Welcome to zerokspot.com, the personal website of Horst Gutmann.

Archive for 2009

  • QuickTip: JQueryTools Overlays and Accessibility

    During the latest minor design changes here (no sidebar anymore, yay!) I placed the information that was previously provided within a sidebar next to every entry into a couple of lightbox elements in combination with a small dropdown menu. Both were implemented so that non-javascript-enabled browsers should still be able to at least access the content, but I wasn't yet certain how to add the keyboard navigation to it. 

    Today I browsed a bit around and found a really nice article by Roger Johansson about "Lightboxes and keyboard accessiblity". He basically sums up all my gripes I normally have with lightbox implementations out there; and just to pick one here: They lose focus. Most already come with a keybinding for closing them again, but they normally out of the box don't restore your focus from before entering them. jQuery Tools' overlays seem not to be an exception here, but it is rather simple to give an overlay some memory in this regard :-) 

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    2009/12/22 at 21:11:07

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  • USK game boxes - Lost in Translation

    After half a year of not playing Mirror's Edge anymore, today I finally bought it. In spring Mathias let me mess around with it a little bit and I really enjoyed it. But suddenly other things came up and I never finished it. For a few months now I've been thinking again and again about buying the game ... and never actually did it. Why? Because, while I often see the PS3 version in local stores for 20 EUR, all they have is the USK-rated version that says it only offers the German voice tracks.

    Let me make a small detour and tell you something about localized games: While often acceptable, it is only very rarely en par with the original voice work. There are some notable exceptions from this rule like Prince of Persia (the "new" one) but in general if you understand the "original" language a game was developed in, play it in that language. 

    So, back to the main topic: Today I again went into a local electronics store, primarily to get Spirit Tracks, but also saw once again a bunch of Mirror's Edge boxes. Naturally the already mentioned USK-box. So I checked with gameware.at and found, that it actually might also contain the English language pack. I guess I was kind of adventurous today so I just bought it and was really delighted when all the voice work was really in English :-)

    But why is it so hard to just write that onto the box? The same happened with Red Faction and other games and IIRC inFamous even offered the English language pack as a download right after the game's release. It's like someone forgot that oftentimes there is more than just a single language pack on the disc. @Sony: Don't hide, that the English pack is on the disc! Be proud of it and write it on the box :-)

    2009/12/19 at 16:27:47

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  • Resource packages - generische CSS Sprites

    Irgendwie ist mir das total entgangen, deshalb "Sorry" für die Verspätung :-) Resource Package ist ein Vorschlag von Alexander Limi für ein durchaus gängiges und absolut reales Problem: Viele Seiten verlangen vom Browser, dass er eine ganze Reihe von Ressourcen wie Stylesheets, JavaScripts und Bilder herunterlädt, bevor die Seite vollständig dem Benutzer präsentiert werden kann.

    Dabei entsteht jedoch das Problem, dass Browser ein Limit haben, wie viele gleichzeitige Verbindungen sie zu einem einzigen Server herstellen, einerseits um diesen nicht zu sehr zu belasten, andererseits natürlich auch, um die Verbindungen des Clients nicht zu überstrapazieren. HTTP/1.1 spricht hier von 2 Verbindungen. IE8 geht da ein bisschen weiter und bietet 6. In Anbetracht von Seiten, die mehr als 30 Ressourcen laden wollen, ist selbst das nur ein Tropfen auf den heißen Stein. Aus diesem Grund gilt auch schon seit Längerem die Devise für die Entwicklung performanter Websites, die Anzahl der nötigen Verbindungen möglichst gering zu halten.

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    2009/12/14 at 20:55:50

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  • Finally some choice

    The wait is finally over! It only took more than two and a half year but since yesterday Amazon MP3 is now also finally available in Austria :D It naturally still comes with its own little downloader application (which is at least available on Windows, OSX and Linux) but that didn't prevent me from spending 15 EUR with them right away. Currently they have a huge selection of albums for sale - at a price about half of what Apple wants - so I just couldn't resist :-)

    Now I'm just waiting for either Apple or Amazon to give me access to international tracks :-)

    2009/12/05 at 20:25:29

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  • Etwas für den Kalendar: Photowalk 3 in Wien

    Primary link: blog.webnfoto.com

    Gerade gelesen: Am 13. März findet der 3. Photowalk in Wien statt. Genaueres gibt es derzeit scheinbar noch nicht (ist ja auch noch genug Zeit fürs Planen), aber nach dem letzten Photowalk im Oktober freue ich mich schon wahnsinnig auf März.

    So vom Konzept her war der letzte Photowalk genau richtig für mich: Themen, schöne Gegend und danach bequemes Zusammensitzen mit gutem Essen; und da habe ich großes Vertrauene in die Orgas, das sie mir auch dieses Mal wieder ein weiteres Stück Wien näher bringen :-)

    2009/11/27 at 16:41:40

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  • Root contexts prefer not to share

    Tonight I learned something funny with Spring: Don't be lazy when defining your root application context. I wanted to play around with Jersey and its integration with Spring, but was kind of lazy:

        <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>WEB-INF/SpringMVC-servlet.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>SpringMVC</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
        </servlet-class>
    </servlet>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>spring-jersey</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.spring.container.servlet.SpringServlet
        </servlet-class>
    </servlet>

    This is a really bad idea because you will end up with both the REST Resources as well as everything in Spring being able to access the same beans (those defined in the SpringMVC-servlet.xml) but with actually 2 contexts. If you, for instance, try to access a singleton bean called "dataService" from within a Resource and then also from within a SpringMVC controller, the hashCode of that so-called "singleton" will be different ...

    So don't be lazy and give your root application context its own bean configuration if you intend to put something like a connection pool or something that really should be singleton in there ;-)

    2009/11/11 at 20:30:21

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  • Webmontag Graz #9 zusammengefasst

    Heute war mal wieder Webmontag in Graz. Ich konnte zwar leider nicht bis zum Schluss bleiben, aber dennoch sind in dieser Zeit genug interessante Themen besprochen und nützliche Tools erwähnt worden, dass ich sie mir sicher nicht merke, wenn ich hier nicht etwas darüber niederschreibe :-)

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    2009/11/09 at 22:26:40

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  • Some movement on Google Groups?

    It has been only a week since I thought about Google Groups and imagine my surprise when I noticed this little box on the "Join this group" page:


    A select box for your e-mail address on Google Groups

    You can finally also select your Google Domain Apps e-mail addresses when joining a group, which was very high on my all-time most-wanted list for a really long time. It's not perfect yet (you can't use your aliases yet) but it's definitely a nice enough addition on its own :D

    2009/11/03 at 20:50:40

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  • Little love for Google Groups?

    Primary link: ejohn.org

    Today, John Resig wrote a really nice (and quite lenghty) post about Google Groups and why he dislikes it because of its interaction with SPAM. The article is a really nice read so I highly recommend to check it out. I've been a participant on quite a few Google Groups to see the problem. Especially larger groups eventually offen see themselves in a situation where moderating them is so much work, that it's sometimes not worth the effort anymore. So, they either set the moderation limit rather restrictively or move to a different solution altogether simply because Google Groups are a too attractive target for the scum of the adverticing business.

    I'm personally not really a big fan of Google Groups. At first I was thrilled by how easy it is to set up a mailinglist + archives with it. For some reason, though, it never had the feel of an integrated solution but this is probably mostly due to also the other Google apps not really integrating themselves not all too well with Google's own Domain Apps. There is also the whole problem of being locked in without a clean way of exporting all mails posted on such a group. For this and also the SPAM problem, a dedicated server is probably the better solution than something so centralized. You simply have far more options at your disposal and can tweak your whole battle-strategy to your own liking. For some reason, I also always fear that one day some spammer will spoof my own email address on too many Google Groups and all my mails sent to other people on GMail will see only the SPAM folder during their 14 days of life :-/

    <update>Not that I think mailman is the perfect solution either. Google Groups tries to be somehow a mix between a bulletin board and a mailinglist, which is a good idea, but for me the focus is still too much on the mailinglist part, which has its problems when used for really large communities.</update>

    Google Groups is still a nice solution for private groups where members all have a Google account but I definitely understand why some projects are slowly moving away from it for large mailinglists. In this regard I'm also really curious about what solution JQuery will use in the future.

    2009/10/27 at 21:22:49

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  • Deep Space Nine: The Never-Ending Sacrifice

    The summer is finally over and autumn is on its way in. And with it comes a ton of new Star Trek books in more or less every series. Even though Simon & Schuster's new website makes it really hard to find new books, I managed to find one before the new Enterprise finds its way into my hands next week: The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack.

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    2009/10/22 at 19:14:41

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