Design Patterns are something that a lot of use without really knowing what they are. I guess that a lot of the time they’re actually common sense, but this book will help you no end.

Head First Design Patterns (O’Reilly)

I highly recommend it! Its written in a fun and engaging style and has plenty of diagrams to help you break through the jargon.

Although the patterns are based on Java examples, any AS2.0/AS3.0 developers will still find it useful.

I’m looking forward to getting some patterns going!

So I thought I’d make some effort and download the latest Machine Head album legally today. How hard could it be?

I had some HMV vouchers I got when I left my previous company so I thought I’d try and use HMV. Of course the mp3 downloads weren’t in the normal online shop, they were in HMV Digital, so I had to go there. (A bit strange calling your download shop “digital” since the internet is digital medium as are CDs which are sold in the normal shop!). Did HMV Digital work with Firefox? No.

Ok… so now I’m finally there and I’ve re-registered with HMV Digital (having already registered with HMV normal) it asks for my credit card details! I haven’t even bought anything yet. So after double checking they’re not selling me something without me knowing, I carry on.

Finally I get to the download page, which works fine and proceed to the checkout. But what’s this?

The dreaded DRM! But don’t worry, their help tells me that “For a full list of these compatible players please go to the downloads tab at www.hmv.co.uk.” Er…. So assuming my player is compatible I can copy (and burn?) the wma 3 times. But who knows what happens if my computer dies and I have to retreive it from a backup. Or if I upgrade my computer. Or etc… Its just not worth it!

I like their little dig at Apple here: “Unfortunately Apple iPods are not compatible. Currently they are only compatible with Apple iTunes. ” Yeah, so don’t have a go at HMV!

So where can I get a legal mp3 of this album? Countless Russian websites have them. They appear to be legal, but in the end you’re not giving much money to the artist. (Which I guess is what this paying money for music stuff is all about).

But in the end, by far the easiest way to download the album is to do a Google search for “Torrent Machine Head Blackening“. And that’s one major reason why illegal downloads are so much popular!

Let’s hope they all sort their act out soon.

When you download Skype you get download instructions that are specific to the browser that you’re using.

What a great touch!

It does mean that you need to be quite diligent when it comes to browser/OS updates and I wonder if they change the screens depending on the language of your OS. Now that would be an impressive level of attention to detail.

http://www.laptop.org/

This is a brilliant new project to build laptops for $100 and give them to the “developing” world.

It has some amazing features:

• each laptop is a wireless router and can connect to other laptops within 1km. If any laptop can connect to the internet then any laptops connected (they call it a mesh) can get access
• the laptop uses 1/10 the battery power of a normal laptop
• you can wind up the laptop using the crank when the battery dies
• no toxic chemicals are used in it
• software is all open source to keep costs down (linux, open office?)

It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes!

As you might have noticed, the site is slowly updating and now has a little “Beta” notice in the header. So you may (or may not as is the most likely case) be wondering what will need to happen before this site is no longer a beta site. Well, there is a plan!

• Make clickable (enlargable) images appear clickable
• Link some other blogs to this blog and add trackbacks
• Find out what a “trackback” is!
• Convert the last.fm image to a styled feed (xslt perhaps?)
• Improve the navigation on pages other than the homepage
• Limit the number of posts on the homepage
• Stick some information about myself and a link to my CV from the blog
• Write something worth reading
• Improve the graphics

Phew… the scheduled completion of these is a closely guarded secret but if anyone wants to help, feel free to email me.

Which reminds me:

• Add a contact form/email address to the blog
• Do something about all those spam comments

This is a great little login system from http://whatshouldisay.com/. To save space it starts off compacted.

Click “Login” and the box slides down and reveals the username and password fields. The username field is already selected so you can type in straight away.

Great stuff. No need for for those ugly username/password boxes on the top, nor any need to have the page reload or a pop up when you want to login.

That’s a confusing title I know, but check out what it refers to on http://www.123-reg.co.uk/.

I spent a while trying to figure out how to log in to this website. Although its generally an excellent website, they’ve written “log in to your control panel” instead of “log in to your control panel”.

It’s a weird one! I guess they presumed people were looking for the control panel button. I wasn’t! I was looking for the login button, which I suspect a lot of people will.

Captchas are those annoying squewed bits of gobbledegook you get on registration forms and blog/forum forms. They're there to prevent automated bots posting spam.

Here's Yahoo!'s Captcha system as displayed on their registration form.

They've helpfully provided a "more info" link which has a little "new window" icon next to it. That's a great little icon for those who know what it means, because it takes away the worry that all the information you've spent the last few minutes entering won't be wiped off when you click that link and get taken to a new page.

I think this system does have some problems though:

1. The most major problem with this system is that it is not accesible. People using a screen reader simply cannot read the image and therefore cannot register with Yahoo! Which is the ultimate form of discrimination for visually impaired web users.
2. "Verify your registration" doesn't really mean anything. This isn't about verifying your registration (the website should do that itself!). This is about verifying that you're a human. So this section should really be called something else, like "Human verification" or better still "Anti-spam verification".
3. Its not immediately obvious what "more info" refers to. It would be better placed at the end of the "…prevent automated registrations" sentence. You do also wonder if it would have been easier to have this information on the page, or if it appeared on the page (via CSS) when you clicked it instead of opening a pop up.
4. The Captcha text itself has case issues. i.e. is it "sTXu" or "STXu" or "sTXu"?
5. (This is a really picky one) The image isn't really a code. So saying "enter the code shown below" is a bit inaccurate. "Enter the text you see below" would be nicer.

Here's Google's Captcha from their registration page.

This is better than Yahoo!'s since it resolves the accessibility issue by having an audio version of the word. It still has problems:

1. "Word verification" doesn't really explain what this is again. Are you verifying the word? No. You're verifying that you're a human using the word, but that's not really what "Word verification" implies.
2. Is that disabled symbol actually a button? Also, I don't know how great it is to use an image of a wheelchair for user's who might have bad vision.
3. "Letters are not case-sensitive" - this is an improvement on the Yahoo! system, but the text is overly complicated. Why not just have "Letters are all lower case" or "do not use capital letters" (since lower and upper case are quite technical terms)

Here's an unusual one from www.altpick.com

This is certainly more fun, but is also quite a simple system to crack, so it doesn't seem very effective really.

So Google's system looks the best and most solid of three, but could still be improved. Apparently these systems are being actively cracked so I guess the battle will go on…

What’s the solution to this problem? Entries on a postcard please!

Channel 4's video on demand service (still in beta) suffers from a difficult to use interface. To use 4od you need to download the 4od player which uses your browser to work. However, it doesn't let you use your browser features since it opens in a full screen pop up without your browser navigation bar.

This means that instead of having your usual trusted forward and back buttons with their mini-history lists, you get two small forward and back buttons with no history. Instead of being able to bookmark your favourite pages (such as the "Free for All" section in the image below) you have to navigate there each time from the homepage. You can't open multiple pages at once either. There are no tooltips nor any right click allowed at all. Neither are there any RSS feeds.

With all these handy features built into browsers it seems a shame to have lost them. The 4od site is a great step forward for on demand video though. Let's hope they sort some of these issues out before it leaves its beta stage.

Having a site map at the bottom of the page is becoming a bit more common these days.

The last.fm website has a particularly good one with copyright, legal and language information nicely included.