Countries I've visited

A friend pointed me in the direction of this little beauty: A site that generates a map of the world showing the countries you've visited.

I've got to admit that the comments on the site are more actual fun than the map, but still...

So here's mine:


Not that impressive.

Fingers crossed, if all goes to plan, in 18 months it'll look more like this:



Though still, it'll look nothing like as impressive as Tom Kyte's "countries I've in which I've given presentations" ;-)

Make your own mind up

Earlier today Bob Binder made a comment on my test conference entry that included a (not too complimentary) summary of his talk. In response to his comment I made a statement that I want to make absolutely clear to everyone else...

I thought that every single one of the talks at the conference was worth attending.
Every one had value, and I think you should watch every one on Google video.

If any comment on an individual talk makes it sound uninviting it doesn't mean it wasn't a good talk. The conference quality was far above the norm, and every talk is worth seeing. And you can, they're on Google Video

Other than that, I invite comments from the speakers, other attendees and anyone that might disagree with me. Just because I have an opinion, doesn't mean that I don't want to hear yours! But don't expect me to agree with you ;-)

The Google Test Automation Videos are here...

Well, not here, but here

I'll update the earlier posts with each relevant video link when I can...

XHTML Transitional

OK, so it's taken a bit of time, though very little effort (if you know what I mean), and I think it's probably one of the sadest exercises I've ever gone through (pretty difficult to believe, I know)... BUT the home page of this site is now XHTML Transitional compliant.

It's been validated in two seperate sources.

First up, the obvious: W3C 's online validator

Secondly (because one is never enough), the much handier HTML Validator Firefox extension by Marc Gueury, which is based on the Tiny validator.

The plan is to keep any new posts to the site XHTML transitional compliant. Though I've got no plans to go back and fix earlier posts. Frankly I've got better things to do with my time than remove the <br /> tags that Blogger sticks between <li> tags and change all the &s to &amp;s in the hrefs. :)

At least the site finally looks the same in Firefox and IE6 now!

Update: Is it just me, or is the commented out CDATA tag inside the script tag telling the browser that there's unstructured data a bit of a hack. I know my javascript should be in a different file, but I don't have any hosting for the files, and I'm not going to set it up for 2 or 3 1K files!. Anyway, you'd think the spec would cover this problem in a more natural way. Maybe an attribute on the tag

unstructured="true"

Maybe

type="CDATA"

Maybe it can be implied by the script tag itself?

I'm no XML expert, but the solution seems more than a bit nasty to me.

Google LTAC - A more personal note

Alright, so I've been going on about the Google LTAC quite a bit recently, but I wanted to mention a few more personal observations...

• Is it coincidence that the comedy presenters were called Adam and Joe?
• Google might talk about Work / Life balance, but you're always at the conference even when you're on the toilet thanks to the highly informative 'testing on the toilet' hints and tips sheets ;) (see below)
• Even the user interface 'simplicity innovators' can't help themselves when it comes to conference freebies... I never realised that I needed a coloured light on my pen until now. (Shame the light makes the pen a bit too heavyweight, the ink keeps clogging meaning a slow startup time and the blue LED keeps on cutting out)
• Also, for a company that's very much 'of the now', a mouse mat is just soooo last millennium.
• I've never been at a conference where there were so many laptops. Although I'm a little surprised that no-one brought any internet enabled CI lava lamps with them.
• Google may not be Evil, but they still gave us plastic cutlery and polystyrene plates (boooo)

And a couple of awards

• Phrase of the conference: "That's a big bucket of suck"
• Agile Pimp: Dan North, a man with an eye for spotting the delegate that's ripe for a bit of lean process
• Free snack food of the conference: Innocent Smoothies.
• Information Download Award: Adam Porter, watch the video (when it's out), you'll understand.
• Demo of the conference: Jason Huggins, the cutting edge can cut you deeply when you've got an audience.