OMG! Digg is censoring 09-f9…!!!

Arrrrrhhh, me hearties, it be Talk Like a Pirate day, says I. Avast, you’d best all be keelhauling me for that title.

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Shiver me timbers! Can it be that scurvy Slashdog “dfk” has found a solution for landlubbers being so ignorant of sarcasm on forums? We be needing some more XML namespaces over here.

Why you shouldn’t use LinkButtons

ASP.NET has a LinkButton control, which looks like a link but works like a button. Almost.

Generally speaking, when you hover over a link in your browser, you get to see the URL of the link, so you know where you’re going. With a LinkButton, however, you get gibberish.

Normal link	LinkButton

Right-clicking a link gives users a range of options for doing what they want with that link. A LinkButton doesn’t allow this - it looks like a link, but it doesn’t work like one. Not doing things like your users expect leads to confusion.

Normal link	LinkButton

In some browsers, you can middle-click to open up a link in a new tab. Personally, this is something I use all the time. Indeed, there’s even a Firefox extension, SubmitToTab, which lets you do the same thing with a button. LinkButtons, however, break this, and break it badly. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it also sends you to a blank page with gibberish in the address bar.

Now, granted, so far, everything’s working as though it was a button, not a link - and a LinkButton is supposed to be a button, after all (which happens to look like a link). However, a user expects that if it looks like a link, then it will be a link, and behave like a link, and vice versa. Putting actions behind (what looks like) a link is dangerous because users might not realise that they are committing an action. If it’s supposed to be a button, why use what looks like a link? You’ll just confuse things!

Anyway, most of the sites that I’ve seen using LinkButtons have been using them for what is, effectively, navigation.

None of that, however, compares to the big weakness of LinkButtons - and that is Javascript. Using a LinkButton unnecessarily requires Javascript to be enabled in the user’s browser. Otherwise, they end up getting a Page Not Found error message when they click it!

Some percentage of your users will have Javascript disabled. Perhaps they’re using a mobile phone or PDA which doesn’t support Javascript, or using NoScript, or maybe it’s company policy to disable Javascript on Internet Explorer (and, frequently, this can’t even be changed by the users). Do you really want to stop all these users out from using your site?

There are alternatives. For example, if you have a button, and, for some reason, you absolutely need to display it as a link, you could use a little CSS magic to get pretty much all of the way there. The results work without Javascript and will degrade even if CSS is disabled (unlikely) or the user is using a browser that predates CSS (it will just look like a button).

Seraphiel 0.61 released!

The new version will remember your attack force (briefly) to make it a bit easier to double/triple/etc tap.

It also fixes up a couple issues:

• Doing a SoM on a Gnome no longer results in an annoying error message
• Issues with copy/pasting into Angel have been resolved
• A couple tweaks to the kingdom page

And the code continues to get cleaner, little by little :p

Both the extension and the script have been updated (granted, I have been somewhat more consistent about doing both lately).

Enjoy!

Of memes and mobiles: Part 2

A little over a year ago, I mentioned a noxious company called DC Marketing with a mobile phone scam. I’m afraid I’m a little late to this party, but the Australian Communications Media Authority fined them almost $150,000 a couple of weeks ago.

The system works!

Link: Article in the Sydney Morning Herald

6 tags to crash IE….

Slashdot may be bored by the 6 tags that can crash IE, but even so, I thought it was interesting.

Here’s the code:

<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input /></table>

Indeed, if you take that and save it onto your hard drive, you can crash Windows Explorer just by selecting it (YMMV depending on the version of IE and the operating system: I’m using IE6 on Windows XP Professional (32-bit)).

Use the leftMouseButton to grab on the control points and drag.

It is very rocky. It is your responsibility to respect all legal aspects.
Duration of an activity that began in the past and continues to the
present. It is worth noting that for performance reasons, delaying as
much as possible is often a good idea.
Then the time came to give the talk, and here are these monster minds
in front of me, waiting. An unusual situation can arise that puts
Windows in an infinite loop when the ES register holds the selector
to a discardable code segment.
But I think I see what you mean. Alternately, you can install
Microsoft Posting Acceptor 2.
Then I got up and stood behind her. I lit a cigarette.
FramerD was originally developed at MIT’s Media Laboratory by Ken
Haase. Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.
And yet, as you see, I will not touch the creature. When an
application passes the handle returned by CreateCompatibleDC to one
of the drawing functions, the requested output does not appear on a
device’s drawing surface.
Maybe there are others like me and others who have found a solution,
might be good if we get an answer to this. Those Tsorteans must think
we’re simple.
It is zero if the function failed. Single-element operations return
positions, where a non-NULL value indicates that it worked.
It is your side that needs that little homily, I think. Maybe I can
work them into the package some way.
This can be used to avoid that a contained item matches in the start
or end pattern. It isn’t like we had some money laid by to take care
of emergencies.
He’s always bad then. As we have seen, that is what causes activation
object persistence.

Yay! More image spam!

If you want more of this sort of rubbish, I guess you’ll just have to read something from that no good fish pirate. It makes almost as much sense as the above.

Yeah, that’s free will alright

Australian (presumably Victorian) police are investigating Telstra after it surfaced that Telstra had installed GPS devices in work cars without their technician’s consent.

But their technicians signed on agreeing to it!

Let’s see… (allegedly, )

1. Four days before fitting their cars with GPS devices, Telstra gives its employees notice.
2. Union objects.
3. Telstra notifies employees they will probably be fired if they don’t agree.
4. Some of them note, while signing, that they are doing so under duress.
5. Telstra tells them they’ll probably be fired if they don’t take that bit off.
6. Employees continue to refuse, Telstra gives them one last chance.
7. Employees sign.

Hoorah! They agreed to it!

Article in The Australian

Yeah, thanks for helping me trust you

Text message from my mobile phone provider (Optus) - emphasis is mine:

To get a free ringtone, call 966 and select 9 after the greeting. Call costs 30c/30secs, standard data charges apply, expires 30/08/07.

I’m not entirely sure which definition of free costs 30c/30secs and then some. I very much doubt that they’re going to be granting every caller enough intellectual property to describe it as libre.

Also, what sort of person would want to pay to get an unspecified ringtone?

Spam is boring.

Really? Couldn’t one of them mix in just a little of the stuff from their image spam brethren?

Seraphiel 0.60 released!

A bunch of smallish changes, but I feel that they add up to a lot

New features:

• Auto-hide Seraphiel menu and monarch messages (thanks Avarice!)
• Messages received now fit your style
• A character count has been added to the send messages page
• Arrows showing which way you’re sorting provinces in the kingdom page
• More per-acre ratios in the throne page (in report view)
• The actual percentages you have of each building is shown, along with the effects

Fixes:

• Kingdom locations are converted into links faster (thanks Avarice!)
• The resource bar pinning is a little bit nicer
• The monarch message is retrieved somewhat more reliably

(P.S. I added a developers page.)