What is this Blog about Anyway?

Not really very much, but I suppose at least it is not about my cats, I do not own any cats, I suppose if I did than there would be a picture of them upo here.

Anyway my studiesa are going well, I feel that I have a goo basic understanding of computers now and am confidenmt to start an IT degree next year, but wiill have to give it some thought because a degree in new media studies also looks rather tempting.


I have fiinished learnindg the basics of javascript, I fell pleased and disaapointed as well. Pleased becuase I achived what set out to, and I understand all of the basics now. But sad becausre of how limited in scope javascriopt is, still I am now going to spend some time focusing on XML the beggining Javasscript book ny Wrox that I read was so good that I thnk I will give the Beggining XML book a go.

This time I will mainly just read the book and type out some of the examples and all of the questions, while typing the entire fiorst 500 pages of Beggining Javascript did help my typing like I had hoped it would, it qalso slowed down my progress, I am not going to put quite that much into learninig the basics of XML, becuase soon I want to start learning a server side scripting language, probably PHP, but I guees It will also depend on what I end up studying next year, whatever it is I am going to put both hands into it, and there will be tiie for little else.

Source of Hope

I have really been progressing well withth javascript that I have been learning lately. And was pleased to be able to solve a problem that I stumbled across on a blog.

The nblpg is written by a software devloper, and is abit heavy for me, but I checked it out becuause it was a link:
coding horror
on a helpful forum users response over at Wrox javascript forums. Any here is an extract of the article:



After a fair bit of trial and error I've discovered that people who struggle to code don't just struggle on big problems, or even smallish problems (i.e. write a implementation of a linked list). They struggle with tiny problems.


So I set out to develop questions that can identify this kind of developer and came up with a class of questions I call "FizzBuzz Questions" named after a game children often play (or are made to play) in schools in the UK. An example of a Fizz-Buzz question is the following:


Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".


Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.


To be honest I think that the claim is well and truly exaggerated, but it was nonetheless inspiring becuase as I read the question I sauid to myself I think I can do that , so I open up notepad and hammered out a solution:

var nums=new Array();
function FizzBuzzTest()
{
for(i=0;i&lt101;i++)
{
nums[i]=i;
if(i%3==0)
{
nums[i]="Fizz";
}
if(i%5==0)
{
nums[i]="Banger";
}
if(i%5==0&&i%3==0)
{
nums[i]="FizzBanger";
}
document.write("<>"+nums[i]+"
");
}
}

Just had to post this becuase it felt so good, now where is my Biscut?

Back to JavaScript

OK I think I have gotten all of the save the whales and liberal heart bleeding out of my system for a while phew..

For a little while now I have been learning the basics of javascript, although since Uni has started I have petty much left it alone as I have been too busy with trying to learn some networking and Windows XP fundamentals.


This last weekend I took the time to spend a little while studying JavaScript again, and it was really fun, I want to make sure that I do not leave so long till the next time so I figured I would throw something random up here, of course only just having started out it is a bit hard to Incorporate code into the Blog because there are restrictions on what you can upload and I have to access my images thru an external site( photobucket) but meh! it is all practice I suppose.



If you click on the above image than you will see a slide show of some of the images that I took when I went to the Territory wildlife park( a great place that I will probably blog about when I am of a more cheery disposition)

There are a few options that I have been playing around with in this script, one of them was to get the image to move randomly around the screen, I was surprised how easy this was to achive, but at the moment I think I will leave it as it is, although I will probably add a preload, tat shuold helo the images to load a bit more smoothly.

This little bit of code has been a really good learninig experince beacuse when I was first trying to set this up it just refused to work, and I quickly jumped to the wrong conclusion assuming that Blogger was somehow to blame, I tried all sorts of thinks in the Blogger HTML, but all to no avail, then thankfully I went back and had another look at the javascript code and there was an extra quote mark in the setTimeout() method, Doh!

So I guess that next time I will do the logical thinkg and scan the code very carefullly before I go off trying to find other reasons why the code does not work, but, yeah overall now that it is working I am happy with it and look foward to the next bit of javascript that I throw up amnd have a play with but it could be a litttle while as I have a lot of reading to do.

Task 16

In your blog, comment on what you think about online surveys as a way of collecting feedback from customers, and addressing the questions below. Before you comment, discuss the topic with your group with emphasis on the following questions:

• What are the advantages of online surveys?
• Where there any questions in the survey which weren't particularly useful?
• Identify issues concerning online surveys that could compromise accurate customer feedback about your organisation? Are there any aspects of desired customer feedback which online surveys cannot capture? How often do you fill in online surveys?
• Identify at least two other ways to capture customer feedback, apart from online surveys?
• What kinds of responses can you provide to customers about to their feedback? How do you tell customers you appreciate their feedback? Provide examples.
• If you cannot satisfy an online enquiry from a customer, to whom will you refer it? Does your customer policy indicate how difficult enquiries will be escalated?

Firstly I think that this whole question is rather contrived given that we are basing the answers to these detailed questions upon a fictitious scenario, and I personally do not believe that I have the experience with online surveys, traditional surveys ad customer feed back in general to answer these questions as they stand, I can however pretend to have such experience and provide answers not based on any real experience but rather upon contrived answers to contrived questions, so with out further ado I shall give you my expert opinion on online surveys.

What are the advantages of online surveys?

The advantages of online surveys are numerous they allow for a non labor intensive collection of information, that can in many cases penetrate deeper into the market than may be possible with traditional methods. Online surveys are highly dynamic, the same survey with the same penetration can easily be changed and updated on the fly.

Identify issues concerning online surveys that could compromise accurate customer feedback about your organisation? Are there any aspects of desired customer feedback which online surveys cannot capture? How often do you fill in online surveys?

One issue that tends to arise with online surveys as a form of collecting customer feedback is that many people are hesitant to fill out forms online, due to a perceived security risk many people are afraid of spam and various other online scams that may try and collect personal information for nefarious purposes, and so they have a very negative attitude to any kind of online feedback.

Personally I have had very little experience filing in customer feed hack forms online, there was only in fact the one time that I did so in all my years of internet browsing, I filled in this survey because of the great service that received at that particular website, and because I was not using my own computer so I did not fear the risk of malicious code.

Online surveys are not a good tool for obtaining certain types of customer feedback, things like gender and age are not easily obtained with any degree of certainty because people tend to lie, and if you can not observe these features with your own eyes than you just never know they could well be lying to you and that would mess up all of your data and that would not be good, because that your online survey would just be a big waste of time, and from personal experience I can testify to how much i detest having my time waisted by stupid questions.

Identify at least two other ways to capture customer feedback, apart from online surveys?

Customer feedback can be obtained by installing a root kit into software that you sell to your customers this can be an incredible source of customer feedback because it eliminates the risk of customers deceiving you and also allows you to monitor habits of the customer that they may not actually want to tell you.

Another form of obtaining customer feedback is to set up a forum that deals with the products you sell, this can than be used to monitor how people feel about your product the only problem with this method is that it can be hard to manage an online forum and it takes a dedicated team of propaganda agents to ensure that the good will of the company is not damaged online. If this method is however done correctly than it can be a really good method because aside from collecting customer feedback you can also bad mouth your competitors and promote your own products, this works best if there your propaganda agents are deeply undercover, even occasionally questioning certain conduct of the company so that there true identity is never revealed.

What kinds of responses can you provide to customers about their feedback? How do you tell customers you appreciate their feedback? Provide examples.


Groan!~

Email is the preferred method and it is also a good idea to make sure that you have an automated email system in place so that you can thank people, this is polite and is the least that you can do to thank people for taking the time to fill out your survey.


If you cannot satisfy an online enquiry from a customer, to whom will you refer it? Does your customer policy indicate how difficult enquiries will be escalated?

How long is piece of string and does it serve any purpose?


If I can not satisfy a customer enquiry online, than I suppose whom I refer it to will depend on the nature of the enquiry , the nature of my company and the nature of my role in that company, I do not feel that I can answer such an open ended question as this with out a little bit of background information as to the nature of the enquiry so I have compiled the following fictitious scenario so that I may answer such a question should it arise.

The Scenari
I find myself creating a blog and I happen to post a fictitious scenario online with a mock feedback form that I do not really care about, when suddenly a member of the general public posts a comment on my blog wanting to know How Mr Howard can sleep at night with so much blood on his hands I am unable to answer this question so to whom should I refer this question that I am unable to answer?

I decide that I will simply tell the man that I too am puzzled by this question but that the answer escapes me, I would suggest asking the man himself but honestly abandoned him when he lost his integrity so I decide to do the honest thing myself and simply te;l; him that he will needed to ask somebody else as I nither know the answer nor do I know tio whom he should refer his question.

As for the latter part of the question the answer is definitely no, my policy does not speculate as to how difficult enquiries will be escalated, nor do I know why I should ever wish it to.

This is not Democracy

I have been watching the APEC debacle and it has got me feeling really depressed. There is no democracy in this nation, grave injustice is occurring on our street and yet the mainstream media is doing it's best to hide this fro the Australian public.

When I was still in school and before the media diversity laws were changed and the ABC was silenced by Howard I learned about the importance of a healthy media and the role that it played in a liberal democracy. Now our media is not healthy, and our democracy is not liberal.

I saw this footage on you tube, I should have seen it on prime time news!

And it saddened me greatly how can police officers assault a woman like that ? why did they not even help her up again? did they not feel like tyrants? whose interests are they serving? I thought that they were supposed to protect society and I thought that society was supposed to exist to prevent things like mobs of men from assaulting women in the street and to stop the strong from from abusing the weak.

I think I will do a a bit of research and a few posts about these matters hopefully this will help to ease my mind over the distressing state of affairs that our world is in. There once was a time when I used to follow politics and the news, but then it all got to depressing for me I could not handle all of the injustice, I just burried my head n the sand and changed the channel.


Now I feel compelled to do something, my own government is looking more and more like a totalitarian regime every day and while I used to be able to shut myself away from all the injustice that was being committed by the likes of Bush and Howard on the other side of the world now it is a lot closer to home and I can no longer change the channel,because the injustice is not just being committed on the television it is being committed outside on the streets and my head is likely to be trampled if I leave it under the sand.

At the very least I will ease my own sense of frustration by highlighting some of the injustices that I see over the next few blog posts.

Look out opinion ahead!

TASK 13

Part 1

What are the advantages of separating the styling (i.e. CSS) from the actual document with the content?

By separating the styling from the document itself the full power of digital text can be realized, if the style and the document are tied together than the advantages that digital text has over the plain old written word are severely compromised. But when the styling is separated from the document than the exciting and dynamic nature of hyper text is fully realized, and the advantages of doing so are legion here are a few advantages dynamic hypertext has to offer.

When the web was young and before the advent of Cascading Style sheets the content and the styling of web pages were all combined in the HTML document, this provided some basic styling in the form of Tags such as the <> tag used to denote bold text. However HTML did not provide the kind of presentation that the new and expanding Internet web masters craved

HTML was initially created by Tim Berners-Lee
as a method of sharing and updating research among colleagues and it was more than capable of doing this. It was not however, quite as suitable for the plethora of uses to which it would be employed as the world wide web began to take of in the 1990's.

This led to a lot of inspired and some what at times genius attempts at employing tables as a method of laying out the contents of web pages and greatly improving the way that web pages could be laid out. Given the simple tools that early web developers had to work with it was quite remarkable how much they manged to accomplish with the industrious use of tables.

However tables were not originally created as a means of expressing style and as such they tend to become clustered and clumsy and difficult to both work with and maintain, they also make it very hard for search engines to find the content that is hidden amidst a sea of table data and table row tags.

Finally a solution to what was fast turning into a styling nightmare was provided in the form of Cascading Style Sheets. These are specifically designed to meet the styling needs of the web and are purpose built to be used with HTML. A site that is built with CSS styling as opposed to one that relies on a table based layout will load significantly quicker and be far more accessable to Internet search engines .

The advantages of using cascading style sheets have long been recognised now and since the HTML.40 specification it has been a tenet of the standard that HTML is not t be used to apply styling, but rather as a means of structuring a document, and it is left up to CSS to provide the style to a document. Old attribute tags that were formally used to style HTML documents are now depreciated in favour of the styling attributes provided by CSS.

The latest XHTML standards further recognise the advantages of separating the style from the content, as this allows for the dynamic digital advantages of hypertext to be fully realised so that the one document can have differing styling applied and allow it to be tailored to the media that is being used to view the document, the need for this dynamic capability is growing rapidly as the number of Internet enabled hand held devices like the Iphone for example continue to grow rapidly.

Another huge advantage of separating the styling from the content is that it makes it a lot easier to implement a site wide style change without going into each and every document and changing it by hand, the amount of time that can be saved by using an external style sheet and then simply altering this to effect site wide changes can be mind boggling.

With this in mind it is often worth going to the effort of insuring that you do not defeat one of the primary advantages of CSS by over using the internal style commands, it is better to use an external style sheet and link this to the document rather than host the style sheet within the document itself, this ensures the content and the style are truly seperated and allows the dynamic nature of XHTML to be realised.

Part 2

Identify at least two style manuals which you think would be useful for future reference.

I have found the w3schools site
To be really useful while trying to learn the basics of HTML Javascript and CSS. This site has a wealth of resources and I particularly like the Try it yourself textbox that they have set up so that the user can practice their styling technique and have the results of their code displayed in screen simply by clicking the refresh button.

ADDACTIO is a well written site that I have found to be very useful. While I have learned a lot from reading thru some of the material on this site I do not feel that it is comprehensive enough to recommend as a style guide that I will be referring back to, but it is nonetheless worth checking out and having a Read thru, so I have included it here as well.

As for a second style guide that I will find useful for future reference, I suppose that it is hard to go past a complete and detailed guide such as that found at the Westcive site
I have chosen this site as I know that if I run into a problem or need to know how to do something than it will most likely be covered here, and thanks to the comprehensive hyperlinked table of contents finding that information shall be made all the easier.