Michael Kimsal of WebdevRadio asked me about an hour about almost everything I have done to write Beginnning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax and the YUI.

You can check the podcast on WebdevRadio and if I sound tired then it is because we had to do the interview twice as the first time around Michael’s equipment gave up.

Topics Covered:

• [tag]JavasScript[/tag]
• [tag]Progressive Enhancement[/tag]
• [tag]Distributed Development[/tag]
• [tag]CSS[/tag]
• [tag]CSS behavior problems[/tag]
• Working together as designers, web developers and engineers
• [tag]Firebug[/tag]
• [tag]Yahoo ext[/tag]
• [tag]YUI[/tag]
• Edward Eliot’s automatic JavaScript merging script

Earlier tonight (before we ended up with free drinks and a Chinese meal in Chinatown) I recorded a podcast for the German site Technikwürze which was a podcast with a twist.

Instead of being interested in what I had to say (be fair – who would?) the maintainers wanted to have some expert information about Flash and accessibility, and I translated and sent the questions the podcast maintainers had to Niqui Merret and Aral Balkan.

Taking this knowledge I tried to convey what their ideas (and boy they are great ideas) in German and was aided by one of the highlights of the German accessibility world Tomas Caspers who had a lot more to say about the implications of Flash on screenreaders and other assistive technology than I could ever muster.

It certainly was the weirdest conference I had done in while and if you speak German it might be a fun thing to listen to.

Technikwürze also published the answers of Niqui to my questions in English, so it’ll be worth while visiting the site anyways.

[tags]Flash,accessibility,niquimerret,aralbalkan,tomascaspers,podcast[/tags]

I won a bottle of Sake at a christmas party raffle. Does anyone know if this is a high quality sake that I should give a party for or something to have with cheap take-away?

All photos of the sake bottle on flickr.

[tags]sake,japanese,bafflement,headache[/tags]

I just got some blank DVDs for my brother and I am amazed how much you money you pay in highstreet shops for low quality DVD-Rs.

Here’s some dirty secrets:

• The brand of the packaging is irrellevant, there are a lot less DVD-R producers out there than brands.
• There is a stunning web site that explains you all about quality and reliability of DVD-Rs at No more coasters
• according to this web site – and that has proved right for me in the past (having burnt about 500 DVDs since I got a writer) you need to make sure you know the real brand of the DVD-R which are:

1ST CLASS (A): PVC, MXL, TY/YUDEN, MCC/MKM, TDK/TTG/TTH, SONY
2ND CLASS (B): RICOHJPN, PRODISC, RITEK, FUJIFILM, OPTODISC, INFODISC
3RD CLASS (C): CMC, LEADDATA, DAXON, INFOMEDIA, MBI, MAM-E/A, PRINCO, ONID, GSC, PHILIPS
4TH CLASS (F): LONGTEN, YIJHAN, AN/ANWELL, AML, INFOSMART/ISO, VDS, UME, WFKA

As you normally won’t find a shop or online store that has this information, check out SVP who give this information for each of their DVD offers.

I am not at all affiliated with SVP, but they did save me a lot of money in the past and I don’t think you should pay a lot for consumables.

[tags]DVD,blank DVD,DVD-R,DVD-RW,shopping,bargain,quality,reliability[/tags]

Over at Ed Elliot’s the man himself came up with a cool PHP script that allows you to create a single cached include automatically from all the JavaScripts or CSS files you want to include. Check out Automatic merging and versioning of CSS/JS files with PHP.

For those who wonder why the hey you’d want to do this: working on high traffic sites means you learn a lot about how to make pages perform and as Nate Koechley explained at @media 2006 every http request sent from page results in another DNS lookup and generally slows down the perceived loading time of the page. Furthermore, scripts loaded in the head of the document get loaded first and add to the whole page loading time as browsers start rendering after all the dependencies in the head were loaded.

Using Ed’s script actually means you can have the maintenance benefit of different includes without having to worry about the performance problems.

[tags]performance,javascript,php,speed,usability[/tags]