Three days later, the ExtJS Forum post has received no response at all where as there were two answers on Stack Overflow, one of which is reasonably helpful, and the other of which completely solved my problem. I guess it’s a testament to the power of offering people some sort of quantifiable ‘reputation’ points.

input [error] Unexpected Exception: message ->
  element.ownerDocument.createEventObject is not a function
...

From a bit of digging, it looks like the current version of Selenium (0.8.3 as of Jan 15, 2008) isn’t compatible with mootools.

The mootools forums have a fairly simple patch to fix the issue.

Apparently Selenium is checking for the fireEvent method, normally only available in IE, but which mootools adds to other browsers. As a result, mootools thinks it’s running in IE, and tries to call createEventObject, which really is only available in IE.

Having made it over that hurdle, selenium is looking like quite a nice tool.

Maplets look cute, but I’ve not really played with maps much, so it doesn’t seem to radical to me. The ‘coming soon’ mention of AdSense for maps is interesting – looks like you’ll be able to make a call with your id and a number of ads to display and have them shown along with whatever other map content your maplet/mashup is adding.

Food’s been pretty good, got a very cool notepad which has a picture of the earth on the cover then zooms in as you tilt it forward.

…And why do they always have conference name tags designed so they turn backwards accidentally so easily. Surely it would be simple to attach it to the lanyard at two corners rather than just at the centre…

Technorati Tags: GDD07, GDD07au, google, gears, maplet

whereis.com does seem to give semi-decent directions, but has poor looking maps, and the interface is horrible by comparison (though they’re attempt at dynamic zooming is quite amusing). The other problem with whereis is that it’s impossibly to email someone a link to one of their maps without paying for it, which seems rather silly.

I imagine it would be quite challenging to generate good driving directions efficiently, but then, it would also be difficult to build the maps in the first place I imagine. Anyway, here’s hoping the other guys get the directions working sometime soon, or whereis gets it’s interface act together.

On the other hand, perhaps there’s one I haven’t heard about yet.

I’m not all that up on Windows programming in perl, but it seems that adding in any particular path (say C:\WINDOWS\system32) isn’t likely to work if Windows is installed in some unusual location. Unfortunately avoiding the shell processing (by passing a list of arguments to system or exec rather than a string) isn’t looking like it’s a viable option either, at least in the short term, so I’m more or less stuck.

I’m sure there’s some sort for clever trick for solving this, but Google has not turned up anything obvious. Perhaps, as a last resort, there’s some way to find out where Windows is installed through the registry?

Update

Thanks to Victor for his suggestion about the registry. What I ended up doing was looking at the SystemRoot environment variable with some code along the lines of the following.

delete @ENV{qw(IFS CDPATH ENV BASH_ENV PATH)};
if ($^O =~ /win/i) {
            # Perl must be able to find cmd.exe, so add
            # C:\WINDOWS\system32 to the path
            $ENV{'SystemRoot'} =~ /([A-Z]:(\\[A-Za-z0-9_]+)+)/;
            my $system32_dir = catdir($1,'system32');
            $ENV{'PATH'} = $system32_dir;
}
exec($command);

If anyone has suggestion, or just knows for a fact that this will fail in some case, please let me know (in the comments).

Technorati Tags: windows, perl, cmd.exe, taint

Here are a few classic excuses for not putting effort into building an information architecture for a small company website.

1: We don’t have time

So do you have time to build a web site at all? You need to ask yourself what exactly the goal of building the website is, and hopefully come up with an answer which is centred around the expected end users. Unless you have time to build what these users want, then there’s really no point in building anything at all.

If you don’t have time to work out what to build, you certainly don’t have time to build it.

2: We can just evolve the site – It’s small enough

A big advantage of having a well thought out information architecture is that it gives a more objective basis for future site enhancements. Plenty of brilliant programmers have squandered their time trying to understand a design they should have documented the first time, and it’s just as easy to do with a web site.

The other problem here is that you’re not likely to get the kind of feedback necessary to evolve the site. If users came to the site, failed to find what they wanted, then told you so, then you might have a chance, but as a rule, the users will just leave (to your competition). Structured user testing would probably help to some degree, but requires much of the same work as building an information architecture.

3: We can get away without it, we’re smart guys

Even if you could keep everything straight while designing the site the first time, you’re unlikely to remember the reasoning behind every decision in a years time.

If you’re smart enough to get away without it, you’re smart enough to know that you shouldn’t.

4: We’ve only got a couple of classes of users anyway

Let me guess, your classes are ‘prospective customers’ and ‘current customers’. It’s easy to break users down into these big classes but it’s not very helpful. Current customers, for example, might have a support question, or want to order more of your product, or find your postal address to send you a Christmas card. Prospective customers often have bosses who’ll need to sign off and will be looking for different information from someone who’s just opened 6 tabs with your website alongside all your competitors.

5: We can’t justify the cost

I guess this is similar to the ‘we don’t have the time’ excuse, but given the traditional scope vs schedule vs budget balancing act, it somehow seems separate.

If you can’t justify the cost of building a site which fits your user’s needs, then how can you possibly justify the cost of building a site which probably doesn’t?

6: We just want a site structured like competitor X

There is certainly something to be learnt by looking at the structure of sites in a similar space to the one you’re designing, but simply copying another site’s structure means putting far too much faith in it’s design. You probably wouldn’t be planning to restructure your site to match every time competitor X restructures theirs, but without a documented information architecture to back you up, that’s probably the only justifiable approach.

Even if you and competitor X are almost identical, it’s very likely that you have some competitive differences you want to draw attention to, which is exactly what the architecture of your site should be doing.

Technorati Tags: web, information architecture, excuses, small business

If only JavaScript needs them there really no reason to send bits of state back to the server, and you might imagine this sort of mechanism might even afford some small degree of privacy (though it wouldn’t be hard to write JavaScript to pass the info back I suppose).

Anyway, is there any such mechanism for storing state information which is preserved between pages (and browser sessions) but is only normally available to JavaScript?

Technorati Tags: javascript, ajax, web

That means that, per hit, MSNBot is loading about 23.3k of data, where as Googlebot is loading about 5.5k (and Yahoo slurp is similar with 4.5k).

My question is (being far to lazy to go and actually look at the raw logs myself), what’s MSNBot doing differently that it should be downloading over four times more data per hit?

My guesses would include MSNBot not understanding some ‘content not changed’ hint or being more interested in images and PDFs than the others, but I’ve no idea if that’s even close.

[Update: Looks like I'm not the only one to have noticed.]

Technorati Tags: search, googlebot, msnbot, web

Putting on my devils advocate hat for a moment…

Just because Americans happen to equate censorship and ‘evil’ doesn’t mean everyone does. From the Chinese government’s perspective, ‘evil’ could very well be defined as assisting Chinese citizens in accessing material the government considers inappropriate. That, in fact, would be why they have made doing so illegal.

As an international company Google is going to be faced with many situations where what happens to be considered evil is going to vary from society to society. How they try to resolve this with their ‘do no evil’ policy will be interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: google, censorship, china, america, law