Kid's flash games don't get it right.

I had to explain to Lily (almost 3) that computers aren't always helpful after Windows 7 and the touchpad drivers completely ticked her off. Why can't I disable the right click and scroll wheel again? I know I can do this in any version of Ubuntu. (Not to mention being able to change the wallpaper without paying $150).

And what's with designing kids flash games that don't fullscreen into the game itself. I have to manipulate the DOM every time (to remove the page header, footer. and ads). I'm tempted to make a better kid-friendly web experience to show PBS and NickJr how it should be done.

A kid is playing this! All the ads are going to do is become accidental click targets that will lose the game progress (since flash apps don't maintain state once the page has changed - so after you come to the rescue and hit "Back" they are back to the index of games instead of their exact drawing in the game they were in).

She's been using my netbook. While it is perfectly sized for her, the touchpad has a single button which acts as a right or left click depending on where you click. There is no visual cue to this, which is a little tricky to explain, but Lily's got that down (mostly). Why don't they disable the right click context menu in their flash games?!

Then there is the scroll behavior assigned to the right and bottom of the touchpad. She knows that she can scroll with it, but I'd rather disable it because on flash games with (lots of other junk content on the page) she can accidentally scroll off the game. When I full screen the game their shouldn't be enough content to permit scrolling, but there is, and I can't resize the content (using ctrl +/-) because then the flash pointer doesn't track the position of the mouse cursor. And why can't they hide the native cursor? We get an in game cursor and the native cursor, but this is just an annoyance as it doesn't cause her any trouble.

And when she does accidentally scroll down, since the flash app steals the focus, you can't scroll back without clicking somewhere off the game first (which is very unintuitive). She also discovered that my touchpad has multi-touch capabilities and has managed to squeeze zoom and un-zoom the flash apps (which took forever for me to figure out - I didn't think my touchpad had multitouch) - again, this causes the native mouse position and in-game mouse cursor to get out of sync and makes certain areas of the app unreachable due to the max cursor position not being scaled right.

Embeddy or Bloggy? Which bot will let my Blogger account host a Wave?

If you have a Google Wave account, you may (if this works) see a wave above this line! Because I've added this HTML to my blog post:


<div id="wave" style="width: 560px; height: 420px"></div>


And this to my Blogger HTML Template:


<script
type="text/javascript"
src="http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var wave =
new WavePanel('https://wave.google.com/wave/');
wave.setUIConfig('white', 'black', 'Arial', '13px');
wave.loadWave('googlewave.com!w+Co24OsIYC');
wave.init(document.getElementById('wave'));
</script>


The Jettaless life and times of Marques Johansson

I sold my '98 Jetta GLS!!!

I sold my Jetta for $500!!!

My trusty stead stopped prancing in the rain long ago. And then he seemed to self-geld at the start of this year and decided not to exceed the brisk pace of 20mph.
A local Jetta rancher decided to graze him on his field and possibly breed and make a stud of him. With proper motivation, he may even race again!

Gum addiction has side effects

I came into work today and found a group of protesters awaiting my coworker's arrival.
They were clearly upset about the recent culling.

Not one member of those stationed at our shared cubicle space, 60 at the start of week, could be located prior to the assembly of this protest.

Solar Recepticals

My workborhood has gone eco. Solar trash compactors!

Spring for three

Here is some evidence that I exploit my kids for my own enjoyment.

Welcome to Blogger

As part of my continual effort to populate the internet with all things displague, I have marked my territory on blogger with this account. For all other things displague, see http://www.displague.com/