Installation did not go smoothly mostly because of the disappointing internal error reporting capabilities implanted in TorrentFlux. The logs and error messages should be more precise like the ones printed in the Apache logs. From the searches I did on the interwebs, I seem to have bumped in an easy to fix, though still much too common, issue.

If QManager is not running (PID: ‘nothing’ in the admin logs) or if the torrents do not download, make sure all the paths in TorrentFlux’s configuration do not have spaces in them. That goes for the download directory and for the paths to the multiple BitTornado files. Obviously, make sure you installed the prerequisites like Python and Curl and double check your php configuration file also.

If you had already added torrents to the queue, you may have to delete and add them back using the web interface. This is because the path will have changed without TorrentFlux noticing.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

Yahoo! is not a place I like to hang around. I guess it has all to do with how they handled the presentation of their search results back in the day. I never was a fan of categorized results — at least wasn’t ready to try harder to use them at that time.

So, for years I’ve been using AltaVista and then Google instead of Yahoo! search; Hotmail, then GMail instead of Yahoo! mail. Since I don’t like to be overrun with data, I don’t even read the news on their portal. The NY Times‘ and Radio-Canada’s RSS feeds suit me better.

In other words, I am not part of the gazillions of people that help make Yahoo! the most important website on the Internet at the moment, according to Alexa. I didn’t have much of an opinion on Yahoo! until they got so useful for the web developer I am.

YUI

Yahoo! Developer Network is a priceless resource for information on popular web technologies. What I’m more interested in however is the YUI section — the Yahoo! User Interface Libary.

Javascript

YUI is said to be built around Yahoo!’s own Javascript library. Similar to jQuery and Prototype, the YUI library helps writing Javascript code that is more efficient more quickly. At the time of this writing, Yahoo!’s library has proven to work faster than its competitors when working on the DOM. A massive advantage on its competitors is its structured verbose that seems closer to more classic programming languages.

Notably, you can create namespaces for your scripts as well fire as custom events. Obviously, you can create visual effects of custom controls for your interface using objects the community is developing. Broken down in many files, you can import only the libraries you need in your application from Yahoo!’s servers. No hassle in storing multiple version of the files.

Templates

The section supplies a collection of pre designed templates for anyone to use. Whether you need a 3 column fixed layout, or fluid 100% wide 5 columns templates, you will find the XHTML and CSS files in the YUI section completely free. Free as in no charge, but also free as in open source.

Cross-platform

Most importantly, the library is guaranteed to be working the same on any Grade A browser. Other libraries don’t always live up to that mention as the script gets more complicated. This guideline is to be followed religiously, no matter if you are using Yahoo! products or not. The chart provides great arguments when you need to justify your decision to you employer when asked to design for IE3.

Standard Pipes

While the tools themselves are incredibly useful and time saving, it’s not the best thing about the YUI. Through guidelines, tutorials and free files, Yahoo! is lowering the pain of doing web design for people who don’t know about standards, don’t want to dig in or who just don’t care. If an important company like Yahoo! continues providing resources and using their influence in the developer’s community and the software makers building the browser, the Internet can standardize fairly quickly.

Yahoo! seems to be pushing towards a better Internet and the same cannot be said of everyone in the top-most influential websites.

The point of the drawing was to test the Pressure Pen option in Photoshop’s brushes panel. I’ve started from a blank image and not from a pen drawing.

While I’m guessing his opinion may have been toned down on the way from his head to his hands, I do believe he has a point. To paraphrase and sum his opinion: “Accessibility is cool and all because it’s bad to ignore people with disabilities, but you can’t expect a company to spend all their web design budget for 0.5% of their customers. Therefore, some site aren’t 100% accessible on purpose.”

And it’s true. In real life, my employer gives me, say, 4 days to finish a website. It’s good enough if I can be satisfied with the semantics of things in that period of time. Odds are I won’t have any time left to make separate style sheets with high-contrast colors, one with big text, etc.

All can agree that it’s a good thing that there’s a lot more awareness around the accessibility of online content at the moment.

However, just like in any trend, it’s all too easy to pick on those who don’t follow it, never considering all the reasons for them not doing so.

Sure, you can use :

<form> <label for="name">Name</label>
    <input id="name" name="name" type="text" />
</form>

But I find manually managing the label feels like a line too many. Another issue is the focusing of a control upon a page’s load event using JavaScript. If you can specify the tabular index of a control, you should also be able to force initial focus on a control using HTML. Keeping in mind the way attributes work in HTML, it could easily be specified the same way you use the selected attribute of a tag.

From the little information available on the W3C, I think Xforms will help a lot, giving a programming feel to building XHTML forms. However, HTML tags should have been reorganized much sooner. As an e-commerce software developer, almost every page I build is actually a big form. There is way too much use of JavaScript to accomplish simple control behavior.

Experience with ASP controls, so little it may be, still showed me they offer a lot more control on the display of web forms. In their programming language, Microsoft was inspired a lot from the way Windows Forms are built. I would also assume JSP can offer the same liberty.

The thing is, I don’t feel it’s the server-side programming language’s job to deal with what seems like first level options for HTML controls. Everyone is putting high hopes in financial success on the Internet nowadays. E-commerce is still expected to become a big fraction of most company sales in the near future. Means of collecting user data under need to be improved if this is to happen.