Accesskeys that aren’t

My work webmail is provided by IMP.

This bit is wildly wrong but is what I saw for a variety of Greasemonkey-related reasons.


Like Gmail it provides keyboard shortcuts for just about everything you might want to do with an email. Unfortunately, like Gmail, instead of just adding real accesskeys it uses JavaScript to interrupt key events and see if they match any of the IMP pre-set ones.

Compounding this is that the keystrokes IMP recognises as shortcuts are all ALT+, which is not only exactly the same as most default accesskey implementations (but without the accessibility benefits), but one of the ones it recognises is ALT+D, which in Internet Explorer and Firefox has been a shortcut for “address bar” for at least a decade.

In IMP it deletes the mail you’re reading.

Thanks, IMP!

Wiki or facebook? Decision decisions.

Loads of people in my office have a Wii. Being British, this is a terribly amusing state of affairs.

I was considering setting up a space on our work wiki where we could jot down our friend codes, games we’ve got, would recommend, release schedules, etc. (or just link to external resources – the world always needs another clearing-house, right?) when it struck me that Facebook might be an alternative – it would be easier to open to other people (although harder to regulate the scummy masses) and easier to post information.

The problem is that I just don’t like using Facebook. There’s something terribly clumsy about its interface which really turns me off. I can never quite find where I’m supposed to be going at a particular time, and the way groups are formatted is just a bit, well, shit. There’s the Wall for conversations, but also the discussion boards, and it’s just a mess, especially with no way of checking what’s going on without putting some dedicated effort into visiting all the time. I thought we left that behind the best part of a decade ago.

So I’d like to use a wiki and integrate our forums, but our forums are, uh, well, “not available” is pretty accurate. I guess I’ll plough through the Confluence plugins and see what I can do.

Future Wii games free on Linux and Windows today

If you’re looking forward to Blast Works on the Wii next year then you probably want to spend some time playing Tumiki Fighters which as far as I can tell is what it’s based on. I’ve been playing Tumiki Fighters and rRootage (both by Kenta Cho, probably more famous for his Tempest-a-like Torus Trooper) for a couple of months now and they’re both totally enjoyable shooters in a very old-school vein and well worth the quick and easy download.Give them a go!

IWMW 2007 redux

I’d like to thank everyone who put up with my ‘eternal beta‘ session at IWMW 2007 – it was baking hot and I had a cracking headache, so congratulations for not hurling chairs and broken glass at me!

In other news it was good to catch up with a number of people and to meet a lot of new ones, although I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the number of people I’d apparently met before and blind forgotten or who knew who I was in advance. It was good to meet you all, and many thanks to the girls from Essex for taking me to task about my electronic, motorised rabbit (specialist stockists only).

I only stayed for a day (although went out for a drink the night before) but even in that short period it was interesting to see what kind of people with what kind of backgrounds were embracing new tech to what extent. I think Paul twittering in the pub was the first live-action Twitter I’d seen.

A good event, videos are online, as are a lot of the presentations, and many thanks to the organisers!

Shadow marvels

I have a number of blog posts I want to make. About Jabber, about Edinburgh, about wikis, about Venus.

I’ve just read this story Shadow lamps to connect friends on the BBC and I absolutely love it.

How could we do something similar at home? Off the top of my head: maybe a webcam taking shots every x seconds and then using ImageMagick to do an inverted monochrome transform and post to the web (copy to public_html, FTP, whatever) and then use some desktop gadget system (Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, GNOME panel applet whatever) to pull it down and embed it?

Sounds good!