My candle burns burned at both ends;

It will did not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

It gives gave a lovely light!

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited 06/2007 by jd.

If I can just survive the summer.... Every year, miraculously, I seem to. But every year I have my doubts.... This year's doubts are redoubled by the fact that they've given me two courses to teach instead of one. Wheeeeeeeeeee!

At least I have a few things to help keep me sane(ish).

I want to go canoing....

Update: Boing Boing says I need to go canoing.

Studies have shown that people deprived of contact with nature were at greater risk of depression and anxiety.

Boing Boing is at least as credible as a doctor -- I'd argue more credible. Time to go to the boss with my note from Boing Boing....

• Therapy session co-pays: $20 each
• Maximum Dose NoDoz 3 pack: $18.70
• Straitjacket from Amazon.com: $272.99
• Being able to kvetch freely about the insanity that has become your day job: Priceless

Switching topics since that's no longer an option.... Am I the only one who finds it amusing that the Amazon.com page for NoDoz suggests the drug is "Better together (with) Tylenol Acetaminophen Extra Strength, 500 mg, Rapid Release Gels 225 gelcaps" or that there's a link to "Share your own customer images" on the straitjacket page?

The one thing I have found lacking in Linux is a OneNote equivalent. Zoho Notebook seemed like it would fill that gap, but it was in private beta for so long.... Now it is in public beta. Finally. Be sure to check out the video on the Zoho blog as well as Robert Scoble's video on PodTech. I had read somewhere that Notebook was "so much more" than a web 2.0-style OneNote, but I didn't fully get that until I saw the PodTech demo.

Time to start populating my Notebook. Woo hoo!

Break out the champagne 'cause the label guess functionality for Orca has just been checked in!

In case you're wondering -- and even if you're not, which I realize is far more likely to be the case -- guessing form field labels is something that screen readers such as Orca need to do because most web designers do not follow the W3C Recommendations for labeling form fields. Were these designers to do so, filling out forms on the web would be really accessible to people who are blind: The user would simply press Tab/Shift Tab to move from field to field and the screen reader would in turn announce the label for that field thus informing the user about the information he/she was expected to enter. But web designers don't do this. As a result, as the user moves from field to field all he/she knows is that something needs to be typed here. Who knows what that something is? So the user has to leave the field and arrow around in the hopes of being able to figure out what text applies to that particular field and, having done so, work his/her way back to that field to actually provide that information. One field down, a bunch more to go.... To put it bluntly, it sucks to fill out forms on the web if you happen to be blind -- unless your screen reader is able to accurately guess the text that is functioning as the label.

Orca now guesses labels -- and if I do say so myself, does a nice job of it. Now it's just a matter of refining the heuristics as feedback from users comes in.

It was not a trivial task, programmatically doing the work sighted users do automatically. In fact, the resulting patch wound up being about 10% of Gecko.py! Granted some of that is related cleanup and modifications, but the bulk of it is the addition of code to look spatially at the form field and try to determine based on the type of field, the location of surrounding text, and the presence/absence of other objects of various and sundry types, exactly what is serving as the label. Fortunately, as is often the case in the open source world, someone stepped forward with a suggested approach which I was able to use as my basis for implementation. Thanks Tom!

Onward and upward....