Indistinguishable from Jesse

• Amazing sidewalk-chalk drawings, 2, 3 (via schmack)
• Once upon a time, there was a SPC Schwarz stationed with the Army in the Balkans. SPC Schwarz was either very clever or very bored; but probably both, since he managed to attempt or be warned about 213 things he wasn't allowed to do. (via schmack)
• Vote for the next US president (via jcurious)
• Caitlin Silberman: Matholicism
• David Shrigley's signs and other interventions (via caitlin)
• mpt: customer service
• The great aluminum foil prank
• KoL forum: Traffic tickets are inherently sexist
• KoL: Top 45 Signs Your Workplace Productivity Could Improve (3 items are mine)
• KoL: Top 82 Rules Of Military Combat (6 items are mine)

I signed up to interview with Expedia on Monday. I figured I should look at their site for a few minutes before interviewing with them, but I ended up playing with their basic search feature for over an hour.

Should I spend my 30-minute interview pointing out how their site sucks* or trying to get a job?

The form on the front page

• "Search for flight" (for submitting the form) looks like a link, not a button. IE users are used to losing form data randomly when they click on links, so they'll spend a lot of time looking for something that looks like a button before clicking the link.
• The return date textbox is prefilled with "mm/dd/yy". Prefilling textboxes like that is usually frowned upon, in part because it makes people like me skip the textbox. But I think I understand why Expedia prefills it.
• If the return date textbox is prefilled, it should clear itself onmousedown!
• Why make it look like I have to enter a year? I'm very unlikely to book a flight more than a year in advance. And I'm still typing the year as "03" out of habit, even though it's been 2004 for a month.
• The single-digit date for February in the "Depart" textbox makes it look less like a date.
• Why can't I get a flight and a car without a hotel? I can get every other combination of flight, car, and hotel.
• I think the form should use 3 checkboxes (flight, car, hotel) rather than 7 radio buttons (each nonempty subset of {flight, car, hotel}). Using checkboxes would make the UI simpler but would require more clicking.
• "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": What times does Expedia consider "morning"? More importantly, what times are "noon"?
• "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": Where's the "middle of the night" option?
• The DHTML calendar does not work in Firebird.
• In the DHTML calendar, double-clicking the right button only goes forward one month. This is a bug in IE, but Expedia should work around it because it affects almost everyone who books a flight two or more months in advance.

there are no free t-shirts at the Harvey Mudd College career fair.

Firebird 0.8 should be out soon on Monday, Feb 9.

Update: Firefox 0.8 (note the new name) was released on Feb 9.

Here's some of what's new:

New features

• Windows installer
• New download manager
• Work Offline
• Add Bookmark dialog: recent-folders dropdown and folder-selection tree (replacing a single dropdown listing all folders)
• DOM Inspector is now included in zip builds
• IDN support
• IPv6 support on Windows 2000/XP/2003

Major improvements

• 220807 - prompt user about invalid text/plain content. (Solves most problems like "Firebird tries to display some .rar files instead of downloading them.")
• 214266 - Find should wrap by default
• 217286 - Cookie whitelist should override session cookie option.
• 142459(?) - Shift+click and middle-click on scroll bar should jump to that location
• 214260 - XPInstall UI improvements
• 33282 - enable external scheme handlers (like aim: and telnet:) in Linux
• 6% faster page loading (comparing December to September on a Tp (pageloader time) graph)

Important bug fixes

• 210910 - Right-clicking a file within a bookmarks folder in the bookmarks menu or toolbar makes that folder inaccessible.
• 203102 - URL typed into address bar lost after switching tabs; "Open in new tab" should prefill URI in address bar.
• 222157 - View Source: Find and Save don't work.
• 213250 - Autoscroll prevents middle clicking on links in XML (XHTML) documents.
• 224416 - Tabs don't remember focused element.
• 216170 - Send Page (as Link) omits query string
• 98564 - caret overlaps the last character in textfield (if positioned after the last char).
• 212366 - Make -moz-opacity apply to descendants as a group, as required by CSS3 opacity
• 219705 - Linux: Blackdown Java crashes, saying "Internal error on browser end".
• 102578 - Linux: Clicking wrongfully fires onmouseout (breaks some dhtml menus, css/edge menus)
• 201209 - GTK2: -moz-opacity makes things invisible.

Howard Dean leads in a Google search for "for president". He is followed by Bush, Kucinich, Clark, Kerry, Nader (2000), Edwards, Lieberman, Gephardt, Braun, Cthulhu, Bradley (2000), a hamster named Potus, Cusack, nobody, and Tony Blair.

Zarro Boogs = Oll Korrect?

Leonard Lin is teaching animation students basic programming so they'll be able to use Maya's MELScript and Flash's ActionScript. He chose JavaScript as the first language for his students because JavaScript and ActionScript are both variants of ECMAScript.

I made a simple JS learning environment to cut out the save-switch-reload cycle and the "magic" HTML that surrounds a short JS program. If an error occurs, it highlights the line.

I reused a lot of code and UI ideas to make it. The overall UI comes from the Real-time HTML editor, the print() function comes from the JavaScript Shell, and the error-selecting idea and code come from the "blogidate XML well-formedness" bookmarklet. If you want to look at the code for the JS env, most of it is in the "buttons" frame.

Hint added Jan 22: