I just had my mind blown by the English language, yet again. There’s actually a word whose opposite (or close to it) is the same word, spelled the same, but pronounced differently. That word is: resigned. “Jon resigned his position on the basketball team.” vs. “Jon resigned his contract with the team for one more season.” As in, that BP CEO who resigned and got an $18 million bonus.
Not knowing if I was using resigned incorrectly, I had to look it up. Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com demonstrate the disparity on the front page of Google. Pretty cool – I feel like I just won the word nerd lottery.
So I noticed that Firefox updated itself again today, only a few days after it did last time. Why the short time-lapse between Firefox 3.6.4 and 3.6.6? Just one bug: 574905. The Farmville Bug No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash …
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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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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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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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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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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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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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