The end of October each year finds La Cittadella and much of the rest of Kawasaki surrounding the station filled with costumed Halloween revelers and a massive throng of spectators. The event gets bigger and better produced every year, and for the first time the family and I decided to join in the festivities. We chose Alice in Wonderland for our theme, with me as the Mad Hatter, R as the Red Queen, M as the White Queen and S as Alice. We bought basic costumes online and then embellished them with add-ons and other assorted touches. We thought we were looking pretty fine, until we got to the venue and had a look at how the pros do it. Here are some examples.

Looking forward to doing it again (and better) next year!

You can see the full gallery (with high-res versions) on my Picasa site.

I waited a while before getting an iPad. From the pre-release hype right on through the orgiastic post-launch buying frenzy I kept thinking, “now here’s a device that’s getting waaaay more attention than it deserves.” I mean, let’s face it, the way things are these days Apple could announce an iFlowbee and Mac fans everywhere would be as giddy with excitement as a Japanese schoolgirl queuing for an Arashi concert.

I seem to be seeing more and more of these lately, mostly thanks to them being forwarded by confused and  concerned clients. If you want to get someone’s attention these days you can start by injecting a little FUD into their thinking about their Internet domain name.

Those ever-industrious Chinese have taken this idea and run with it, giving the world yet another high-quality Chinese export, this time delivered by email.

The subject often reads “Registration Proclamation,” and the message looks like this:

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on July 30, 2010. one company which self-styled “West innovation Ltd” were applying to register “domainname” as Network Brand and following domain names:

domainname.asia
domainname.cn
domainname.co.in
domainname.com.cn
domainname.com.tw
domainname.hk
domainname.in
domainname.net.cn
domainname.org.cn
domainname.tw

After our initial checking, we found the brand name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “West innovation Ltd”.

Best Regards,

Peter Chang
Senior Consultant
Tel : (+86) 555-1212
Fax : (+86) 555-1212
Address:  Bizpark West
Ningguo Road, Baohe District, HeFei, China

First things first: this is merely an unsavory sales tactic, nothing more. There is absolutely no need to “check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names,” and what you’re really looking at is an inducement to pay the sender to register these additional domains. If you get one of these I suggest you simply ignore it. If you want more detail/background have a look at this detailed blog entry on the subject.

Netwise wine portal site Vinotokyo was featured today in The Japan Times along with a short interview with Netwise president Michael Rollins. Read the full article text.

The site–billed as “Tokyo’s Guide to All Things Wine”–offers information of Tokyo wine events of all kinds, classes, Tokyo wine bars and restaurants and more. Members can post reviews of wine bars, wines and events, as well as add their own listings of shops and restaurants they know and love. Content is only available in English at the moment, but we are planning to roll out a Japanese version by this Summer.

With the arrival of JavaScript libraries like jQuery web development has gotten a lot easier. Better still, these tools make it possible to design website user experiences that are simple, intuitive and interesting. Our use of jQuery and MooTools has opened a world of “cool” possibilities and makes our work a lot more interesting. However, as we recently discovered, the use of and reliance on these tools involves a certain degree of risk.

We recently lunched a new, redesigned and much improved website for a Tokyo-based client. This firm’s website has grown over the years–as happens with many businesses–to be its primary tool for customer acquisition and interaction. Web-based forms and a host of back-end systems–most of them browser-based and built by Netwise–handle key business operations such as inquiries, estimate and work requests and the like.

As part of the website redesign process we sought to optimize and refine the customer-facing functions in order to create the most positive user experience possible. We made changes to the information architecture and workflow, improved the design, built in improved error handling, assorted Ajax functions and more. In this critical area we succeeded in realizing significant improvements over the previous version of the site, using the latest tools and practices. But we had a problem.

One of the main jobs of the website is to collect information and documents via a somewhat lengthy form. With the launch of the new site, however, we started seeing a drop in the number of documents that accompanied inquiries. In this area documents are more or less assumed, but now we were getting 5% of inquiries with no attached documents, or about a 300% increase. Something was clearly wrong.

We tested and tested some more, using all of the current browsers and also older ones. We used fast connections and slow ones. We tried big files and small ones, and myriad file types. We could not reproduce the error. We scoured the data from Google Analytics to try and find some clue, a hint as to the cause. We collected information from users who reported problems, tried to reproduce the issue with the same combinations of OS and browser, all to no avail. Frustration mounted.

Finally, one of the team, trying to reproduce the bug reported by phone by a customer moments earlier, decided to try the site at IE’s “High” security setting. And in doing so, he saw the bug for the first time. That simple setting disables JavaScript, and by extension just about all of the new, cool functionality companies like ours use to create useful and interesting websites.

Who browses the web with JavaScript disabled? Nobody, right? According to Google, only 0.75% of users surf with JavaScript off. Why? One reason is that the web can be a pretty barren and forlorn place these days without it. While there are certainly sites that work the same with or without JavaScript, the majority today definitely make extensive use of it as well as frameworks and libraries that rely heavily on it. Nobody would disable it, right? Wrong. In our small sample we saw figures at or around 5%, which is, well, a lot.

Finding these users was especially tricky because–like so many other sites and applications–Google Analytics relies on JavaScript as well, and needs it to collect traffic and usage data. Each visitor that came to the site, and everything they did while there, was essentially hidden from our view.  It was only through more thorough testing that we were able to identify the source of the problem.

The lesson learned in this case is this: jQuery, MooTools, form validation code as well as most client-side behaviors and dynamic functionality all reply on JavaScript. If you’re not testing your websites with it disabled then you really have no idea what a small percentage of your visitors are experiencing while there. Developers and testers are used to working from a matrix of browser and OS combinations, but need to include a “security” dimension in there as well if they’ve not already. Even today, when common sense and experience suggest otherwise, JavaScript can’t and shouldn’t be assumed.

I got an email from Metropolis today. It came to an address I used when I joined their community, though I don’t remember opting-in to anything. At any rate, I opened it and was amazed at just how completely bad it was. Clumsily composed in plain text and littered with duplicate links, it looked more like a parody of an email newsletter, like someone’s farsighted 6-year old had been given an event calendar and a Palm Pilot and told to share the important bits with the Internet.

So bad was it, in fact, I’ve included it here. I figure with all of the useful articles out there on how to do email marketing right, the world could use one that illustrates how to do it really crap.