While we are submerged into the rich user interface and web 2.0 features of web application, one area that gets defocused (even otherwise most of the time) is the accessibility of the site.  Accessibility is the visual design aspect of a site that helps even the physically challenged to use the web site. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has lot of insights on this. If you want to take a quick peek at making a accessible web site check out “Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites“.

It is always a (dis)belief that Agile and Software process like CMM (Capability Maturity Model) or TSP (Team Software Process) do not go well with each other. I read this almost couple of year old article “Agile CMMI: No Oxymoron” in Dr.Dobbs. Some good insights on how agile value statements can be mapped to TSP.

Have a great week!

Kartoo is a pictorial/navigational search engine that can connect information relevant to your search and connect the sites and display them pictorially. Take a look at it, it is an interesting concept and well done.

Happy weekend!

“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” - Confucius

What a good quote it is, learning and thinking has to go hand in hand and cannot be lived one without another. Looks like I do go by that quote. Because as I read this quote in the local newspaper it also made me think, “Have I ever learnt something without thinking or am I just thinking and no-learn person?” Whether I have answer to that question or not it looks like I did learn that quote and thought about it too

Happy Saturday.

If you are dealing with converting string to numbers particularly a currency with locale specific formatting (surch as $10,300.83-) then the default parseInt/parseFloat in Java will not help as it would throw a NumberFormatException. This article “Resolving NumberFormat’s parsing issues” in IBM developerWorks describes how the class java.text.NumberFormat can be used effectively to solve locale specific conversions.

During development when some issue blocks the progress most often it is not a single step fix that solves the issue. There might be several things that need to be done to really address and fix the issue.  This might even involve backtracking previous steps and altering some statements/dependent programs/input values etc. And more than likely some nasty issues can take a while altering and backtracking and at one point things might get set and the issue gets solved. This could be a time consuming process but ultimately there are couple of home works to be done after fixing any long time issue. One is to understand what the actual problem was and the other is to truly understand the steps that fix the problem. If one had been trying different permutation combination of changes to fix the problem then it is most likely that the actual path to fix the problem maybe too difficult to recollect after finding the solution. In essence the developer might be happy that he/she fixed the issue but may not have done those two home works.  The advantage of doing those home works is the lesson one learns in fixing that issue and most importantly the time that it saves the next time when the same issue is encountered is enormous.  The easiest way to make sure that the steps to fix a problem are captured is to keep open a simple editor and note down each and every step before making it.  The bread crumbs approach helps in two ways. One to retrace back and another is the documentation of steps to fix the problem. In fact if the fix to the issue runs for days there is no harm in version controlling this whole bread crumb document.

I was little shocked after reading this BBC technology news article “Virus creators target Wikipedia“. Wikipedia is the knowledge source for millions of online community and it is a site that runs on the basis of trust and knowledge sharing.  Such misuse of it does really can shake that trust and can open up introducing rules around posting information in this famous online encyclopedia.

I came to know about CardSpace when I read an article “Microsoft plan to combat online fraud” in the local newspaper yesterday. CardSpace is a new initiative from Microsoft that is an identity metasystem that provides a consistent way to work with multiple digital identities, regardless of the kinds of security tokens they use. What does this mean? You have several digital identities when you are on the net.  There will be sites where you are identification is validated through a credit card, and there will be sites which identifies you with just a user name and password and think about some sites like the banking application which does something beyond user name and password (say you have to enter randomly picked up digits from your ATM card) to validate your identity and so on.  We need these different identities depending on the situation but to bring them together that can manage these identities we need a system.  That’s what a CardSpace does.  Think of it this way, suppose if we pasted your driving license, passport, your office identity card, credit card etc as one single card and wherever you present it, there was one system that can pick up the appropriate one to be used then we are talking about how CardSpace works.  Here is an excerpt from an MSDN article on what CardSpace provides.

• Support for any digital identity system
• Consistent user control of digital identity
• Replacement of password-based Web login
• Improved user confidence in the identity of remote applications

The concept is similar to Federated Identity Management using open standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) but with CardSpace a lot of the intricacies are managed by Microsoft. But as pointed out in this article “You Are Now Entering CardSpace” the biggest challenge for Microsoft would be to get the buy in from site developers and important organizations like the financial institutions. To know more about CardSpace you can look at the several links including a video presentation in MSDN.