Most developers think of software bugs as annoying but ultimately harmless. Sadly, as I found out today, that isn’t always true. It turns out that due to a bug in ScreenFlow, occasionally it will suddenly and inexplicably start playing extremely loud random noise instead of the soft, dulcet tones of the screen cast you were aiming for1. I was wearing headphones at the time and even though the volume was turned down to just one click above mute, it didn’t seem to pay any attention to that and just about blew my eardrums out.

Shelley Powers: Weblogging, where no one really knows how many people are following you, most people don’t care, we can actually communicate complete thoughts, and do what we want with our URLs. Twitter is like haikus, an interesting application of extreme limits that inspires creativity and a different way of thinking. Entirely useful, fascinating pursuit, good luck to you all. Haikus have their strong points, but let’s face it even the best haikus don’t come close to telling the same kind of story as a novel, or even a ballad.

From the Maidenhead Advertiser: Look out for a giant pink fluffy testicle gracing the nation’s top sporting events this summer. Raising awareness of testicular cancer – good on him and best of luck to him: “I’m going to go to whatever I can, but no doubt most of it will be sport-related. Tennis, football, cricket – whatever I can get to. I’ll be using public transport so I’m sure I’ll get well-noticed.

Note to self: the nu.validator has a really handy looking SAX handler that serializes the XML. Hat tip to Henri Sivonen for pointing this out along with a bunch of other useful XML generating tips.

I hadn’t realized this until Rob Weir pointed it out, but Windows XP moves to the “extended support” phase of it’s life cycle (also Office 2003) after today. So for most consumers, that means XP is now dead – though still more popular than Vista1{#footlink1:1239695774478.footnote}. I have a lot of demo VMs set up with XP and I really don’t want to migrate them to Vista (let alone pay for that), but a demo on Linux just isn’t going to cut it with clients who use Windows exclusively.

Recently John Gruber started an uproar against the Diggbar – an URL shortening service that also adds frames. Frames are one of the most annoying inventions ever to come to HTML, even when used by the original site author. When used by third party’s they have a major impact on the usability for readers who can no longer bookmark, copy URLs or see where they actually are. Back in the 90s when frames were accepted practice, nearly every site would have a link saying something like “stuck in frames?

Gianugo Rabellino, among a bunch of interesting stuff on Agile and Open-source development: do-ocracy and his French-speaking twin JFDI I really must remember that phrase – just brilliant. Doug, you’d probably be interested in Gianugo’s thoughts as well.

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages: openmotif compat-libstdc++ Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage. Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks: Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets. The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone. People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time.

When I wrote my post on accessibility the other day, what I really meant to say is what basically what Rob Foster wrote. Very roughly summarized, accessibility is about real people, not checklists. The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. … Here’s my point–if your brother or sister had a disability, you would give a crap.

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have been going back and forth and back again about accessibility and in particular the SVG images on Sam’s blog. In Mark’s latest post he explains the somewhat crazy world of access enablement: Long answer: As far as I know, none of the commercially available screenreaders support svg in any way, much less reading the title of an svg image included inline in an xhtml page (as opposed to, say, linked from the src attribute of an <img> element, or embedded in an <object> element).