I am not a CSS guru, but when I look at how hard it is to produce a clean 2 columns design with a header and footer, having both columns the same height, I understand why so many people stick to HTML tables…
Or is there a better way ?
My VoIP provider (Telio) won’t show a warning to the user if she has some unpaid bills. I know it’s possible to view the bill status list on a particular page in my account, but “it’s not possible” to display a warning on the front page.
Whether the refusal is based on technical or will ground, I don’t know.
Hopefully I don’t need to wait for them to change their mind. A little greasemonkey script comes to the rescue… Here’s the result:
It’s very easy to DOS someone’s access to Norwegian’s tax declaration online system. If you happen to know their personal ID (not too hard to find if you really want), you can enter 3 erroneous passwords on the Altinn web site and get the online access blocked for one hour 
update. Even better! When you fail for the 3rd time, it doesn’t check how long passed since the second. I’ve tried with a delay superior of one hour, and it still failed me. This can clearly be improved: they should add a least the last failure timestamp together with the failure counter.
The problem is interesting: how do you maintain some kind of secure authentication? Every site has his own strategy and the chosen balance between security and ease of use never quite the same.
David Baron, of Mozilla fame, made a very good introductory document targeted to web authors describing the need to use character encodings.
COM, CORBA, EJB, Web Services and XPCOM.
The problem is not new. It’s even been known for ages. But every user community of a technology involving interfaces between (possibly remote) components has to go through the same trial and error cycle, finally reaching maturity when good design patterns combined with a little bit of real life experience and good sense compensate for the too fine grained usage that comes out from over-enthusiasm and inexperience of the first adopters.
It’s funny, but it looks like everytime a new technology appears, programmers forget the experience of their fathers. Stand up on the shoulder of giants as they say…
You want a tip? Wait for the next technology, and write an article/book on good design patterns involving that technology. You won’t need to be the best designer ever (although you still need to be good at it), just make sure you have the right writing skills.
J’ai fait une petite petite introduction a l’informatique (materiel, logiciel, reseaux, securite et logiciels libres) au centre culturel francais d’Oslo cette semaine. La presentation est sous license Creative Commons. N’hesitez pas a ameliorer/reutiliser. C’est en Francais…
Cherchez le 08th of February 2006, et suivez les liens….
I made a small introduction to IT (hardware, software, networks, security and FOSS) at the French cultural center this week. I used a Creative Commons license. Feel free to improve/reuse. It’s in French…
Search for 08th of February 2006, then follow the links….