The bad part about travelling is that when you come back you simply have the same amount of work as if you had been at work and didn’t do anything.
It looks like people don’t think that you’re away and that basically you CAN’T do the things you would do while at work, send you emails and requests as if you were at your computer/terminal and when you come back after your trip (a really pleasant work trip in my case) you have a BUNCH of emails of things to do.

Of course saying that you were away doesn’t solve the problem, people will simply sit there and wait for you to have done everything…

Is it just me that suffer from the multi-tasking, multi-window, multi-desktop “desease”? I can’t live without at least 4 desktops and I think at least 10 windows open, but the drawback is that sometimes I get lost in the windows and don’t complete things. When it’s like today, that I have a 100 things to do and 10 people trying to talk to me and tell me things, I often get lost in the windows I open (and leave open to remember I have that thing to do) and have difficulty to complete tasks.
It’s a great relief when I start completing some and so I can close some of the windows.

This is also somehow reflected in the chat windows. When you work with someone far away instant messaging is VERY useful, but if you don’t reply instantly people think something has happened. Don’t they know it’s not like the phone?
Sometimes I read the message, but I leave it in the background for later and when I reply I receive back replies such as “oh, I hadn’t seen you replying so I thought the message had been lost somewhere on the internet…”.
In my opinion one good thing about instant messaging is that the messages remain written and you can also read them a little bit later and the text will not change!

For Mac users I would like to suggest adiumX and growl. The cool thing is that you can read the message in the growl popup and decide if you should open the message and reply instantly or leave it for later. Really cool, but sometimes distracting, I have to admit.

So yesterday the MWI DDWG meeting reached an end.
The second day was totally different from the previous, while the first day we talked a lot and discussed about what we should do and on what we should concentrate, the second day was focused on trying to write down the things we talked about and decide what should be written in the papers we will have to write.

Once again it was good to see the team at work and considering the fact that the documents could be read by anyone in the world, terminology was very important and sometimes a good amount of minutes was dedicated to picking the appropriate word.

The final line is that I really liked to be part of the team and I can’t wait for the rest of the work that will come. This is a great experience and I hope that great things will come out.

EDIT: I am a little in a rush, but I would like to write more on this topic, but I also have to catch back with the “normal work” so I will see what I can do.

The first meeting day was really interesting. I spent most of the day listening to others speaking and looking at them trying to catch their expressions and the thoughts they were not expressing.
It was really amazing to see all this different people around the same table.

Everyone was really nice and we also went out to drink a beer (or a coke, or anything) all together and chat. Fortunately the chat was about many things and not simply “what do you do at work” or things like that.

Today I’m back for 2 day. Unfortunately part of the group had to leave to go back to their daily occupations so the group is smaller.

I am really interested about the two MWI working groups and I expect great things to happen. Then next months will tell us.

Tonight I’ll be back in Milan and tomorrow back at work.

I have spent quite some time on the Samsung Z107 which runs the Samsung Mobile Browser 3.0 and I have to say that this browser is NOT full featured.

It is said to support xHTML-MP, but this is not entirely true. It does render xHTML pages and supports some extra tags such as the “format” attribute as I described in my previous post, but then has some features that I would have lived much better without!

Prepare a page with your head, title and body. Put an image in a p tag and then create your form. You can use a div tag or a fieldset, or whatever you like and then your good old submit button. The use of GET or POST methods is not influent.
If you use the Content type for HTML (text/html) or xHTML-MP (application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml) and the phone will show you the logo ONLY. If you click the left softkey (options in English) a special item appears labelled “Accept”, if you click it you will see the form fields.
If you use the content type for xHTML Basic (application/xhtml+xml) magically the page will be rendered all together and look much nicer (even if you haven’t changed anything at all).
While xHTML basic is not supposed to support forms, selects and other elements, even if you use the normal DTD, these elements will work fine.

Another thing? Using the xHTML Basic content type the device will also accept part of your CSS, but don’t forget that you can use only *1* external CSS file (or better write it inline).

Another thing? This is really strange. Setup a page with a select with, let’s say, 3 elements. None of them is selected, but of course the first one is automatically visualized to the user. If you don’t open the select and simply click on “submit” or open the select, pick the first item and click on sumbit, the browser will pass an empty value! But you add a selected=”selected” to the first item it will work even without opening the dropdown and picking that element.

Using the xHTML Basic content type you should use the CSS property to define the format of an input field (style=”-wap-input-format:’*N'”) while using the xHTML-MP content type you should use the format attribute (as I was suggesting in the other post; consider this an update!).

Oh well, back to work and testing

an Italian title for this new post which means, with a rough translation, “You can recognize a good day from the morning”.

Yesterday I reserved a seat on the train to Florence (from Milan) at 9:00 AM instead of the common 8AM because there were no seats. The train arrived with about 5 minutes of delay.
When we were half way to Bologna we already had about 15 minutes of delay AND we were advised that because of a failure we would stop for a few minutes.
When we arrived in Bologna we were 30 minutes late.

While on the way to Florence the train slowed down rapidly and stopped in the middle of a bridge HIGH on a little river. It wasn’t nice to be there, in the middle of nothing and 50-60 feet from the Earth.

We arrived in Florence with 55 minutes of delay and while in line to get a cab I remembered that these days there’s Pitti in Florence. Of course I forgot to reserve my hotel room. As soon as I got at the office I called the hotel and NO ROOMS were available. Thanks to Cinzia of our offices in Milan I found another room, now I feel better!!

All I need to do now is change my reservation for tomorrow (Florence to Milan) because I did it wrong yesterday! OH What a day!
Where is my mind?

This weekend has been less relaxing than commonly. Moving to the new apartment is reaching the end, but while in the beginning we could move things we did not need immediately, now we are at the step of “moving everything”, this means the TV, the furniture that we are moving and all the rest.

My brother kindly helped us (also with a small truck) and while on Saturday we finished mounting the IKEA furniture, on Sunday we moved the “heavy stuff”.

On sunday we watched the F1 grand prix (something happened?) on a 6 inches TV attached to the VCR and the hifi because the TV was moved. It was funny, the sound was like being at the circuit, but the TV was really TINY!

Something VERY important when you want to build a wireless site is to make users’ life easier when they need to input data. The first step is of use the smallest number of input fields that you can (selects or lists of links are always more comfortable), but when you can’t avoid it you should at least help the user. One way is of defining the format of the input field (numbers, letters, etc).

In the WML days you would add an attribute named “format” to the input field and specify the format you wanted to apply, for example “*N” for numbers only, “4N” if you require 4 numbers, “*X” for any uppercase character and so on. Check this out if you can’t remember.

With xHTML we don’t have the “format” attribute anymore so many browser developers agreed to use a specific style attribute: -wap-input-format
The syntax remains the same. Copying and pasting from an old page I was sure that worked, I used:
<input style=”-wap-input-format=*N”>

It worked for some devices and did not work for others. Posting on the great wmlprogramming list I got the solution: *N should be surrounded with apostrophes. The new syntax works like a charm:
<input style=”-wap-input-format=’*N'”>

&apos; may be used in place of ‘. With the devices I tested it worked nicely.

In case the style attribute did not work, you may try to use the old “format” attribute which is not compliant to the xHTML standard but some device support it nicely (for example the Samsung Z107). One extra of the format attribute is that you may also specify more complex strings such as “NNN-NNN-NNNN” if you want the user to input numbers the way they are generally referred in USA, for example.
Sample code:
<input format=”NNN-NNN-NNNN”>

I would also like to suggest this nice site that was suggested on the list. It has many useful information about WML and xHTML-MP and CSS.
http://www.developershome.com/

UPDATE: Please, read the comments a kind visitor posted a little correction to my xHTML-MP styles.

The answer is pretty simple, but probably not SO obvious:

Mounting your new IKEA Stolmen!
The apartment is starting to get filled with new furniture, but it takes time. 😦
2 days of 2 people were not enough to finish, but at least we installed all the poles and part of the shelves. We still have a couple of drawers to mount and then we’ll be able to fill it with clothes.

I took some pictures, but it’s hard to render the idea of the spaces, I will try to attach them and see if it makes any sense.