And then there’s the Name That Flu, er, event.

• Total Flunacy #namethatflu #swineflu #h1n1 #
• OMGWTFBBFlu!! #namethatflu (Though I have to admit #hamthrax is a good one) #
• Looks like Hamthrax has been chosen by the Masters of the Fluniverse #namethatflu #

The web browser works great. Most sites work fine even with the small size, though sometimes I run into problems submitting forms. I think it’s an intermittent issue with sites that submit forms via JavaScript instead of a regular button. Unfortunately that includes WPTouch, the WordPress skin for iPhone and Android devices that I’m using on the site, but that could be a conflict with another plugin.

Now that I’ve got a phone that will actually load most of the web, it’s really interesting to compare the different levels of mobile support out there. For example, Flickr has an incredible mobile site optimized for iPhone/Android (and if you do web development, it’s worth taking a look at their lessons learned post about it). Amazon has a surprisingly featureful mobile site as well, though it has fewer bells and whistles. There are more sites with bare-bones mobile versions, and of course many more that don’t even bother.

I do use Opera Mini occasionally, mostly when I’m in an area without 3G coverage or when a particular page gives me problems.

I keep running into one critical roadblock: Flash-only sites. Neither the Android browser, nor the iPhone browser, nor Opera Mini has support for Flash at this time. Mostly this seems to be restaurants trying to prevent me from reading their menus, looking up hours, or looking up allergy information, in the name of looking trendy. Brilliant move, there.

The touch screen is quite responsive now that I’ve replaced the packing screen protector with a normal one. I’m not sure why it should make a difference, but it does seem to. I do occasionally run into problems where my finger is too big for the target area, but it usually manages to figure out what I’m “clicking” on.

Email is extremely basic, but works well enough as long as you don’t have a zillion messages when you check. As far as I can see, there’s no way to delete multiple messages at once, but at least I have the option of installing a third-party email client, which is something I’ll have to try out sometime.

The camera’s okay, but not spectacular. It manages well enough when there’s plenty of light, but doesn’t pick up colors very well, especially reds. Pictures taken on overcast days, or at dusk, tend to come out blue. On the plus side, I can easily post straight to Flickr using the email gateway, or straight to Twitter using Twidroid.

Applications I use the most, in no particular order:

• Dialer & Contacts, of course.
• Browser.
• Power Manager (which makes it much easier to turn on and off power-consuming features like wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS).
• Twidroid.
• Weather Channel.
• Camera.
• Calendar.
• Email.
• Tag ToDo. There are a couple of other to-do lists, but this is the one I used to build my Christmas gift-buying list, so that’s what I’ve been using for now.
• ShopSavvy

Hands-free controls are limited. With my last phone, I would hear a tone through my Bluetooth earpiece when it connected. This one’s silent. It doesn’t offer control over things like auto-pickup. And I’m not sure the button on the headset actually does anything with the G1. (On the RAZR, it would initiate voice dialing, or would end a call.)

Voice dialing is pathetic. Somehow, as I’ve switched to newer phones over the last few years, each phone has had worse voice dialing. I used to have a phone that let you record several names in your contact list, then when you used voice dialing it would try to match the sound of your voice against the recording of your voice. You could only have a few names, but it worked.

Then the RAZR V3T actually tried to interpret sounds and match them against the address book, but half the time I had to repeat the phrase “Name Dial” so many times that I started just hitting the dial button twice to redial. Plus half the time it couldn’t tell the difference between “Katie,” “Stacy” and “Jason.” I kid you not.

Even that’s better than the G1’s voice dial, which I once managed to trigger accidentally, only to have it decide that “Oh, I guess I wanted that lane after all” meant “Call Mom at mobile.”

The other problem I keep running into with the phone features is that every once in a while a call will connect, but not actually transmit any sound. I’m not sure whether this is an issue with my phone, with the G1 in general, or with T-Mobile’s 3G network.

So I went down to the nearest T-Mobile store, asked about a couple of issues that hadn’t turned up in my previous research, and got the last one in stock. There was a couple there before me looking at them, but they said they weren’t ready to buy, just researching.

It took me about an hour to activate the phone, mainly because I didn’t have a data plan beforehand and it can take that long for a new plan to take effect. Once I did, I started playing around experimenting with it. (Unfortunately this meant a lot of the things I was going to do this afternoon…didn’t get done. Oh, well.)

Good Stuff:

• I really like the keyboard. Even though I’m using my thumbs, just knowing where the keys are (and not having to do any kind of combos for letters & numbers) means that I can type much faster than I could on the RAZR. I’m already starting to get used to some of the secondary characters, like dashes and such.
• Real web access! The web rendering is very nice. But then it’s WebKit, so it’s basically the same as Chrome or Safari, so that’s not a huge surprise.
• Twitdroid (a Twitter app) and Quickpedia (an optimized front-end for Wikipedia) have impressed me so far.
• There’s a tip calculator app called BistroMath. I had to pick it up or the name alone. (Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work as an FTL drive.)
• I absolutely love being able to look things up online instantly!
• Wi-Fi was easy to set up, including WPA2 security, so I can use our wireless network at home.
• Wallpaper selection is very nice, with a built-in crop & resize function.
• Plain old USB charging, which means I can still use the car charger I got for my last phone.
• The WPhone alternate interface for the WordPress admin area, originally developed for the iPhone, is fantastic on the G1! (Too bad they aren’t developing it much anymore.)
• The built-in calculator app includes limited scientific capabilities (trig, logs, roots, etc.)
• My bank has an app that will look up the nearest ATMs or branches to where I am.
• Scrolling by dragging the actual content instead of the scroll bar is surprisingly easy to get used to. Actually a lot of stuff about the UI is like that: awkward at first, but in just a few hours it becomes second nature.

Minor Issues:

• Our apartment is right on the edge of a cell coverage area, so I haven’t had a chance to try it out on the 3G network yet. But that’s not the phone’s fault.
• It took me a while to figure out how to sync transfer data via the USB cable, since they’ve changed the way it’s handled since the manual was printed. The manual lists it as a system setting, but it’s now an option that pops up in the notification area when you connect it to a computer.

Not So Good

• The touch screen isn’t always responsive, but that may be because I haven’t removed the screen protector that ships with it. I wanted to pick one up that’s actually designed to be used before I pulled this one off.
• The covers on the USB port and memory card feel really flimsy.
• Battery life doesn’t seem to be terribly great. In fact, the clerk at the store suggested I charge it nightly.
• I’ve only played with the camera a little but seems slow and isn’t great with artificial lighting.
• Playing around with WordPress and Wikipedia shows how valuable it is to have a layout optimized for the small screen. The Android browser seems to rely entirely on zoom to handle large-screen layouts, and it would be nice to have something like Opera’s fit-to-width option. Update: It seems to ignore handheld stylesheets, which IIRC is true of the iPhone as well. When website providers try to help you with the small screen, maybe you should let them? *sigh* Need to see if it handles media queries, at least for screen size. Update 2: It does have a fit-to-width option, but I’m not entirely sure what it does, given that I keep running into layouts that end up scrolling horizontally.

Stuff I Have Not Tried But Intend To

• Anything involving GPS. I’m inside right now and it can’t get a signal.
• I don’t know how fast the download speed is over 3G. (Wifi is quite nice!) Update: 3G speed seems pretty decent, actually!
• Map directions. But it’s Google Maps, and those are generally quite good.
• I haven’t hooked up my Bluetooth earpiece yet. Update: Pretty simple. I just needed to remember how to put the headset in pairing mode.
• I haven’t tried connecting to an open WiFi network/hotspot.
• I need to do some more testing with the camera, see how it handles daylight, check out image quality, etc.
• I haven’t really messed with voice dialing.
• Email. It automatically links to your Gmail account, and has the ability to access POP and IMAP accounts, but I haven’t tried out any of the above yet.

Good:

• Site compatibility seems to be fine so far, with a couple of minor issues (see the “Bad” section).  Mostly I’ve tested it with a couple of forum sites, LiveJournal, Slashdot, and WordPress.
• I like the simple settings box, with “Basics,” “Minor Tweaks,” and “Under the Hood.”
• It does feel fast.
• Showing the URL of links in the lower left-hand corner is a perfect compromise between the spatial advantages of a permanent status bar and the extra room provided by leaving it out.
• I like the task manager for the browser itself.  It’ll be good for developers, but it’ll also be good for users: as the comic points out, if your browser starts chewing up all available resources, you’ll be able to tell what page/plugin/program is at fault instead of just blaming the browser.

Bad:

• Gears support doesn’t seem to work quite right.  WordPress.com doesn’t detect that it’s available.  Local WP installs with Bad Behavior can’t sync completely.  (It doesn’t send an Accept header on the request for one of the TinyMCE files, which causes Bad Bahavior to think it’s a spambot and triggers a 403.)
• Cookie management is too simplistic.  I like to accept all cookies temporarily, but clear everything when I end my browsing session, with exceptions for sites where I want to stay logged in.  This is easy in Firefox, a little trickier in Opera, and doesn’t seem to be an option in Chrome.
• I have seen it pause a couple of times, with as few as 5 tabs. [edit: these seem to be related to Flash content]
• No Incomplete spell-check.
• I keep hitting the forward-slash key to search within a page, since that’s the shortcut I’m used to in Firefox and Opera.

It’s got built-in support for the Gears API (not surprising). And, like Firefox 3, IE8, and Opera 9.5, it’ll do full-history search & auto-suggest in the location bar. Interestingly, they’ve adopted a couple of UI elements from Opera, including thumbnails of your most-visited pages when opening a new tab (like Opera’s Speed Dial, though in this case the list is automatically generated from your browsing behavior), and putting the tabs above the main toolbar — something that Opera has taken a lot of flack for.

According to the blog post, the first preview release should be out for Windows tomorrow, with Linux and Mac following.

Oddly enough, I found out about it through comics blogs (A Distant Soil, specifically), not tech blogs, because Google hired Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain what makes the browser different in comic-book form.

Social tagging initiative from WaSP to physically tag bad web designers.

Opera hits 106/100 on Acid3 after discovering an Easter egg in the test.

The openSUSE mailing list announced OpenSUSE 4.1, with KDE 4.1, GNOME 4.1, MP41 support, OpenOffice 4.1, XEN 4.1, VirtualBox 4.1, and a 4-in-1 CD install.

Added: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a newsletter detailing its findings on a Congressional Listening program (apparently they monitor citizens for their opinions—who knew?), plans to move the EFF offices to an armored zeppelin, an NSA-sponsored social networking site (to “allow ordinary Americans to instantly share their private data with the government”), and Homeland Security’s conclusion that Wikipedia is a “Larger Threat Than Terrorism, Dixie Chicks Combined.” Sadly, the newsletter does not appear to be archived on the website.

Added: Virgle, a Virgin/Google joint venture to establish a permanent colony on Mars. Now seeking applicants for Martian pioneers. Takes the Google moon base from 2004 to the next level.

Added: A co-worker pointed out that all of YouTube’s featured videos are Rickrolls today. And it looks like Google is going all-out with some 15 hoaxes today. *whew!*

The Internet Storm Center is keeping a list as well.

I was rather surprised to see that a search for “klasjdf” turned up 508 hits.

As I think about it, it makes sense. Those letters are 7 of the 8 home keys on the QWERTY keyboard layout, and the eighth is not only a semi-colon, but home to a pinky. A touch typist hitting random keys might be inclined to just hit the ones that are already under his or her fingers. One per finger, leaving out the single non-letter, gets you exactly the 7 that I typed.

As for the letter order, I spot-checked a few permutations, the lowest of which was just 251 for klasdfj. Those with patterns scored higher: 18,400 for alskdjf (alternating left & right, working in from the edges to the center); 99,600 for asdfjkl (left-to-right).

I guess there must just be a lot of people typing random text. Infinite monkeying around, so to speak.

With the demise of the Jamie Jack and Stench show, Another One Bites the Dust has shot back up to the top 5 pages on the site. It turns out it’s the #7 hit on Google for “jamie jack and stench.” Oddly, the comments feed for Alternative to Music? is #8. Not the post itself, which includes all the same comments, but the feed.

I don’t want to keep the feeds out of Google’s index — if someone’s looking for feeds, and mine happen to be relevant, I want them to show up. But if someone’s looking for web pages, shouldn’t Google bring up the web page with substantially similar content in favor of the feed?

Did a Google search just for the heck of it. I wonder how quickly those numbers will climb…

The weird thing was that this form had name and e-mail fields, but AutoFill only recognized e-mail. I figured, OK, people might be using this, let’s see if I can adjust the page and make it compatible.

This form was using “name” and “email” for the actual names of the fields. They were labeled “Your Name” and “E-mail,” in separate table cells before the fields, with explicit <label> elements. A bit of searching turned up the fact that AutoFill looks for field names defined in ECML (RFC 3106). That list applies to the actual field names, not the visible labels, and if I’m reading it correctly, both “name” and “email” should work.

So I started checking other forms, and noticed that on the comments field here in WordPress, it fills in the wrong fields! It shows the email and website fields as being fillable (AutoFill doesn’t have a spot to provide a website). Worse, it fills in your name as in the email field, and your email address as your website!

At this point, I figured I’d read the search hit called Google Toolbar Autofill quirks. The author did some investigation and found that “it apparently looks at a text box and then tries to backtrack from that location looking at text.” In other words, instead of looking at the field’s name, or the content of an explicitly-associated label, it looks to see what text appears before it. This is just plain dumb. It makes sense as a fallback measure, but you don’t start with the heuristics when you have more reliable indicators that you can check just as easily!

It broke on the first contact form because, despite the fact that the field was called “name,” the label said “Your Name.” I pulled out the word your and it recognized it. Strangely, it was perfectly happy with anther form which had a field labeled, “Your Full Name.”

It broke on the WordPress comment form because the Kubrick layout puts the labels to the right of the fields. The fields and labels are paired within lines—in fact, each field/label pair is its own paragraph. So you’d think that some text in the same paragraph would be more closely associated with the field than some text in an earlier paragraph. Plus, each field has a <label> tag, so there should be no ambiguity as to which label applies to which field!

A more sensible approach would be this:

1. Check the field name, as in…
   <input type="text" name="email">
   This is where ECML says to look, after all! If it matches your list, use it and do not continue to step 2; no one is going to ask people to fill out “Ecom_ShipTo_Postal_City.”
2. Check for an explicit label, as in…
   <label for="myfield">E-mail</label> <input type="text" name="indecipherable" id="myfield">
   If it matches, use it. If you find a <label> for the field, even if you can’t use it, do not continue to step 3. The page’s author has already told you what the field is called, and you’ll either get the same label or something irrelevant.
3. If those both fail, check the text immediately before and after. Figure out which is more closely associated. (Hint: If some text is on the same line, and some isn’t… the text on the same line is probably attached to this field!)

I’ll rename the “Your Name” field in the first form, and I’ll tweak any other pages I find having problems, but I’m just plain annoyed at the spectacular failure on the WordPress form.

For future reference, this behavior was observed with the Google Toolbar for Firefox version 2.0.20060515W. The WordPress comment form in question is from the WordPress 2.0 version of the Kubrick theme, modified only slightly (I changed the “URI” label to “Website,” since more people will know what it means).