Jakob Vad Nielsen

It suddenly struck me as odd that we haven’t got a html page bundle format ages ago. So what do I mean by that? Well, I was creating this documentation in a text based format (APT). And I was supposed to send this documentation to an outsider of the company. The only way I could send him the documentation, and still preserving the formatting, was by creating a PDF.
But it turned out that this documentation really didn’t fit into the paper format. Tables were cut, images to large, and so on. And what I really wanted was to let the customer read it, not concerning about wether he was going to print it or not. I should also say that the system I used didn’t allow me to adjust the paper format of the PDF.

So I started to think about alternatives. I could zip down the html, css and images. But then the customer would have to unzip it before reading it. And a lot of people wouldn’t understand how to do that. Then I could convert it into a document format not having limitations on the page format. But again the software I used didn’t support anything else but exporting to html and pdf.

What would have really helped me out was if we’ve had a unified way to bundle one or many html files (including resource files like images/css/js/movies) into one compressed file with a predetermined file extension. This would be pretty much the same thing as OpenOffice have done with their document files for years (It’s really just a zip-file). This way my customers email client would know how to handle the file by unpacking it and opening it in the default browser.

This could be really easy to implement:

1) Define an internal structure for the compressed bundle
2) Consider if it would need a meta file defining what to be found inside the bundle.
3) Find a file extension for this bundle format (eg: bwp)
4) Decide what compression format to be used.

And then the hard part:

Getting the different mail clients / browsers / operating systems to implement support for the format. *Gah!*

Please let me know it such a thing already exists, or if there have been any attempt to standardize on a solution concerning this.

At least I have the balls to admit that I was wrong about Twitter (http://www.jakobnielsen.net/?p=25). But I still stick to a lot of what I said in the post referred.

I still think that some people are spamming their Twitter account a lot. But I have found the “unfollow” button. So now I follow people that tend to tweed funny stuff or things that I am interested in.

I still dislike the reply system. It is extremely hard to understand that people are finding this useful. I also stick to everything I said about tiny urls. They waste my time.

I have found software that makes it easier to follow communication on all the different services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, ++. So it really doesn’t bother me being on yet another channel anymore.

So my new view on Twitter is: It is a nice little tool keeping me updated on things that interests me at work. But it has really no value for my private life. There Facebook is the right tool.

JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library / JSR-52) has been around for quite some time now. It was certainly a breath of fresh air when it was introduced as an alternative to inline java in JSP files. Unfortunately I still find it lacking. I will try to describe these problems as best I can in a number of posts here on my blog. Please comment if you think I have misunderstood some of the concepts along the way.

Continue reading ‘Where JSTL comes to short (Part 1 : I speak to you in klingon)’ »

During the last week I have really tried to get the grip on Twitter. But no matter how hard I’ve tried, I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m to old.

Anyway here is my 8 reasons to remove my account.

Continue reading ‘Bye Twitter!’ »

Me was there!

Copyright: Use is freely as long as you keep the image intact.

I’m so sick and tired of Linux and Windows on my Laptop. Has anyone ever had a windows based laptop where sleep/suspend really worked? Or does there exist a laptop where you don’t have to do anything to get this working (except from installing linux off course)?

I’m tried of having to check, and then double check the supported linux hardware every time I buy a laptop that’s supposed to run linux.

Getting Gentoo up and running on a Dell 8600 Inspiron is fairly easy. But I had some initial problems with the network settings.

The problem was that the network card (Broadcom 4400) wasn’t detected. To fix this I simply had to execute.

> modprobe b44

But the tricky part was that I had to unplug the network cable (and then put it back) before I could start the eth0 interface.

> /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start

Except from this I just had to follow the installation instructions from Gentoo.

After 4 months of spending time with my youngest son, it’s about time to go back to my work at NHST. I must say that it is with mixed feelings that I do return to my office. On one hand I look forward to meet the colleagues again, but on the other hand it’s really nice to control your days without having to go to job. Hopefully I will have a chance to look at a lot of new technologies the next couple of weeks…