UI Horror: Untrimmed Validation
Hmm... this zip code looks pretty good to me.
This was on the Discount Tire mobile site. It's awesome that you can schedule a service appointment on the web using your mobile phone. It's not so awesome that the form validation doesn't compensate for the trailing space that my phone's …
Google Voice Search Multiple Personality Disorder
I was using my Galaxy Nexus for some turn-by-turn navigation today and it was an odd experience. Half the instructions spoken by the Navigation app were in a typical synthesized voice, while the other half were in a chipper, natural sounding voice.
"In five hundred feet, turn right. Then YOUR …
Clean HTML from Microsoft Word: Rube Goldberg Method
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to save nice clean HTML from Microsoft Word? Here's a way that is only slightly convoluted.
If you use the "Web Page, Filtered" option from Word, you get buried in piles of CSS cruft, but as noted here, you can use the Publish …
I can't figure this one out...
It is true that I'm a fan of Orson Scott Card -- Ender's Game is one of my favorite books. The relationship to professional wrestling generated by Amazon's recommendation engine is... puzzling.
Handy Tax Tip
Kind of off-topic for this blog, but since it is tax day, I thought I'd share this handy tax tip that I found at the IRS website in a document titled "How long should I keep records?"
For all of you folks out there that file fraudulent returns -- if you …
UI Horror: No-Paste Password Fields
Sure, it makes sense to disallow copying passwords from a password field, but disabling pasting is just being annoying.
News flash for developers doing this (such as Intuit, in TurboTax): I'm not thrilled about manually typing my 20 character random password. Just let me copy it from my password vault …
Kindle for Technical Reading
I've read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think it's not quite there yet.
The book I read is Jez Humble and …
Updating an Amazon Linux AMI to Python 2.7
I've been doing some work with Linux lately, a new thing for me, and feel a bit like I've been thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Today I updated Python to version 2.7 on an EC2 instance.
Amazon Linux (Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09 …
Alert Camera Gadget
Download Gadget
Version 0.8.0 (beta)
26 Sep 2012
Around 74 KB
The Alert Camera Gadget lets you keep an eye on your Logitech Alert cameras by rotating through snapshots (still images) from all the cameras associated with your account. This gadget is not provided by or supported …
The Holiday Amazon Box Problem
By the time Christmas comes around, our house is usually awash with boxes from Amazon. It gets a bit tricky at that point, because I'm never sure if the box is something I ordered to give to my family, or something someone else sent me as a gift. In the …