Hamster in a wheel

Here’s the latest in the anti-IE6 campaign: http://www.ie6nomore.com/.

I just finished a project for a company where IE6 is the standard browser.  I did most of my development on Firefox because it has good developer tools: Firebug and HttpFox.  Once it worked with Firefox, I tested with IE, changed the parts that were incompatible with IE, re-tested with Firefox, and repeat until it works for both.  Support for Opera and Chromium came for free after that 🙂

The QA team used IE6, so, officially, only ie 6 is supported because other browsers were not tested.  An application that was released in August 2009 officially supports IE6 to the exclusion of all other browsers!  It will be interesting if they ask external users to downgrade back down to IE6.

I wrote an application called List Keeper yesterday.  It is used to maintain lists such as grocery lists, to-do lists, etc.

The interface is very simple, and I hope it will work well on web-enabled cell phones.  I intend to use it for my grocery list (I remove items from the list as I pick them up from the grocery shelves.)  Hopefully other people will find it useful too.

It’s available here: http://list-keeper.appspot.com

It is deployed on the Google App Engine.  You can log in using your Google account.  This means you don’t need to create yet another account on yet another website.  Moreover, it is secure since your password is not sent to me, it is only sent to Google.

Future plans for this application:

• usability testing (determine if it’s better than pen & paper)
• ability to move items up and down the list
• keep history of recently removed items (and undo capabilities)
• google gadget for iGoogle page

This site gets very little traffic, but if you actually search for “hamster in a wheel running in circles” this site will be in the search results.  It means that this site has a very small and mostly accidental audience (probably pet hamster owners, I apologize to them, sigh…)

Blogging hasn’t been as inspiring as I hoped.  I usually have no idea what to write, so I end up posting links to cute YouTube videos.

My previous article (on XML Beans) provides information that I know people are looking for; I’d say it’s my first “real article.”  The last 3 lines of code took a long time to figure out and I’m sure it could be of help to other people.  At this point, though, unless someone proofreads the article, I’m reluctant to actually post links to that article.

Writing’s hard, I need practice.  My main goal at this point is to learn to be concise and to-the-point.  Following this philosophy, I just deleted two-thirds of this article.  Maybe I’ll revise it again tomorrow and cut it down further!