Eyes (by alaric)

When I was quite young (5 or so?) I remember having conjunctivitis - rather vividly, since it involved my eyes being stuck shut in the mornings and having to be cleaned out by my mother before I could open them. And, alas, I have it again; this morning, my wife had to clean my eyes up before I could see...

So when I could see well enough, we went and got this 'eye ointment' stuff that she had to put in my eyes (holding me down as she did it!), and afterwards, my eyes felt very sensitive so I sat there for some time with them closed.

This brought to mind a long-running area of interest of mine, which is the design of computer interfaces that are usable to the blind. I only see usefully with one eye anyway, so if anything should happen to the other eye, my career in software development will rather depend on such software...

Going Live! (by alaric)

It's not often that I get to actually write about my work other than tangentially, since it's usually somebody's trade secret, but for a long time now I've been doing the technical architecture and some of the programming for an actual publically viewable web site; and it's been under wraps during development, but now the site is soft-launching, I can start telling people about it.

Feline Cannibalism (by alaric)

Spotted in supermarkets all over the UK:

The text reads "Whiskas Kitten In Jelly"...

The implementation of Web applications (by alaric)

I first started Web app development in PHP in 1998. Although PHP as a programming language has many, many, shortfalls, the fundamental model - take an HTML file, change its file extension to bring it to the attention of the PHP module, then stick bits of code in where needed - was great... for the kinds of pages that are the results of simple GET requests; idempotent data-gathering. Code that's purely functional, at least macroscopically.

However, once you started bringing forms beyond search boxes into the mix, things started to go downhill. This first struck me when I had to develop a series of pages that allowed people to register domain names. At the time, this required gathering four sets of contact details (legal registrant, administrative contact, billing contact, and technical contact), along with some technical details. Since, most of the time, all of these sets of contact details would be one and the same, it was decided that we'd start off with a page with a form for the legal registrant's details, and this would have a "Next" button leading to a page with a form for the administrative contact's details, plus a button that would invoke Javascript to fill the form with the legal registrant's details so they could be submitted as-is or modified slightly (perhaps a different person's name, at the same company and postal address), then submitted with a "Next" button that led to the next set of contact details, this time with buttons to prefill with the legal registrant's details or, if they differed, the administrative contact's details. And so on.

And, of course, there was validation; any of these "Next" buttons might well instead bring you back to the page you just came from, with an error flagged, rather than to the next page.

The Curse again (by alaric)

Eargh.

I've been laid low with something flu-like the past two days, but that's not the problem at hand; it just adds a little extra horridness to it all.

Somebody wanted some information from Sarah before school time today, and since it was late last night when Sarah had the information, we decided to ring at eight in the morning to pass it on rather than eleven thirty at night, since they might already be sleeping.

So I set the alarm for eight, and had my phone to hand (with the number in). And went to sleep. I was woken by the alarm, turned it off, then found to my annoyance that the clock said eight twenty - I'd slept through twenty minutes of alarm, mainly thanks to only having gotten to sleep around one o'clock and being ill, so I poked Sarah awake, handed her the phone, and she left an answerphone message - at the time, I though this meant the whole family had probably already left and we were too late. Afterwards, we drifted back into our troubled sleeps.

I then naturally awoke at half past nine (since I work from home, my normal routine is to wake up at nine, to start work at ten).

So, imagine my surprise when I found I had a voicemail message from this person, rather annoyed that we'd woken them up by ringing at twenty past five that morning...

I still don't know how this happened. I distinctly remember turning the alarm off, and seeing it was twenty past eight before waking Sarah to make the phone call.

This suggests three possibilities:

1. My alarm clock played a mean and nasty trick on me. It shifted three hours ahead in the night, then shifted three hours back before I woke again. (Yes, the alarm was set for eight, not five; I'd not slipped up in setting the alarm or anything simple like that, and the alarm clock's time does currently match what my watch, wall clock, and NTP-synched computers say). Which is actually possible, since it does synchronise to the MSF time signal; perhaps it received a corrupted time signal, but then reset itself when it received a non-corrupted one later.
2. I dreampt of the alarm clock going off and me stopping it, and woke naturally from this, then saw the ...:20 on the clock face and thought it was 8:20 because that's what I was expecting (and 8 and 5 look similar on a seven-segment display)
3. The Painswick telephone exchange is using Time loop logic as part of an experimental new generation of infinite-bandwidth broadband connection.

I suspect (1) is the most likely. But either way, it's incredibly depressing.