're a bit artistic. Most of those pictures are much better than mine taken with my much more expensive D70. Pictures taken with the Sony Ericsson 750i and the Sony Ericsson K800i

Google Groups has just had a redesign. Maybe this is old news but it's new for me.

I like the new design a lot. It's more welcoming and warmer. Comparing it to the old design you notice that not a great deal has changed except the colour choice and the cuddly icons. I think the icons are great. Icons is a time-tested proven concept and by making the icons large it'll take less milliseconds for users to click on them with the mouse because they're easier to aim at.

I also like the fact that each group or category gets its own icons. It's something I'd like to have for some of my yet-to-be-released projects but I don't have the resources to get a designer to design all the various icons. I guess this is part of what makes the icons so impressive, that they're not just cuddly but damn hard to do.

Good work Google Groups people!

Maybe the design of csdc.net is just as bad as any other website but what's really unique about this company brochure site is the logo. "We Develop Success" in quotation marks as well. Why? Is that not what you do? Or is it a quote from someone anonymous?

The HTML code stinks of Microsoft-only. There's loads and loads of code like this:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
if(MSFPhover) { MSFPnav14n=MSFPpreload("_derived/CSAS2 Budget 
Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn.gif"); MSFPnav14h=MSFPpreload(
"_derived/CSAS2 Budget Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn_a.gif"); }
// --></script><a href="CSAS2%20Budget%20Management.htm" 
language="JavaScript" onmouseover="if(MSFPhover) 
document['MSFPnav14'].src=MSFPnav14h.src" onmouseout="if(MSFPhover) 
document['MSFPnav14'].src=MSFPnav14n.src"><img 
src="_derived/CSAS2%20Budget%20Management.htm_cmp_ice174010_vbtn.gif" 
width="147" height="31" border="0" alt="Budget Management" 
name="MSFPnav14"></a><br>

You'll get quite a shock when you visit the site with Firefox because the letters "csdc" is shown as <big> to the power of 20!! Here's a screenshot of it in Safari too