A serious developer has to think of making money, not of some religious beliefs. Contrary to what many people think, software business is just like any other business - invest the money and reap the income. No place for Mother Teresa- if you don’t make money, you fall out of business. Then, should you invest your money to make your sites more accessible? Of course!

Your site should make money. A simple equation: more clients = more money. Your site is not accessible? Less clients- less money. Simple as that.

A digression: making pages accessible is not so hard as it seems. Coding the site in HTML Strict + CSS and remembering a few guidelines should be enough. Not a big deal, actually.

Another happy conclusion from the “information should be free” slogan: all the software should be free! I liked the Joel Spolsky article. It explains why the free software even exists- it exists because it actually pays to publish the software free of charge if it helps selling other software or services.

And yes, I understand the difference between the “free” software as stated by GNU Foundation and “free” software, which you simply don’t have to pay for. I don’t mind the difference. Do you?

1. The client doesn’t know what he wants, and even if he knows,
2. he can’t communicate his needs.

This is how “we” (the computer people) usually view our clients. I’d say this is absolutely wrong. The problem is that “our” interface to common people is rather poor. Remember, common people don’t think in terms of “processes”, “objects”, “workflow” etc. Software designers seem to forget that their clients have no technical educations, understand no programming jargon and have little interest whether the implementation uses XML, HTML or whatever. People become easily confused- just as “we” get confused when we speak with poets, for example. This confusion leads to poor design- and then, we get the “but it’s not what I wanted” problem.

I’d say, when speaking with the client, to go no further than the requirements stage. That is:

• What will the software do?
• How to check if it does?

That’s it. The rest is our problem.

There exists a bunch of "solutions" to this problem, using "alpha filters", chunks of javascript, server-side scripting (this is my favourite) and the like. This is all fine, but it is a patch, not a solution- a lot of unnecessary coding, just to make one buggy browser happy. The real solution is not to use IE... For the time being, I just converted all the weather .pngs to .gifs using ImageMagick:

A digression: there have been many rants about how M$ Internet Explorer is "evil", M$ is "evil" and the like. I'd say it's just a very, very old browser - there hasn't been any significant update in 5 years! No wonder the software is not up-to-date. So? So now it is the time of "the turn of the tide". More and more people use alternative browsers - Firefox, Opera and others. And this is good. Stop complaining and download Firefox! And - Spread the Word!

Just a few institutions want to share their weather data for free (without paying money, to be precise):

• National Weather Service- data is shared through FTP connections,
• Weather Underground - they provide a RSS feed with weather data of selected location,
• weather.com, which provide a XML-based API to their service.

I've chosen the last option - and to get a grip on the solution, I put together a simple WordPress plugin to display the weather data (look to the right). The plugin has two functions:

1. Caching data from weather.com - current conditions are checked once per hour; the XML file from remote server is stored locally to speed up the display process, and to satisfy the usage conditions.
2. Parsing the XML data and displaying the result.

It was the first time I wrote a WordPress plugin - it was quite simple, even if I haven't checked any tutorial or whatever. Just by examining other plugins it was possible to find out the plugin structure. The program however, is too alpha-ish to be presented publicly without shame. Maybe in the near future I will publish the plugin source.

A digression: if you ever happen to come to Poland, try to do it in June/ July. It's strawberries season, and polish strawberries cannot be compared with anything else - they are just the best tasting strawberries in the World! Furthermore, you can buy them for as little as 2.50 zł (about .50 €) for a kilo.

Right, let's cook! I gathered the resources and began to wonder- how in the world do you cook rice on milk? I can cook rice in three different ways - the mundane way, the Japanese way and the Risotto way. But on milk? No idea. What is the algorithm (not very surprisingly, cooking is somewhat similar to programming)? Let's search the Internet... Nothing. Common recipe for rice on milk - "cook the rice on milk". Great. Time for experiments...

Another digression: never buy "parboiled" rice. It just stinks. So does rice in "handy bags". Simple "long grained" rice in paper bags (the cheapest one) does the trick.

Ad rem: one cup rice, three cups milk. A tablespoon of butter. A tablespoon of sugar. Put in a pan, boil for 30 mins. And you know? It worked!

Well, I just had to use Another Network Installer. The software was Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Beta. The installer just plain didn't work. It kept trying to contact the download server and... nada, nothing. WTF?

Oh well, it's not a problem, I can use different C++ compiler, as I need it only for a small project. But, being the person I am, I couldn't let go. I kept digging, and finally succeeded. The problem was two-fold:

• I had to upgrade the BITS service. Of course the VC++ installer cannot just use a plain socket connection, oh no - it has to use some Microsoft only solutions.
• I had to disable my personal firewall for the downloading time. The BITS tried to use svchost service, which I had permanently banned from the Internet, as the only thing it did was shutting down the machine because of some mysterious viruses. Oh well, at least now I know another use of svchost..

Have I mentioned I had to restart the computer after the installation? Another story...

The problem with personal data is not so big, because you can just make up some gibberish. However, you almost always need to submit your email - which is a piece of data you really shouldn't give away so easily. You don't like spam, do you?

One-time email is the answer. Web pages like dodgeit, Mailinator, spamgourmet and Spam Bob can provide you with a disposable e-mail, which will be used just once - to confirm registration or whatever. You register, the e-mail address gets dumped and everybody's happy.

Or, if registration forms just drive you nuts, use bugmenot. This website maintains a database of identities which can be used to bypass the otherwise compulsory registration. They even provide a Firefox plugin for this!

Of course, there is an ethical side to this. A discussion can be found here. I guess you'll just have to decide by yourself.

The language is Ruby, developed by a single japanese guy. It seems to be something between Smalltalk and Perl - with quite simple syntax, full object orientation, exception handling and what not.

First impressions - the syntax is still a bit disturbing for me, some concepts are unfamiliar, some things seem to be overly complicated - but generally nicer than Perl, and closer to shell scripts than Python. Promising.

Some additional resources can be found on Ruby Central. Another thing worth taking a look is Rails, a open-source web framework written entirely in Ruby.

For the moment however, I'll stick with Python as a scripting language of choice - but you never know...

Hmm, I would. For some misterious reasons it works everywhere - but not in Oracle! If the line is longer than 2499 characters (in version 8.something, maybe it's different in other versions), all you get is a friendly error message. What to do? Write a program, say, in Java. There is about 2.7 million ways to do it, of which this is one of the easiest:

So much fun...