RAMsey

U2 performing “Bad” from the music film, “Rattle and Hum.”

I remember still images from the scenes with Luke and Biggs on Tatooine that were cut out from the finished film. If you had a copy of the Star Wars paperback book, you might remember these scenes as they were in the book. Fan Justin Lensen has taken these lost scenes and edited them together with music from the film to give us a glimpse into what these may have looked liked as a finished scene from the film.

Kat & I celebrated our 5th anniversary this past weekend. We spent the weekend in the Hill Country town of Fredericksburg and at surrounding wineries and vineyards. Except for buying many many bottles of outstanding wine, we had a relatively low-budget and very enjoyable weekend.

This is the 2006 Cuvée Blanc we enjoyed on the patio at Grape Creek Vineyards. That bottle, along with a nice Camembert and some crackers made for a pleasant and relaxing afternoon.

I work with accessibility in technology. I do it because I believe it is the right thing to do. I am also one who believes all ideas can be taken too far and the proposals being made in the city of Austin for mandated accessible homes are examples of an idea being taken too far.

Bettie Dunkerley is behind these proposed changes to the building codes and she’s putting them to the council for a vote on her last night on the council, which is tonight, the 18th. A pdf of the proposals is available at Austin Contrarian’s site.

I’m opposed to these ideas on the grounds that what is being mandated is being mandated for all, regardless of need, as opposed to being available for those who have a specific need. This isn’t the same as making a public building accessible. These are private dwellings.

I downloaded Firefox 3.0 this afternoon and ran into something that’s a wee bit annoying. Firefox’s interface includes a smooth, single-toned grey top to all its windows. Here’s the Preferences window (cropped for size issues; click on the image to see the full-size):

Looking at this, you would think that anywhere in the dark grey area you could click and drag around the window. Such is the case for just about every Mac OS X application, Cyberduck, Safari, iTunes, etc. The areas of the window in dark grey are draggable areas. (Apple Human Interface Guidelines) Apps that don’t use the large expanses of grey, TextWrangler, Neo Office, for example, use a thinner dark grey bar at the top of the window reminiscent of older Mac interfaces and their window bar. Still, the dark grey area is a draggable interface.

But in Firefox 3, while the look of a native Mac app is there, it’s misleading. Only the top 20 or so pixels of the window tops is draggable. You click anywhere below that invisible 20-pixel line and you can’t click & drag. In addition, Firefox 3 uses the dark grey color at the bottom of browser windows. This area is also not draggable.

Good design serves a purpose and is invisible to the user. The look, while right, in this instance it’s a hindrance.

**Some more Googling and I found a comment left at Alex Faaborg’s blog back in May that mentioned this same thing in one of the beta releases.