Aiming for Accessibility Conference

Desire2Learn sent me to the Aiming for Accessibility Conference at the University of Guelph for one of the two days, and it was a really solid.  There’s quite a bit of expertise around accessible web technology here at the office, so it’s nice to see the cause celebrated and discussed.  The conference wasn’t huge: intimate …

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June 25, 2010 – 15:55 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Chrisitian Rohrer’s Greatest Hits

Whenever I try to frame a usability problem we have with some sort of solution, I usually get overwhelmed.  Usability research is difficult to execute well even if you know what you’re doing .. but UX is a field with an over-abundance of methods and strategies.  All of these strategies have pros, cons, proponents, and …

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June 16, 2010 – 11:49 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Little pictures, big ideas

I subscribe to this one photo blog on my work laptop.  Updates don’t come often, but regularly, and always with a well-written synopsis of what’s going on, and a little biography of the photographer.  The writeup is usually just enough to get my interest piqued, something else to look up online, something to share and …

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June 11, 2010 – 14:11 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Microformats to the Rescue

This one is for the CMS designers out there.  If you’re in the business of building platforms that people create content in, you undoubtedly have run into the problem of storing metadata.  It may seem easy at first, “just put it in a database!”, but then you start running into predictable problems: the context information …

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May 21, 2010 – 16:26 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Sorting Country Names in their Native Language

I used to think that sorting things was easy. Collation is a really difficult problem, especially once you start considering different script (Latin, Chinese, German, etc.) and numeral systems (Western Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, etc.) in the same list, not to mention locale-specific sorting irregularities like German Phonebook sorts. The problem of sorting country names is …

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May 10, 2010 – 11:44 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Happy IDN Day!

Today is the day that internationalized domain names (IDNs) go live on the internet. As someone really interested in globalization, this is a huge development: this is the first time non-latin characters can be used as domain names in the public internet. Arabic nations especially are loving this, and I’m sure Hebrew and Chinese language …

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May 6, 2010 – 09:11 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Vimeo and Puerto Rico

I know I’m probably pretty late to this bandwagon, but I never realised just how much amazing content there is on Vimeo.  YouTube may be the king of video quantity, but sometimes (often? all the time?) I want to see original videos on interesting topics, in HD. The artist community on Vimeo is really strong, …

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April 24, 2010 – 18:12 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

PHP on IIS

I’ve been playing around with IIS recently.  The Windows/IIS community is not nearly as well served by Open Source as the competition, which is unfortunate given that IIS is a really popular platform for intranets and other enterprise applications.  It’s not really fair to ask your IT department to support Apache + MySQL as well …

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March 11, 2010 – 18:08 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Final thought on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics

As much as I was extremely happy for all the Canadian athletes at the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics, especially the speed skaters, I’ve had this nagging feeling I want to get off my chest. Maybe it’s too early to say it, but I didn’t like the blatant Canadian nationalism on display at the 2010 Olympic …

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March 3, 2010 – 11:26 | By dariusz | Posted in Activism and Politics, Personal Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Lunch and Adventure, my new blog: loudlunch.com

Hey all, I’ve been busy blogging at work behind the firewallz so I haven’t been so keen on updating my personal blog.  But I have been pretty passionate about lunch-time lately.  So in that vein, I decided to start writing about it on a new blog, Loud Lunch. Loud Lunch will be dedicated to my …

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January 21, 2010 – 17:33 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Comments (0)