Hamstaa!

In a previous post I talked about the "art" of Graffiti so when I came across this piece in my recent wanderings, I had to share it.

The piece is on the side of a small shop and by the looks of it, it's been there for a while. I love the feel of the piece and how it seems to fit within the character of the building and the business within. In fact, this was confirmed when I showed one of the others in our office and they immediately identified the name of the business.

So can good graffiti contribute in a positive way to the character of a space? I believe so and this piece seems to achieve both enhancing it's space along with becoming iconic for the business within.

For the last 6 months I've been contributing to the TinyMCE forums. In this time I've noticed a couple of disturbing trends, one of which became quite evident in a recent members post to a very old thread.

From time to time people will ask questions about how to make TinyMCE do something that it's not really designed to do. This is mostly to output non-standard HTML and is usually due to the "client requirements". The most common one is the use of <BR> tags instead of <P> tags.

I'm not going to join into the argument of using <P> tags as a good friend and colleague posted a great round up of the importance of P tags already. What I'm interested in, is the way people respond both in terms of the initial question, and the followup responses.

From what I've seen, the response to these sorts of questions can occasionally be quite harsh and usually question "why" the person is even contemplating doing this. Now while I don't always agree with the tone of the responses, I can empathises, especially if they've had to answer the 100th question that has been addressed elsewhere, including the documentation.

The disturbing trend I've recently seen however is in the reaction of some people to this "criticism" or questioning. It appears people believe we should ignore the reason why someone is doing it, and simply answer the question. I tend to disagree.

As a developer I believe it's my duty to educate, as well as assist people. This includes both other developers and clients.

I believe that there are a lot of people out there who don't know any different with respect to the choices of output. By questioning why they are doing this and ideally providing the more acceptable alternative, the respondent is potentially educating them. Now it may be that the developer knows this already and is unable to educate their current client, but for others, they may now know an alternative. They still mightn't be able to change their clients mind this time around, but they will be better armed for future engagements.

It's been 3 weeks since the flood that hit Brisbane shutdown the city and affected thousands of people in Australia's third largest city.

While our office in West End wasn't flooded, being on the fourth floor, the buildings underground carpark was. This resulted in our office being closed for a couple of weeks as everything from communications systems, to fire-control and the lift were affected.

I went for a walk along the Brisbane river near our office this week to see what the area that was inundated looked like now. The first thing that hit me was just how quiet the river is. The water traffic that you associate with our city is gone. No ferries, commercial or pleasure boats. In many cases, the pontoons that they would use are gone as well.

As I walked along the path beside the river, the signs of the flood were still in evidence in the trees around me. Rubbish is stuck in the branches a metre or more above my head. That said, the road, the gardens and buildings are mostly clear of the sludge and rubbish the flood waters dumped, testament to the hard work of the local people and businesses.

As I got towards an open section of the river, I came across the first boat I'd seen. A recovery team was next to what, at first appearances was a shipping container caught on the embankment. It wasn't until I was closer that it became clear this was an entire trailer from a semi-trailer. Who knows where it came from, but it highlighted the force of the river at it's peak that it could wash this away and down the river.

Despite the great work of everyone involved in cleaning up, there is still alot to do to return our city to normal.